#like. my rain world fic gets a good 5-7 comments plus any replies to my replies to them

[stormcloudsandshadows]

No one:

Me at 230 am: hm…… Nedzu.

[terresdebrumestories]

Chapter 7/24: Loop

✗ 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]

“If you hear this,” Lorna’s voice crackles through the speakers, “I’m either at work or planning world domination. Leave a message after the beep and I’ll call back, eventually.”

Tony almost pulls his phone away from his ear just so e can stare at it, but the sweat and shivering keep him glued to the stupid piece of plastic, feet tapping against the ground while his free hand digs into the flesh of his thigh as hard as he can. Loki may be as obvious as she wans in her message after all, it’s none of Tony’s business—he just wishes she’d answer the damn phone.

With a trembling sigh, he wipes at his forehead—finds it clammy and burning—and tries to keep his voice as smooth as possible when he says:

“You know, I still can’t believe you’ve got a regular, nine-to-five job—it’s got to be something weirder like a—tattoo artist or traveling record seller or something like that—I mean, no offence, but can you imagine yourself in a bank or whatever? Please.”

Tony clears his throat, eyes glued to the way his other hand shivers against his will, and continues in a far less cheerful tone:

“Listen, I’m sorry to bother you but the house is empty and I’m craving a drink like you wouldn’t believe—so I guess now is the part where you start regretting sponsoring me or something. I should probably have some regrets too seeing as you’re supposed to be our mortal enemy but eh. Self preservation. Not my thing.”

He pauses, more out of breath than he likes to admit, and takes a steadying gulp of water before he keeps going:

“Well, I say ‘our’ but I guess I should count myself and Thor out of that, since he never really seemed to think you were an enemy and I’m kind of two-facing it these days. You guys should have a chat one of these days, by the way—I know you think he’s fucked up a lot and he says so as well but he’s trying so maybe if you could, I don’t know, talk to him without getting into a screaming fit—yeah. Just try it out, I don’t know. Could be worth it in the end.”

Somewhere in the back of Tony’s brain, a tiny, sane, negligible part of him screams in horror at the turn his monologue has taken and the horrors it might bring raining down on his head. The rest of him though—sick and weak and so very done with everything—ignores it and keeps going.

{ooo}

He’s surprised when Lorna reappears the following Monday, with the same tattoos and artistically messy hair—although the waistcoat and shirt make her look a lot more elegant this time around—but it vanishes quickly, snapping out of him and leaving only petulance in its wake:

“You never called back.”

“I know,” Loki answers as they make their way to their usual disappearing spot, one eye on her watch, “I was busy.”

“Too busy to call?”

“That is the general implication of ‘I was busy’,” Loki replies without missing a beat, “and I did text.”

Tony frowns at that—at the distance in her tone and the way she doesn’t seem to see the dirty concrete walls around her—and wonders what on earth could possibly have detained Loki away from the phone for five days straight.

“Feel free to blame my side-job, if it helps.”

Right. Lorna’s side-job. The one where a meeting usually ends up with one or more supervillains destroying an entire street of New York and stealing millions worth of precious stones for who-knows-what crazy reason, terrifying thousands of people in the process and nearly crushing a woman and her two toddlers under a block of concrete the size of a car.

(Tony remembers watching it fall, knowing he’d never reach the family in time to save them—remembers the way Thor yelled his brother’s name and the concrete zipped out of its trajectory to crash a good ten yards away from the woman and her children.)

All in all, Tony—and New York—could definitely do without that side-job, but he still hasn’t figured out how to broach the topic without putting an end to this strange relationship of theirs, so he reminds himself that no one has been grievously injured since the first few days of Loki’s stay on Earth, and decides to switch topic even as he grabs Loki’s hand in preparation for their travel.

“Where are we going today?”

“Nowhere just now.”

Tony frowns and waits for the green light of teleportation to blind him, but it never comes this time.

Instead, the world around him starts spinning counterclockwise in a slow, lazy movement, speeding up until the lines of it blur into a mess of gray—brick red—brown, and then green, green, green.

The world jerks to a halt like a roller-coaster bumping against the finish line, and Tony would fall face first into the grass if Lorna, one eye still on her watch, didn’t catch his arm to stabilize him. Tony waits until his brain catches up with the lack of movement before he casts a look around.

Far into the distance, he thinks he can make out a sliver of blue that doesn’t quite look like the sky. The rest of the horizon vanishes under green, grassy plains swirling under the wind, and no trace of human presence as far as the eye can see.

“Alright,” Tony says, doing his best to sound vaguely serious even as he grips Lorna’s biceps to avoid falling on his ass, “seriously, where are we?”

“I told you,” she says with a smirk in her voice, “we haven’t moved yet. As far as when we are, however….”

“Wait, you can travel through time?”

“I acquired the power some centuries ago. An excellent purchase, if you ask me.”

“I—you can travel through time!”

Alright, so maybe Tony kind of deserves having Lorna’s ‘duh’ face thrown at him, but then again he can probably be forgiven. Magic, he can deal with. It’s just science that hasn’t been explained yet. Time travel, on the other hand—sure, there are some far fetched, what-ifs theories, but it’s not like he ever really believed them…and even if he had, there’s a difference between theory and practice, dammit:

“I can’t believe you can time-travel.”

“And shape-shift, and trick people,” Lorna smirks before she seizes Tony by the waist and lifts him up on her shoulder as easily as she’d lift a toddler.

“You know,” Tony warns, leaning over her head like he’s three and trying to talk to his father’s butler, “I haven’t ridden a horse in decades.”

Lorna laughs which, considering the decidedly bizarre turn the situation took—he is, after all, literally sitting on Loki’s shoulders like he doesn’t weight anything—Tony doesn’t really have the heart to feel offended by.

“Don’t worry,” she says with a roll of her shoulders, “we’re not going horse-riding.”

Tony opens his mouth to say that he’s perfectly capable of hiking to wherever she wants to go on his own legs, thank you very much, but before he can say anything Lorna’s clothing ripples, her skin shivers between Tony’s thighs, and in a flash of green light he finds himself sitting astride a crow the size of a small cart, the green of its eyes all but twinkling at him as it gets ready for take off.

“You know we could have done this in the present, right?” Tony blurts, stopping Loki’s first movement in their tracks, “right?”

“Of course. No one in New York would ever notice a giant crow carrying Tony Stark around in the sky.”

“I could have used my suit,” Tony insists, “It’s not like you’re making me discover anything there—I already know how to fly.”

“You fly like a fish in a submarine,” Loki—Lorna—whoever—replies, voice dripping with condescension, “I’m taking you skinny dipping.”

“Okay but—”

“Besides, flying is an accessory to today’s outing, not its purpose.”

“Oh, great,” Tony says, does that mean we can—”

“Hold on tight.”

Tony grabs a handful of slippery feathers just as Loki lurches forward with a satisfied cackle and propels them into the air with a powerful beat of her wings—they slap against Tony’s calves hard enough to leave bruises, and his thighs aches with how rigid he need to keep them in order to maintain his balance, but he doesn’t pay any attention to that as he bends down and puts his arms as far as they’ll go around Loki’s neck.

It takes him a long time before he opens his eyes again, and when he does the sea of green stares at him past the blurry black frame of Loki’s feathers. The wind sweeps large waves through the grass, and Tony’s nausea recedes a little at the beauty of it, even as his field of vision expands until it encompasses what will turn into New York’s harbor and Liberty Island at some point in the future.

He clenches his arms and legs harder around Loki when they start going forward instead of up, lurching up and down in a regular beat like a mechanic horse on a merry-go-round, cold wind beating up so hard against Tony’s face he has to lean to the side to breathe.

Loki definitely wasn’t lying about skinny dipping.

The Iron Man suit swallows the world away from Tony—keeps it safely tucked into a small screen and away from the rest of him like the most expansive virtual reality system ever invented. In the suit, Tony has to cut the circuits if he actually wants to look through the mask’s eye-slits.

Flying on Loki’s back feels more like the world is trying to pummel into him, and Tony has to squint his eyelids shut against the onslaught of informations, the cold tears—the overwhelming certainty that, should he fall, he’ll have no possible amount of control over what happens to him this time around.

“How are you feeling up there?”

“I don’t know,” Tony yells into what he assumes might be the crow’s ears, “I’m feeling!”

It’s not even a lie. Loki’s wings keep beating at his calves, her feathers biting red lines into his palms, and he’s still stiff all over with fright…but then the winds against his face, the knowledge that the sky surrounds him on all sides, the way the world itself flays at him until he can’t quite tell if all of this is exciting or terrifying or both—he’s not sure how he feels exactly, but he can’t deny that he’s hardly ever felt that stimulated in his life.

He’ll take that over the numbness of the past few months any day.

“Good,” the bird laughs, “that was very much the point.”

“Mission accomplished then—can we go back down now?”

“Do you really mean that?”

“I don’t know!”

“Well then, do try to sit up straight, will you? You might be surprised yet.”

Tony swallows the undignified squeak of surprise rising to his lips and, with a deep breath, does as he’s told, gripping the feathers harder so the wind won’t catch him and pull him off his seat. Then, because it seems stupid to keep his eyes closed when he’s already getting into the more dangerous position, he decides to take a look around.

He’s seen what it was like already—green and blue cottoned with white as far as the eye can see, rays of sun bouncing off the sea in a myriad of golden diamonds that send sparkles into the very depths of Tony’s yes and brain—but it’s different watching it from the ground or through half-closed lids and taking it all in full. There’s a sentiment of infinity there that Tony hasn’t ever felt anywhere else—strong enough that, this times, when tears bloom at the corner of his eyes, he knows for a fact the wind doesn’t have anything to do with them.

“Okay,” he yells down at Loki, “that’s pretty cool!”

“Would you be interested in something even cooler?”

“Like what?”

“We’ve almost reached out destination,” Lorna smirks with a quick glance back at Tony, “now it’s time we caught the other guests.”

“The—what?”

“Brace yourself, this will be fast.”

Tony barely has time to compute the sentence before the crow takes a dive and sends them plummeting toward the ground. He grapples at the feathers under him, head bouncing against the crow’s tail as he remembers that one time he froze the suit’s circuits and nearly Icarus’d his way back to earth.

His knees tighten around Loki’s wings, his arms pull at feathers, his eyes screw shut.

He screams.

{ooo}

The Coyote—rich beige and brown fur glistening in the sunlight—laughs so hard in Loki’s claws Tony would almost worry about their bursting a vein if he wasn’t so busy trying to catch his breath.

“I apologize,” Loki says once a burst of green light took the wet stain out of Tony’s jeans, “I figured you did this enough on your own not to be scared today.”

“Well, I usually fly like a fish in a submarine, don’t I?” Tony throws back, more shocked than actually angry, surprising as that may be. “Next time give me some warning—or bring a freaking diaper.”

The coyote laughs even harder at that—Tony can feel them shaking against Loki’s legs even as they keep flying, far lower than they did earlier, the crow’s eyes never quite leaving the ground—before they heave a contented sigh and, to Tony astonishing lack of surprise, start talking:

“I have no idea where you found this mortal, Loki, but I like him already.”

“It’s actually more of a matter of when,” Lorna replies, only half of her attention on the conversation, “he’s from the twenty-first century.”

“Oh, good.” A pause. “Wait, when did you start traveling in time?”

“Around the sixteenth century—by Christian reckoning. Kali and I found an agreement.”

“And why, pray tell, did you bring this mortal so far into the past?”

“Excellent question,” the Crow replies, still scanning the ground, “neither of you would let me know. I’m merely upholding the loop.”

“The loop?” Tony echoes, but then Loki makes a soft ‘ah’, like he’s found what he was looking for, and Tony focuses on not vomiting through what is, admittedly, a much slower descent this time around.

{ooo}

“So,” Anansi—who, as it turns out, is a giant freaking spider—starts when Loki is done making introductions, “when exactly are we supposed to start this loop?”

“At some point in my future,” Loki shrugs—it jostles Tony hard enough that his attempt to get off the crow’s back ends in an undignified yelp and a frankly embarrassing fall in the dirt, but while the other three check to make sure he’s not hurt, none of them seem to mind too much. “I presume I was the one who instigated it, though I don’t know why yet.”

“It must have been of the utmost important if you went through the trouble of securing us both the power to travel through time—I assume the deed required serious negotiations?”

“Yes,” Loki replies with a slight shudder, “quite.”

“Four divinities and a special favor,” Anansi muses, fangs clicking as all eight of his eyes focus on Tony, “I don’t know what you did exactly, but it must have been something very special.”

“He is a very bright man,” Loki confirms with a nod.

Tony resents the way his face flares up at the comment, but there’s nothing to be done about it, really, and he looks at the ground for a long moment before something clicks in his brain:

“Wait, you mean you guys are gods too?”

There’s a pregnant pause, during which Coyote and Anansi stare at Loki, Loki stares at Tony, and Tony tries to stare at all three of them equally because seriously, what? It’s not like people meet gods every day, okay? He’s allowed an honest mistake!

“Very special,” Anansi repeats while Coyote muffles a snicker into his chest—Loki’s feathers ruffle, but he doesn’t protest.

Which is, of course, the moment Tony picks to miss an occasion of keeping his mouth shut:

“I keep forgetting you’re a real god,” he breathes in Loki’s direction, half-wondering when he stopped thinking of Loki as a self-aggrandizing alien and started seeing him as an actual divine—or divine-like—creature.

He’s not sure what it would mean about him if it turned out he’d only changed his mind because they started becoming friends.

“You’re hardly the first,” Anansi says, shrugging with all four of his left shoulders, “and I don’t believe you’ll be the last—”

“Though I’m surprised you survived Loki’s acquaintance—”

“He was Thor’s friend before he was mine,” Loki specifies—without, Tony notices, denying the murderous implication of Coyote’s statement.

“Thor is almost as prickly as you are about this,” Coyote replies with a shrug, “he nearly skewered me last wee, remember?”

“You called Mjölnir a toy,” Anansi points out—Tony thinks he sees Loki’s eyes widen in recognition before they close as Coyote snickers.

Tony watches Anansi kick the guy—god—in his lupine shins, to which coyote responds with a rough—but, it seems, playful—tug at Anansi’s fang, and before Tony can quite process what’s happening, he’s watching a full-on scuffle the kind of which he’s only seen back in college. It’s like watching kids measure dicks in the most good-natured way they know how, and the image clashes against the memory of Loki’s prim hauteur, of Thor’s easygoing power—of the way both of them can fill a room as easily as Tony would turn the lights on.

He’s not a bad orator if he says so himself, but even he can’t send shivers running down people’s spines just like that.

“If anything,” Loki states—a tad loudly—when the play-fight has gone one long enough, “I should probably have helped him along for suggesting I’d risk my head for mere trifles.”

“Wait,” Tony interrupts before the ribbing can resume, “you mean that thing with the horse wasn’t the only time you risked your life for the rest of Asgard?”

“We’re tricksters,” Anansi replies, disdain dripping form his voice, “putting our lives—or honor—on the line to reach our goals is part of the job description. Haven’t you paid attention to the stories?”

“My bedtime stories were from the bible,” Tony deadpans, unwilling to go into the topic of his mother or education. “It doesn’t matter though, I’m an atheist.”

For a long, heavy moment, all three gods’ attention focus in on Tony—even Loki, in his bird form, manages to convey some form of surprise at the words. Coyote and Anansi, marred with dust, stay very still, as if waiting for the prairie to start screaming ‘April’s fools’ and, when nothing of the sort happens, they dissolve into snickers, which turn into snorts of laughter, which turns into full blown howling in less than a minute.

Even Tony can’t help joining in, and goodness knows he hasn’t been the best with self-mocking these days.

“Oh, Loki,” Anansi sighs after a bit while coyote wipes tears out of his eyes, “you always did have impeccable taste.”

“Of course,” Coyote replies in a perfect—if  tad breathless—imitation of Loki’s prissier tones, “I may be from Asgard, but I’m not a complete brute.”

“Hey! I don’t sound like that!”

“You do indeed,” Coyote insists, and Anansi gives a suspicious cough, “or you did, I suppose, by your present reckoning. Either way, it is a good thing you changed, or I would have thrown you off a cliff some day.”

“You already did that.”

“See? My point exactly.”

Loki buries his head under his wing and refuses to talk to the other two until they solemnly swear to stop teasing him for the time being.

Tony laughs, but only until they decide teasing him will make an acceptable substitute for mocking Loki.

{ooo}

Tony comes back to his own time after several hours spent watching Loki get teased to hell and back, at least thirty minutes being a rabbit, grass stains all over his clothes and ants in places they really shouldn’t be, all of that topped up with a headache strong enough to kill. He’s sore all over, tired beyond belief, and maybe a little drunk without even having thought of drinking even once today, but there’s a grin on Lorna’s lips that he can’t help but answer in kind, satisfied with a day well spent.

“Well, they’re a handful and they gave me a killer migraine,” Tony tells Lorna with a contented sigh as they walk out of their alley and back into the twenty-first century, “but I liked them.”

“The migraine was unavoidable, I’m afraid,” Lorna shrugs, half her attention focused on her phone already, “they didn’t speak English back then, so they had to use other ways. It takes its toll.”

“Other ways?”

“No one thinks they couldn’t understand their patron god if they talked to them, do they?” Lorna asks, raising her eyes from her phone to meet Tony’s. “We can make any human understand us, no matter what languages we may use—it’s simply harder to do with a man of little faith.”

“Should I feel insulted? I kind of feel insulted.”

“You did tell three gods you didn’t believe in any kind of deity,” Lorna points out before she leans down to plant a kiss on Tony’s cheek. “Don’t worry though, I think they liked you, too.”

Tony likes the idea so much, it takes him several hours to realize he didn’t even think of asking for more detail on the time loop he’s apparently a part of.