Loki and Toni's Excellent Adventure in World Saving . Avengers . Loki/Toni . Part IV .
Author: pprfaith
Title: Loki and Toni's Excellent Adventure in World Saving
Summary: In which Loki and Toni try to save the world, Steve is obnoxious, Clint has no patience for artsy movies and there are cupcakes. And issues.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers. Surprise!
Warnings: Oh goodness. Genderswap, pregnancy, violence, Toni's filthy mouth, sexual references, femslash, Odin and Howard's A+ parenting, unrequited love and issues. So. Many. Issues.
Rating: R
Pairing: Loki/Tony, wherein both of them are genderswapped.
Reltated Works: Link to everything related to this - podfic read by the lovely Reena_jenkins, art and mixtape - can be found here.
+
Part III
+
+
Perhaps it’s the concussion, but it’s more likely that Toni’s simply raw from the emotional upheaval of getting injured, having her suit ripped up, having JARVIS called a thing, finding out Steve’s hate-on for her is actually a hard-on and then getting waylaid by her friends who have suddenly turned into the kind of dicks that blame a woman for saying no to a man.
Or perhaps it’s simply that Loki came looking for her, even if she’d probably deny it to the death, and then laid a claim on her with tongue and teeth and snarled words. Just thinking about it still sends memory-sparks down Toni’s spine.
A pregnant woman should not be this skilled at angry sex.
Whatever it is, lying in the semi-dark of midnight in New York, Toni finally dares to reach out that hand, to finish that aborted gesture from days ago.
Loki’s belly is taut and strangely hard and soft at the same time under her palm. And warm. It seems far too warm. Strange. The rest of the god is always cool to the touch.
She can’t help it. When Loki doesn’t immediately rip off her hand, she pokes the belly. And prods a little. And makes faces at it.
Eventually, Loki snorts delicately. “You behave like a child with a new toy,” she observes, somewhat snidely, but not actually unkindly.
Here’s a secret: It’s possible to fuck the meanness right out of the god of lies. You only have to try hard enough.
Toni shrugs, rolls onto her back and keeps her hands to herself. “I’ve never actually been around anyone who’s pregnant before.”
“Surely some friends…”
She shakes her head. “Nah. Not really the friends type, me. Or the baby type. I actually had that taken care of when I was twenty-five. Permanently.” She mimes cutting something.
Loki actually twists onto her side, head in hand so she can loom over Toni. “You had someone remove you ability to have children?” She sounds aghast.
Toni shrugs. “Guess I knew, even back then, that I’d make a shitty mother. I mean, can you imagine me raising a kid? It’d be…” she shakes her head.
Toni is terrified of being a parent like her father but, secretly, she is even more terrified of being a parent like her mother: pale grey in the background, unwilling, unable, or simply too numbed by sherry and society parties to give a fuck about her child. Because Toni’s biggest fuckups have been and always will be, not the things she does, but the things she doesn’t do.
Like thinking about where all her bombs go. Like telling anyone she’s dying. Like considering the consequences of her actions.
Loki frowns, unfairly prettily. “My children are always and forever doomed,” she confesses, looking Toni straight in the eye. “But I cannot imagine not having them.”
She cradles her belly, not protectively, but gently. Softly. Holding.
It’s Toni’s turn to frown, because she had a father who labeled her as a lost cause the moment he saw her vag where a dick should have been and she knows it’s not a nice thing to grow up with. “You can’t know that.”
Eyebrow. “You still have not read up on our lore, have you?”
“Have you read up on Twilight by now?” Toni shoots back, earning her the second eyebrow and a load of silence.
Loki waits for her to sigh and shake her head before going on. “The lives of the aesir are cyclical. We are born, we live, and come Ragnarok, we all die, only to be born again. We do not retain our full memories but there are… glimpses. Hints.” The semi-amused expression morphs into something utterly blank. “No matter what I do, the outcome is always the same. My children are always reviled and hated for their parentage.”
“It can’t really be…” Toni tries, only to get cut off.
“It is. It always is. No matter what I do, no matter which path I choose, I am the villain and my children suffer for my imagined crimes.” The god doesn’t even sound angry. Just very, very cold. Hard, in the same way she did during the Chitauri disaster when they talked in the Tower. Loki sounded just like this when he told Toni that he had an army. The world was going to burn and in his voice was nothing but certainty, hard and immovable. It pissed Toni off then, and even more so now.
“Determinism. Now there’s a cheery thought.”
“’Cheery’ is not the term I would use.”
“How about ‘convenient’?” Toni tries, snidely. “Can’t change it anyway, so why try? Why not throw people out of windows and be done with it?”
She’s being aggressive. She knows it. She can see it coming from half a mile off, but Loki’s attitude is making her angry like whoa, zero to sixty in less than a second, and there’s nothing she can do about it. It must show on her face because Loki sits, less graceful than a month ago. It puts some distance between them.
“You are being childish,” she observes. “I am merely stating facts.”
“You’re stating an excuse to not even try anymore.”
It’s impressive, really, how fast and how totally Loki’s face can lock down, back to that mask Toni first saw almost a year ago, on Fury’s big boat. The mask of a man intent on destroying the planet. It makes Toni feel very small and very cold.
“What do you know, little mortal, of what I try and do not try? I have attempted to escape my own fate since the dawn of time and nothing I have done has ever changed the outcome.” There’s no bitterness there, just the ice, just the certainty.
Toni rolls to her feel, almost lands ass over teakettle and starts grabbing her clothes. “Bullshit,” she says. “This is complete and utter bullshit.”
It matters what you do, how you try. It matters which way you chooses and how you do things. It matters. It has to matter because if it doesn’t, then all the shit that’s happened to Toni was just random. It wasn’t deserved, it wasn’t there to make her make herself better, it just happened and it means nothing and if everything means nothing, she might as well put on her suit and sink herself in the Atlantic with the engines off. Things, decisions, choices (walking out of that cave and fixing things), it has to matter. It has to.
She’s dressing so fast her hands are shaking because she needs to get out of here, needs to get out, get away from that idea, from the look on Loki’s face, needs to get away from because if she doesn’t, if she doesn’t. She’ll break down and cry, a tiny little heap of broken Stark on the floor and she can’t, can’t, can’t. She allots herself two hours after every major crisis to break down and this isn’t it, she can’t, not now. Can’t, can’t, can’t.
She has to go, she’s a busy woman, she has a world to save and an energy problem to fix and maybe puppies to carry across the street and old ladies to kiss and she needs to do those things because they matter. Because she did a bad thing and if she redeems herself enough, she’ll…. It matters. It will matter. What she does now. What she tries to undo. It’s not redemption because she doesn’t believe in that. She’s a futurist. The only thing she believes in is making things better and so that’s what she does.
And it matters.
“You are being ridiculous,” Loki observes, still in that bland, polite tone that really doesn’t hide her fury.
“Your face is ridiculous,” Toni snaps back, because there is a naked god with a baby bump sitting in the middle of rumpled sheets calling her ridiculous and that’s just… she giggles. Bites her lip.
“Careful,” comes the warning, like Loki read her mind and Toni remembers how, a few hours ago, they were teasing each other about caring and now here they are and Toni is so angry with Loki for giving up like that, for just lying back and taking it, like nothing matters, but it does. It has to. Afghanistan… it has to.
“Of what? Your face? Sorry, but unless you’re going to cut me with your cheekbones, I don’t see how this is a threat.”
“Stark,” Loki’s growling now. Hey, look, anger! Toni grins, the phantom taste of blood already in her mouth, a sound like bombs going off ringing in her ears. Part of Toni wants to lunge and throw the first punch. Part of her wants whatever the god will do to her then because there’s an explosion sitting in her chest, waiting to happen, something bright and brutal, just waiting to rip through her and out into the world, and isn’t that the perfect metaphor.
Toni is the perfect bomb.
And she wants someone to push the big, red button because here she is, body too small, skin too tight, with something churning inside of her, helpless and nameless and angry. Toni gets so angry.
But nothing of that makes it to the surface. All that shows is a smile like broken glass. “That’s my name, don’t wear it out, sweetheart!”
“You do realize I’m a moment away from murdering you, yes?”
“What are you going to do? Defenestrate me again?”
“The thought is tempting, yes.”
“Great. Good to know where we stand.”
“I am not the one suddenly behaving like a lunatic.”
Almost vibrating out of her skin, Toni does what she does best. She keeps prodding, keeps poking, keeps the lighter on the fuse. She doesn’t even know why. She just knows that she has to.
“No, you’re the one who blames their shit on fate and fuck the rest. No wonder your kids end up as monsters and outcast with you raising them, teaching them they have no chance!”
It’s a cruel thing to say because Toni knows that Loki loves that baby in her belly, but no-one has ever accused Toni Stark of being kind when she’s helpless. And right now? She’s feeling as helpless as she ever did in that cave.
Loki raises a hand and Toni has a split second to think, oh fuck, or maybe that’s, oh, yes, as she takes in the god’s expression, pure rage, and then -
- she’s standing in the middle of a dirty, abandoned alley at the far end of New York, her jeans only half done up, shirt in hand and no shoes.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Fuck.
+
Of course the others are still awake when she gets back and of course they’re sitting in her damn living room, staring at her like she’s covered in moonlight and sparkles when she comes stomping in, her hair a mess, her make-up ruined, barefoot and only half dressed, still feeling like all her edges are showing wickedly sharp, catching the light in the New York darkness.
“We were worried about you,” Bruce says before anyone else (Steve) can start laying into her for walking out on them with a concussion and no phone on her. Good old Bruce, eternal peacekeeper. One day, when she has a lot of time on her hands, she’ll find out if he’s always been this way or if the Hulk taught him that.
“Bully for you,” she snarls, marching straight to the bar, pours herself a drink, downs it, foregoes the glass for the second drink and takes a long swig directly from the bottle. That’s more like it. Somewhere below the arc reactor, a roaring monster starts settling back into its place.
“Toni?” That’s still Bruce, who suddenly sounds very worried because, yeah, okay, he probably figured out who she went to after she stomped off and having her come home and crawl into a bottle after seeing Loki probably doesn’t bode well for the world.
Except that Loki isn’t going to go out and take out her anger with Toni on unsuspecting humans. Toni has no idea why, but she’s sure of that. Loki didn’t even take her anger with Toni out on Toni, just zapped her away.
“Shitty fucking day,” she supplies, means, don’t get your panties in a twist, no homicidal gods on the streets. Bruce relaxes marginally.
“What the hell happened to you, Stark?” Clint fills in the silence, backed up by Natasha’s, “You look like roadkill.”
Toni points at the redhead, smirks and says, “Bitch.”
Behind her, Thor looked mildly put-upon and Steve glowers. Which, now that she knows is his version of a love-sick-puppy look, kind of makes her want to gag. And anyway, this is all his fault. If he hadn’t acted like a dick, she wouldn’t have run off to see Loki in the state she’s in and maybe that fight would never have happened. Toni usually has thicker skin than this.
A god telling her nothing she does matters even the slightest bit should not be enough to send her into a tailspin. Except. Shitty fucking day.
She shakes her head and when she looks back up at the peanut gallery, they actually look worried, which, wow. Clint and Bruce she kind of expected, but the others not so much.
“Stark?” Natasha asks, talking half a step forward. Or maybe everyone else takes half a step back because this is clearly ovary-territory, didn’t you know. Chauvinist pigs.
Toni waves her off because if the other woman comes any closer, she may cry on her, or maybe punch her, and neither of those things will do. “Relax guys. New York is still standing, everything is peachy keen, ignore the madwoman with the bottle.”
She toasts them. “And get out of my home.”
“What happened?”
“I had a big, fat fight with my girlfriend, what do you think happened?”
She snorts and sort of shoves past Natasha on her way to the lab. Which can be put on lockdown. Yay.
Steve chokes, Clint makes noises, Thor is confused (default setting, seriously) and Bruce, who is the only one who knows who the girlfriend is, asks, “About what?”
Good question.
“Philosophy,” Toni snaps and, grabbing another bottle as she goes, gets the hell out of there.
+
You shouldn’t drink with a concussion.
Toni heard that somewhere (Pepper) once, so after her rapid fire self medication in front of the entire team, she actually stands in front of the bottles she snagged, a mournful expression on her face. For five whole minutes.
She wants to get drunk.
She needs to get drunk.
Because she just freaked the fuck out over the most ridiculous thing and she doesn’t care what anyone (Pepper, who would have guessed?) say about time for healing and natural reactions. It’s been almost three years. She should not be having fucking flashbacks anymore. It’s over. It’s done. Everyone that ever saw her in that cave, that knows how weak she was, how pathetic, is dead. She killed most of them herself.
It should be okay.
But when Loki started her whole spiel about determinism and rebirth, she freaked. Loudly, explosively, viciously. The way she does most things. Why? Because she’s rationalized Afghanistan by telling herself she deserved what happened for being a fucktart. By convincing herself that she can undo all the bad that happened with the good she’s doing now. Save ten innocents, get one nightmare less this week.
Logic is what keeps Toni going, always has. Logic and numbers and reasons. She needs to know how things work and if there isn’t a proper explanation, she makes one. And this was hers. And then there was Loki, who is a god, who is real and she said all those things Toni cannot compute, cannot refute because it’s a god saying them and…
If a primitive program is faced with data it cannot assimilate into its known patterns, something will blow up. In this case, Toni Stark’s head. Boom.
She freaked out. And now she’s standing here, thinking it through instead of getting absolutely blitzed and she thinks this might be growing up, might be this responsibility shit everyone keeps yelling at her about. And, like poison, the thought slithers in: What does it matter if you grow up now, if nothing you do ever matters at all?
She really needs to get drunk now.
She doesn’t.
She goes online, she finds a collection of Norse Myths and she downloads it onto a tablet (manually to give her hands something to do). Then she sits her ass down and actually reads and that’s so unlike her that she actually needs to stop and wonder for a moment.
On the far table, the bottles beckon. In her chest, something throbs and shifts. Toni gets down to reading.
+
Her first thought while reading Loki’s Story as Told by Someone Who Wasn’t There is, I really hope this is made up.
Her second is, shit, and after that it devolves.
She hopes that the whole half dead thing is a metaphor, because if Loki’s bouncing baby girl is actually born half dead, Toni foresees a definite problem with zombie cults springing up all over the place.
She reads about Sleipnir and Fenrir and Jormungandr and Vali and Nari, about Angrboda and Sigyn and Odin and Thor and dwarves and a mouth sewn shut, of snakes and poison and chains and caves.
Eventually, she comes to the conclusion that she owes Loki an apology for the comment about not being fit to raise her own children. Shortly after that, she realizes that she wants to punch Thor and Odin both in the face because, Jesus on a stick, if this had been her, if this were her life, her children, you can damn well bet Toni wouldn’t have taken a thousand years to go nuts and try to blow up a planet.
And it definitely wouldn’t have been the planet of an enemy, but her home world.
She tries to imagine what Loki described, being endlessly reborn, knowing but not really knowing. Having hunches. And running head first, arms spread wide, into the same traps, the same knives as before.
It makes her feel pretty damn helpless.
+
“Toni, this is Pepper. Steve just called me and told me that, apparently, you had a fight with your girlfriend and that he’s sorry he didn’t know you were in a relationship. Toni, you don’t do relationships. And you don’t have a girlfriend. Please call me. I’m worried.”
Toni stares at the speakers JARVIS used to relay that message. “JAR,” she says after a moment, “Call Pep when it’s morning on her coast. Tell her that I’m fine, that I’ll explain, but not right now. Tell her not to come here, please. I just… not right now. And tell her, tell her that I love her and that she can whack me later for being stupid and I promise I’m not dying. You got that?”
“I do, Miss Stark.”
“Good.”
+
It’s almost sunrise when Toni emerges from her workroom in search of something. To distract her from her own thoughts, her memories, and that deep, heavy ball of compassion and pity rolling around her stomach.
Afghanistan and Loki’s children haunt her, all for nothing, all without sense or rhyme or reason. All just happening and there’s nothing she can do to fix it.
Toni hates nothing more than being helpless.
Like she was in that cave.
Like she is now.
“You look like something chewed you up and spat you out,” Clint says quietly from where he’s perched on top of a bookshelf. She doesn’t even jump, which just goes to show how crazy her life is these days.
And she made it even crazier by adding a god to the mix. Why is that again?
“Thanks,” she answers, tries a smarmy camera-grin and gives up halfway there. “Shouldn’t you be in bed like a good little Robin Hood?”
“Tasha and Phil were watching The Fountain. I needed to get away before I started clawing at my own eyes.”
She snorts, walks past him to the kitchen and pours herself a cup of stone cold coffee before sitting down at the counter. Dummy whirs over, presents his claw for a few pats, then wheels back into the darkness.
“Seriously, though. You look like shit. And you don’t smell like a bar, so it’s kind of freaking me out, to be honest.” He’s there suddenly, across the counter, tapping his fingers on the marble surface, half-smirk in place despite the hour.
“Join the club,” she mutters, then takes him in, tired eyes, lines around his face, hiding in her living room at the asscrack of dawn. “Are we friends?” she blurts before she can stop herself and then flinches, looks away.
Her head hurts really, really much.
Clint cocks his head to one side. “Are you going to kick me out if I say no? Because I can’t go back down there before I’m absolutely certain that movie is over. It makes no sense!”
Yeah, ok. Toni isn’t very good at people, but neither is Clint, and she thinks that means that yes, they are friends, why is she being such a maudlin idiot.
“Do you believe in free will?”
“As in Team Free Will? Have you been watching Supernatural again?”
“I don’t watch that show,” she defends, although it lacks her usual vigor.
“Su-ure. Whatever you say, Stark.” He’s smirking. Damn him.
“Pepper is a lying liar who lies and her pants should be perpetually on fire because I do not watch that show, no matter what she says. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
For a moment, Clint looks pensive. Then he says, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the lovely Miss Potts in anything other than skirts.”
Toni blinks. “She wears those jean-shorts sometimes. They’re really short.”
There’s a moment of silence. Then Clint offers, “Sometimes I’m really glad you’re a dyke.”
“Bisexual, technically, and keep your labels to yourself.”
More silence. Then, “Why do you ask?”
She shrugs as he nimbly jumps on the counter, sitting cross-legged right in front of her. “It’s like this, right? If we have free will, then our actions matter. What we do matters because we could just as well not do it. So when I go out and save the world, that matters. On some cosmic scale or something. It matters. And if we don’t have free will and it’s all planned from the word go, then it doesn’t matter and I can fly a hundred nukes into space and it’s not going to change a single damn thing because doing it isn’t my decision and it can’t make up for all the shit I did before. That means I’m just a shitty fuck-up of a person because that’s what I was meant to be and there’s no fixing it. End of story, everyone go home.”
This time, the silence stretches until it becomes uncomfortable while he scratches his head awkwardly. “Is this about your…Despicable Me days?”
She laughs half-heartedly, at him and his phrasing and the fact that he’s comparing her life to a kids’ movie. “Nope,” she tells him. “It’s about Afghanistan.”
And wow, that is so weird to say because she’s never talked about it before, not to anyone. And certainly not voluntarily. Pepper and Rhodey tried, and Obie, too, before she killed him. But she never said a word. Everything that happened in that cave died in that cave and sometimes Toni thinks she did, too. What came out certainly isn’t the same as what went in.
Rebirth.
Maybe Loki and gang aren’t the only ones that live cyclical lives. She scrubs a hand through her hair. It’s way too late for this, she thinks, and looks back up at Clint, who is inching away from her, an oh shit look on his face.
“Do you want me to get uhm… Pepper? No? Tasha maybe? Or…” he’s frantically trying to come up with more females he could throw at her and she knows why.
“They didn’t rape me,” she says, abruptly, making him freeze with half his ass off the counter. He actually wavers for a moment and she thinks he might fall and it’s ridiculous but she’s not laughing. “Everyone always assumes they did and I never correct them, but they didn’t.” Her smile is a dark thing on her face. “They didn’t have to.”
“Shit,” he says, “Do you really think you want to tell me this? I mean, me? I’m not exactly…” He waves his hands in the air in a gesture that can either mean ‘curvy’ or ‘stable enough to be considered a help to anyone’.
She thinks that’s why she likes the guy so much.
“I mean, that’s what rape is about, isn’t it? About control. About taking it away. But they’d already shoved a giant magnet between my tits and hooked it to a car battery, how much more control were they going to take from me, right?”
She pauses, waits for him to run. He doesn’t. He just sits there, ass half in the air, frozen and stupid looking and she closes her eyes. “The boss guy liked to threaten me with it, though. After the water boarding and the hot coals and all that shit. He’d come down to our cell and he’d tell me, in detail, what he would do to me. Here’s the bed, and this is the chain I’d use to tie you up, and this is the knife I’d cut your clothes off with. On and on he went because he loved the sound of his fucking voice and there was nothing I could do because, hey, car battery.”
Eyes opening, she shrugs. “He didn’t have to rape me. He already had all the control.”
“You killed him. With a giant ass robot,” Clint points out, eyes narrowed with something she’s too tired to identify. He scoots closer again, now that the emosplosion seems to be over and done with.
“Yeah. And I saved the world half a dozen times over since that and it was my decision, right? I mean, I decide to put on the suit. I control it. I…”
Matter. What she does matters. What she is matters. Because she took her control back and no fucking deity writing fiction in a big book somewhere is going to take that away from her ever again.
“I don’t know,” Clint suddenly says, shrugging, nudging her arm with his knee. “About free will and all that shit. Who controls the universe. But… I think it matters that we try, you know? I’m not exactly a stand-up person, at least not until recently. Bow for hire and all that crap. But I try, for Nat and Phil, and I think that matters. That I try.”
For a long time, Toni chews on her lip, thinking. Trying. She’s the queen of fucking trying.
And failing, too. Less often lately, but still. She inhales deeply. “So, this is going to sound stupid, but… can I cry on you? Just a little bit? Because I’ve had a shitty fucking day and everything went wrong and I think I just… opened up or something, and I really need to cry now.”
He looks like he’s freaking out, but he asks, “Does that mean we’re done talking?”
Toni nods. “God, yes. Done. Absolutely done. Never happen again, Girl Scout’s honor.”
“I really doubt they let you into the Girl Scouts, Toni.”
“I think I have shares, that’s just as good.”
“The Girl Scouts don’t have shares.”
“Damnation.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, you can cry on me. But keep the snot away from me and don’t expect me to pat your back, or anything. That shit’s too girly for me.”
Toni laughs even though it’s a crappy joke, and then she sobs and then she leans her forehead against his knee and cries on him.
She isn’t even sure what she’s crying for, but there it is and it feels good, actually, despite the pounding headache and the burning eyes.
Clint just sort of stares at the ceiling and really doesn’t pat her back, but that’s okay, because he doesn’t pull his knee away either. When she wakes the next morning, blurry-eyed and sore, she’s in her bed, stripped down to her panties and with a message on her phone that consists of nothing but lecherous smiley faces.
+
Toni despises pointless websurfing. Jumping from link to link, messing about on Wikipedia just for shits and giggles, trolling blogs, crashing annoying little fansites. It’s a horrible, time-sucking waste of electricity.
That said, she occasionally does it when she’s totally wiped out, idea-wise.
It’s been almost ten hours since Clint put her to bed after she snotted on his pants in the kitchen. It’s the second most awkward thing that ever happened to Toni.
And no, she’s not telling you what the number one is.
She blew her nose. Then she made her way down the workshop and did what she should have done in the first place. She stuck her head into the sand. The metaphorical sand. The kind that’s made up of all kinds of futuristic projects and construction ideas for a magical bomb that will save the world.
And then her mind went blank because she still has that concussion and she hasn’t slept in months, it feels like. Being unconscious in a SHIELD hospital does not count.
So now she’s surfing the web. And she hates it, staring bleary-eyed at the screen, clicking link after link and trying to abandon the screen and get back to work but never managing.
She stops on a site that sells all kinds of designer shit for babies. Stares at the blue and pink and candy yellow striped background. Stares at a load of onesies that say things like ‘My Mom’s the Best’ and ‘Daddy’s Girl’ and ‘Don’t Look at Me, My Mom Dressed Me Like This’.
Clicks another button. Lands on plain onesies in all colors of the rainbow, baby blue to Barbie pink and back.
She didn’t know they came in all those colors. And really, why would she. Toni Stark is never going to be a mother and she’s made a point of not being maudlin about it. It was her choice. And it was the right fucking one.
She orders a pastel green one, the color of mint and soft moss, with butterflies stitched onto one side in pale blue. It reminds her of the grass and the sky, of ridiculously sentimental things.
She tags it as an express order and goes back to clicking random links until she gets to toddler gear. Half brain-dead, she skims over a raving review (probably fake) for a heavy winter coat in pint size. There’s something about great insulation due to two layers, blah, blah.
Toni clicks another button.
Stops.
Goes backwards.
Stares.
Two layer insulation.
“JARVIS?”
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“I am fucking stupid. Make a note of that, have it put on business cards, on my tombstone, I don’t really care, how could I have been so stupid? I have the biggest brain in this entire hemisphere and I am fucking stupid, I should give MIT back my doctorates, at least my first, the engineering one, this is ridiculous, why didn’t you tell me I’m this stupid?”
“I am afraid I am not currently following your through process, Miss Stark.”
She snorts. “Course you aren’t. You’re smart, that’s how I built you, you’re brilliant and this is basic, it’s stupid, it’s primary school, except not, it’s kindergarten. Jesus.”
Without a backward glance at the website, she abandons the computer to stand in the middle of the room. “Okay. Pull up the schematics from attempts three through thirteen, strip the outer layers, come on, yeah, just like that. Now blow them up for me and color code it, exactly.”
“I am afraid I still don’t understand.”
“JARVIS, buddy, we’re building a bomb. And this time, it’s going to actually work.”
+
Toni marches into Loki’s lab with a lot more gusto than she feels and smacks a pale lilac gift bag on the table in front of the god, who looks like she isn’t quite sure which way to twist when she goes about snapping Toni’s neck.
Left, right, left, right. Choices, choices.
Clearly, Toni better talk fast.
“This is for you, don’t read into it, I obviously need a shrink, but that’s okay, because I think I’ve solved the problem we’ve been having with the, you know, blowing up and stuff. Disfigurement via shrapnel and all that. I think. The sims work in any case and, uhm, could we forget about me little nervous breakdown the other day because you sort of hit all the buttons and I may have had a good cry since then. There is no digital evidence of it, I made sure of that, but it happened, I was there and now it’s over and I’m all about the mature and grown up shit now, with the trying and the not denying that I maybe have a teensy-weeny little case of PTSD. Possibly. And here, have a working bomb.”
She pushes a button on her phone, uploading JARVIS’s simulations onto the skeleton version of himself that she left with Loki. A 3D model of a prototype pops into existence between them and Toni takes a deep breath and then holds it because this could go either way.
Loki might forgive her. Or she might blast her into eternity in itty-bitty Toni-bits, which would be bad. A smart person probably would have apologized properly. Said the actual words, for one. But. But, but, but, this is Toni and she doesn’t do apologies, doesn’t even do remorse. Or regret. Or guilt.
Move on. Make yourself better.
Pretend whatever hurt you never happened and you didn’t cry on your teammate like a little girl.
She thinks that Loki might understand that.
When the silence gets too loud and Toni’s kind of starting to turn blue from holding her breath, waiting for Loki, she adds, “Also, that thing I said about you raising kids? That was me being a defensive bitch and lashing out, just FYI. You’ll make a great mom. Dad. Whatever. What do your kids call you anyway? Maddy? Dommy? Uhh, that sounds kinky. What are you…?”
Slowly, Loki extends one arm, pushing the gift bag aside without a glance, palm extending toward Toni. Might be going for her neck. Maybe her tongue. Toni is fairly certain a large percentage of the people who know her have daydreamed about ripping out her tongue.
She holds her breath again and waits, but the touch never comes. Instead Loki grasps the hologram and sends it spinning, staring fixedly at it.
“You added a second shell,” she observes after a moment.
Uhm. O-kay.
“Yeah. Actually… sort of. We have vibranium as a non-magic-conductive material for the shell, right? But the test versions still blow up on us, or, lately, fizzle out. It’s because something about the V doesn’t just repel magic, is also…dissolves it for lack of a better word. That’s why the fizzing instead of the boom. The magic inside the bomb erodes, at least according to our readings, right?”
A nod.
“So we need the magic inside the V, but not touching it. And we’ve played with electricity before. An electric current to keep the magic in, which didn’t work because enough magic overwhelms the current and sort of… reverses it. That’s why machines explode when you get hormonal, but anyway, in low doses the electricity works to repel magic. It’s like they’re magnets with the same polarity. You can’t put them together.
“So, brilliant bitch that I am, I combined the two. Now there are two outer casings of vibranium, with electricity flowing between them. The charge is strong enough that the ‘dead zone’ between that current and the magical current includes the inner layer of V. The V contains the magic and the electricity keeps the magic far enough away from the V that it doesn’t erode. Best of both worlds. Of course, I haven’t actually tried it, seeing as I was missing my handy magic-charger, but, well? What do you think?”
“This is what you did after you ran out of here?”
Toni considers pointing out that she didn’t run so much as she was magically dumped, but decides against it. If Loki hadn’t zapped her across town, she would have run. It’s what she does.
“That, and I may or may not have angsted on Clint for a little bit, but we’re not talking about that.” She scratches at her temple, tucks a loose curl behind her ear, wishes, not for the first time, that she had her long hair back.
The Ten Rings chopped her hair off to almost nothing and it’s just now getting down to her shoulders again. She hates the reminder whenever she looks in the mirror. Another thing they took.
Another thing she had to fight, tooth and nail, to reclaim.
“Hawkeye?”
“Yes?”
“You are friends?”
“Yes?”
“He is well?”
Welcome to the Twilight Zone! Toni shrugs, unwilling to give away more than necessary about Clint. He’s got issues with Loki, obviously, seeing as how he leaves the room whenever the wayward god is brought up. Toni feels actually bad about it. “Yeah,” she says in the end. “I guess.”
Loki narrows her eyes briefly, then nods, seeming content. It surprises Toni, who asks, “Why do you care?”
Silvertongue or not, there is an awkward, not at all smooth, break when Loki turns her attention back to the hologram before offering a belated, “I did spend a week inside his mind, Toni.” Then she adds, “You have combined the two faulty attempts into one.”
Obviously, they are changing the subject. Go figure. “Yeah. I mean, both sort of do the same thing in different ways and they added up nicely.”
“They make up for each other’s weaknesses,” Loki agrees. “Despite not seeming compatible at first. Vibranium is not especially conductive to traditional electricity, if I remember correctly.”
She’s looking up now, meeting Toni’s gaze, green on brown. Somehow, Toni’s pretty sure they’re not exactly talking about the bomb anymore.
Huh.
+
Half an hour later, when Toni’s already busy with metal and wiring and blowtorches, Loki looks into the gift bag.
And looks.
And looks.
And then pulls it closed again and neatly folds the edges over before tucking it into an out of the way corner with a little smile on her face.
Toni has no idea why, but her poor, damaged heart sort of grows three sizes in her chest.
Something’s happening here, but she has no idea what it is.
Or maybe she doesn’t want to know. Shut up, nobody asked you.
+
Toni is up to her elbows in techno guts while Loki, sitting only a few feet away (recent development, no, we’re not reading into it), is working out some magical snag and chewing on her pen with abandon. Her free hand is under the table and Toni knows, without looking, that she’s cupping her belly like it’s in danger of falling off.
JARVIS occasionally chirps something when Toni gets too close to frying the circuitry and Loki grumbles every now and then and stops working to run a problem by Toni. Half the time she can’t actually help, but just talking out loud helps the god.
It’s their usual tableau when working at Loki’s lab and they fall into it easily after all those months. It feels natural, like working with Bruce, only better, because Toni actually learns stuff from Loki, and doesn’t have to watch what she does so as not to piss anyone off.
Sure, it would probably be healthier, but pissing off a Norse god and potentially getting killed is more fun than pissing off a friend that could potentially turn into a rage monster, ruin the equipment and then guilt trip about it for weeks on end.
Yes, it’s screwed up. No, Toni does not care.
Working with Loki like this is comfortable.
And freaky. But mostly comfortable.
So of course that’s when Loki’s head jerks up like a bloodhound catching a scent and JARVIS suddenly warns, “Miss Stark, I am detecting intruders in the hall-.”
And by then it’s already too late because the wooden front door explodes inward in a hail of splinters and Thor comes marching through, hammer swinging, the rest of the Avengers only half a step behind.
“Loki! I have detected your magic upon this building! Show your-“
Toni really, really hopes JARVIS is recording this because the look on Thor’s face when he spies girl-Loki and Toni sitting peacefully next to each other at the same work bench, can only be called gob-smacked. It’s a good look on the god.
The kind of look that you fondly remember for the rest of your life and pull back up whenever you need a good laugh.
That is to say, Thor looks like naked monkeys are dancing the jig in front of him. With hats. In high heels. And sunglasses. And possibly two heads apiece.
The expressions of the rest of the Avengers aren’t quite as entertaining. Steve looks furious, Bruce looks painfully amused, Natasha and Coulson look blank, which is their version of murderous and Clint actually does look blank, which is weird.
They’re also all sort of eyeballing Loki, who, while female, is still definitely recognizable as Loki, at least in this context. Toni expects someone to make a comment, but that would be either Bruce or Clint and Bruce knew already and Clint… Clint doesn’t look like he’s up for wisecracks at the moment. He just stares at Loki, his jaw set and his hands clenching around his bow.
The woman herself is frowning and smirking at the same time, which is interesting. Toni mostly just wants to disappear completely.
“I thought you were not followed, Toni,” the god, the female one, finally says. She calls Toni by her name intentionally, Toni bets.
Steve’s scowl deepens. Bruce makes a sort of constipated face. Thor isn’t blinking. Before Toni can defend her wounded pride, Coulson takes half a step forward. “You leave blank spaces when you hide from us. SHIELD is fully capable of following those blank spaces, if given enough time and incentive.”
“And what incentive did you have, after almost four months?”
The agent smiles blandly at her, which she takes to mean there wasn’t actually incentive so much as they just figured out how to trail her and went for it, though he’s never going to admit that.
She also just sort of admitted that she’s been meeting with Loki for four months. Paradoxically, it makes everyone relax, just a fraction. She guesses it’s because she hasn’t murdered them all in their sleep yet, or something.
Whatever. The whole situation is strange. Toni expected there to be fighting the second the Avengers finally caught on, but there isn’t. She guesses they came here out of curiosity and then Thor detected Loki’s wards and everyone got a bit overzealous stormed the place, only to find the two of them working peacefully. It probably also helps that Loki didn’t so much as twitch toward a weapon. And now here they are, staring at each other like idiots.
“My life sucks,” Toni observes, very succinctly, just as Steve takes half a step forward and asks, very curtly, “Could you please put down the… whatever it is you have in your hands?”
Toni looks down at the trigger mechanism she was fiddling with. Then back up at Steve. “Seriously? You think I’m going to, what? Blow you up? Really?”
“You are obviously collaborating with Loki, who is in disguise, what do you think I think, Stark?!”
Okay, so maybe everyone but Steve relaxed a bit. The man is as perceptive as a rock some days.
And back to last names, are they? Toni smiles and it’s not necessarily a nice smile.
“I think,” she drawls, slowly and carefully, like she’s speaking to a particularly dumb toddler, “That I have been ‘collaborating’ with Loki - kudos for the big word, by the way, did that hurt? - for more than three months and so far, neither me, nor she, nor you, or anyone else has died and hey, look, Loki isn’t attacking you like a psychotic bondage freak!”
She’d say more (unfriendly, pointless things, mostly, she can admit), but Loki interrupts. “I resent that description,” she throws out, a studiously bored expression on her face.
Toni smirks at her, “Sorry, but as long as you wear body armor made from leather, I call you a bondage freak. I mean, half those straps don’t even have a purpose and it looks like you’re wearing a seatbelt, seriously.”
Loki opens her mouth.
“Ah-ah, don’t even. I know you’re not insulted by the ‘psychotic’, don’t pretend you are. You like it when people are afraid of you.”
Yes, they’re playing their audience. Yes, it’s cheap. No, it’s not really working anyway, since Steve just snaps Toni’s last name again. Toni’s eyes narrow and she can see Bruce sort of wincing out of the corner of her eye, because he recognizes that look, even if Cap’n Mighty doesn’t.
It’s Black Widow, surprisingly, who cuts the bossman off before he can make Toni blow her top. “Why?” she asks, very calmly. She’s fingering her guns while she talks, but Toni appreciates the effort. She remembers, suddenly, that Natasha was one of the people who never really seemed upset with Loki getting off easy after what he did. Toni guesses the Russian knows, better than more, the value of being given a chance by the enemy.
She shrugs, turns to look at Loki, who shrugs back. Leaves the playing field to her. She meets Coulson’s gaze next, not entirely on accident and finds a spark of what she’s looking for there.
“You know,” she observes, with more calm than she’s feeling. He doesn’t answer, so she keeps talking. “I know I’m a genius and everything, but SHIELD is big, and you have computers I built, and you guys do eventually figure stuff out. You know. About what’s out there, about the Chitauri. They’ll come knocking again, bigger, badder and angrier than before. You know.”
After a moment of frigid silence, during which Clint shifts from foot to foot, Thor bounces on his heels and Steve just looks homicidal, Coulson nods. “Dr. Banner was so kind as to point out a few observations.”
Toni gapes, not quite managing to hide her surprise. Bruce just shrugs at her when she throws him a look, and she smiles. Trust good old Bruce to find a way to help her even without actually helping her. He took Toni’s observation to Fury and Coulson, paving the way for her and Loki.
She owes him a gift basket. One filled with dangerous biochemical components, delicate equipment and half a dozen puzzles for him to play with. And possibly her never-gonna-happen firstborn.
Neither of their resident blond muscle mountains notices the byplay, but Loki does, inclining her head in silent thanks. Bruce looks a bit uncomfortable, but he nods back.
“What do our enemies have to do with the truce between you and my sister?” Thor finally booms, bored with the riddles.
If she’s honest, Toni is impressed with his switching of pronouns and titles. She didn’t expect that kind of acceptance from the giant lug of a god. But then, he does love his sibling to the point of obsession.
Loki snorts and folds her hands under her chin delicately. Playing it up. “Surely even you understand what the return of the Chitauri means, Thor.”
Thor opens his mouth. Predictably, Loki is faster, “They will return and they will burn this planet to the ground for the defeat dealt to them at the hands of Iron Woman and your little team.”
Toni rolls her eyes but doesn’t say anything. She watches Clint instead, who’s grinding his teeth hard enough for her to see. Coulson seems fine with the situation, but then he attacked an enemy and got beaten, fair and square. He’s the kind of guy to actually respect that. He’s also the kind of guy who can tuck his personal opinion so deep down, you wouldn’t find it with a flashlight and a map. And he’s smart enough to notice the same thing Toni did, when she watched the tapes of his fight with the god.
Loki stabbed him in the kidneys. Not the heart, the kidneys. That’s a painful death, but also a slow one. And really, dealing an enemy a slow death in his own territory, where help is close enough to save him, is the kind of stupid move Loki simply does not make.
Toni was right, all those months ago. Even while he was giving them hell, Loki was careful not to burn too many bridges.
Except with Clint.
Clint looks like he can’t decide whether to hurl or start shooting. Toni looks away, guilt stabbing in her belly. Clint is her friend. And she’s kind of fucking his worst nightmare.
“And why would you care what happens to this planet?” Steve bites in Loki’s direction. “You tried to end it yourself not too long ago.”
“Right,” Toni jumps in, “And there’s no such thing as second chances, right?”
Natasha used to be a Russian assassin. Clint used to be a mercenary. Bruce used to use cars for footballs. Thor used to wear his ass on his shoulders. Toni used to build weapons to blow the world to bits. Hell, even Steve is on his second chance, in a way.
Third, if you count him becoming Mr. Buff and getting de-thawed as two chances.
“He tried to kill us!”
“Did she?”
“Yes,” Coulson asks, one eyebrow raised perfectly. “Did you?”
Loki sneers and everyone in the room, bar Thor and Cap, maybe, knows that even if she didn’t, Loki would never admit it. Toni has been spending most of her waking hours with her for months and still not a word of confession or apology has crossed Loki’s lips. Toni doesn’t need it. Toni doesn’t want it. She’s a futurist, not a historian. She doesn’t give a flying fuck about yesterday.
And the rest of the Avengers wouldn’t buy it anyway. So instead of ‘sorry’ Loki says, “I need this planet intact and to keep it that way, I need Stark’s expertise in certain areas, just as she needs mine. It’s a compromise.”
“Why would you need this planet ‘intact’?” For a goody-two-shoes, Steve sneers surprisingly well. And a lot. And Toni is getting really, really tired of all his judging. From the very first time they met, he’s been laying judgment after judgment on her. She’s female so she shouldn’t fight. She’s a Stark, so she should be like Howard. She’s arrogant, so she has to be unfeeling and a failure as a human being. She’s smart, so she can’t be kind. She’s independent and comfortable with herself, so she’s a whore. She gets that this world is kind of overwhelming him and that he’s just trying to make it fit by applying old frameworks to this new, scary world, but someday soon, she is going to punch him in his ridiculously pretty, all-American face.
Right now, she bites her lip hard and then opens her mouth to cut. Him. Down.
Unfortunately, Loki beats her to the punch.
When the door blew open, Toni stood up out of sheer reflex. Loki didn’t. She does now, slowly, dramatically, because that’s who she is, growing behind the workbench like a rising titan.
Or a beach ball popping out of the water.
Silence.
Toni has the weird urge to look around for passing tumbleweeds and even Coulson looks surprised.
Then, at the exact same moment, the Norse siblings start talking. Loki’s, “I cannot very well take this child back to Asgard,” is more or less drowned out by Thor’s booming, “You are with child! This is a joyous occasion!”
Loki snarls, wordlessly, and raises a hand as if to claw her brother’s eyes out. Thor, wisely, takes half a step back. Then he catches himself and asks, “Why would you not take your child home, sister?”
“Why would I? So you can take her away from me like you did Sleipnir? So Odin can treat her like an animal? Like a monster?! So she can be reviled and spat on for her parentage? Give me one good reason, brother, why I would subject my daughter to Asgard’s idea of love!”
For a moment, everyone holds very, very still. Even Toni, who has known Loki for months, has never seen her like this. The god is livid with anger where before, she’s only ever been cold. She was actually yelling just then, and she never yells.
Thor apparently understands the significance of that, too, because he looks like Loki just ripped his guts out with her bare hands and showed them to him. Toni, who actually likes the giant goofball most of the time, feels something like satisfaction curl in her gut anyway.
Still she looks away, more for her own sake than his privacy, finds Coulson looking intrigued and Natasha looking… softer than usual, even if only for a second. Bruce looks sympathetic, mainly because he doesn’t do pity, but probably really wants to, right now. Clint hasn’t moved at all, hasn’t so much as blinked. Steve, on the other hand, looks as gobsmacked as Thor, all open and gaping, defenseless.
It’s never fun to hear your enemy is just as fucked in the head as everyone else and in serious need of a hug. Or two. Or a million billion, to make up for a thousand years of Odin’s shitty parenting. Toni found Asgard a lot more fascinating before she read the myths.
Of course, Loki being Loki, doesn’t give anyone time to digest what she just said. Instead she pulls all the masks back up and asks, in a voice as cold as that blue, blue skin she hides, “Why would I expose my child to that? Asgard is not an option and neither is Jotunheim. Where else, beyond those two worlds, could I raise any child of mine? Midgard is, for the duration of my daughter’s stay here, quite safe, I assure you. From me, and from those who would seek to destroy it. That is why I need Stark. The Chitauri’s leader is not going to win.”
She doesn’t cross her arms or anything like that because that would be defensive, but damn if she doesn’t manage to look absolutely ‘take that, bitches’ anyway.
Toni can’t help the, “Burn,” that escapes her. It’s low, but apparently still audible, because Clint suddenly makes a noise somewhere between a scream and a grunt, turns on his heel, and marches out.
Her first instinct is to run after him because, somehow, this is her mess. Without Toni, Clint and Loki would have never ended up in this room together. Loki might still be the badass monster she’s like everyone to believe she is and Clint might still be trying to shoot her in the eye and he would probably be fine with that.
Reason number twenty-seven Toni doesn’t do relationships: People get hurt.
Fuck.
But she can’t run after Clint because there’s this growing up thing again, this responsibility thing and if she leaves now, the Avengers will tear Loki limb from limb (or at least try to arrest her again and that worked so well the last time they tried), and there will be no bomb and Thanos will take over the world and really? Toni would look absolutely whorish in Princess Leia’s slave costume.
If she survived the initial world-ending, that is.
Which she probably wouldn’t.
Also, she likes Loki, which is probably the stupidest fucking thing she has ever done.
“Look,” she interrupts the brewing tension, “Let me lay out the facts for everyone. You don’t like Loki.”
Preemptively, she raises a hand toward Thor. “Yes, I know, you actually do. Shut up.”
“You don’t like Loki because Loki was a pissant the last time you saw her - him. I hate pronouns. Couldn’t we have a general pronoun, like we have a general definite article? Maybe I should write my senator. He just loves me.” She doesn’t even bother grinning winsomely because really, the snark is just reflex at this point and no-one is amused. “He took Clint and Erik mind-hostage, he shiv’d Coulson, he called Natasha something I still haven’t had the time to look up, but I’m pretty sure it was sexists, which, irony like whoa. Thor got beaten up, Steve got beaten up, Bruce got a bit used, shit went down, Manhattan looks like someone threw a tantrum and no, Brucie, I don’t mean you, don’t look at me like that.
“Point is, Loki is a shit.”
Loki proves that by smirking.
“I could list a dozen different ways she actually isn’t,” - Loki’s smirk falls - , “But I like my heart inside my ribcage and those hormones are not to be taken lightly, let me tell you. Fact is, Loki needs this world to raise her kid. And for that, she needs to find a way to get rid of Thanos - that’s the bad guy’s name, by the way, Thor, don’t use it, apparently it’s magic - when he comes knocking. She can’t do that alone. That’s why she found me and why she made me an offer and why we’re here. Loki needs us. That’s the good thing about egoistic assholes. You can always trust them to save their own skins first.
“Steve, everyone, this is Loki, saving her skin. And before you all jump on her for using and abusing us, we need her too, because there’s a big, bad monster heading our way and I know that nothing we have can stop him. But with my magic fingers and Loki’s magic… well, magic, we almost have a solution. In fact, you just interrupted the production of what will, hopefully, finally, be a working prototype. So. I wasn’t going to make a speech. Crap. Anyway. Loki needs us. We need Loki. And really, she hasn’t done anything naughty since she got out of detention with Daddy Dearest so give her the benefit of the fucking doubt and stop glaring at me like you want to set my panties on fire, Jesus, Dicksicle, I get it. You don’t like me. You don’t like Loki. Guess what, you’re gonna have to suck it up.”
Toni breathes. Long, deep inhales. Wow. Oxygen sure is neat.
She looks at everyone only to be met with a whole bunch of blank, disgruntled or amused faces. Blank being the two SHIELD agents left, disgruntled being Steve and amused being Loki and Bruce, the latter of which is getting a kick out of this.
Coulson runs a hand over his head. “This is going to be so much paperwork,” he mutters to himself and then, even quieter, “We are doomed.”
Then Loki cocks her head to one side and studies Toni like she just did a neat trick. “You knew,” she finally says and Toni blames the lack of oxygen to the brain for taking a moment to figure that one out.
“That you popped up on that street on purpose, wearing a maternity dress you didn’t need yet and staring at a baby store window like it was the gateway to the Playboy Mansion? Yes. Haven’t I told you, I’m a genius.”
“And you still went along with it.”
Toni shrugs, spreads her arms a little, palms out. “Got what I wanted, didn’t I?”
She could say more. Doesn’t. Loki gives her a nod. Thor lowers his hammer and grins. Steve sort of slumps, shield drooping like a sad little Frisbee. Toni might be a tad hysterical, she thinks, but not really. It’s weird. This should be all adrenaline and shouting and fighting, but fact is, she’s right. She knows she’s right. And everyone else knows it too. Bruce paved the way for her, in a way, and Loki paved the way for herself by behaving ever since her return to earth. Thor just wants everyone to be a happy family. Coulson is made of stone cold logic before everything else and Steve, while angry and irrational, also knows what compromise means, better than Toni ever has.
Plus, he wouldn’t hit a pregnant woman if she were standing over him with an axe and a grudge.
This is it.
The great showdown Toni has been dreading for months, the clash of the titans. It’s over. There’s something bigger than either of them coming and if they want to beat it, they have to work together. End of story.
Except for one thing.
“Now,” Toni says into the awkward silence, “you kids play nice. I have to run after Clint and maybe, possibly, grovel so he will ever talk to me again, much less be my movie snuggle buddy.”
She grimaces.
Toni hates groveling.
+
+
Part V
+
Title: Loki and Toni's Excellent Adventure in World Saving
Summary: In which Loki and Toni try to save the world, Steve is obnoxious, Clint has no patience for artsy movies and there are cupcakes. And issues.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Avengers. Surprise!
Warnings: Oh goodness. Genderswap, pregnancy, violence, Toni's filthy mouth, sexual references, femslash, Odin and Howard's A+ parenting, unrequited love and issues. So. Many. Issues.
Rating: R
Pairing: Loki/Tony, wherein both of them are genderswapped.
Reltated Works: Link to everything related to this - podfic read by the lovely Reena_jenkins, art and mixtape - can be found here.
+
Part III
+
+
Perhaps it’s the concussion, but it’s more likely that Toni’s simply raw from the emotional upheaval of getting injured, having her suit ripped up, having JARVIS called a thing, finding out Steve’s hate-on for her is actually a hard-on and then getting waylaid by her friends who have suddenly turned into the kind of dicks that blame a woman for saying no to a man.
Or perhaps it’s simply that Loki came looking for her, even if she’d probably deny it to the death, and then laid a claim on her with tongue and teeth and snarled words. Just thinking about it still sends memory-sparks down Toni’s spine.
A pregnant woman should not be this skilled at angry sex.
Whatever it is, lying in the semi-dark of midnight in New York, Toni finally dares to reach out that hand, to finish that aborted gesture from days ago.
Loki’s belly is taut and strangely hard and soft at the same time under her palm. And warm. It seems far too warm. Strange. The rest of the god is always cool to the touch.
She can’t help it. When Loki doesn’t immediately rip off her hand, she pokes the belly. And prods a little. And makes faces at it.
Eventually, Loki snorts delicately. “You behave like a child with a new toy,” she observes, somewhat snidely, but not actually unkindly.
Here’s a secret: It’s possible to fuck the meanness right out of the god of lies. You only have to try hard enough.
Toni shrugs, rolls onto her back and keeps her hands to herself. “I’ve never actually been around anyone who’s pregnant before.”
“Surely some friends…”
She shakes her head. “Nah. Not really the friends type, me. Or the baby type. I actually had that taken care of when I was twenty-five. Permanently.” She mimes cutting something.
Loki actually twists onto her side, head in hand so she can loom over Toni. “You had someone remove you ability to have children?” She sounds aghast.
Toni shrugs. “Guess I knew, even back then, that I’d make a shitty mother. I mean, can you imagine me raising a kid? It’d be…” she shakes her head.
Toni is terrified of being a parent like her father but, secretly, she is even more terrified of being a parent like her mother: pale grey in the background, unwilling, unable, or simply too numbed by sherry and society parties to give a fuck about her child. Because Toni’s biggest fuckups have been and always will be, not the things she does, but the things she doesn’t do.
Like thinking about where all her bombs go. Like telling anyone she’s dying. Like considering the consequences of her actions.
Loki frowns, unfairly prettily. “My children are always and forever doomed,” she confesses, looking Toni straight in the eye. “But I cannot imagine not having them.”
She cradles her belly, not protectively, but gently. Softly. Holding.
It’s Toni’s turn to frown, because she had a father who labeled her as a lost cause the moment he saw her vag where a dick should have been and she knows it’s not a nice thing to grow up with. “You can’t know that.”
Eyebrow. “You still have not read up on our lore, have you?”
“Have you read up on Twilight by now?” Toni shoots back, earning her the second eyebrow and a load of silence.
Loki waits for her to sigh and shake her head before going on. “The lives of the aesir are cyclical. We are born, we live, and come Ragnarok, we all die, only to be born again. We do not retain our full memories but there are… glimpses. Hints.” The semi-amused expression morphs into something utterly blank. “No matter what I do, the outcome is always the same. My children are always reviled and hated for their parentage.”
“It can’t really be…” Toni tries, only to get cut off.
“It is. It always is. No matter what I do, no matter which path I choose, I am the villain and my children suffer for my imagined crimes.” The god doesn’t even sound angry. Just very, very cold. Hard, in the same way she did during the Chitauri disaster when they talked in the Tower. Loki sounded just like this when he told Toni that he had an army. The world was going to burn and in his voice was nothing but certainty, hard and immovable. It pissed Toni off then, and even more so now.
“Determinism. Now there’s a cheery thought.”
“’Cheery’ is not the term I would use.”
“How about ‘convenient’?” Toni tries, snidely. “Can’t change it anyway, so why try? Why not throw people out of windows and be done with it?”
She’s being aggressive. She knows it. She can see it coming from half a mile off, but Loki’s attitude is making her angry like whoa, zero to sixty in less than a second, and there’s nothing she can do about it. It must show on her face because Loki sits, less graceful than a month ago. It puts some distance between them.
“You are being childish,” she observes. “I am merely stating facts.”
“You’re stating an excuse to not even try anymore.”
It’s impressive, really, how fast and how totally Loki’s face can lock down, back to that mask Toni first saw almost a year ago, on Fury’s big boat. The mask of a man intent on destroying the planet. It makes Toni feel very small and very cold.
“What do you know, little mortal, of what I try and do not try? I have attempted to escape my own fate since the dawn of time and nothing I have done has ever changed the outcome.” There’s no bitterness there, just the ice, just the certainty.
Toni rolls to her feel, almost lands ass over teakettle and starts grabbing her clothes. “Bullshit,” she says. “This is complete and utter bullshit.”
It matters what you do, how you try. It matters which way you chooses and how you do things. It matters. It has to matter because if it doesn’t, then all the shit that’s happened to Toni was just random. It wasn’t deserved, it wasn’t there to make her make herself better, it just happened and it means nothing and if everything means nothing, she might as well put on her suit and sink herself in the Atlantic with the engines off. Things, decisions, choices (walking out of that cave and fixing things), it has to matter. It has to.
She’s dressing so fast her hands are shaking because she needs to get out of here, needs to get out, get away from that idea, from the look on Loki’s face, needs to get away from because if she doesn’t, if she doesn’t. She’ll break down and cry, a tiny little heap of broken Stark on the floor and she can’t, can’t, can’t. She allots herself two hours after every major crisis to break down and this isn’t it, she can’t, not now. Can’t, can’t, can’t.
She has to go, she’s a busy woman, she has a world to save and an energy problem to fix and maybe puppies to carry across the street and old ladies to kiss and she needs to do those things because they matter. Because she did a bad thing and if she redeems herself enough, she’ll…. It matters. It will matter. What she does now. What she tries to undo. It’s not redemption because she doesn’t believe in that. She’s a futurist. The only thing she believes in is making things better and so that’s what she does.
And it matters.
“You are being ridiculous,” Loki observes, still in that bland, polite tone that really doesn’t hide her fury.
“Your face is ridiculous,” Toni snaps back, because there is a naked god with a baby bump sitting in the middle of rumpled sheets calling her ridiculous and that’s just… she giggles. Bites her lip.
“Careful,” comes the warning, like Loki read her mind and Toni remembers how, a few hours ago, they were teasing each other about caring and now here they are and Toni is so angry with Loki for giving up like that, for just lying back and taking it, like nothing matters, but it does. It has to. Afghanistan… it has to.
“Of what? Your face? Sorry, but unless you’re going to cut me with your cheekbones, I don’t see how this is a threat.”
“Stark,” Loki’s growling now. Hey, look, anger! Toni grins, the phantom taste of blood already in her mouth, a sound like bombs going off ringing in her ears. Part of Toni wants to lunge and throw the first punch. Part of her wants whatever the god will do to her then because there’s an explosion sitting in her chest, waiting to happen, something bright and brutal, just waiting to rip through her and out into the world, and isn’t that the perfect metaphor.
Toni is the perfect bomb.
And she wants someone to push the big, red button because here she is, body too small, skin too tight, with something churning inside of her, helpless and nameless and angry. Toni gets so angry.
But nothing of that makes it to the surface. All that shows is a smile like broken glass. “That’s my name, don’t wear it out, sweetheart!”
“You do realize I’m a moment away from murdering you, yes?”
“What are you going to do? Defenestrate me again?”
“The thought is tempting, yes.”
“Great. Good to know where we stand.”
“I am not the one suddenly behaving like a lunatic.”
Almost vibrating out of her skin, Toni does what she does best. She keeps prodding, keeps poking, keeps the lighter on the fuse. She doesn’t even know why. She just knows that she has to.
“No, you’re the one who blames their shit on fate and fuck the rest. No wonder your kids end up as monsters and outcast with you raising them, teaching them they have no chance!”
It’s a cruel thing to say because Toni knows that Loki loves that baby in her belly, but no-one has ever accused Toni Stark of being kind when she’s helpless. And right now? She’s feeling as helpless as she ever did in that cave.
Loki raises a hand and Toni has a split second to think, oh fuck, or maybe that’s, oh, yes, as she takes in the god’s expression, pure rage, and then -
- she’s standing in the middle of a dirty, abandoned alley at the far end of New York, her jeans only half done up, shirt in hand and no shoes.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Fuck.
+
Of course the others are still awake when she gets back and of course they’re sitting in her damn living room, staring at her like she’s covered in moonlight and sparkles when she comes stomping in, her hair a mess, her make-up ruined, barefoot and only half dressed, still feeling like all her edges are showing wickedly sharp, catching the light in the New York darkness.
“We were worried about you,” Bruce says before anyone else (Steve) can start laying into her for walking out on them with a concussion and no phone on her. Good old Bruce, eternal peacekeeper. One day, when she has a lot of time on her hands, she’ll find out if he’s always been this way or if the Hulk taught him that.
“Bully for you,” she snarls, marching straight to the bar, pours herself a drink, downs it, foregoes the glass for the second drink and takes a long swig directly from the bottle. That’s more like it. Somewhere below the arc reactor, a roaring monster starts settling back into its place.
“Toni?” That’s still Bruce, who suddenly sounds very worried because, yeah, okay, he probably figured out who she went to after she stomped off and having her come home and crawl into a bottle after seeing Loki probably doesn’t bode well for the world.
Except that Loki isn’t going to go out and take out her anger with Toni on unsuspecting humans. Toni has no idea why, but she’s sure of that. Loki didn’t even take her anger with Toni out on Toni, just zapped her away.
“Shitty fucking day,” she supplies, means, don’t get your panties in a twist, no homicidal gods on the streets. Bruce relaxes marginally.
“What the hell happened to you, Stark?” Clint fills in the silence, backed up by Natasha’s, “You look like roadkill.”
Toni points at the redhead, smirks and says, “Bitch.”
Behind her, Thor looked mildly put-upon and Steve glowers. Which, now that she knows is his version of a love-sick-puppy look, kind of makes her want to gag. And anyway, this is all his fault. If he hadn’t acted like a dick, she wouldn’t have run off to see Loki in the state she’s in and maybe that fight would never have happened. Toni usually has thicker skin than this.
A god telling her nothing she does matters even the slightest bit should not be enough to send her into a tailspin. Except. Shitty fucking day.
She shakes her head and when she looks back up at the peanut gallery, they actually look worried, which, wow. Clint and Bruce she kind of expected, but the others not so much.
“Stark?” Natasha asks, talking half a step forward. Or maybe everyone else takes half a step back because this is clearly ovary-territory, didn’t you know. Chauvinist pigs.
Toni waves her off because if the other woman comes any closer, she may cry on her, or maybe punch her, and neither of those things will do. “Relax guys. New York is still standing, everything is peachy keen, ignore the madwoman with the bottle.”
She toasts them. “And get out of my home.”
“What happened?”
“I had a big, fat fight with my girlfriend, what do you think happened?”
She snorts and sort of shoves past Natasha on her way to the lab. Which can be put on lockdown. Yay.
Steve chokes, Clint makes noises, Thor is confused (default setting, seriously) and Bruce, who is the only one who knows who the girlfriend is, asks, “About what?”
Good question.
“Philosophy,” Toni snaps and, grabbing another bottle as she goes, gets the hell out of there.
+
You shouldn’t drink with a concussion.
Toni heard that somewhere (Pepper) once, so after her rapid fire self medication in front of the entire team, she actually stands in front of the bottles she snagged, a mournful expression on her face. For five whole minutes.
She wants to get drunk.
She needs to get drunk.
Because she just freaked the fuck out over the most ridiculous thing and she doesn’t care what anyone (Pepper, who would have guessed?) say about time for healing and natural reactions. It’s been almost three years. She should not be having fucking flashbacks anymore. It’s over. It’s done. Everyone that ever saw her in that cave, that knows how weak she was, how pathetic, is dead. She killed most of them herself.
It should be okay.
But when Loki started her whole spiel about determinism and rebirth, she freaked. Loudly, explosively, viciously. The way she does most things. Why? Because she’s rationalized Afghanistan by telling herself she deserved what happened for being a fucktart. By convincing herself that she can undo all the bad that happened with the good she’s doing now. Save ten innocents, get one nightmare less this week.
Logic is what keeps Toni going, always has. Logic and numbers and reasons. She needs to know how things work and if there isn’t a proper explanation, she makes one. And this was hers. And then there was Loki, who is a god, who is real and she said all those things Toni cannot compute, cannot refute because it’s a god saying them and…
If a primitive program is faced with data it cannot assimilate into its known patterns, something will blow up. In this case, Toni Stark’s head. Boom.
She freaked out. And now she’s standing here, thinking it through instead of getting absolutely blitzed and she thinks this might be growing up, might be this responsibility shit everyone keeps yelling at her about. And, like poison, the thought slithers in: What does it matter if you grow up now, if nothing you do ever matters at all?
She really needs to get drunk now.
She doesn’t.
She goes online, she finds a collection of Norse Myths and she downloads it onto a tablet (manually to give her hands something to do). Then she sits her ass down and actually reads and that’s so unlike her that she actually needs to stop and wonder for a moment.
On the far table, the bottles beckon. In her chest, something throbs and shifts. Toni gets down to reading.
+
Her first thought while reading Loki’s Story as Told by Someone Who Wasn’t There is, I really hope this is made up.
Her second is, shit, and after that it devolves.
She hopes that the whole half dead thing is a metaphor, because if Loki’s bouncing baby girl is actually born half dead, Toni foresees a definite problem with zombie cults springing up all over the place.
She reads about Sleipnir and Fenrir and Jormungandr and Vali and Nari, about Angrboda and Sigyn and Odin and Thor and dwarves and a mouth sewn shut, of snakes and poison and chains and caves.
Eventually, she comes to the conclusion that she owes Loki an apology for the comment about not being fit to raise her own children. Shortly after that, she realizes that she wants to punch Thor and Odin both in the face because, Jesus on a stick, if this had been her, if this were her life, her children, you can damn well bet Toni wouldn’t have taken a thousand years to go nuts and try to blow up a planet.
And it definitely wouldn’t have been the planet of an enemy, but her home world.
She tries to imagine what Loki described, being endlessly reborn, knowing but not really knowing. Having hunches. And running head first, arms spread wide, into the same traps, the same knives as before.
It makes her feel pretty damn helpless.
+
“Toni, this is Pepper. Steve just called me and told me that, apparently, you had a fight with your girlfriend and that he’s sorry he didn’t know you were in a relationship. Toni, you don’t do relationships. And you don’t have a girlfriend. Please call me. I’m worried.”
Toni stares at the speakers JARVIS used to relay that message. “JAR,” she says after a moment, “Call Pep when it’s morning on her coast. Tell her that I’m fine, that I’ll explain, but not right now. Tell her not to come here, please. I just… not right now. And tell her, tell her that I love her and that she can whack me later for being stupid and I promise I’m not dying. You got that?”
“I do, Miss Stark.”
“Good.”
+
It’s almost sunrise when Toni emerges from her workroom in search of something. To distract her from her own thoughts, her memories, and that deep, heavy ball of compassion and pity rolling around her stomach.
Afghanistan and Loki’s children haunt her, all for nothing, all without sense or rhyme or reason. All just happening and there’s nothing she can do to fix it.
Toni hates nothing more than being helpless.
Like she was in that cave.
Like she is now.
“You look like something chewed you up and spat you out,” Clint says quietly from where he’s perched on top of a bookshelf. She doesn’t even jump, which just goes to show how crazy her life is these days.
And she made it even crazier by adding a god to the mix. Why is that again?
“Thanks,” she answers, tries a smarmy camera-grin and gives up halfway there. “Shouldn’t you be in bed like a good little Robin Hood?”
“Tasha and Phil were watching The Fountain. I needed to get away before I started clawing at my own eyes.”
She snorts, walks past him to the kitchen and pours herself a cup of stone cold coffee before sitting down at the counter. Dummy whirs over, presents his claw for a few pats, then wheels back into the darkness.
“Seriously, though. You look like shit. And you don’t smell like a bar, so it’s kind of freaking me out, to be honest.” He’s there suddenly, across the counter, tapping his fingers on the marble surface, half-smirk in place despite the hour.
“Join the club,” she mutters, then takes him in, tired eyes, lines around his face, hiding in her living room at the asscrack of dawn. “Are we friends?” she blurts before she can stop herself and then flinches, looks away.
Her head hurts really, really much.
Clint cocks his head to one side. “Are you going to kick me out if I say no? Because I can’t go back down there before I’m absolutely certain that movie is over. It makes no sense!”
Yeah, ok. Toni isn’t very good at people, but neither is Clint, and she thinks that means that yes, they are friends, why is she being such a maudlin idiot.
“Do you believe in free will?”
“As in Team Free Will? Have you been watching Supernatural again?”
“I don’t watch that show,” she defends, although it lacks her usual vigor.
“Su-ure. Whatever you say, Stark.” He’s smirking. Damn him.
“Pepper is a lying liar who lies and her pants should be perpetually on fire because I do not watch that show, no matter what she says. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
For a moment, Clint looks pensive. Then he says, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the lovely Miss Potts in anything other than skirts.”
Toni blinks. “She wears those jean-shorts sometimes. They’re really short.”
There’s a moment of silence. Then Clint offers, “Sometimes I’m really glad you’re a dyke.”
“Bisexual, technically, and keep your labels to yourself.”
More silence. Then, “Why do you ask?”
She shrugs as he nimbly jumps on the counter, sitting cross-legged right in front of her. “It’s like this, right? If we have free will, then our actions matter. What we do matters because we could just as well not do it. So when I go out and save the world, that matters. On some cosmic scale or something. It matters. And if we don’t have free will and it’s all planned from the word go, then it doesn’t matter and I can fly a hundred nukes into space and it’s not going to change a single damn thing because doing it isn’t my decision and it can’t make up for all the shit I did before. That means I’m just a shitty fuck-up of a person because that’s what I was meant to be and there’s no fixing it. End of story, everyone go home.”
This time, the silence stretches until it becomes uncomfortable while he scratches his head awkwardly. “Is this about your…Despicable Me days?”
She laughs half-heartedly, at him and his phrasing and the fact that he’s comparing her life to a kids’ movie. “Nope,” she tells him. “It’s about Afghanistan.”
And wow, that is so weird to say because she’s never talked about it before, not to anyone. And certainly not voluntarily. Pepper and Rhodey tried, and Obie, too, before she killed him. But she never said a word. Everything that happened in that cave died in that cave and sometimes Toni thinks she did, too. What came out certainly isn’t the same as what went in.
Rebirth.
Maybe Loki and gang aren’t the only ones that live cyclical lives. She scrubs a hand through her hair. It’s way too late for this, she thinks, and looks back up at Clint, who is inching away from her, an oh shit look on his face.
“Do you want me to get uhm… Pepper? No? Tasha maybe? Or…” he’s frantically trying to come up with more females he could throw at her and she knows why.
“They didn’t rape me,” she says, abruptly, making him freeze with half his ass off the counter. He actually wavers for a moment and she thinks he might fall and it’s ridiculous but she’s not laughing. “Everyone always assumes they did and I never correct them, but they didn’t.” Her smile is a dark thing on her face. “They didn’t have to.”
“Shit,” he says, “Do you really think you want to tell me this? I mean, me? I’m not exactly…” He waves his hands in the air in a gesture that can either mean ‘curvy’ or ‘stable enough to be considered a help to anyone’.
She thinks that’s why she likes the guy so much.
“I mean, that’s what rape is about, isn’t it? About control. About taking it away. But they’d already shoved a giant magnet between my tits and hooked it to a car battery, how much more control were they going to take from me, right?”
She pauses, waits for him to run. He doesn’t. He just sits there, ass half in the air, frozen and stupid looking and she closes her eyes. “The boss guy liked to threaten me with it, though. After the water boarding and the hot coals and all that shit. He’d come down to our cell and he’d tell me, in detail, what he would do to me. Here’s the bed, and this is the chain I’d use to tie you up, and this is the knife I’d cut your clothes off with. On and on he went because he loved the sound of his fucking voice and there was nothing I could do because, hey, car battery.”
Eyes opening, she shrugs. “He didn’t have to rape me. He already had all the control.”
“You killed him. With a giant ass robot,” Clint points out, eyes narrowed with something she’s too tired to identify. He scoots closer again, now that the emosplosion seems to be over and done with.
“Yeah. And I saved the world half a dozen times over since that and it was my decision, right? I mean, I decide to put on the suit. I control it. I…”
Matter. What she does matters. What she is matters. Because she took her control back and no fucking deity writing fiction in a big book somewhere is going to take that away from her ever again.
“I don’t know,” Clint suddenly says, shrugging, nudging her arm with his knee. “About free will and all that shit. Who controls the universe. But… I think it matters that we try, you know? I’m not exactly a stand-up person, at least not until recently. Bow for hire and all that crap. But I try, for Nat and Phil, and I think that matters. That I try.”
For a long time, Toni chews on her lip, thinking. Trying. She’s the queen of fucking trying.
And failing, too. Less often lately, but still. She inhales deeply. “So, this is going to sound stupid, but… can I cry on you? Just a little bit? Because I’ve had a shitty fucking day and everything went wrong and I think I just… opened up or something, and I really need to cry now.”
He looks like he’s freaking out, but he asks, “Does that mean we’re done talking?”
Toni nods. “God, yes. Done. Absolutely done. Never happen again, Girl Scout’s honor.”
“I really doubt they let you into the Girl Scouts, Toni.”
“I think I have shares, that’s just as good.”
“The Girl Scouts don’t have shares.”
“Damnation.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Okay, you can cry on me. But keep the snot away from me and don’t expect me to pat your back, or anything. That shit’s too girly for me.”
Toni laughs even though it’s a crappy joke, and then she sobs and then she leans her forehead against his knee and cries on him.
She isn’t even sure what she’s crying for, but there it is and it feels good, actually, despite the pounding headache and the burning eyes.
Clint just sort of stares at the ceiling and really doesn’t pat her back, but that’s okay, because he doesn’t pull his knee away either. When she wakes the next morning, blurry-eyed and sore, she’s in her bed, stripped down to her panties and with a message on her phone that consists of nothing but lecherous smiley faces.
+
Toni despises pointless websurfing. Jumping from link to link, messing about on Wikipedia just for shits and giggles, trolling blogs, crashing annoying little fansites. It’s a horrible, time-sucking waste of electricity.
That said, she occasionally does it when she’s totally wiped out, idea-wise.
It’s been almost ten hours since Clint put her to bed after she snotted on his pants in the kitchen. It’s the second most awkward thing that ever happened to Toni.
And no, she’s not telling you what the number one is.
She blew her nose. Then she made her way down the workshop and did what she should have done in the first place. She stuck her head into the sand. The metaphorical sand. The kind that’s made up of all kinds of futuristic projects and construction ideas for a magical bomb that will save the world.
And then her mind went blank because she still has that concussion and she hasn’t slept in months, it feels like. Being unconscious in a SHIELD hospital does not count.
So now she’s surfing the web. And she hates it, staring bleary-eyed at the screen, clicking link after link and trying to abandon the screen and get back to work but never managing.
She stops on a site that sells all kinds of designer shit for babies. Stares at the blue and pink and candy yellow striped background. Stares at a load of onesies that say things like ‘My Mom’s the Best’ and ‘Daddy’s Girl’ and ‘Don’t Look at Me, My Mom Dressed Me Like This’.
Clicks another button. Lands on plain onesies in all colors of the rainbow, baby blue to Barbie pink and back.
She didn’t know they came in all those colors. And really, why would she. Toni Stark is never going to be a mother and she’s made a point of not being maudlin about it. It was her choice. And it was the right fucking one.
She orders a pastel green one, the color of mint and soft moss, with butterflies stitched onto one side in pale blue. It reminds her of the grass and the sky, of ridiculously sentimental things.
She tags it as an express order and goes back to clicking random links until she gets to toddler gear. Half brain-dead, she skims over a raving review (probably fake) for a heavy winter coat in pint size. There’s something about great insulation due to two layers, blah, blah.
Toni clicks another button.
Stops.
Goes backwards.
Stares.
Two layer insulation.
“JARVIS?”
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“I am fucking stupid. Make a note of that, have it put on business cards, on my tombstone, I don’t really care, how could I have been so stupid? I have the biggest brain in this entire hemisphere and I am fucking stupid, I should give MIT back my doctorates, at least my first, the engineering one, this is ridiculous, why didn’t you tell me I’m this stupid?”
“I am afraid I am not currently following your through process, Miss Stark.”
She snorts. “Course you aren’t. You’re smart, that’s how I built you, you’re brilliant and this is basic, it’s stupid, it’s primary school, except not, it’s kindergarten. Jesus.”
Without a backward glance at the website, she abandons the computer to stand in the middle of the room. “Okay. Pull up the schematics from attempts three through thirteen, strip the outer layers, come on, yeah, just like that. Now blow them up for me and color code it, exactly.”
“I am afraid I still don’t understand.”
“JARVIS, buddy, we’re building a bomb. And this time, it’s going to actually work.”
+
Toni marches into Loki’s lab with a lot more gusto than she feels and smacks a pale lilac gift bag on the table in front of the god, who looks like she isn’t quite sure which way to twist when she goes about snapping Toni’s neck.
Left, right, left, right. Choices, choices.
Clearly, Toni better talk fast.
“This is for you, don’t read into it, I obviously need a shrink, but that’s okay, because I think I’ve solved the problem we’ve been having with the, you know, blowing up and stuff. Disfigurement via shrapnel and all that. I think. The sims work in any case and, uhm, could we forget about me little nervous breakdown the other day because you sort of hit all the buttons and I may have had a good cry since then. There is no digital evidence of it, I made sure of that, but it happened, I was there and now it’s over and I’m all about the mature and grown up shit now, with the trying and the not denying that I maybe have a teensy-weeny little case of PTSD. Possibly. And here, have a working bomb.”
She pushes a button on her phone, uploading JARVIS’s simulations onto the skeleton version of himself that she left with Loki. A 3D model of a prototype pops into existence between them and Toni takes a deep breath and then holds it because this could go either way.
Loki might forgive her. Or she might blast her into eternity in itty-bitty Toni-bits, which would be bad. A smart person probably would have apologized properly. Said the actual words, for one. But. But, but, but, this is Toni and she doesn’t do apologies, doesn’t even do remorse. Or regret. Or guilt.
Move on. Make yourself better.
Pretend whatever hurt you never happened and you didn’t cry on your teammate like a little girl.
She thinks that Loki might understand that.
When the silence gets too loud and Toni’s kind of starting to turn blue from holding her breath, waiting for Loki, she adds, “Also, that thing I said about you raising kids? That was me being a defensive bitch and lashing out, just FYI. You’ll make a great mom. Dad. Whatever. What do your kids call you anyway? Maddy? Dommy? Uhh, that sounds kinky. What are you…?”
Slowly, Loki extends one arm, pushing the gift bag aside without a glance, palm extending toward Toni. Might be going for her neck. Maybe her tongue. Toni is fairly certain a large percentage of the people who know her have daydreamed about ripping out her tongue.
She holds her breath again and waits, but the touch never comes. Instead Loki grasps the hologram and sends it spinning, staring fixedly at it.
“You added a second shell,” she observes after a moment.
Uhm. O-kay.
“Yeah. Actually… sort of. We have vibranium as a non-magic-conductive material for the shell, right? But the test versions still blow up on us, or, lately, fizzle out. It’s because something about the V doesn’t just repel magic, is also…dissolves it for lack of a better word. That’s why the fizzing instead of the boom. The magic inside the bomb erodes, at least according to our readings, right?”
A nod.
“So we need the magic inside the V, but not touching it. And we’ve played with electricity before. An electric current to keep the magic in, which didn’t work because enough magic overwhelms the current and sort of… reverses it. That’s why machines explode when you get hormonal, but anyway, in low doses the electricity works to repel magic. It’s like they’re magnets with the same polarity. You can’t put them together.
“So, brilliant bitch that I am, I combined the two. Now there are two outer casings of vibranium, with electricity flowing between them. The charge is strong enough that the ‘dead zone’ between that current and the magical current includes the inner layer of V. The V contains the magic and the electricity keeps the magic far enough away from the V that it doesn’t erode. Best of both worlds. Of course, I haven’t actually tried it, seeing as I was missing my handy magic-charger, but, well? What do you think?”
“This is what you did after you ran out of here?”
Toni considers pointing out that she didn’t run so much as she was magically dumped, but decides against it. If Loki hadn’t zapped her across town, she would have run. It’s what she does.
“That, and I may or may not have angsted on Clint for a little bit, but we’re not talking about that.” She scratches at her temple, tucks a loose curl behind her ear, wishes, not for the first time, that she had her long hair back.
The Ten Rings chopped her hair off to almost nothing and it’s just now getting down to her shoulders again. She hates the reminder whenever she looks in the mirror. Another thing they took.
Another thing she had to fight, tooth and nail, to reclaim.
“Hawkeye?”
“Yes?”
“You are friends?”
“Yes?”
“He is well?”
Welcome to the Twilight Zone! Toni shrugs, unwilling to give away more than necessary about Clint. He’s got issues with Loki, obviously, seeing as how he leaves the room whenever the wayward god is brought up. Toni feels actually bad about it. “Yeah,” she says in the end. “I guess.”
Loki narrows her eyes briefly, then nods, seeming content. It surprises Toni, who asks, “Why do you care?”
Silvertongue or not, there is an awkward, not at all smooth, break when Loki turns her attention back to the hologram before offering a belated, “I did spend a week inside his mind, Toni.” Then she adds, “You have combined the two faulty attempts into one.”
Obviously, they are changing the subject. Go figure. “Yeah. I mean, both sort of do the same thing in different ways and they added up nicely.”
“They make up for each other’s weaknesses,” Loki agrees. “Despite not seeming compatible at first. Vibranium is not especially conductive to traditional electricity, if I remember correctly.”
She’s looking up now, meeting Toni’s gaze, green on brown. Somehow, Toni’s pretty sure they’re not exactly talking about the bomb anymore.
Huh.
+
Half an hour later, when Toni’s already busy with metal and wiring and blowtorches, Loki looks into the gift bag.
And looks.
And looks.
And then pulls it closed again and neatly folds the edges over before tucking it into an out of the way corner with a little smile on her face.
Toni has no idea why, but her poor, damaged heart sort of grows three sizes in her chest.
Something’s happening here, but she has no idea what it is.
Or maybe she doesn’t want to know. Shut up, nobody asked you.
+
Toni is up to her elbows in techno guts while Loki, sitting only a few feet away (recent development, no, we’re not reading into it), is working out some magical snag and chewing on her pen with abandon. Her free hand is under the table and Toni knows, without looking, that she’s cupping her belly like it’s in danger of falling off.
JARVIS occasionally chirps something when Toni gets too close to frying the circuitry and Loki grumbles every now and then and stops working to run a problem by Toni. Half the time she can’t actually help, but just talking out loud helps the god.
It’s their usual tableau when working at Loki’s lab and they fall into it easily after all those months. It feels natural, like working with Bruce, only better, because Toni actually learns stuff from Loki, and doesn’t have to watch what she does so as not to piss anyone off.
Sure, it would probably be healthier, but pissing off a Norse god and potentially getting killed is more fun than pissing off a friend that could potentially turn into a rage monster, ruin the equipment and then guilt trip about it for weeks on end.
Yes, it’s screwed up. No, Toni does not care.
Working with Loki like this is comfortable.
And freaky. But mostly comfortable.
So of course that’s when Loki’s head jerks up like a bloodhound catching a scent and JARVIS suddenly warns, “Miss Stark, I am detecting intruders in the hall-.”
And by then it’s already too late because the wooden front door explodes inward in a hail of splinters and Thor comes marching through, hammer swinging, the rest of the Avengers only half a step behind.
“Loki! I have detected your magic upon this building! Show your-“
Toni really, really hopes JARVIS is recording this because the look on Thor’s face when he spies girl-Loki and Toni sitting peacefully next to each other at the same work bench, can only be called gob-smacked. It’s a good look on the god.
The kind of look that you fondly remember for the rest of your life and pull back up whenever you need a good laugh.
That is to say, Thor looks like naked monkeys are dancing the jig in front of him. With hats. In high heels. And sunglasses. And possibly two heads apiece.
The expressions of the rest of the Avengers aren’t quite as entertaining. Steve looks furious, Bruce looks painfully amused, Natasha and Coulson look blank, which is their version of murderous and Clint actually does look blank, which is weird.
They’re also all sort of eyeballing Loki, who, while female, is still definitely recognizable as Loki, at least in this context. Toni expects someone to make a comment, but that would be either Bruce or Clint and Bruce knew already and Clint… Clint doesn’t look like he’s up for wisecracks at the moment. He just stares at Loki, his jaw set and his hands clenching around his bow.
The woman herself is frowning and smirking at the same time, which is interesting. Toni mostly just wants to disappear completely.
“I thought you were not followed, Toni,” the god, the female one, finally says. She calls Toni by her name intentionally, Toni bets.
Steve’s scowl deepens. Bruce makes a sort of constipated face. Thor isn’t blinking. Before Toni can defend her wounded pride, Coulson takes half a step forward. “You leave blank spaces when you hide from us. SHIELD is fully capable of following those blank spaces, if given enough time and incentive.”
“And what incentive did you have, after almost four months?”
The agent smiles blandly at her, which she takes to mean there wasn’t actually incentive so much as they just figured out how to trail her and went for it, though he’s never going to admit that.
She also just sort of admitted that she’s been meeting with Loki for four months. Paradoxically, it makes everyone relax, just a fraction. She guesses it’s because she hasn’t murdered them all in their sleep yet, or something.
Whatever. The whole situation is strange. Toni expected there to be fighting the second the Avengers finally caught on, but there isn’t. She guesses they came here out of curiosity and then Thor detected Loki’s wards and everyone got a bit overzealous stormed the place, only to find the two of them working peacefully. It probably also helps that Loki didn’t so much as twitch toward a weapon. And now here they are, staring at each other like idiots.
“My life sucks,” Toni observes, very succinctly, just as Steve takes half a step forward and asks, very curtly, “Could you please put down the… whatever it is you have in your hands?”
Toni looks down at the trigger mechanism she was fiddling with. Then back up at Steve. “Seriously? You think I’m going to, what? Blow you up? Really?”
“You are obviously collaborating with Loki, who is in disguise, what do you think I think, Stark?!”
Okay, so maybe everyone but Steve relaxed a bit. The man is as perceptive as a rock some days.
And back to last names, are they? Toni smiles and it’s not necessarily a nice smile.
“I think,” she drawls, slowly and carefully, like she’s speaking to a particularly dumb toddler, “That I have been ‘collaborating’ with Loki - kudos for the big word, by the way, did that hurt? - for more than three months and so far, neither me, nor she, nor you, or anyone else has died and hey, look, Loki isn’t attacking you like a psychotic bondage freak!”
She’d say more (unfriendly, pointless things, mostly, she can admit), but Loki interrupts. “I resent that description,” she throws out, a studiously bored expression on her face.
Toni smirks at her, “Sorry, but as long as you wear body armor made from leather, I call you a bondage freak. I mean, half those straps don’t even have a purpose and it looks like you’re wearing a seatbelt, seriously.”
Loki opens her mouth.
“Ah-ah, don’t even. I know you’re not insulted by the ‘psychotic’, don’t pretend you are. You like it when people are afraid of you.”
Yes, they’re playing their audience. Yes, it’s cheap. No, it’s not really working anyway, since Steve just snaps Toni’s last name again. Toni’s eyes narrow and she can see Bruce sort of wincing out of the corner of her eye, because he recognizes that look, even if Cap’n Mighty doesn’t.
It’s Black Widow, surprisingly, who cuts the bossman off before he can make Toni blow her top. “Why?” she asks, very calmly. She’s fingering her guns while she talks, but Toni appreciates the effort. She remembers, suddenly, that Natasha was one of the people who never really seemed upset with Loki getting off easy after what he did. Toni guesses the Russian knows, better than more, the value of being given a chance by the enemy.
She shrugs, turns to look at Loki, who shrugs back. Leaves the playing field to her. She meets Coulson’s gaze next, not entirely on accident and finds a spark of what she’s looking for there.
“You know,” she observes, with more calm than she’s feeling. He doesn’t answer, so she keeps talking. “I know I’m a genius and everything, but SHIELD is big, and you have computers I built, and you guys do eventually figure stuff out. You know. About what’s out there, about the Chitauri. They’ll come knocking again, bigger, badder and angrier than before. You know.”
After a moment of frigid silence, during which Clint shifts from foot to foot, Thor bounces on his heels and Steve just looks homicidal, Coulson nods. “Dr. Banner was so kind as to point out a few observations.”
Toni gapes, not quite managing to hide her surprise. Bruce just shrugs at her when she throws him a look, and she smiles. Trust good old Bruce to find a way to help her even without actually helping her. He took Toni’s observation to Fury and Coulson, paving the way for her and Loki.
She owes him a gift basket. One filled with dangerous biochemical components, delicate equipment and half a dozen puzzles for him to play with. And possibly her never-gonna-happen firstborn.
Neither of their resident blond muscle mountains notices the byplay, but Loki does, inclining her head in silent thanks. Bruce looks a bit uncomfortable, but he nods back.
“What do our enemies have to do with the truce between you and my sister?” Thor finally booms, bored with the riddles.
If she’s honest, Toni is impressed with his switching of pronouns and titles. She didn’t expect that kind of acceptance from the giant lug of a god. But then, he does love his sibling to the point of obsession.
Loki snorts and folds her hands under her chin delicately. Playing it up. “Surely even you understand what the return of the Chitauri means, Thor.”
Thor opens his mouth. Predictably, Loki is faster, “They will return and they will burn this planet to the ground for the defeat dealt to them at the hands of Iron Woman and your little team.”
Toni rolls her eyes but doesn’t say anything. She watches Clint instead, who’s grinding his teeth hard enough for her to see. Coulson seems fine with the situation, but then he attacked an enemy and got beaten, fair and square. He’s the kind of guy to actually respect that. He’s also the kind of guy who can tuck his personal opinion so deep down, you wouldn’t find it with a flashlight and a map. And he’s smart enough to notice the same thing Toni did, when she watched the tapes of his fight with the god.
Loki stabbed him in the kidneys. Not the heart, the kidneys. That’s a painful death, but also a slow one. And really, dealing an enemy a slow death in his own territory, where help is close enough to save him, is the kind of stupid move Loki simply does not make.
Toni was right, all those months ago. Even while he was giving them hell, Loki was careful not to burn too many bridges.
Except with Clint.
Clint looks like he can’t decide whether to hurl or start shooting. Toni looks away, guilt stabbing in her belly. Clint is her friend. And she’s kind of fucking his worst nightmare.
“And why would you care what happens to this planet?” Steve bites in Loki’s direction. “You tried to end it yourself not too long ago.”
“Right,” Toni jumps in, “And there’s no such thing as second chances, right?”
Natasha used to be a Russian assassin. Clint used to be a mercenary. Bruce used to use cars for footballs. Thor used to wear his ass on his shoulders. Toni used to build weapons to blow the world to bits. Hell, even Steve is on his second chance, in a way.
Third, if you count him becoming Mr. Buff and getting de-thawed as two chances.
“He tried to kill us!”
“Did she?”
“Yes,” Coulson asks, one eyebrow raised perfectly. “Did you?”
Loki sneers and everyone in the room, bar Thor and Cap, maybe, knows that even if she didn’t, Loki would never admit it. Toni has been spending most of her waking hours with her for months and still not a word of confession or apology has crossed Loki’s lips. Toni doesn’t need it. Toni doesn’t want it. She’s a futurist, not a historian. She doesn’t give a flying fuck about yesterday.
And the rest of the Avengers wouldn’t buy it anyway. So instead of ‘sorry’ Loki says, “I need this planet intact and to keep it that way, I need Stark’s expertise in certain areas, just as she needs mine. It’s a compromise.”
“Why would you need this planet ‘intact’?” For a goody-two-shoes, Steve sneers surprisingly well. And a lot. And Toni is getting really, really tired of all his judging. From the very first time they met, he’s been laying judgment after judgment on her. She’s female so she shouldn’t fight. She’s a Stark, so she should be like Howard. She’s arrogant, so she has to be unfeeling and a failure as a human being. She’s smart, so she can’t be kind. She’s independent and comfortable with herself, so she’s a whore. She gets that this world is kind of overwhelming him and that he’s just trying to make it fit by applying old frameworks to this new, scary world, but someday soon, she is going to punch him in his ridiculously pretty, all-American face.
Right now, she bites her lip hard and then opens her mouth to cut. Him. Down.
Unfortunately, Loki beats her to the punch.
When the door blew open, Toni stood up out of sheer reflex. Loki didn’t. She does now, slowly, dramatically, because that’s who she is, growing behind the workbench like a rising titan.
Or a beach ball popping out of the water.
Silence.
Toni has the weird urge to look around for passing tumbleweeds and even Coulson looks surprised.
Then, at the exact same moment, the Norse siblings start talking. Loki’s, “I cannot very well take this child back to Asgard,” is more or less drowned out by Thor’s booming, “You are with child! This is a joyous occasion!”
Loki snarls, wordlessly, and raises a hand as if to claw her brother’s eyes out. Thor, wisely, takes half a step back. Then he catches himself and asks, “Why would you not take your child home, sister?”
“Why would I? So you can take her away from me like you did Sleipnir? So Odin can treat her like an animal? Like a monster?! So she can be reviled and spat on for her parentage? Give me one good reason, brother, why I would subject my daughter to Asgard’s idea of love!”
For a moment, everyone holds very, very still. Even Toni, who has known Loki for months, has never seen her like this. The god is livid with anger where before, she’s only ever been cold. She was actually yelling just then, and she never yells.
Thor apparently understands the significance of that, too, because he looks like Loki just ripped his guts out with her bare hands and showed them to him. Toni, who actually likes the giant goofball most of the time, feels something like satisfaction curl in her gut anyway.
Still she looks away, more for her own sake than his privacy, finds Coulson looking intrigued and Natasha looking… softer than usual, even if only for a second. Bruce looks sympathetic, mainly because he doesn’t do pity, but probably really wants to, right now. Clint hasn’t moved at all, hasn’t so much as blinked. Steve, on the other hand, looks as gobsmacked as Thor, all open and gaping, defenseless.
It’s never fun to hear your enemy is just as fucked in the head as everyone else and in serious need of a hug. Or two. Or a million billion, to make up for a thousand years of Odin’s shitty parenting. Toni found Asgard a lot more fascinating before she read the myths.
Of course, Loki being Loki, doesn’t give anyone time to digest what she just said. Instead she pulls all the masks back up and asks, in a voice as cold as that blue, blue skin she hides, “Why would I expose my child to that? Asgard is not an option and neither is Jotunheim. Where else, beyond those two worlds, could I raise any child of mine? Midgard is, for the duration of my daughter’s stay here, quite safe, I assure you. From me, and from those who would seek to destroy it. That is why I need Stark. The Chitauri’s leader is not going to win.”
She doesn’t cross her arms or anything like that because that would be defensive, but damn if she doesn’t manage to look absolutely ‘take that, bitches’ anyway.
Toni can’t help the, “Burn,” that escapes her. It’s low, but apparently still audible, because Clint suddenly makes a noise somewhere between a scream and a grunt, turns on his heel, and marches out.
Her first instinct is to run after him because, somehow, this is her mess. Without Toni, Clint and Loki would have never ended up in this room together. Loki might still be the badass monster she’s like everyone to believe she is and Clint might still be trying to shoot her in the eye and he would probably be fine with that.
Reason number twenty-seven Toni doesn’t do relationships: People get hurt.
Fuck.
But she can’t run after Clint because there’s this growing up thing again, this responsibility thing and if she leaves now, the Avengers will tear Loki limb from limb (or at least try to arrest her again and that worked so well the last time they tried), and there will be no bomb and Thanos will take over the world and really? Toni would look absolutely whorish in Princess Leia’s slave costume.
If she survived the initial world-ending, that is.
Which she probably wouldn’t.
Also, she likes Loki, which is probably the stupidest fucking thing she has ever done.
“Look,” she interrupts the brewing tension, “Let me lay out the facts for everyone. You don’t like Loki.”
Preemptively, she raises a hand toward Thor. “Yes, I know, you actually do. Shut up.”
“You don’t like Loki because Loki was a pissant the last time you saw her - him. I hate pronouns. Couldn’t we have a general pronoun, like we have a general definite article? Maybe I should write my senator. He just loves me.” She doesn’t even bother grinning winsomely because really, the snark is just reflex at this point and no-one is amused. “He took Clint and Erik mind-hostage, he shiv’d Coulson, he called Natasha something I still haven’t had the time to look up, but I’m pretty sure it was sexists, which, irony like whoa. Thor got beaten up, Steve got beaten up, Bruce got a bit used, shit went down, Manhattan looks like someone threw a tantrum and no, Brucie, I don’t mean you, don’t look at me like that.
“Point is, Loki is a shit.”
Loki proves that by smirking.
“I could list a dozen different ways she actually isn’t,” - Loki’s smirk falls - , “But I like my heart inside my ribcage and those hormones are not to be taken lightly, let me tell you. Fact is, Loki needs this world to raise her kid. And for that, she needs to find a way to get rid of Thanos - that’s the bad guy’s name, by the way, Thor, don’t use it, apparently it’s magic - when he comes knocking. She can’t do that alone. That’s why she found me and why she made me an offer and why we’re here. Loki needs us. That’s the good thing about egoistic assholes. You can always trust them to save their own skins first.
“Steve, everyone, this is Loki, saving her skin. And before you all jump on her for using and abusing us, we need her too, because there’s a big, bad monster heading our way and I know that nothing we have can stop him. But with my magic fingers and Loki’s magic… well, magic, we almost have a solution. In fact, you just interrupted the production of what will, hopefully, finally, be a working prototype. So. I wasn’t going to make a speech. Crap. Anyway. Loki needs us. We need Loki. And really, she hasn’t done anything naughty since she got out of detention with Daddy Dearest so give her the benefit of the fucking doubt and stop glaring at me like you want to set my panties on fire, Jesus, Dicksicle, I get it. You don’t like me. You don’t like Loki. Guess what, you’re gonna have to suck it up.”
Toni breathes. Long, deep inhales. Wow. Oxygen sure is neat.
She looks at everyone only to be met with a whole bunch of blank, disgruntled or amused faces. Blank being the two SHIELD agents left, disgruntled being Steve and amused being Loki and Bruce, the latter of which is getting a kick out of this.
Coulson runs a hand over his head. “This is going to be so much paperwork,” he mutters to himself and then, even quieter, “We are doomed.”
Then Loki cocks her head to one side and studies Toni like she just did a neat trick. “You knew,” she finally says and Toni blames the lack of oxygen to the brain for taking a moment to figure that one out.
“That you popped up on that street on purpose, wearing a maternity dress you didn’t need yet and staring at a baby store window like it was the gateway to the Playboy Mansion? Yes. Haven’t I told you, I’m a genius.”
“And you still went along with it.”
Toni shrugs, spreads her arms a little, palms out. “Got what I wanted, didn’t I?”
She could say more. Doesn’t. Loki gives her a nod. Thor lowers his hammer and grins. Steve sort of slumps, shield drooping like a sad little Frisbee. Toni might be a tad hysterical, she thinks, but not really. It’s weird. This should be all adrenaline and shouting and fighting, but fact is, she’s right. She knows she’s right. And everyone else knows it too. Bruce paved the way for her, in a way, and Loki paved the way for herself by behaving ever since her return to earth. Thor just wants everyone to be a happy family. Coulson is made of stone cold logic before everything else and Steve, while angry and irrational, also knows what compromise means, better than Toni ever has.
Plus, he wouldn’t hit a pregnant woman if she were standing over him with an axe and a grudge.
This is it.
The great showdown Toni has been dreading for months, the clash of the titans. It’s over. There’s something bigger than either of them coming and if they want to beat it, they have to work together. End of story.
Except for one thing.
“Now,” Toni says into the awkward silence, “you kids play nice. I have to run after Clint and maybe, possibly, grovel so he will ever talk to me again, much less be my movie snuggle buddy.”
She grimaces.
Toni hates groveling.
+
+
Part V
+