[SEADLA] Chapter 8/24: Begin
✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS
FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU
SERIES: SEADLA Verse, version 2.0
RATING: Mature
WORDCOUNT: 3 360
PAIRING(S): -
CHARACTER(S): Tony Stark and Loki, plus mention of other characters.
GENRE: Odd dates.
TRIGGER WARNING(S): Mentions of suicide and generally low self esteem (Check the AO3 listing for a glimpse of what’s to come).
SUMMARY: In which there is a Crow, a Coyote, and a Spider.
DEDICATION(S): As always, to the first version’s readers, to the people who leave comments on the fic three years after its last update, and to 2012!me, who needed to write this fic a lot.
SEADLA ON TUMBLR: [Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6] [Chapter 7]
SEADLA ON LJ: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7,
SEADLA ON DW: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7,
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On Thursday, morning, Tony distracts Lorna from whatever problem she has with a long-winded rant about all the things that makes a Gran Torino an amazing car. Then he gets into an argument with Steve.
Or, to be more accurate, he gets into an argument with Captain America.
It’s a subtle difference which Steve, of course, denies with the most earnest honesty. He means it, too, that’s easy enough to tell-there are bags under his eyes and fairly explicit glances between him and Pepper that wouldn’t exist if he truly were indifferent to Tony’s fate, but just because Steve cares doesn’t mean he’s caring for an actual friend.
He can’t even be blamed for that, honestly-at the very least, Tony doesn’t blame him for that. It’s just that if Tony learned anything in first five weeks of his therapy-including life, it’s that he and the other Avengers really don’t know each other all that well. Okay, sure, he knows Black Widow can crush him with her thighs, and he knows Hawkeye uses hearing aids in the field, and he also knows that Captain America does something like five billion push-ups in the morning because prolonged congelation apparently turns people into health nuts.
For all of that, though, Tony has no idea what any of his fellow heroes do in their free time.
(Well, he suspects Bruce doesn’t have much more of a life outside his work than he himself does, but that doesn’t really count as knowing the guy personally, even if it makes him far easier to figure out than the others.)
Tony was never really a people person. He can, of course, charm and manipulate his way in and out of most situations efficiently enough: it’s a necessary survival skill in his position, really. Just ask Obadiah. Manipulating someone and connecting with them are two different things, though, and while Tony has been taught how to do the former since infancy, the latter is another kettle entirely...and robots, as experience proved numerous times, are just easier to deal with.
The end result is that, once Tony stops and take a good hard look at his life, it’s impossible not to realize that, yes, people around him are genuinely concerned by his antics-his well-being, whichever answer fits best, really-but it’s more for Pepper’s sake than his, and Steve is no exception.
It’s okay, really. Pepper is an amazing woman who Tony is lucky to have as a PA-CEO-best-friend-possibly-platonic-soulmate, not in that order. She deserves to have friends who care for her better than Tony does, and he at least knows better than act on his jealousy where she’s concerned. Even he has standards.
It’s just that knowing all of this makes it particularly grating to have Steve act like Tony is his long-lost best friend when he’s mostly just the most readily available target for Steve’s insanely universal protective instincts, at best.
(At worst, this is Captain America protecting an asset, but Tony has been an asset before and the idea of being one again is gut-churning enough that he squashes it with vicious ruthlessness whenever it pops up.)
Anyway, Tony points that out. Steve denies. Things escalate. There is screaming, and then Tony and Steve each go to sulk in their respective corners of the tower.
Thor explicitly disapproves, but he sticks by Tony’s side anyway, and the more vicious part of Tony’s brain wonders if the god is acting for his sake or for that of his brother.
{ooo}
On Sunday, twelve-feet-long, slimy slugs crawl all over New York and cover it in a sticky, neon-yellow substance that makes Tony feel like he’s being trapped in a giant chewing-gum. There are no reports of deaths, injuries or even allergic reactions so far, just insane traffic jams and the most epic collective tantrum Tony has ever witnessed. He still wants to put the things somewhere in the top ten of Worst Creatures He’s Met, if only because having to stay trapped under one of them for almost five minutes and realizing the slime in his suit is keeping him grounded makes him want to punch someone in the sensitive bits.
“Honestly,” he mutters into the comm once he finally manages to take his helmet off, “I appreciate Loki’s downscaling on the lethality front but this stuff is just annoying.”
“This,” Thor replies with a huff of effort-Tony didn’t even know he knew how to make that sound-“is not my-brother’s-work!”
Tony hears a shout of triumph, followed by the dull ‘oof’ of someone falling over, and tries not to snort when he imagines what Thor must look like right now.
“Right,” Hawkeye scoffs as he limps out of a building and toward Tony, left boot missing and half or his head covered in yellow, “clearly these have to be the latest Doombots.”
Tony is halfway through a protest-no way Doom would figure out how to make something like that, even if the manual slapped him in the face-when Steve and Natasha joins them with matching murderous expressions.
Tony almost wishes he’d gone back to the tower with Bruce when they realized the Hulk wouldn’t be of any help here.
“Point is,” Steve says, taking his cowl off with a horrible suction noise that leaves them all tying not to giggle, “Loki has to be behind all this.”
“I know my brother,” Thor says, “and I know his pranks-”
“If that counts as a prank,” Natasha says as she pulls a long string of slime out of her ear, “we seriously need to up our game.”
“Loki didn’t do this,” Thor repeats, attention half-focused on his hammer as he scratches some of the foul substances out of the carvings on the head, “it’s far too messy. He doesn’t like messy.”
“Tell that to the guys who had to clean up after the Chitauri.”
“That was chaotic,” Tony points out over the click of his suit’s emergency opening system, “this is just...yeah. Messy.”
The others turn to stare at him, splotches of hideous yellow peppered across their hair, faces and uniforms in a truly laugh-worthy display.
“Seriously,” Tony insists, “the Chitauri killed people. This just makes everyone look like a dumbass who got attacked by a sentient highlighter. Basic profiling says there’s a difference.”
“Tony’s right,” Thor approves-Tony pretends to fiddle with his suit so he can hide the proud little smirk trying to crawl its way onto his lips at that-“Loki’s specialty lies elsewhere. This seems to be the work of one of his friends.”
“What,” Clint asks from where he’s pulling slime out from under his armpits, “you mean there’s someone other than Doom who’s crazy enough to associate with Asgard’s resident nutcase?”
To the guy’s credit, he barely blinks when Thor glares at him, electricity gathering in the air around them and tickling at Tony’s neck with a strong sense of impending doom. No pun intended.
(The fact that three quarters of Thor disappear under stinky yellow slime probably helps making him look less scary, too.)
“Victor Von Doom,” Thor says, low, warning tone compensating for the undignified appearance, “is not my brother’s friend.”
There’s a pause while Tony and the rest of their group blink at Thor, mostly because Loki and Von Doom have been acting like proper little chums since the Asgardian crashed on Earth so they can probably be forgiven for their assumptions.
“Maybe,” Natasha concedes, carefully detaching syllables, “but there’s no one else we know who’d help Loki with his battle plans.”
“You don’t,” Thor replies, starting on his arm braces now that he’s done cleaning meow-thing up, “I do. In fact, I can think of a couple of people who wouldn’t pass the opportunity to annoy me on Loki’s behalf for the world.”
Tony watches Thor pick at his armor for a moment longer, then he scoffs, swirls his hammer into the air and takes off before anyone can ask who exactly he was thinking of.
Steve and the others trade perplexed glances but, when even several minutes of brainstorming don’t provide them with a satisfactory answer, they decide to stop looking the gift horse in the mouth and use the slugs’ relative harmlessness as an excuse to allow themselves early showers. The things aren’t hurting anyone, after all, and the lot of them will do more good by showing up for clean up later on than by hovering uselessly over the streets.
Tony spends the rest of the day wondering if Coyote and Anansi have a thing against messy pranks as well.
{ooo}
“There is a question I wanted to ask you, Tony,” maybe-Martin says once they’re settling in their respective seats on Monday morning, “this is our sixth session since you came out of the hospital, correct?”
Tony nods, more for form than because he thinks the guy actually needs confirmation.
“And you aren’t thinking of attempting suicide again these days, correct?”
Another nod. It’s a little less accurate, in that Tony still thinks about dying sometimes, it’s just that he knows he has no intention to act on it now. It’s the same end result, though, so he’s not exactly lying there.
“Very good. In that case, I think it’s time you told me, if you can, what brought you here exactly?”
Part of Tony wants to say ‘my feet’, if only because a lifetime of flippant deflections doesn’t go away in a few weeks, life-changing as they may be. Trouble is, while that answer would make things a lot easier on him for a few minutes, it would also be a waste of time, so Tony is kind of stuck trying to be serious.
The right answer-or at least, the expected answer-is probably something along the lines of ‘I wanted to get better’ but the words kind of stick against the dry roof of his mouth. It’s not that he was against the idea when he first came here, but he’s never been very concerned by his own health, let alone concerned enough to actually bypass his own issues and ask for help. In all honesty, if he’d been left entirely to his own devices, he’d probably never have ended up here.
Pepper and Rhodey, however, can be awfully persuasive when they want to, especially when he’s too tired to resist in the first place-and now here he is.
“I got scared, I guess,” he admits, looking down at his hands so he won’t have to meet his therapist’s eyes. “Pepper got scared. Rhodey got scared. I guess I just figured they’d know what to do better than me.”
It’s not a very fair thing to assume, when the situation was so new and nerves-wracking, but Tony has been doing that for decades now, and he’s never pretended to be perfect, anyway.
“It’s probably a good thing though,” he admits a beat too late, “it makes me work things out. Try to work things out.”
It’s painful, ugly mess of a process that makes him wish he could go and get teeth pulled most of the time-not to mention he’s still postponing the very important conversations he needs to have with Steve and Pepper and Rhodey, something he mostly realized since he started coming here. Besides, it would probably have been better if therapy had been an active choice on his part instead of the least bad solution he could think of at the time.
He still feels better ow than he did two months ago, and while it can’t be called great by any stretch of the imagination, it’s still progress. It’s better than nothing.
“True,” maybe-Colin says with a little smile, “getting help for your loved one’s sake is better than not getting help at all. It begs the question, however: if this isn’t something you do for yourself, what is?”
Three months ago, Tony would have launched into a tale of countless partners in his bed over the years, complete with exaggerations and purposefully teasing additions to make the whole thing sound more adventurous than it really was. He hasn’t hooked up with anyone in months, though-he’s thought about it a little, but it didn’t sound appealing.
Maybe because,f or the first time in years, he doesn’t have enough energy to pretend a second body between the sheets does anything to make him less lonely.
“I...go out,” he says in the end, surprised he hasn’t thought of that earlier, “with a friend. We talk a lot about-about things we can’t really tell other people. We get each other. It’s nice.”
“Good. That’s good. Do you do that often?”
“Every week after I come here,” Tony shrugs, “Lok-I mean, her schedule’s rather full.”
He tries not to look too panicked when he looks back at his therapist’s face, but if the guy guessed who Tony is talking about he doesn’t seem to be affected by it.
“It’s still a good thing,” he says instead of the yelling Tony half-expected, “it’s a first step. Maybe you could try and add to that list, though. Figure out other things to do for your own sake.”
Nothing comes to Tony’s mind when he gives the assignment some cursory thoughts-it’s not even like he started going out with Lorna on purpose, after all.
It’s not a bad project to have, though.
{ooo}
Tony surprises himself when he gets on tiptoes to greet Lorna with a hug after his session, but it’s been a while since he’s felt a smile pull at the corner of his eyes, so he tries not to over think it, and he smiles when she returns the hug.
“What are we doing today?”
“We’re celebrating an anniversary,” Lorna replies with a smirk.
Tony, who would be lying if he said he doesn’t like the idea of being surprised every week, follows her to their alley without being asked to, grabbing her hand as soon as she stops.
They’re traveling through time again, the world spinning around them faster and faster as its colors change-brick red and grass green and ocean blue and then black, black, black, until Tony can’t even see himself and wonders if that’s what it feels like to be blind.
At least he can still feel his own body, if nothing else.
“So, when-”
The end of Tony’s sentence stays stuck in his throat when he realizes he can’t even hear his own voice. In fact, now that he’s really paying attention, it’s painfully obvious he can’t hear anything around him-no sound at all, except maybe the lazy beat of blood in his veins-ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump-like a clock gone lazy.
There’s no light, no shape, no sound, no ground under his feet and no wall his fingers can reach for guidance-in his ears, his heartbeat picks up, keeps an anxious rhythm at the edge of his mind like a horror movie soundtrack and he’s about to-there are fingers around his wrist.
They slide down over his palm, slot in the space between his own fingers, and the knowledge that he isn’t alone-that, and the clothes he finds himself uncannily aware of now the panic has been short-circuited-brings his heart rate down like nothing else could have.
(He still kind of wants to pull Lorna into his arms just so he won’t have to satisfy himself with six meager points of contact-one palm, five fingertips-but he’s not sure how she’d take it, so he stays still.)
“Don’t be scared,” Lorna’s voice says in his ears.
It’s a flimsy whisper, a ghost of her usual tone coming at Tony from everywhere and nowhere all at once-Tony tries to tell her she’s making it hard to obey, but nothing comes out of his mouth and she whispers again:
“I can’t hear you here.”
Her voice echoes against nothing, faint and ethereal as if to preserve some kind of useless mystery.
“There’s no air, no sound, and telepathy isn’t one of my talents-this is why I have to use my tricking voice.”
Tony can’t decide if hearing her talk about perfectly normal things-or at least, things that wouldn’t be scary in and of themselves-is more creepy or weird. Murmurs and whispers, they’re not meant for ordinary conversation. they’re meant to scare people-or love them, maybe.
He can’t picture whispering to Lorna about physics either way, strange as they may be in this place-or this time, rather. He’d probably keep that for telling her things he never quite dares to say aloud-what she means to him, and how glad he is to have her, to have this. Maybe he’d admit how terrified he is most of the time, and then make stupid, unfulfillable promises like ‘I’ll always be there for you’.
In a way, it’s probably a good thing Tony can’t communicate here.
Lorna seems to have run out of things to say, though, and they stay immobile for a long moment, until a small pinprick of light appears in front of Tony.
It’s no bigger than a pin head, but after so long in absolute obscurity it burns at his eyes like he’s staring into the sun, and he can’t help but wonder where he is exactly, even as he watches the light grow. It flashes sometimes, bursts of flame-red and bright yellows mingling with blue licks of fire, and the darkness recedes, chased by what Tony can only describe as an explosion in slow motion. It floods Tony’s vision-makes his heart beat harder, his breathing deepen, and he can’t make himself tear his gaze away even when the pain becomes almost too much to bear.
There’s movement then, a rush Tony would call wind, if he could, but deeper, bigger than anything he’s experienced, like something shaking at his very core. When he opens his eyes again, unable to remember when he closed them, there are pieces of rock floating past him, bits of ice shining among them and gliding to the farthest recesses of the infinity of black they’re standing in.
Tony realizes he’s clutching at Lorna’s hand hard enough to leave bruises where his nails dig into the flesh, but he doesn’t care-it takes him a moment to understand the tiny, bright little things floating in front of his face are his tears.
“Is that-”
Tony stops talking when he realizes Lorna won’t be able to hear him, but with the newfound light it’s easy to see her smile at him, more amused than awed. Her lips don’t move when Tony hears her voice in his ears again:
“I would have gone for your cake-and-candles tradition,” she says, “but mother Earth is best left to her slumber. Besides, I supposed a scientist would find this more interesting.”
Tony, mouth wide open on words he can’t even untangle, let alone try and say, turns away from Lorna and back to the beginning of the world, chest tight with more emotions than there are ways to describe them.
Then quietly, a little foolishly, he says:
“Happy birthday, world.”