Time To Dance - For Loki
"JARVIS, lights, thirty percent." His head is absolutely aching. pulsing behind his eyes to match the not-quite right heartbeat that twitched against the base of the reactor. There's no snappy answer from an AI that acts as if playing to Tony's fiddle is just another boring part of his daily tasks as the quirky robotic butler. "JARVIS, stop
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That's what does it in the end. Not the buzzing that makes his head spin every time he closes his eyes, which makes him nauseous and miserable. Not the puncture mark in his arm or his aching shoulder (tranquilliser darts, he remembers now). Not even the ignoble fact that he's being kept here... experimented on?
He's tried to think. Who it might be. Why. S.H.I.E.L.D. top the list, nevermind that Asgard has labelled him provisionally untouchable. Safe. Reformed. More or less. Or... or perhaps Victor. Victor the madman, Victor his old friend, insane but clever, wonderfully clever. And wounded. They had found a commonality of interests and they'd acted upon it. Broken things. Been fond of one another, perhaps.
But von Doom had always wanted to know what made Asgardians tick. What made their magic work, gave them their strength and longevity and talent in battle. Of course any mad dictator would want to know such a thing and use it for himself. He'd tried it on Thor often enough, and the Latverians had never been particularly bothered by international (or interplanetary) law.
So this Loki considers also. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who it is. It's driving him mad all the same. He pushes himself to his feet, up from the corner into which he's curled himself, and prepares.
Slam!
His shoulder against the door makes the room shudder and he winces at the noise. But no matter. He'll keep going until either the door breaks or he does.
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Once he's got the footage, with Loki still banging away at the door near by, Tony watches through it all on high speed and grunts at the way his Tower was just...stormed, altered, occupied.
Not cool.
"JARVIS, unlock the door, set up a containment field and lock the surrounding rooms to everything but my passcode. And then revoke and passcode I've given out to anyone other than Rhodey and Ms. Potts."
Once acknowledge, Tony waits for a lull in the frantic banging before he keys open the door. His hands are shoved into his pockets as he stares at Loki. Just Loki. No leathers, no horns.
"You've been a very bad boy I hear." Or not really. Fury told him nothing of Loki's next step at rehabilitation.
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"Oh, yes," he snarls, clutching the shoulder he'd been slamming against the door and hunching. Just Loki. Just six foot two of lean, dense muscle and tightly coiled rage. Letting him out could easily become a mistake, dampeners or no. "I attended the opera. High-class criminal activity and worthy of having my flat broken into and being shot full of tranquilisers, kidnapped, locked in a box and tortured."
This containment field is torture, anyway. Did they not test it on anyone half as powerful as him first, or did they simply not care? "I am on Earth on an approved and supervised visit, Stark. Under Asgard's sanction; you've no right to keep me. You've no right to experiment on me."
His eyes were dark with rage. Not betrayal. Not hurt. This is precisely the sort of behaviour he expects from Nick Fury and his band of superpowered idiots. Do the best for Earth, no matter how many people get killed, no matter how many laws are broken or how many people have to make sacrifices they never agreed to make for it to happen.
And maybe he'll snap Tony Stark's neck for helping to turn him into one of those people. Maybe he will, but only if he can't get to Fury himself.
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What a mess. What a veritable shit show. What have they done to his home?
"Hey, take it up with Fury," Tony says, slipping through the field at the door because he can, not because he is trying to openly taunt Loki. His fingers move along the seams of the windows and he glances towards the city in the distance. Gorgeous view for a gilded cage.
Gorgeous cage, period.
"Trust me, not experimenting on you. Just sit tight. I'm sure your dear brother will fly in to save you any moment now. I just hope to God he hasn't found a new and interesting snack food to share with me."
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It couldn't be that. He'd worked with Doom long enough to have learned of such things. Besides, tranquillisers are perfectly efficacious when administered into the muscle. Intravenous injection wouldn't have been necessary.
It makes sense, really. Taking samples makes sense. They want to understand him. This is the beginning of that endeavour. Keeping him in a box, watching for what made him tick, that was the next step. And throwing Stark in front of him like this.
"My brother won't come for me. He values his work with your little pals more. Those particular strings are easy to pull," Loki says, pushing away such thoughts. He pauses. "The strength with which I threw you through that window was not a trick. The dampeners won't help you a bit there. Perhaps I can't break these ones but I can still see what happens if I throw you against them hard enough. It would be self-defence. You're holding me prisoner illegally."
He takes a step forward. "Torturing me. Driving me mad."
And by the laws of this particular section of Earth he's within his rights to act accordingly. "I want to speak to Fury. I am within my rights to do so."
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But no. He's not intimidated. He just looks slightly annoyed, and not at the whiney little Asgard either. He has no say in what's happened to Loki and, evidently, no say in what's happening now either.
"That's a good idea. Let's speak to Fury. JARVIS? Let's dial our good friend, shall we?"
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"Ask him why he chose you; that could be interesting. I could just as easily have been kept in one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s facilities. More easily, in fact," he says, pushing on the muscle where the tranquilliser darts hit. Still tender. Rapid injection.
"I expect he wants to torment me with your presence. And you with mine, like as not; I have heard stories of your little spats." He's heard lots of things, in fact, and he doesn't mind a bit that he's likely to get Thor in trouble by saying so. Leaking information, some of it quite secret, to one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s least favourite individuals probably isn't smiled upon.
But they are brothers, of a sort. They are brothers and Thor is a sentimental fool. Loki despises him as thoroughly as he ever did, but that hasn't changed their relationship a bit in Thor's mind. Still brother. Still Odinson. It's infuriating. To them he's nothing, nothing of his own. Thor's brother. Odin's son, not Laufey's, whom he killed and in doing so made himself free.
Certainly not just Loki. Certainly not a creature all his own. And now this, and he's less still.
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This is purely SHIELD.
Tony's getting pretty damned tired of it too.
So, JARVIS complies with a quip Tony ignores and Fury appears on a holographic protected screen in mid air, looking... Fury-like. "Stark this better be--"
"I need you to tell me why you picked me, why his brother doesn't know he's here and why he's all beaten up. Especially the later part because I specifically requested to be included on any Asgardian beatings."
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"I would rather like to know why me," he adds smoothly. He doesn't think he has to specify for Fury that he's permitted to be here and under Asgardian supervision. He does know that if his home planet wanted him back, they'd have been here by now.
"I would ask why him, but I suspect I already know why. Otherwise I second his questions in given order of importance; it's hardly a proper trip to Earth if I can't defenestrate a billionaire or two sometime during the proceedings." Maybe if he's very good and very lucky this one will end the same way. Maybe Fury's counting on it.
"Stark-- Tony, why is he there with you? All you had to do was keep him in the--" Fury presses at the bridge of his nose. This is already backfiring. How could this already be backfiring? "Alright. I'm forwarding you some files, your eyes only. I mean that."
And with that he's gone. "Well," Loki quips, "he is a busy man."
The files do come in momentarily. Not Avengers Initiative. A deal. S.H.I.E.L.D. needs a man who knows the ins and outs of the supervillain world. Asgard didn't mind getting rid of him for a while. They didn't expect he'd cooperate, hence the snatch and grab. That, and S.H.I.E.L.D. policy. The fact that Fury's letting their usual contain and study program overlap with this is purely optimistic and not technically sanctioned, but since when did Nick Fury ever do exactly what he's told?
And that, of course, is where Stark comes in. Because of the studying, on the one hand, and on the other because he's best equipped to take any information Loki provides and act upon it. New gadgets. New strategies. Villain-specific.
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"As you wish, sir. Anything else while I'm at it?"
"Yeah, put on some cartoons for our guest."
Tony snorts in amusement at having Loki watch Dora the Explorer before he throws himself onto a couch and flips through the documents again. "I'm not much of a spy."
"You talk too much, sir."
Tony doesn't even bother to roll his eyes at that. It's true. "I think that's my biggest asset right now. All right, I'll be in the kitchen."
Eggs and toast. Loki's not going to get much because Tony had not specified on the phone to his chef that he wanted Thor specific proportions. Loki's so... Slight. He doubts he eats barns and all of their contents.
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It's a balance, there's a balance between breathing and suffocating on the dizzy noise in his skull. He tries to tip it in the direction of the former but the latter is heavy, terribly heavy, presses down on his chest like a demon. He'll get used to it. Learn to work around it. Something.
At the sound of Tony's approach he straightens, eyes still closed but palms flat on his thighs, the very picture of meditative calm, unruffled save for where his fingers have mussed his hair. Pointless. There are cameras in the room, there have to be, and Stark will have access to their feeds. S.H.I.E.L.D. too, for now, but Loki knows through his brother's stories of the ongoing privacy battles between Stark and Fury. He expects that particular data outflow will only be intermittent in future, if only to convince Fury to move Loki elsewhere.
He eyes the meal with a faint smile. "And you're starving me now, too. I would say this is a humanitarian disaster but I'm hardly the top of any amnesty organisation's list of concerns, am I? Thank you, Stark, all the same."
A moment's consideration passes before he adds, "O quizá debería decir gracias, given your most thoughtful choice of entertainment. My brother speaks quite highly of it. Now I know why. It is perfection incarnate for a man of his intellect."
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He still refuses to feel sympathy for the mass murderer, though. Loki needs to rule. Funny, though, that Tony does as well. Inferior beings for them both, things of their own creation. Loki wants -- wanted -- to hypnotise the hearts of man and sway them into his thrall. Tony creates friends out of wire and artificial intelligence that he tweaks. Both are gods in a way.
Tony just has more of a heart.
He's got the reactor to prove it and it hums mildly in acceptance of being acknowledged.
"Thor's a big dumb mutt, but he's our big dumb mutt, so be nice or I'll let you go back to rocking yourself for comfort."
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"And I suppose it doesn't matter a bit to you, but I sought relief, not comfort. The dampeners your friends installed in this cell are excessive and painful." And nauseating. He'd not be terribly surprised if even this meagre meal refused to stay down.
"You've been a prisoner. I know the story. In a cave. If you had been in an ill-fit coffin locked in a room that screams, so loud you can barely think, inside of your own skull, then you might begin to understand," he explains. "I don't expect your sympathy for it. I'm only attempting to couch it in terms you might understand."
Loki takes another bite, eyes fixed on his plate, and huffs suddenly in amusement, grinning and shaking his head. "And Asgard sanctions this. They'd have come for me by now if they didn't. 'Come home, brother. We thought you dead. We have all mourned.' Laughable."
It isn't home. It was never quite home and now it's hardly better than this cell. This trip to Earth was meant to be a reward for good behaviour. But he's not surprised, not really. It's typical behaviour and perhaps, after recent events, no more than he deserves.
But where does this chain of cause and effect end? Not with him, he thinks. Not at the very start. If they refuse to look back far enough then so be it. He will be punished for their sins against him and laugh as he begs for more. Laugh as they tangle themselves tighter into binds of their own making. Fools, the lot of them, and even if only Loki can see the joke, someone will be laughing.
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Tony leaves before Loki can speak again. Thor had warned them all the first time that Loki had come into captivity that the man was a liar, a manipulator, and a cheat. That's fine. Tony is all of those things as well.
He's a tactician. He can see the lines as they form and rewrite them to suit himself. He has a bit of a silver tongue himself, doesn't he? He can talk himself out of quite a lot.
Maybe he'll add that to his business card or his Avengers file: Consulting Negotiator.
Who knows, he might even be good at it when not trying to benefit himself alone.
Over the course of the next few days, Tony spends all of his time watching Loki in his room. He eats his meals at the console when Loki does, though they are never in the same room. He has mock conversations with Loki when the other man looks like he's mouthing something or when he speaks out loud.
It's an obsession. Like the suit has been. And constantly reworking the configuration of the tower has been.
Pet project. Maybe he should get Loki a collar.
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He showers, and he's certain the cameras watch him there, too. Not a moment of privacy lest he turn it to his advantage. It doesn't matter. All he does is wash himself clean and turn his face up to the spray and wait. Moments of stillness.
He talks to himself. Tony had company in captivity. Someone to speak to, something to do. Loki has nothing, so he talks to himself, stares out the window and murmurs in whatever languages seem best to suit the moment.
On the third day he sings rímur to the spattering of the shower's spray and beats his knuckles against the window until they've split. The whole room shudders but they hold. It was worth a try. There's nowhere to go if he gets through but down but maybe that's not so bad either. He doesn't know if it would kill him. Perhaps. He returns to staring out the window, idly licking at bloodied knuckles to soothe them.
That ends quickly. He scrapes the smear of blood from the windowpane, disposing of it before it can be stolen and tested, and decides to dissemble his television. Thoughtful of them to provide one, though he doesn't watch it. Now perhaps he can finally figure out how they work.
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Not that she's been home since the incident at that party. Tony hasn't really thought about her. His curiosity is tuned directly and completely into Loki and his strange mannerisms.
He's been thinking about what he said, too. If they wanted him out, he'd be out. Thor'd be at his front door, ruining all of his toys. But he's not here. While SHIELD constructed this place, he was swinging his hammer around and boasting about how many crackers with little cheeses he could put into his mouth at one time.
It's the fourth day now of Loki's captivity and Tony has an ipod filled with songs, a new television, a massive sack of slop that Thor always liked from a local burger joint under his arm, and some Bactine spray with band-aids featuring Disney princesses.
"Special delivery." Tony's an ass hole. But he also knows when he has to be better than the assholes that held him captive were. Fury said watch him. Tony can do that from in here too.
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