#seadla verse

[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.

[terresdebrume]

What I learned from doing these infographics is that while I don't regret my MCU years, it's still just a teensy bit frustrating to see it dominate my stats when there are several more recent projects I'd love to showcase too xD

I mean, SEADLA will always have a special place in my heart and I'm still pretty fond of the Dots verse, but also by the parameters I've set, I don't get to show off Clark Kent of Krypton or All On My Own (or heck, Like Poison From A Wound would be nice too)...and even from back in the days, I have a couple SPN fics that get entirely swallowed in the stats xD

It's just a game of numbers but it's interesting to see how it reflects or goes against how I feel about my fics x)

[terresdebrume]

About my writing, and letting go

So, I was going to do a big Thinking Post about all the fics in progress I’ve failed to touch (or in some cases, think of) for...anywhere between two to eight years. I was planning on having, idk, a summary of what went wrong and a maybe even try to see if any of them had a chance of being picked up. After all, I’m turning 30 next year, and I figure that’s as good a reason as any to decide if I want to do a clean slate-style move or not.

The thing is, though, that looking at the multichaptered fics I’ve abandoned...none of them makes me feel like going back to them.

Some are just too old, and I’ve moved on from the style or fandom, and I’m no longer interested in the story idea. It’s a shame, because at least one of those fics was a thank you fic for something else and it seems like both the person and I kinda...gave up on it. In at least one case, the setting calls for A Lot of angst from beginning to end (unless I cop out of the natural progression of the story) and it isn’t the sort of story I’m interested in writing anymore.

And in the case of The Immortal Cup...well, the problem that fic has is actually pretty similar to my SEADLA problem: it turns out it’s not about what I thought it was going to be about.

To be honest, I don’t know that I would have even started the fic if I’d realized what I wanted to talk about (aka: being trans), or at least not the same way. Part of me wants to say ‘if I hadn’t lost about 98% of the work I put in on this...’ but the truth is I don’t think it would have helped.

It isn’t that I’m not interested in the Immortal Instruments ‘verse anymore (although, having largely moved on from that fandom, at the moment that interest is fairly nonchalant, so to speak) it’s just that...well, frankly, it’s just that if I’m going to write about Shadowhunters again, I’d rather write about Alec.

(Which is why I think More Fire than Ice, the Malec series I began a few years ago, actually has more chances of being finished someday—though that doesn’t guarantee anything either.)

I thought, for a while, about restarting the story and making Clary into a trans guy, but then that would have meant either having a m/f main pairing if I wanted to keep the planned Clizzy (which, despite the inherent queerness of such a pairing, is not something I feel like writing) or change the story so thoroughly it wouldn’t have been anything like the base material, and frankly I figure if I’m going to do that much work on quasi-original characters, I might as well go back to the elven OCs I haven’t touched in over ten years, now. (Or, you know, start a new novel project, I’m not that picky.)

So you can see why I’m not going to bother doing a one-by-one detailed post, I think. I’ll probably just make (yet another) series on AO3 for my unfinished multichapters and move on from there.

This decision is actually easier to make than it was to discontinue SEADLA. Part of it is probably because none of these works were ever half as popular as SEADLA was :P

But another, more significant part is that I am no longer the person that I was when I started writing these fics, and I’m not interested in the same projects, or the same characters—or, when I am, it’s in a different way.

It is possible that this is a side-effect of my mental transition (until I finally begin the administrative and physical processes). I mean, it did feel really strange to see ‘Terresdebrume’ used along with he/him/his during the Superbat Big Bang—it’s possible that, in the long run, I’ll be thinking about changing my internet handle, if I don’t get used to the feeling. Part of me feels like Matt is more than enough of a name and I don’t really need anything else, but website urls can’t always be just a first name :P

As for fic writing...right now I’m in a bit of a rut, probably because I’ve spent so long on Clark Kent, of Krypton (no, I have absolutely no shame about linking it here), but even for after that passes, my whims and wishes are more oriented towards Good Omens and/or The Man fomr U.N.C.L.E. than the MCU these days, and not just because the first phase of the MCU has come to an (only partially satisfying) end.

So...yeah. I guess this is me officially discontinuing a bunch of fics (well, five of them) and giving myself space to seriously think about what I want to do with my numerous series, some of which may have a chance of being added to and some others...may not.

And as for me and fanfiction writing in general...eh. We’ll see how that goes ;)

[terresdebrume]

So between the Grading Days, Christmas and the TIC related excitement of fic prep, I haven't really done actual writing do far these holidays (as in, adding words to a draft). For next week do I:

Continue the SEADLA rewrite in the hope of finishing the story and only leaving myself the second and third drafts to do next year before publication

Try and restart TIC even though maybe two long term projects at the same time aren't all that good an idea after all (it didn't work out so well this year)

Try and work on the Drumfred thing I have ideas for but am otherwise kind of stumped about

Try and take care of the two prompts that have been sleeping in my inbox for literal months at this point

Unearth the one original story prompt I have left in my inbox (it's been over a year now I think?)

Actually try and write some things for said original verse

Fuck it and mess around with pinterest boards all week.

Whatever the choice I'm not getting to it until the 1st of January but still. It pays to ponder it :P

[terresdebrumestories]

Chapter 12/24: Out

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU SERIES: SEADLA Verse, version 2.0 RATING: Mature WORDCOUNT: 4 626 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Clint Barton. GENRE: Jail time sucks. TRIGGER WARNING(S): This chapter contains brief and non graphic suicidal thoughts (it’s really small, but it’s there) as well as iffy matters of consent regarding telepathy that aren’t really discussed. (Check the AO3 listing for a glimpse of what’s to come). SUMMARY: In which there is a rescue team.

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] [Chapter 8] [Chapter 9] [Chapter 10] [Chapter 11]

Tony stares into the abrupt darkness with his heart hammering against his ribs until a green and gold flame, no bigger than a thumb, whispers to life. The light flickers over Loki’s face, makes his features handsome, childish and fearsome in turn, a thousand faces birthed and killed by a thousand tricks of lights.

It makes Tony’s head swim.

Loki, apparently unbothered, sends the flame hovering a little above his head and lights another one, then another and another, until several dozens of small fires float in the air around them, casting their light over Loki and deepening the pitch blackness around him.

“You look like the Boogeyman,” Tony blurts out through the wild rhythm of his breathing, twisting his fingers into his sheets, just to make sure the bed is still there.

The whole scene looks and feels a little like the Big Bang did, except there’s neither scientific wonder nor any sense of emotional closeness to keep Tony calm, and sweat starts prickling at his brow long before Loki shrugs and deadpans:

“Well I did do a bit of interim for him.”

Tony gapes, unable to tell whether this is supposed to be a joke or not, until his eyes catch on to a slightly-less-dark rectangle in the blackness behind Loki. He twists around a little, careful to keep his movements limited to the approximate area of the bed, until he catches sight of something moving in the rectangle, like black heavy fog trying to hide paler silhouettes. Tony thinks they look like trees, but they’re too pale to be real.

“Where are we?” He asks at last, struggling to tear his attention off the door and onto Loki.

“I suppose you could say we’re technically both in you cell. This is your mind. Well, a possible manifestation of it, at least.”

“A physical manifestation of—wait, I’m dreaming?”

“In technical terms,” Loki corrects with impossibly precise enunciation, “you are being Visited.”

“Oh right,” Tony retorts, switching from surprise to sarcasm almost before he has time to decide on it, “and you couldn’t ‘visit me’ before because…?”

“You didn’t pick up the knife.”

Tony’s face flushes red in less time than it takes to blink. What does the fucking knife even have to do with anything? And what the fuck does Loki mean, Tony didn’t pick it up? He spent literal days cutting into his arm with that stupid fucking thing, and Loki has the gall to blame him for not picking it up?

Worse, still! The bastard looks sad! Hurt, even! Like he’s the one who suffered instead of Tony! Oh, what a fucking joke, what a bastard—a week! A full week, at least, in custody, all but tortured into drinking, not knowing when he’d come out and that’s what—oh, what a fucking moron Tony was.

“Oh, forgive me your highness,” he hisses, trying not to choke on his fury, “I guess I’m not smart enough for princely mind games, after all!”

“That’s not what I said,” Loki replies in a neutral tone, one eyebrow raising with so much elegance Tony wants to punch it open, “I’m simply saying—”

“You’re saying bull, is what you’re doing. I picked your damn knife up! For nothing! I’ve been calling you for help—”

“I’m actually fairly certain you were punishing yourself,” Loki replies, drawing his head back like an offended bird.”

“You told me there was a spell in it—that you’d know if I tried to use it on myself—why d’you think I went back to cutting? The aesthetics?”

“Contrary to what you seem to believe, I didn’t actually get inside your head about a minute ago. I knew you were cutting, not why.”

“Oh, right, because that makes everything so much better!”

Tony is all but kneeling on the bed by now, body tense and boiling with the urge to start throwing punches. He’s not even picky about where: face, chest, legs, anywhere it’ll take so long as it gets Loki begging for forgiveness and the ugly mess of Tony’s memories out of his brain forever.

Loki doesn’t seem to care, if he even notices at all.

“It doesn’t,” he says with a slight shrug, “you had to call for me. I planted the knife as because I knew you were too stubborn to—”

“What? Too stubborn to die like you planned?”

Technically, there’s no wall to stop him here, no ground to slam into, which is probably the only reason why flying off and landing in an undignified heap doesn’t physically hurt. The gesture still reels him though, pulls his thoughts into a sharp sideway twist.

Fuck, he wishes it’d hurt though. Wishes it’d bleed like a proper wound so he could just stitch it up and be done with it instead of having to watch himself fester down into nothing. It’d be a bitch to go through but it’d be clean. Straightforward.

Simple.

God, he misses simple.

But it doesn’t hurt.

Loki’s face though, that gets something out of Tony, because he looks hurt. He looks like he’s hurt and betrayed, like Tony should commiserate with the poor widdle god of trickery and lies regret at sending a so-called friend flying. Like Tony should be craddling his cheek and say ‘it’s alright, you’re not really an asshole for trying to throw me into concrete, or whatever you thought would stop me mid-flight’.

Fuck that game. Tony’s most definitely not playing it.

“If I’d meant for you to die,” Loki hisses after a long, shivering pause, “All I had to do was leave you here. I could have killed you a dozen times as Lorna. Better still, I could have ignored your letter and let you do the bloody job for me, you pathetic coward!”

The lights around them burn brighter with each word, swelling with Loki’s venom and turning his hair from black to a bright copper, draws lines of runes onto his face. Tony watches the change proceed with sick fascination, blood humming in his veins as Loki’s ordinary black leather shifts into thick winter gear, his chin colors with a thick copper beard where the runes come and go like words on the wind.

It fills something primal in Tony, like he’s witnessing something he shouldn’t have access to, and there’s the beginning of a punch building up in his fist when Loki strides up to him, seizes him by the collar and hisses into his face:

“You’re a lucky coward, though, I do not intend to let you die. Be ready for an escape tomorrow. You will know when the time comes.”

Tony does punch then, as hard and fast as he can manage, satisfaction blooming into his chest when he hears Loki’s nose crack and spots blood dripping onto the elegant mustache. Fuck him. Fuck him and his mysticism, his arrogance, his every fucking thing! If he wants to think he’s above everyone, fine! But if he thinks Tony’s gonna lie down and take it in silence, he’s got another fucking thing coming.

His thing with Lorna might have worked wonder, but Tony is sure as hell not about to take another one of his lies, fuck him very much.

“Lorna was a lie, that much is true,” Loki says while he dabs elegant fingers under his nose, “but it wasn’t mine.”

He’s out of the door before Tony can try to punch him again.

{ooo}

Tony wakes up to a major kink in his neck and the taste of a hangover gone stale on his tongue. He lies on the bed like a a stringless puppet, crusty-eyed and sweaty, desperatly trying to ignore the headache forming behind his eyeballs. At the edge of his memory, shouting and pain mix with green flames in the dark, and it’s all he can do to push them back in favor of Loki’s words.

Be ready for an escape tomorrow. You’ll know the moment when it comes.

Of course he had to be a fucking cryptic with that, too. What an asshole.

Tony still hopes, though. He thinks about the not-quite-dream all day long as he lies down, unable not to wish Loki said the truth. Unable not to feel like time has turned into especially thick syrup as he keeps his hands under the pillow, clutching Loki’s open knife just in case.

Somewhere around what’s probably the beginning of the afternoon, Clint comes back with more food. He doesn’t make a show of roughing tony up this time, which is definitely progress, but he does mouth ‘be ready’ when he leaves the tray. If nothing else, it probably means Clint is on Tonys side.

In times like these, it’s a thought worth clinging to.

{ooo}

As far as Tony can tell, it’s about four when the guards start screaming. Muffled shouts and the slap of flesh on flesh fill the air for a hot second, and then there’s a pregnant silence and the hiss of Tony’s cell door sliding open. Tony, who at this point is little more than a random collection of ill-kept hair and bloodshot eyes in hospital pajamas, watches a skinny silhouette in red and blue spandex stride into the room with confident step, pause into a full-bodied show of surprise, and exclaims:

“Dude, you look like crap!”

The boy sounds something like seventeen, maybe eighteen. Barely college age, at any rate. It doesn’t stop Tony from saying he’s been worse.

It’s both true and false. Afghanistan hurt more, physically speaking. He doesn’t remember feeling that empty while he was there, though, too busy trying to figure out how to get Yinsen and himself out to feel sorry about his life.

He wouldn’t go back there just to stop being depressed though, thank you very much.

“How did you know where to find me?” He asks, following the kid out into empty corridors with Loki’s swiss knife in hand, “Clint managed to get blueprint out?”

“Yeah, and then a little spider talked to me in a dream.”

A pause, and then:

“I mean, it was really more like the biggest tarantula the world has ever seen, but it’s not as funny an image.”

Tony’s too busy trying to walk in a straight line to care much, either way, but whatever rocks the kid’s world, really. How or why on Earth Anansi got involved, he has no idea. Same goes for Spiderman, actually, but neither of these questions feel pressing enough to distract him from the very real, very urgent need to get away from this place.

So he runs.

They reach a doorway that probably leads outside about fifteen minutes into Tony’s escape, four S.H.I.E.L.D agents standing in their way with old Nazi weapons at the ready, and Tony’s heart sinks.

No way he’ll get past them.

“Okay,” Spiderman says, twisting his head until the bones in his neck crack, “no offense but I think we’ll be better off if I handle that one on my own. You’re in no shape to fight, pop.”

Tony would quip back and say the kid is being a little generous about his suit-less abilities, but he doesn’t have the time. He’s barely started opening his mouth, and one guard is down already, dragged to the ground with a clever use of silky—and sticky—rope. Spiderman runs toward the next one, yells ‘crotch!’ and hit the man with exactly that part of his anatomy, catching one of the two women in the jaw with his foot as he twists the male guard around.

The second woman manages to get a grip on him and twist his arm behind his back, but before Tony gets to helping him, he’s jumped and twisted in such a way that he broke the woman’s nose with his knee and wriggled free of her headlock.

“Phew,” he says, voice rough from the chokehold, “thank heaven for super flexibility, right?”

Tony doesn’t have time to answer before someone grabs his arm and forces him to start running. He barely realizes it’s Clint in time to avoid punching at him—and then it stops to matter, because he’s finally outside.

He was never a very outdoorsy person before but hell, he’s ready to get into full time camping right now, relishing the wind on his face more than he could have thought possible, so happy to be let out of that damned cave of a jail cell that he barely manages to hold himself upright.

“Stark!” Clint yells in his ear with the tone of someone who’s been trying to get his attention for a bit, “they’re trying to torture Banner into hulking, we gotta move out fast!”

“He’s not gonna do it!” Tony protests even as he picks up his pace to keep up with Clint, “Bruce—”

“I’m not wondering if he wants to hold it in,” Clint replies, guiding Tony away from where a gaggle of agents are fighting a man on a horse car, “I’m wondering if he’ll be able to! He’s never had to resist torture before, we don’t know how it’ll affect him!”

Tony, still half-drunk from sudden freedom, wishes he could protest. Bruce saved his life multiple times already—sometimes as Hulk, even!—but Clint as a point. This is brand new territory, and they’re probably better off getting to safety before they start pondering the nature of Bruce’s doppelganger and how it’s gonna react to pain.

Around them, the air screams with explosions and too many voices, multiple fights breaking on the ground and across the sky as Tony lets Clint and Spiderman drag him out into what may or may not be the desert of New Mexico. He thinks he makes out a voice that sounds like thunder in the chaos but, really, there’s no way to be entirely sure.

“We gotta come back for Bruce,” he manages between two steps, dodging Clint’s elbow when he shoots at an agent.

“We gotta get you to safety,” Clint says, eyes roaming the landscape around them for something, “if Banner’s smart he’ll let the other guy come out and get him out of Fury’s hands.”

“But he’s—”

“I don’t see out back up!” Spiderman yells, “Where’s she?”

“Hell if I know! You seen a cat recently?”

Tony stumbles on the uneven ground, legs of cotton and shot vision combining to mess up with his balance, but he’s still got enough brain to despair at Clint’s words. A cat? they’re hanging their survival on a damn cat? God, they’re so lost—he’s just gonna die here and get this kid who asked for nothing down with him and then—

“Oh fuck!”

Tony twists on himself to follow Clint’s line of sight, trusting the guy to take them through a manageable path...and immediately regrets his decision.

Behind them, mounted onto some kind of vaguely horse-like mechanical monstrosity, the scarred man who visited Tony is flinging people out of his way like they’re annoying flies and not full grown adults. He’s yelling something Tony doesn’t understand but, more importantly, he’s catching up to them. Fast.

“Damn it all!” Clint shouts, “Bastet! Where the fuck are you!”

There’s a flash of grayish-pink flesh by Tony’s feet, a shape running toward the artificial horse as the scarred man prepares to shoot, and then he’s flung to the ground under the weight of a hairless lion with a snarl of hatred that shakes the air around Tony.

“The portal’s behind the rock,” the lion—lioness, judging by the voice—yells over the scarred man’s struggling body, “go!”

Tony is scrambling to turn around before Spiderman even manages to grab him—there’s a sharp pain in his guts as he runs, the exhaustion finally settling in, but he doesn’t let it stop him and keep going, passing a giant boulder at breakneck speed.

He doesn’t notice the hole until he’s already falling.

{ooo}

“Finally,” a deep, cheerful voice exclaims when Tony climbs back to consciousness, “I was beginning to think you’d never wake up!”

Trying to ignore the voice, Tony keeps his eyes closed and tries to list his injuries—there should be some, considering the day he’s had...whenever he got knocked out.

He doesn’t find anything.

Nothing hurts.

There’s no fire in his veins, no throbbing in his head, no itching and pulling around the reactor, no dull ache where he thought he’d pulled a muscle running, nothing at all.

He’s not sure what it says about him that the absence of pain is what makes him open his eyes and panic.

“Alright, alright, try to calm down,” the voice says when Tony bolts upright, “it took a while to patch you up, and probably even longer to negotiate your return with Hades, let’s not go and ruin all that good work.”

Tony turns, and stares at the woman he finds there. She’s about as tall as Thor, though her shoulders and hips are slightly narrower. Long, bleached-blond hair tumbles into a thick braid over her right shoulder, and when she walks closer to examine Tony it’s easy to spot the freckles on her golden cheeks.

“What the hell?” Tony exclaims when she inspects his wrists and there’s no trace of scarring there, “Where the fuck am I?”

“The exact answer is a little complicated,” the woman says with an apologetic smile, “so for the sake of simplicity we’ll just say it’s my infirmary, for now.”

“Right. And how long have I been in ‘your infirmary’?” Tony asks with his heart in his throat.

“A little under three days. You were awake for some of it, actually, but you kept trying to tear your glowing gadget out and re-open your wrists, so I sedated you. You should be able to get out tomorrow, depending on your state of mind...i the meantime, you can visit Anansi in the next room but going further would be a bad idea.”

Tony blinks, and takes his first proper look around the room.

White stone walls, too smooth to be natural but not enough to be a modern building, curve in as if to cover whatever is inside them. Blue light, rippling over the room like it had to get through water, mixing with the light of several candles to paint the atmosphere a golden kind of turquoise. It’s unusual and somewhere halfway between magical and spooky, but it’s also oddly soothing.

Secure, more than stifling. It’s a nice change of pace.

As for the furnitures, aside from the way they curve in to accommodate the walls, they look fairly infirmary-like. A spartan bedside table for each of the three narrow cots, a roll up tray with instruments waiting to be used, and a basket filled with whatever it is an infirmary needs to throw away. To the left, a closed door. To the right, a door left ajar, the low hum of conversation filtering through it—probably Anansi’s room, then. Tony should probably go and visit.

He doesn’t have it in him to do it, though.

He didn’t expect to wake up. didn’t even really want to, either. What does he have to come back to, these days? An empty house without Jarvis? A bunch of broken dreams? More problems than he can even begin to count? And that’s taking Loki out of the equation. Loki who, unless he’s even more of a jerk than he already showed, might come walking though that door at any moment.

Wonderful.

Honestly, tony wishes he could stop thinking about him. He’s going to have to, at some point, whether he likes it or not. Might even be a good idea to do so, in the long run. Right now though, nothing in his body hurts—not even the reactor—and his mind is just numb enough to keep him from a fall in complete despair.

It’s not ideal, but compared to the past few days it’s progress, and Tony is not going to ruin it with undue concern, thank you very much.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about Anansi’s health?”

It take tremendous effort to look at the woman again. Here eyes, almond shaped with a distinct fold at the corners, are so dark they’re almost black, but they’re warm too, and comforting. Well, there’s also a hint of reproach in there, but Tony doesn’t really have the energy to care about that.

“I assume he’ll be alright. He’s a God.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t try and be a proper friend to him. Or, you know, a polite person.”

Tony tries to snort, but it comes our more like a huff of breath. Either way, it’s not the answer the woman was angling fro, because she crosses her arms over her chest with a more obviously disapproving stare. She’s wearing an apron over a purple wool tunic, more prepared for viking ships than the imperial court of China, but what does Tony know about mythology, after all? Just ‘cause nobody talks about godly emigration doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

“Just because you’re out of it doesn’t mean you get to be an ass, Tony Stark.”

“And just ‘cause you know my name doesn’t mean you get to use it like you’re my mom,” Tony replies without much heat, “I don’t even know who you are.”

“Only because you didn’t ask.”

The woman’s voice deepens with every sentence, like her annoyance at Tony can be measured in how many octaves she can drop. She still reaches for a bowl and holds it out to Tony, with a firm ‘eat something’ when he takes it in hand.

It’s something like gruel, bland-looking on the whole, though when Tony tries it he finds nuts, honey and dried fruits as well. He doesn’t have the capacity to enjoy it in full, that’s true, but at least it tastes of something.

There are worse thing to unenthusiastically munch on.

“My name’s Sigyn, by the way.”

The name sounds vaguely familiar, but Tony doesn’t quite get why until Sigyn adds:

“You might know me as Loki’s wife.”

[terresdebrumestories]

Chapter 11/24: Cell

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU SERIES: SEADLA Verse, version 2.0 RATING: Mature WORDCOUNT: 4 626 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Clint Barton. GENRE: Jail time sucks. TRIGGER WARNING(S): This chapter contains an instance of Tony drinking alcohol against his will, even though physical force is not technically used. Ther are also brief and non-graphic instances of self-harm. (Check the AO3 listing for a glimpse of what’s to come). SUMMARY: In which things suck a lot, but at least it gives Tony time to think.

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] [Chapter 8] [Chapter 9] [Chapter 10]

Tony’s legs scream with protest when he speeds up, the battery in his arms dragging him down and tearing at the edges of his skin with agonizing slowness. He trips on a swiss knife hidden in the desert sand, and plummets down toward New York.

Tony startles awake with a gasp, wincing when the harsh light of his cell pierces at his eyes. He screws his eyes shut and waits for a few careful seconds before he tries again—the light still sort of stings, but it’s bearable now, and Tony sighs. He scans the glass wall for his guard’s position—she’s about on the opposite side of him—and makes a show of yawning and stretching so he can shove his hands under his pillow in a way that won’t make him look suspicious.

Loki’s knife is still here.

He thought it was a trap, at first. It was in his pocket when he was taken, that’s true, but somewhere between his fight with Steve and the moment he woke up for the second time, Fury’s goons changed him into something achingly similar to hospital scrubs. It took Tony a couple of seconds to notice it when he first woke up, but the panic attack was almost instantaneous. Who knew what else had happened while he slept, right?

The chip turned out to still be in place though, digging against his insides as soon as he got up to pace, which was a relief in more ways than one. First of all: the chip is still there. His most precious possession, and it’s not lost. Second, its presence meant no rectal search, X-rays, or deep searching procedure was used on him. Good news for his body integrity, and an argument about the knife’s presence being a trap, which was useful to cling to when Tony found it under his pillow as he shoved his face in it to hide his relief.

Logically speaking, S.H.I.E.L.D can’t possibly be unaware of its existence. It was right there in his pants pockets. There’s no way nobody noticed it.

Question is: why put it in his cell? Fury has ostensibly taken precautions against suicidal tendencies—irritatingly impractical precautions, but still. Why would he get a knife in Tony’s cell when it runs contrary to his official motives and would lead at least to come silent question in whoever was tasked to put the knife back under Tony’s pillow...unless Fury placed it himself, but that would still be a stupidly risky move.

(The more optimistic part of him keep bumping on the idea that there is a spell on the knife, but Tony’s been listening to his guards talk as they rotate. No sign of Loki anywhere since Tony was put into forced custody. Not exactly reassuring.)

Loki isn’t the only topic of conversation in the prison, though. Hearing the guards talk about the aftereffects of Jarvis’ and other various Stark-owned servers is...well, it’s painful, really, because Jarvis is gone, but it’s also a little vindicative. There’s something satisfying about knowing you’ve made you captor’s life a little more difficult, even if it’s just by forcing them to go back to books instead of the internet for information.

Besides, thinking about Jarvis is painful, but it keeps his mind off the sobriety.

Truthfully, the sobriety itself wouldn’t be a problem, quite the contrary. But between the stress, the lack of sleep, and the general upending of his life, Tony has been itching for a drink for days. What he assumes are days.

It’s not a physical ache—apparently, he’s either slowed the drinking down enough since his suicide attempt to avoid that, or he’s just a lucky bastard in that respect—but it itches and scratches at his brain, like a sick sort of Jimminy Cricket trying to convince him his life would be a lot better with a glass in his hand. Tony knows it’s a lie, of course, but that doesn’t mean he’s not tempted anyway.

He’s kept himself busy so far, alternating between mourning Jarvis and trying to think of an escape plan—anything to either gain contact with the outside world or get himself out—but event that is getting harder as time passes and offers no new solution.

There are at least two security cameras in his cell, on top of the one outside that faces the glass wall. His guards have irregular shift changes—as far as he can judge without real mean of measuring time—and so far there hasn’t been a single repeating face. Tony got hopeful, at first, when it seemed there was a sizable blind spot in the surveillance system above his bed, but knowing Fury the thing might as well be here on purpose to lure him into a false sense of safety.

(The thought rings strangely hollow, like a decayed tooth, but Tony hasn’t been able to put his finger on why yet.)

Even leaving aside the fog of alcohol craving battering at his brain, Tony’s situation would be enough to numb anyone’s mind, and thinking about his allies—or lack thereof—from outside doesn’t help all that much.

Steve has apparently bought Fury’s story in full. Bruce probably hasn’t, but his options are limited at the best of times, and this is definitely not the best time. Clint and Natasha are as much of a mstery as ever, mainly because Tony hasn’t seen or heard from them since this whole ordeal began, and has no way of knowing if it’s because they don’t care or because they decided to make a run for it. If she got his message, Pepper is probably trying to help, if she even can. If she believed him. Hopefully. Rhodey might try and lend a hand but what can he do from his camp? Not much is what. The two of them have moved mountains before, but S.H.I.E.L.D. is kind of a Mount Everest in and of itself, nothing says it’ll let itself be moved.

So all in all, Tony is on his own, whip a plastic box in his ass that’s getting increasingly difficult to ignore, an enchanted swiss knife that has yet to be useful in any way, and the vague hope that one of two Norse gods will not only get his but back to New York but also care enough about him to risk capture and bust him out.

Well, that, and the mother of all alcohol cravings, but he’s trying not to think too hard about that one.

He paces instead, listing the people he can’t count on or hope for help from as he counts how many steps he can take in his cell and tries not to scratch at the itching patch over his arms. The need keeps growing though, presses at his chest and whispering terrible things in his ears. ‘What’s going on outside?’ it asks—Tony comes up with dozens of possible answers, all more terrible than the one that came before, and when he reaches the end of his reasoning, which is that none of this would have happened without him and he should probably refrain from doing anything in the future lest he ruins someone else’s life, the temptation is back.

Just one glass. Just to take the edge off. Just to forget the smear campaign Fury is probably waging against him right this minute.

Damn, he needs to get out of here. He needs to drink something, too, but he needs to get out of here first, and then clear Iron Man’s name. The company has Pepper now, it’ll survive, and so will Howard’s legacy—the parts Tony hasn’t trampled on already, that is. As for his own person, eh. It’s not that important. But Iron Man? It has to come back. It gives hope to too many people—Tony himself included. He can’t let it die like that, not when it is undoubtedly the best thing he’s ever made.

So, he needs to get out of here. That means he needs to focus—he needs a way to shut down the craving, and keep his head as clear as possible. Failing that, he needs to figure out how not to go too crazy until he either gets rescued or finds a way to get out.

Problem is, there doesn’t seem to be one.

{ooo}

He’s just about ready to burst out of his own skin when the realization comes that he’s been sitting on an enchanted knife this whole time—he resists the urge to slap his forehead and draw attention to himself before he leaves the corner of the room he’d settled in and goes back to the bed with a fake yawn.

Slowly, trying his best to look like a man getting ready to sleep, he settles down on his side, with his arms safely tucked into the cameras blind spot. If Fury does know about the knife—there’s no way he doesn’t, but at the same time, if he did, why would the knife even be here?—Tony acting like he thinks he’s got a secret to keep can’t hurt, right? Besides, it would feel weird, doing that in plain view.

He’s not sure he’s supposed to feel that relieved when he cuts the first line into the flesh of his forearm.

{ooo}

The pocket knife lies, forgotten, by their side as Tony feeds Pepper a slice of strawberry. She bites into it and her face starts melting off her bones, and Tony stands there, paralyzed by terror as she reaches for his throat and starts choking him.

Tony wakes up with a start, to a hand pressing at his throat—he throws his fist in the air before he thinks about it in full and hears someone grunt when he makes contact with thin flesh over bones. The hand on his throat leaves, and before Tony manages to wake up in full both of his wrists are tied to the bed, and he ends up staring into Clint’s pinched-neutral face. He bends down next to the bed—Tony contorts to try and see what he’s doing, but he’s bound in a way that makes that impossible—and comes back up with a pitcher full of what is definitely alcohol. The strong kind.

A noise of protest escapes Tony’s throat before he even thinks of making it, and he pulls against his restraints when Clint takes a step closer to the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he says while Tony clenches his teeth together, “but against Loki’s hold it’s this or a blow to the head, and this is less risky.”

Tony doesn’t make the mistake of saying he’d rather take the blow to the head. Either he’d get it, or Clint would use the occasion to shove the alcohol at him, neither of which are things Tony wants. He sinks into the bed, pushes himself deeper into the mattress, and tries to muster anger when Clint’s features shift to sympathy over him—but it doesn’t come, kept at bay by the sick burn of terror at the pit of Tony’s stomach, and the damn manacles that won’t give even an inch—

“It’ll hurt less if you just take it,” Clint says, resigned. Then, when Tony doesn’t manage a sarcastic quip, he sighs and says: “Stark. I don’t wanna make this any shittier for you than it already is.”

Tony sags back against the bed almost against his will, the fight evaporating out of him faster than he’d have thought possible. He doesn’t cooperate exactly—leaves Clint with the task of raising his head to the brim of the pitcher—but he doesn’t struggle either, and opens his mouth with the liquid—vodka, it soon appears—touches his lips. What’s the point in struggling, anyway? Like Clint said, it’s not like it’ll change much to the end result.

It does come as a surprise when Clint angles away from the surveillance cameras and whisper-grunts:

“We got new weapons today. Shiny, Hydra-issued relics for everyone.”

In his surprise, Tony swallows wrong and starts coughing on the vodka—Clint upend the last quarter of the pitcher on the pillow as he straightens up, gives Tony impressively terse well wishes, and takes the manacles out in practiced gestures before he exits the room.

Tony, who knows better than try and move fast after drinking that much in one go, thinks he hears Clint say something about truth and mashed potatoes before the shocked buzzing in his ears overpowers the rest of the world.

{ooo}

When Tony wakes up, dried drool pulls at his cheek, and a part of him is grimly amused to realize his hangover doesn’t seem to be that bad yet. Might grow worse fast, but he’s still a lot more functional than he expected himself to be, even as his skull makes a decent impression of being an echo chamber for a drill concerto in hammer minor. He turns to his side and lets his head hang over the side of the bed for a while anyway, just in case he needs to evacuate something fast. Then, when it seems like he’s not going to vomit just yet—a little surprising, but not unwelcome—Tony opens his eyes.

He’s not coherent enough to think yet—his mind stays focused on the terrible taste in his mouth, an eerily vampire-like distaste for light and ow. Mostly the ow part. Through it all, though, something stirs in his memory when he finally understands that the mushy thing on a tray under his nose are mashed potatoes. There was something about mashed potatoes—Clint said—he said—damn it. It’s right there, right at the tip of Tony’s tongue—or his thoughts, whichever—but he can’t seem to grasp it, like he’s a cat running after a laser, and someone’s keeping the red dot just out of his reach...he’s going to have to clear his mind if he wants to do anything productive. With a grunt, Tony rolls back onto the bed and, tucking his hands under the pillow, he fumbles with the knife until he can open the blade and run the tip of his fingers over the metal.

The pain probably shouldn’t feel like this. It doesn’t just cut—ha—through the fog in his mind it also makes things less...intense, somehow. Like Tony was about to explode with too much to think about, too much to feel about, and the cuts are letting some of it out and allowing him to go back to regularly scheduled existence. It’s odd and unfamiliar and a small, worried part of him wonders if he’ll keep doing this, later. If he’ll have to explain odd scars and habits, if he’ll lose people over it.

Most of him feels relieved.

Pressing his fingers against the pillow to stop the worst of the bleeding—he really should have picked a better place to cut—Tony tries to remember what Clint said about the potatoes exactly. The words are a blur—will probably pop back into existence way too late to be useful, if Tony’s current luck is anything to go by—but the urgency and stress in the words is easy to remember. Whatever it was, Clint wanted Tony to remember it.

Problem is, Clint is still a spy. Even waddling through a hangover—the only thing keeping his craving at bay—Tony still realizes the man is paid to double cross people on a regular basis. Who’s to say that’s not what he was doing...whenever the vodka episode was? Sure, he also mentioned Nazi superweapons coming out of storage when they were supposed to be destroyed. That’s probably not something Fury would want Tony to know. None of that means Clint isn’t trying to lure Tony into a trap.

Let’s assume, Tony tells himself, that Clint was telling the truth. The assumption is probably going to come back and bite him in the ass but, well. He has to believe some things can turn out well, doesn’t he? Yeah, he does. Anyway.

If Clint was telling the truth—if Fury really was stupid enough to outfit his organization with Hydra’s old weapons in the middle of a trust crisis—it lends credence to the possibility of someone using Tony to frame Loki. This is, after all, a blatantly stupid move, certain to raise at least some questions, right? And Fury doesn’t usually do that, even when extremely pressed. Combine that with the apparent weak spot in the surveillance—Tony could have missed a camera, somewhere, that’s true. Even so, the idea of a blonds spot in the videos, even a fake one, doesn’t sound quite right. Not when you add the non-discovery of his chip on top of it, not when he’s been hiding a knife and bloody scars from S.H.I.E.L.D. like they’re regular people and not highly trained super spies.

So, Fury might actually be manipulated, probably to get at Loki.

Question is, who on Earth would be crazy and smart enough to do that?

Tony grunts, pressing his fingertips harder against the pillow, increasing the pain to keep his mind out of the fog and off the strengthening need for another drink. If he stops thinking now, he’s never going to get to the end of that reasoning, and that is not something he can afford. So, theoretical framework: Fury is being manipulated by someone who has the smarts to trump him and the resources to silence embarrassing questions inside S.H.I.E.L.D. That someone, for some reason, is trying to make Loki sound even worse—but somehow, dumber—than he really is. This can give way to at least three different interpretations.

One, Loki knows what’s happening, and he doesn’t care enough about Tony to help him. Sure, Coyote and Anansi sounded like rather close friends—the kind you introduce people who count to—but then again Loki has been entirely unheard of since the beginning of this clusterfuck. Including after fairly extensive use of a knife that’s supposed to alert him if Tony hurts himself. Emotionally speaking, Tony is already about three quarters of the way in believing that one entirely, but he still needs to consider the other two, just to be sure.

The second option is that Loki knows what’s happening, but he’s bidding his time before he intervenes, for reasons Tony doesn’t have the energy to guess at. The thought of being worth planning and waiting for is...well, it’s not unpleasant. However, that implies whoever is behind this is impressive enough to make Loki cautious, and that, on the other hand, is not pleasant at all.

Third—and last that Tony can think of—Loki doesn’t know what’s going on. Depending on when he slipped off the surface of the Earth, he might not have heard about this. Plus, since Thor is also MIA, there’s always the possibility that they’re locked in some kind of intergalactic siblings war somewhere and forgot anything exists outside of it. Tony thinks he knows both of the gods well enough, by now, to asses that as a perfectly valid theory.

Common point between all these theories: there’s nothing to expect from Loki’s side. Not for a while, at least. Meaning Tony’s escape plans are back to square one: hope Pepper—and maybe Rhodey, and maybe Clint—figures out a way to help him.

In the meantime...oh, who’s he kidding? It’ll be a miracle if he doesn’t end up begging for a drink before the end of the day. If it’s even day time—honestly, he has no idea. There’s nothing he can do, nothing he can call—nothing but think back on easier times and hope things will go for the best.

In the midst of wishing for a drink he knows he can’t afford to ask for, Tony suddenly find himself wishing for Lorna.

She might have been a lie. There is, after all, a small possibility that Fury is in the right, and Tony is just imagining the conspiracy theory to escape a painful truth. If he believes that, however—if he does anything more drastic than pretending Lorna wasn’t Loki at all—there’s nothing left for him. If he assumes Lorna was a lie, his main support becomes nothing more than a shadow.

If he believes that, there’s really not much point in fighting anything at all anymore, really.

{ooo}

The strings around Fury’s wrists and ankles are hard to see—they’re almost translucent, only shining when the light hits them right. The blue silhouette though—the one that pulls the strings—is easy to see, and Tony flees from it with supernatural speed. The swiss knife lies in the grass when he rounds a corner, and Tony dives for it.

Ice water to the face never becomes less of a horrible way to wake up, and tony doesn’t hold back his spluttering, let alone his curses as he tries to shake some of it off his head. His brain bangs around the sides of his skull as a result, and Tony has to stop or get sick right here and now.

Nick Fury, sitting at the foot of the bed, doesn’t move during any of this. In fact, once tony gathers enough wits to properly look at him, he looks no different from the man who tried to recruit Iron Man in a donut hole. Behind him a stranger—short, stocky, Greek or Italian-looking, with a caducei hanging from his left ear and wiry muscles clearly visible under his long-sleeved shirt—is trying very hard to be unnoticeable. He’s kind of failing, but that might be because Tony is developing a new helping of healthy paranoia.

“We’re still without news from Thor,” Fury says before Tony can ask about the newcomer.

A wince, and then Tony reaches for the familiar mask of self-assured unconcern he’s used most of his life and says:

“Sorry, haven’t managed to check my texts lately.”

Fury’s irritated silence gives Tony an excuse to shift in place and land on his pillow, cutely aware of how Loki’s knife and his own chip dig into his flesh with painful angles. At least that way, there’s no risk anything is going to slip out of its hiding place at the worst possible moment.

“We need to locate him, Stark,” Fury explains after a long, searching look at Tony’s face, “if you’re compromised, Thor might be as well. We need to make sure he’s still safe.”

Tony barely holds his snort in at that, but something of it must show on his face, because Fury frowns. That should be worrying, maybe, but the last vestiges of Tony’s hangover must have vanished during his surprise nap because the only thing he can bring himself to care about at this point is the overwhelming urge to drink, and the absolute certitude that he can not ask for any alcohol right now.

He stays silent for a long moment—both Fury and his brand new shadow wait him out, but after a handful of seconds have gone by, Fury’s eyes dart to the tray of mashed potatoes by Tony’s bed. The untouched tray. And just like that, Tony remembers what Clint said.

There’s truth serum in the potatoes.

Had Tony known that, he’d have at least tried to fake eating some of it. It might have been enough to keep Fury off his case for a while. As it is, he can’t do much except hope his sudden realization didn’t show, and Fury will think not eating anything was an accident.

“Look,” Tony says after a while, mostly so he can appear a little more cooperative, “I have no idea where either of them is. Even if I did, I’m not sure it’d have helped.”

Fury doesn’t look at the potatoes again—too much of a professional for a second slip up. Usually, too much of a pro for the first one, but the more Tony thinks about this, the more convinced he is that Fury isn’t quite in his right mind. Nevertheless, the more he can keep to himself, the better. He’ll have time to figure things out later.

“Do you have any way to contact them?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Tony answers without missing a beat.

“And neither of them contacted you?”

“No.”

Both of Tony’s visitors frown at that, and he has to refrain from smirking at the sight. They were probably hoping for something more useful—or for Tony to sound a little more dejected, maybe? But Tony doesn’t have any useful answer to that question, even if he wanted to help them. Not that he wants to—he would love to be lying through his teeth right now.

Unfortunately, he’s pretty sure he’s been here at least three days by now, and Loki has yet to be heard from.

“For your sake,” Fury says, sounding irritatingly—and worryingly—sincere, “I hope we find them soon. I’m starting to think this might be the only way to get Loki out of your head.”

Tony tries not to gape as he watches the two men rise and walk out of the cell.

He’s been talking with Fury for a while now, long enough that he’s seen the man express a fairly varied range of emotions—irritation, exasperation, fatigue, anger, and the occasional bout of disbelief at Tony’s more childish behaviors. Up until now, concern has never been one of them.

It’s not just concern, either—there was an undertone of determination there, not unlike the way Steve sounds when he starts on yet another crazy mission to do The Right Thing no matter the cost. What the blatant slip in control means exactly is difficult to parse—it would probably require a more personal knowledge of Fury—but Tony is fairly sure it doesn’t herald anything good for him.

Swallowing around the lump in his throat, Tony lies back down on the bed, hands behind his head, and closes his eyes. He replays the conversation in his head over and over again, gives himself another dozen play-by-plays of his reasoning, tries even the silliest theory he can come up with, but none of it seems to make any kind of sense, even a strange one and, after what feels like a few hours of useless questioning, Tony decides to let go of his dignity.

I don’t know if it’s gonna work, but Loki if you could lend a hand here—

“Well,” Loki says in an openly exasperated tone, “it took you long enough.”

[terresdebrumestories]

Chapter 10/24: Breakdown

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU SERIES: SEADLA Verse, version 2.0 RATING: Mature WORDCOUNT: 4 626 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Bruce Banner, Steve Rogers, Tony’s therapist and the rest of the avengers in the background. GENRE: Plot twist. 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 things are revealed, and none of them are pleasant. Also, Tony may or may not make Steve cry, but it’s not like he cares.

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] [Chapter 8] [Chapter 9]

Tony stares at the therapist—is the guy even a real professional, or was he just acting?—until the world starts swimming, his ears buzzing with the same white noise that deafened him after his jeep blew up on an unnamed desert road. He watches the room swim in a strange kind of slow tango, arc reactor desperately trying to split his chest open even as he tries to make sense of Steve’s wide eyes and pale face. He fucked up—he fucked up and he’s screwed, and the thought of it is almost enough to pull him to his knees.

He reaches for Lorna’s—Loki’s, it’s Loki’s—knife in his pocket and clenches his fingers around the handle hard enough to hurt while he tries to breathe the storm out of his lung, the blankness out of his brain.

He hasn’t told anyone about Loki—not Pepper, who’s seen him through more shit than she should have had to, not Rhodey, who’s undoubtedly going to kill him for the omission, and with good reasons to boot. The only moment Tony even used the name—ha. He really should have guessed, shouldn’t he? Kebradalvin’s presence should have been a dead giveaway! Oh, how stupid can he get?

Months. Months of therapy, of spilling his guts out to a stranger because he thought it’d be safer than trust any of his friends with the mess of him and now—this? Well fucking done, Tony, way to prove you’re actually the idiot you thought you were.

“You said you weren’t keeping tabs on us anymore,” Bruce says from his seat at the very edge of the kitchen.

His voice is full of the same quiet challenge he’s used to coax more than one arrogant dick think of their following words with a lot of carefulness. On the side, Fury gives Bruce a wary side-eye, and Tony wants them both to shut up—to slip into silence and leave what’s left of his world alone. Hell, he’s just about ready to start praying right now—indulge the wobbliness of his knees and call for whoever happens to hear to come and get him out of this nightmare—but Fury steals the rug from under him when he says:

“We at S.H.I.E.L.D came to the conclusion that Iron Man’s safety required special monitoring.”

Tony manages to brace himself on the wall before he actually falls, but it’s a close call—and it doesn’t even really matter anyway. The room blinds him with its harsh lights, overexposed and burning at his eyes harder than the lamps thrown into his face in a darkened cave until he has to swallow against the sudden urge to vomit.

Four months—four months of his life—the thought seizes at his throat, his stomach, his chest, presses at him until he has to gasp around it, drowning in all the things he should never have said, never have confided, and he can’t make himself stop, can’t get air—

“Can’t breathe,” he gasps through sheer miracle, sliding halfway to the floor before Bruce springs out of his chair and stabilizes him, leaving Steve to try and open Tony’s collar.

Tony, meanwhile, can’t—won’t—look anywhere, at anything but Bruce—Bruce, and the way his eyes look like they’re trying to catch Tony and not let him go. Bruce, whose voice is steady and solid when he tells Tony to breath—come on, Tony, in through the nose, out through the mouth, we’ll get there.

It hurts—breathing hurts, looking hurts—but Tony wrestles himself back into some semblance of control, forces his lungs through one, two, three cycles of controlled breathing before he stops feeling like he’s about to have an out of body experience. The whole of him screams, like an exposed nerve rubbed raw, and a small part of his brain wonders if Bruce, who first used the metaphor, feels half that terrified when he hulks out.

If yes, tony is never asking the Big Guy to come out again.

“I have trouble believing you did this for Tony’s sake,” Bruce says after Tony calms down a little, the evenness of his tone keeping Tony anchored there.

Steve’s fingers hurt where they dig into his biceps. Clint and Natasha haven’t made a move either way.

“You don’t have to believe it,” Fury replies with a slight shrug.

Tony grips at Bruce’s shoulder as tight as he holds Loki’s knife, and wishes one or two Norse gods would crash through the ceiling right now. They don’t, though, and so he clings to the tremors of anger in Bruce’s voice when he summarizes:

“You lied to us, breached the doctor-patient contract of privacy—if your boy here is even a real doctor—and set Tony back months in terms of personal progress, and you’re trying to tell us it was all for his sake?”

“I’ll have you know I am—”

“If you’re not a fraud you’re a piece of shit,” Bruce cuts off with uncharacteristic profanity, “either way, you’re seriously starting to annoy me.”

Whatshisface the maybe-therapist shuts up with a squeak and Tony—oh, Tony could kiss Bruce right now, if he weren’t too busy trying to think straight without going into another panic attack. He’s not going to prison—or wherever S.H.I.E.L.D wants to take him, that’s certain. He’s seen the kind of cage they built for Bruce. He’s seen what they think of when faced with a problem—he’s not going down without a fight.

It’s a new though, the refusal to die, but there’s no time to examine it—Tony pulls it close instead, wraps it around him like armor while Bruce—skinny, puny little Bruce with the strength of a nuke beneath his skin—continues to stare Fury down, every line of his body rigidly refusing to give Tony up.

“I think we’ve all noticed Stark’s abnormal behavior,” Fury says, as if he hasn’t heard Bruce’s barely-veiled threat, “and considering he’s mentioned wanting to bone a guy higher than Erik Lehnsherr on the public enemies list—”

Tony gags while the others gasp, mostly because he can almost hear it again—the way he wished Loki weren’t such a complicated person and—no, stop. Shut up—focus. Focus, or give yourself time to get there.

“I was thinking of dating actually,” he manages through the tight lump in his throat, mind racing over possibilities, “just so we’re clear.”

Fury twitches at the touch of sarcasm—it’s good. Piss him off, he won’t be thinking quite so well, will he? Shit, Tony was so stupid though, so naïve—for fuck’s sake Tony, focus!

“Do you really think it matters?” Fury asks with a raised eyebrow, “Did you think we hadn’t noticed you dropping off the radar on the regular? And your behavior hasn’t been going better—

“It’s called depression and suicidal tendencies,” Tony counters, the familiar, thin veneer of sarcasm holding him up against the thought of Fury rattling off all the ways he’s still failing.

If Steve’s face is anything to go by, though, it’s already too late. He steps away from Tony and Bruce, eyes wide as saucers, and while Clint and Natasha aren’t moving any more than they have since the beginning, it’s still easy to guess their surprise in the glance they share.

Think, Tony. Either Fury’s genuinely mistaken—unlikely, considering his resources and the ample evidence that Loki on a mind-controlling spree is far from being that subtle—or he’s deliberately pretending for a reason. The first problem would be easy to solve—a couple of hours, at most.

If it’s the second one, Tony needs to get out or he’ll definitely be doomed.

“Look,” Fury start, looking as genuinely regretful as they come, “I didn’t want to come through this, but you’re not giving me a choice. We are taking your assets into custody.”

“The Iron Man is a private property,” Bruce says, the threat in his voice more evident, you can’t—”

“It’s a private weapon,” Steve counters, kind enough to wince when two unknown agents slip into the kitchen.

He says something else next, but Tony’s brain doesn’t bother tracking that, caught up on Fury’s words. We’re taking your assets into custody. Not the suits. Not the armor. The assets. Dummy. Butterfingers. You.

Jarvis.

Tony’s eyes widen as if in slow motion, and then he’s on his feet, running out of the kitchen as he shouts for Jarvis to put the tower on lockdown, Fury’s rage-filled voice roaring for the agents to catch him. Tony manages to slide one of the bulletproof doors back to the hallway, at least two or three guards slipping in after him—damn, he should have made this whole process faster.

Ten more steps, barrel past another doorway—only two guards and the horrifying sound of crushed limbs follow him into the living room. He has to slam the hidden door hidden next to the chimney into somebody’s face to delay them by a precious few seconds, and clatter down the stairs with a hurricane in his lungs.

He wishes Pepper were here—he’d make a joke about actual secret staircases and forget about the phantom weight of a car battery in his hands—but by the time he realizes she’s too far to reach he’s already in the workshop and screaming his core processor access code. Think, he tells himself as he shoves the hidden panel closed behind him and locks it just in time to keep attackers out, damage control, what would Pepper do?

S.H.I.E.L.D doesn’t get Jarvis—it can’t, not ever. Tony has seen the kind of things they did with only their best brains to work on it, and the thought of Jarvis’ decades of advance on any other technology in their hands sends chills down his spine. Tony has to keep him out of anyone’s reach, that much is clear—at least this way, even if he does something horrible, it’ll be on Tony’s head, and no one else. Come on, what would Pepper do?

Not get involved with Loki, for starters. But if she did—if she somehow took a hit to the head and got herself in that situation, with the same profound conviction that Jarvis cannot be allowed into foreign hands, well...it’s not like Tony hasn’t thought of it on his own. One step down, a couple more to go. Now, as Pepper keeps demonstrating, the key to a successful career is time management, right? Right. Let’s manage time, Tony.

“Jarvis,” Tony asks, fingers clenching and unclenching around Loki’s stupid knife that won’t hold its fucking promises, “how long until Fury’s goons get in there?”

“The two in the workshops are currently being kept away from the tools by the house units,” Jarvis replies with a little more trepidation to his voice than usual, “but one of their bullets is bound to hit home, eventually. Best case scenario, you have a little over ten minutes, sir.”

“Let’s assume we’re on worst case,” Tony pushes through gritted teeth.

“Two point fifty-seven minutes.”

Too short to try going around and grabbing a suit, even if it hadn’t been a last-ditch, ‘I don’t want to do this’ reach. Alright. Pepper’s tip to a successful life number two—prioritize. Breathing first—in, hold, out, hold, in, hold, out, hold, repeat until brain starts back. Think.

Plans. They have to go. No one but Tony could have made Jarvis, but any idiot can follow a plan. If S.H.I.E.L.D wants Jarvis, they’ll need the plans or buckle up for twenty years of full-time work. Hardly the takeover they’re going for.

“Okay,” Tony gasps, blinking moisture out of his eyes, “Jarvis, I need you to send a message to Pepper, if you can.”

“The emergency line is under attack,” Jarvis warns, “Transmission not guaranteed.”

“’Kay,” Tony croaks out, eyes closing before he can stop them.

Loki’s knife digs in his palm, between his fingers. His cheeks hurt, nose itching with saltwater dripping onto the tip. His lungs are only seconds from bursting, but he manages to nod when Jarvis announces he’s recording.

“Pepper, they’re wrong, I’m not compromised, I know I’m not, it’s—”

Tony forces his mouth shut when his voice wavers. Limited time. No babbling. Go.

“S.H.I.E.L.D wants Jarvis. Not sure why but I’m not letting them. I’m sorry—don’t leave me there!”

Something bangs outside Tony’s compartment—the metal is too thick for him to hear anything else, but he really hopes none of the bots is damaged beyond repair. There’s no time for a last-minute save, anyway.

God, he’s spent so many hours hunched over the little guys, poured so much of himself into their codes, their casings, their quirks and boo-boos, what’s he going to do now they’re—unavailable, he tells himself firmly. They’ll just be unavailable. For a while. They won’t even notice. They’re just—just—they won’t notice. They won’t hurt. Come on, Tony, you can do this.

“Sir,” Jarvis says, voice oddly gentle through the speakers, “you are running out of time.”

“I know,” Tony replies.

He chokes on the words a little, bumps his forehead against the walls to clear his thoughts—it works and doesn’t at the same time—and manages to produce a pitiful gargle:

“I’ll miss you, Jarvis.”

“Initiating Project Napoleon,” a horrendous excuse for a vocal simulator intones in a droning voice, “execution in fifty nine seconds, fifty-eight, fifty seven—”

A safe box opens next to Tony’s hand, a memory card barely larger than a thumbnail rattling into it for a mere second before Tony catches it and shoves his pants down his legs—

“—thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six—”

—shoves the chip and its plastic up his anus, wincing when the angles catch at the sensitive skin there and why didn’t he—why did he have to—oh, fuck, Jarvis—

“—thirty four, thirty-three, thirty-two—”

—yanks the whole thing back up, holds in a scream as the first suit explodes overhead—

“—sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten—”

—zips himself up, vaguely hopes he’ll die—

“—nine, eight, seven, six, five, four—”

—closes his eyes, breathes out—

“—three, two, one.”

Acrid smoke burns at his lung with the hiss of an air-tight door opening.

Alarms howl to life.

He falls.

{ooo}

“I’m not mind-controlled,” Tony repeats for the thousandth time, forehead braced against the glass wall of his cell, “Fury’s lying.”

On the other side, Steve looks at him with infinite sadness, the kind that says he wishes he could believe the lovely lie he’s being offered but will face the truth for a friend’s sake. The irony is not lost on Tony, and he sorts of wants to smash the expression off with a crowbar.

“He’s made an enemy to the Avengers when he tried to take your suits,” Steve points out, “and he knows it.”

“And yet you’re still with him,” Tony replies, too tired to put much venom into it.

“It’s too stupid a move to be a conspiracy, Tony,” Steve insists, infuriatingly gentle though it all.

Tony hasn’t slept or sat down since he woke up here about five hours ago, which he figures explains why he can’t even bring himself to shake his head. He doesn’t even know if this is a Steve thing or a forties thing, clinging to the possibility of brain washing, but it hardly matters. He doesn’t have any way to prove this—not when they’re all working under the assumption that he’ll try and lie his way out of this mess.

They’ve been around, the lot of them. Fury, to inform him Clint got freed by a solid knock to the head, but S.H.I.E.L.D is willing to try softer treatments. Clint and Natasha snuck in—or so their poses seemed to say—to make sure his cell was as nice as a bare, sheets-free bed and the chrome equivalent of a hole in the ground can be...and Bruce, telling him the blood samples he’d taken of all of them for study purposes have gone missing.

And Steve, presumably to assess the damage by himself, like he always does.

Too bad he’s inflicting most of it at the moment.

“I’m not mind-controlled,” Tony repeats after a long silence,idly wishing he had bars to rest his arms on, “I’ve been hanging out with Loki for four months. If he really were controlling me it’d be one hell of a long-term game.”

A shit strategy, too. What do they all think, that Tony was gonna join the dark side out of pity? Please. Loki probably knows better than try that—should know better, in any case. Tony would tell Fury as much, really, if it didn’t somehow feel like betraying someone—Loki or himself, that’s still a mystery, but betrayal is betrayal, regardless.

Besides, what could he say? ‘It’s not mind-control if he spills his git as much as I do’? Best case scenario, someone would try to use that as a way to get more intel and, well. Friend. Or at least, from where Tony’s standing there’s friendship.

Loki’s radio silence doesn’t exactly say good things about where Tony stands on his priority list.

“Maybe he’s already got what he wanted,” Steve replies, “and he’s keeping you on a leash because you’re a valuable asset.”

“I didn’t take the samples,” Tony sighs, weary of that non-conversation already.

Bruce said the safe was broken into, though the means are still to be determined. If anything, Tony likes to think he’d be smarter about covering his tracks, even under mind control. Besides, from what he’s seen of Loki, he doesn’t seem the type to hold onto useless things unless they’ve got some form of sentimental value, but well. It’s not like saying that would make his situation any better. Worst case scenario, people are going to assume he’s Loki’s accomplice, anyway.

“Honestly, the guy managed to play Thor’s all-seeing bodyguard. Wouldn’t he be a little more subtle about theft?”

Not that Loki has a big history of subtlety in this world, but still. There’s showy, and then there’s stupid.

“Tony,” Steve sighs, disgustingly weary for someone who isn’t in a cell, “are you trying to imply somebody is using you to frame Loki?”

It’s ridiculous, Tony knows—that’s the only thing keeping him from saying yes. Still, he’s been thinking and over-thinking this thing through for the past five hours, and everything else makes even less sense. He can’t be the prime target of this stint—not when S.H.I.E.L.D as personified by Fury recovered so well from Jarvis’ loss. Not when everyone is still firmly blaming Loki for this debacle...not with the battery of tests, some of which he’s imagined himself, looking for magic he’s been subjected to. So, given that he isn’t dead or being taunted with the news coverage that his fall would generate, Tony is pretty sure he’s not the main objective.

The question is, who would frame Loki, and why?

Tony as a proxy sort of makes sense—he’s big, with enough resources to be a threat if compromised—but Loki already tried to conquer the planet, it’s hard to make himself more undesirable than that. Whoever is behind this, whether it’s Fury—impossible to dismiss, although something about the idea feels off—or someone else entirely, they were clearly hoping for Jarvis as a neat bonus prize. They failed, thanks to Tony’s Afghanistan-born paranoia, but that doesn’t change anything to it.

None of that solves the question of why though, and Steve seems to take Tony’s silence as a confession of guilt because he sighs and says:

“See? Even you can’t come up with a reasonable reason for us to trust you.”

“I kind of thought trust came with the ‘friends’ territory,” Tony hisses before he goes for the belt: “either I got some funny idea about us being friend or that guy Bucky wasn’t the man I thought he was.”

“Bucky didn’t try to kill himself!” Steve roars, angry snarl stopping inches away from the glass, “he didn’t suddenly decide his friends couldn’t be trusted with anything and start giving them the slip whenever he couldn’t be arsed to deal with his problems! And he certainly didn’t go from hating the enemy’s gut to pretending they were good guys in four months’ time!”

“I’m not saying he’s a good guy, I’m saying he’s not doing anything to me right now!” Tony protests, voice rising dangerously close to a yell.

Don’t do anything stupid, he tells himself, fingers clenching into fists against the glass, don’t go there.

“Right,” Steve says, voice tight and body taut, “because you’d know that.”

“I’d at least hope you guys could see I’m still using my brain!”

“Are you?”

Steve’s gaze pointedly goes to Tony’s wrist, and Tony surprises himself when he pounds on the glass hard enough to feel something give under the skin. Steve gives him a shocked puppy look, like he’d only been saying the most reasonable thing, like there’s no reason for fury to tear at Tony’s temples—his ribs, his palms—until the world drowns into a sea of red.

“Oh, of course,” Tony hisses, barely more than a breath between the two of them, “of course you’d think I’m stupid for it—”

“I didn’t say—”

“Yes you did!” Tony cuts off, bile burning at his throat like poison, “Stupid Tony Stark, with his money and his name and his brain who builds things no one else could dream of and still finds ways to try and die! Useless Tony Stark, who could do so much for the world and gets drunk and parties instead—don’t you think I’ve heard it all by now? Don’t you think I know that?”

“Tony, I wasn’t—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Rogers!”

Steve’s face falls, and Tony should stop, should be ashamed and hate himself—will be ashamed and hate himself soon enough—but for now he’s hurting as much as he’s ever hurt, and he’s taken it in silence long enough damnit! He’s taken it all in—the punches, the disdain, the reproaches, and fuck they’ve hurt, but to have them fall from Captain America’s mouth? From the same guy he’s admired and hated since he was old enough to remember?

Well, there had to be a last straw at some point.

“I’m a screwed up, useless piece of shit of a failure, don’t you see that? We’re not all like you—we can’t all be America’s golden boy, the poster child for everything good and righteous on this earth—some of us are just useless messes, that’s how it is! You want a lie? You want a facade? Try the guy you thought I was before this whole debacle! God, Rogers, why do you think I wanted to die?”

“Tony, you didn’t really—”

“Oh yes I did!” Tony hisses, voice dropping almost to a whisper, a thin sliver of poison he can almost feel drifting out of his body and into Steve’s ears, “believe me, I wanted to—haven’t you heard the docs? Five minutes later and I was done for, and that was the goal. But of course,” Tony continues in a more regular volume, “you don’t see that. You don’t believe that. How could you, you perfect, self-righteous ass? You don’t have to wake up every morning wondering if anybody would ever miss you, do you? I bet you’ve never even doubted you had anything to offer the world, have you? You have no idea what it feels like to be me.”

“Tony,” Steve tries again, eyes shining as his face crumbles, “I didn’t mean to—”

“You know I hate you, right?” Tony asks, voice rising with every word, “I tried to hide it—I tried to be a good teammate, a good friend, even, ha! Like I’d ever be worth that! But I hate you, Rogers. I’ve spent my entire life listening to the world rant about how perfect, how chivalrous, how painfully golden you were—all my life. Gods, the hours Howard spent looking for you, talking about you—the house was a fucking museum, your name never to be spoken in vain, and I spent so much time trying to beat you, trying to be better than you—I should have known it was a lost fight from the start! How dumb can I get, right? And the worst part is—the worst part is you—you’re—you! You don’t even have the decency to just be a random schmuck with lab-grown muscles, no! You have to go an live up to the legend! Smile at kittens, never cries, always right mister Rogers, prancing around like a gift from God while the rest of us just—just—”

Tony turns away from Steve with a strangled cry of anger and frustration, hands flailing aimlessly at his side. He wants to break something—smash a vase, rip sheets apart, kick the toilets until he dents the metal, scream into a pillow all at the same time but somehow, all of it seems so—so—stupid, and over dramatic, and Tony just—just—

“Tony, no!” Steve yells when Tony hits his forehead with the butt of his hand for the first time, “stop! Don’t do that!”

Tony doesn’t stop, hitting at his forehead again and again until a piercing headache settles in his skull for the long haul. There’s just—there’s too much. It’s all too much. The pain, the anger, the hatred, the frustration, and now Steve—what the fuck is Tony supposed to do with this? Be patient? Be understanding? Be kind? When was the world ever kind to him?

Yeah, sure, they’re the accident of birth—there’s the money, and the girls—but there’s the loneliness and despair too, there’s the betrayals and the attempted murders, and there’s the gnawing pit of emptiness inside, where he knows even Pepper and Rhodey can’t reach because they’re trying—bless their souls, they’ve been trying so hard—but Tony is just far too fucked up for it to work! And really how is any of it fair? Is that what he gets for being born filthy rich? Is that it? Some kind of cosmic punishment saying he can have one but not the other, that if he’s going to go through life not knowing what it’s like to worry about money he’s damned well gonna know what it’s like to watch everyone he loves leave though his own faults?

“Please, Tony,” Steve tries again when Tony’s hands reach for his face and settle there, as if he could make the world disappear just by not seeing it, “you don’t have to do that. This isn’t—”

“Get out,” Tony tells him, voice muffled by his fingers.

“Tony, I’m trying to—”

“Just get out. Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you.”

There’s a quiet gasp and a shuffle of feet, like Steve is about to protest again, but Tony doesn’t have it in him to ask again. He wipes his face instead, more surprised than he should be to find it wet, and makes his way over to the bed.

His brain feels like it’s banging at the edges of his skull when he faceplants into the mattress, the pain sharp and pointed as a knife, but he doesn’t care. He’ll hate his words—hate himself for them—soon enough, maybe. If he’s good enough a man for that. For now, the whole thing feels mostly like he’s drawn all the pus from a wound—not lighter exactly, not better by a long shot, but still feeling like it’s a first step of healing.

Steve leaves.

[terresdebrume]

Guess who just queued chapter 10 of the SEADLA rewrite?

It me! Which means I can now go back to my (numerous) other WIPs, aka (more or less in that order of priority: - The immortal cup (chapter 2 scheduled for the end of the month) - Zombie War Galactica, the sequel to my BSG/TWD fic (scheduled for July 30th) - ATLA!Verse Baze and Chirrut fic, ft. the Gaang. (Technically the newest project but also my current obsession) - Teeth of the Desert #4, in which Luke gets rescued by a Tusken tribe and asks them to join him in kicking some master ass - Times Between Us #5, in which Shaka and Aphrodite have a Conversation - Who you said you were, a rewrite/remix of my SPN fic 'if it's not Happy, at least it's not sad either' that's intended to cover season 1-5 of the show - Seasons of your life, a 2nd person narrative that's been waiting for its last two chapters for YEARS - The Swayze Protocole, the one with mutant!Loki and Hologram!Tony that's going to need some kind of outline before I can start scheduling updates (most lilely after SEADLA ends next year) - It's all coming back to me, the Thor-centric, super slow progressing fic that was supposed to end with centuries-in-the-future Thorki but will now just be a brothers fic, with some frostiron in the background. - pretending I don't have a dozen more wips waiting to be completed on ly hard drive - taking the 'send me prompts' thing off the writing blog (if I haven't already) because who are we kidding here I'm never gonna habe time for prompts ever again xD

[terresdebrumestories]

Chapter 9/24: Shatter

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU SERIES: SEADLA Verse, version 2.0 RATING: Mature WORDCOUNT: 3 822 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Tony Stark, Loki, Anansi, Coyote, Nick Fury, Tony’s therapist and the rest of the avengers in the background. GENRE: Breaking points. 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 Tony should probably have watched his mouth, but then it would only have delayed the unavoidable.

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] [Chapter 8]

“I’m not sure what to do about my friend,” Tony admits almost before he sits down for his first session after the Big Bang.

 It’s a bit of a liberation to say it—allows him to release tension he’s been trying hard not to think about for the past week.

The thing is, this thing with Lorna—it’s starting to feel very date-like. Tony tried to think about it from another angle, told himself this is a normal friendly thing to do—going on outings, giving each other support and weird gifts and spending who knows how much energy in magic just so you can see the beginning of life together. But, well. It didn’t work.

And the thing is, even if Tony manages to get his own brain under control—even if he’s just being confused over nothing and he really isn’t interested in being anything more than friends with Lorna, who’s to say she feels the same? It’s not that Tony really think he’s irresistible, but Lorna is a complicated person and she’s proven she could go for the most unexpected moves already, what if, for some reason, she starts feeling different about Tony?

 “In what way?” Maybe-Kevin asks, and Tony groans.

 Before he went to therapy—before he thought he’d ever need it, before he really believed in it—if you’d asked him how it worked, he’d have expected the patient to be this pathetic, permanent mess always on the verge of collapsing in tears. He’s learned better since then—although he’d be lying if he said he’s happy about the knowledge—and while the emotional mess part of things is familiar to him by now, it’s not exactly an accurate reflection of his existence.

When he started thinking about this—when Pepper put her foot down and forced him to get some kind of help—he sort of expected whoever would be in charge of his case, he more or less would be attending a class. He’d sit in an impersonal office and be expected to be quiet while some schmuck told him how to deal with his life, his problems, his emotions.

He loathed the idea, of course.

 As it turns out, though, the actual practice of therapy is both a lot less frustrating and a lot more so. He’s not expected to sit down and let people do what needs to be done here—it’s a relief, really. After years and years of following Stain’s instructions only to discover the guy wanted him dead in the end, after years of waiting for Pepper’s instructions to decide on anything—whether he followed them or not—it’s nice to have a space where the expectations he has to meet are kept to a minimum.

On the other hand, now he’s got to figure things out for himself, without guideline or instruction manual and, much like inventing a whole new world of robotics or creating a new chemical element, it’s grueling, hard, occasionally mind-numbingly dull work. Who knew being your own person—knowing what you want, what you need, what you’re going to do, and whether and how these three things overlaps—took so much effort?

 “I...kind of wanted to kiss them last week.”

 Only for a moment, a simple impulse easily contained to that one second between the moment Tony said goodbye and the moment Lorna turned away and left in a flash of green light. It was still there, though, and Tony hasn’t been able to think of anything else for most of the week.

 “Okay,” maybe-Gavin says with a nod that doesn’t completely conceal his surprise, “and how do you feel about that?”

 In all honesty, Tony was kind of hoping he’d get his answer here—he can probably figure things out himself, but it would be nice, sometimes, not to have to do so much soul-searching to get it. It’s probably what normal feels like. ‘Normal’, for better or for worse, has never really been him, though, so Tony sighs and tries to sort his own thoughts out before they tumble out of him.

The thing is, he does better with clear lines. His relationship to Pepper was—is—a constant stream of what-are-we-s, where do we stand with each other, where do we want to go, what do we want to do. Every day came with its lot of surprises and Tony liked it that way—loathes the idea of routine with a fiery passion—but underneath it all, the whims and caprices and fights and abrupt changes, there was always this certitude that Pepper was there for Tony and would continue to be there, just like he’s firmly decided to always be there for her, sloppy as the results may be.

 Lorna isn’t even Lorna all the time. She’s a woman and then a man and she could probably be someone in between if she wanted. She’s there for Tony, but sometimes she isn’t and she doesn’t sound concerned about it—she gets him and she’s helping him through one of the roughest patches of his life in a way no one else manages despite their best effort, but when Tony talks about the other things he does—his projects for Stark Enterprise, the latest progresses in robotics, the occasional reports on charity work—Lorna’s interest turns from earnest to polite, like she couldn’t be less concerned about the work of Tony’s life.

There’s no labels with Lorna, and that’s liberating—that means Tony doesn’t have to conform to the expectations that come with them—but then there’s also no certitude with her, and that is surprisingly terrifying.

 “I don’t know,” Tony says at last, figuring the answer to his therapist’s question as he talks, “I—we haven’t really defined our relationship at all. I don’t even know if they think we’re friends or...I don’t know. And I mean, it’s great that we’re...flexible, I suppose? But it also means I don’t know where the limits are. I don’t know if I’d be jeopardizing something if I indulged in the impulse or—or even just talked about it.”

 He thinks there’s a friendship to lose there. Hopes there is. But there’s no telling, really, and Tony wishes—not for the first time—people could be as simple as machines.

Machines—robots, even Jarvis—they don’t ask for more than you can give. They don’t give you the disappointed puppy face Tony has seen on Steve far too many times, don’t sigh in despair and worry like Rhodey has from the very beginning of his relationship with Tony, and they certainly don’t splutter the way Pepper does when she’s too flabbergasted for words.

(Machines have never pushed Tony away without looking at him, sighing about being busy and for the butler to remove the nuisance in the same breath.)

 “So,” maybe-Rodin starts, carefully filling the silence that follows Tony’s words, “am I correct in understanding that you’re frightened at the idea of losing that friend, should you try to redefine your relationship?”

“Yeah,” Tony mumbles, studiously avoiding the therapist’s eyes, “something like that. I just don’t want to mess up.”

 Tony has a grand total of seven friends—four he created himself, two of the most long-sufferingly loyal people on earth, one who’s been a central point of Tony’s daddy issues since long before they met, and another who mostly started talking to him because Tony reminded him of his brother.

Plus, of course, said brother—sister, sibling, whichever Tony is supposed to use—who is a great support but may or may not be a friend in the end.

Excepting the four non-biological ones, they’ve all gotten more trouble than anything else out of their acquaintance with Tony—it’s a miracle they haven’t left already, one he’s keenly aware of. What happens if Tony messes things up with Lorna, babbles about it to the wrong person—or one too many times, or in the wrong way—and throws things in jeopardy there as well?

 “I just wish Loki wasn’t such a complicated person,” Tony sighs, “or that I was better at dealing with it, I don’t know.”

 Truth be told, it’d be nice if Tony were a nicer, worthier person to be acquainted with—he wouldn’t be worried about Pepper deciding this...thing...with Loki is the final straw, or about Thor refusing to talk to him over some kind of backward standard he may or may not have. If he were a better person, he wouldn’t have to be worried about ending up alone again, stranded in his life the way he was at MIT, except this time there would be no Rhodey to take pity on him and rescue him from his own foolishness—no Pepper, no Thor, not even Fury to pick him up and help him sort through his own mess.

Then again, if he were a better person, maybe Tony wouldn’t have to deal with that kind of problems to begin with—would deal with his own mess instead of imposing them on his friends. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough to keep them around, but at least he wouldn’t be gambling with his life—his place with the Avengers, his place in society at large, everything he’s ever created—for someone as volatile as Loki.

 “Shit,” he admits, the word ringing loud after the too-long silence, “I don’t know what to do about this.”

“Well, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know!” Tony repeats, because that’s not for lack of trying to think about this rationally. “I don’t want people to be mad at me—not that friend, not my other friends—and I don’t want to ruin anything and I just—I don’t know. I have no fucking clue what I want to do. I just want things to be simple.”

“That’s understandable,” maybe-Bradin replies with a tense little smile, shoulders oddly stiff for a phrase he’s probably heard ten thousands of times before, “but I’m sure I’m not teaching you anything when I say that interpersonal relationships are never simple.”

“I’d settle for not disappointing anyone,” Tony mutters as he buries his face in his hands.

“Alright. Who is it you think you may disappoint?”

 Well, that’s the million dollars question, isn’t it?

It could be Howard—both experience and therapy have proven Tony isn’t quite done trying to organize his life according to his father’s wishes—or supposed wishes—though he does the opposite of that as often as he respects his father’s legacy, if not more so. It got quite apparent in his relationship with Pepper, too. Tony loved her—still does, even—of course. He’s an ass, but he’s not that far gone, thank heaven.

Dating her, though, would have been the perfect mix of satisfying his father—she’s smart, charming, charismatic, sensible—and making him despair—she is, after all, from a lower class family. No, it wasn’t Tony’s primary motivation which, let’s not lie, was a relief to confirm a few sessions back, but that doesn’t mean he never thought about it—or hated himself for thinking about it—even while they were dating.

 That’s not what’s happening with Lorna, though, at least Tony doesn’t think so. With Pepper, there was always a dimension of need in their relationship, on his side more than hers. Again, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her, but it does mean Tony made decisions he probably shouldn’t have made—decisions that were definitely not fair to her.

With Lorna, for better or for worse, Howard Stark doesn’t compute—might as well not have existed at all, really. Going out with her, whether their outings are dates or not, or if they’re something in between, is actually more of a pickle in relation to the other Avengers—what would they think, after all, if they learned Tony has been spending time with their most recurring foe? They wouldn’t understand—would they even try to understand what this means to him? He’s not sure, and quite frankly he doesn’t want to risk it.

 Part of him—a tiny, shivering part of him that doesn’t quite dare push the words out of his mouth—wonders, though, if maybe this time he’s mostly afraid of to disappoint himself.

 {ooo}

 He comes out of the consultation without a clear idea—or even a fuzzy one—of how he wants to handle the Lorna situation, but he does feel lighter and half-resolved to just wait and see.

He pushes his concerns at the back of his mind—not that different from what he does in ordinary situations,although this time he has to make a conscious effort for it instead of just assuming fate, in the form of Pepper and (or) Rhodey will take care of it.

 Of course, the downside is if—when?—he fails, he’ll have no choice but to shoulder the blame for it but, he supposes, you can’t have everything.

 He finds Lorna waiting for him on the sidewalk, messy braids tumbling over a small, three-quarters vest in gold cotton and a shiny green dress that sways in the gentle breeze. Tony’s lips curl into a smile when he notices a black feather hanging from her hair, and he compliments her for it before he asks:

 “What are we doing today?”

“Culinary experience,” Lorna replies, the tip of her hair brushing past her shoulder blades when she turns around without waiting to see if Tony follows.

 He doesn’t particularly mind, and simply smiles when they teleport into a cramped space between two white stone walls blackened by time. Lorna must have messed with some kind of timeline, too, because it’s already dusk when they step out into a larget street and all but stumble on the Eiffel Tower, scintillating with white lights.

 “Is today a holiday?” Tony asks, but Lorna shakes her head.

“It’s an hourly thing. I can’t always take you to the most spectacular times.”

 Tony thinks of absolute silence and light coursing through his body and nods, even as he follows Lorna toward the tower. They bypass a host of tourists milling around the neatly-trimmed grass, trees planted in a straight line on either sides, and fall in line for the elvators.

It’s a pity, really, that today isn’t a holiday—Tony liked the idea, for one, and besides he feels like doing something festive with Lorna just now. He’s not sure what, or why, exactly—just that he’s in a good mood and a little giddy and, well. He might as well enjoy it.

 Together, they wait their turn before they can climb up to the second floor and the restaurant there, called La Tour D’Argent. It’s posh, with an old-money feeling that Tony doesn’t see all that often, used as he is to the newest, shiniest establishments he can find. The view, perched above the Seine and the city lights coming to life, is nice though, and Tony is pleased when Lorna steers him to a table by the window.

Two men are already seated. One, clearly of Native American descent, gives a wolfish smile to the waitress, ocher skin stretching to bare sharp white teeth and a hint of gum as he readjusts the a leather vest on the back of his chair, hair as black as his eyes carefully braided at the back of his neck. Across him, cheekbones just as high but skin the darkest shade of black Tony has ever seen, the other man stretches in a blood-red suit, golden-red eyes shining under the scarification marks standing above his eyebrows. His hair, short cropped, curls tight above his skull, and when he smiles it looks almost too wide for his face.

Tony looks at the men as they bicker, apparently busy comparing a heavy silver ring and what looks like a fang on a leather cord, as if the two pieces of jewelry were even truly comparable.

 Tony frowns as he and Lorna approach their table, something about the way red suit’s fingers move, a little too shaky—a little too fast—tickling at the edge of his brain, until the long-haired man turns his wolfish grin to him.

 “Ah,” he says with a look of intense satisfaction, “if this isn’t my favorite atheist in the world!”

“Oh,” Tony realizes, sharp and a little embarrassed at the lateness, “Coyote? Anansi?”

“In the flesh,” Anansi says as he takes a cocktail from their waitress, “you don’t look very different from what I remember.”

 Tony frowns at Anansi’s brief hesitation, until it occurs to him that, while they first met two weeks ago as far as he’s concerned, both gods probably took the long way back—or forward?—to the here and know. If anything, he should probably be flattered to be remembered for that long, even if he can’t help but wonder if there was anything beside his atheism that secured his spot in the others’ memories.

He doesn’t let himself dwell on the question too much—doesn’t want to open the can of worm wriggling under the desire to know what the two gods think of him—and tries to keep his expression pleasantly neutral as he sits down. At least now he knows tonight is definitely not a date, and can act accordingly. It’s easier, at least.

 “Neither do you,” Lorna replies when Tony is a little too long to answer, “but then we didn’t exactly come here to compare wrinkles, did we?”

 “Of course not,” Anansi agrees, “but it’s fun to tease.”

 Lorna smiles, something dagger-sharp and flashing like a jewel, and Tony tries very hard not to think of the stories he heard of Norse Gods drinking mead from human skulls.

 {ooo}

 “We needed the faith that came with it,” Lorna finishes with a shrug, “that doesn’t mean we always enjoyed it.”

 Somehow, despite Tony’s best effort to pretend there’s nothing odd about his current company—or nothing odder than usual, at least—the conversation derived from where the four of them traveled to when, and then it somehow took a dive for the frankly theological, leading tony to learn more about human sacrifices  than he ever thought he’d know.

 “Are you kidding me?” He asks, incredulous, “You’ve got the power to create entire worlds and destroy them in the blink of an eye, and you’re trying to tell me you couldn’t refuse human sacrifices?”

“And who,” Coyote asks with an edge to his voice, “do you think created us?”

 They’ve left the restaurant by now, wandering the city streets without aim, occasionally pausing to look at an interesting building or a fountain...or, in this case, for Tony to stare at Coyote like he’s just grown a second head.

 “Who did what now?”

“Create us,” Anansi repeats with a loose shrug, posture far too relaxed for the bombshell he just released.

“I...I have no idea,” Tony admits.

 He has, he realizes, just sort of assumed the Gods appeared one day, fully formed and potent. Who was there to create them if they created the world, after all?

 “Humans did,” Lorna says.

 Something brief and tight-looking flickers across Coyote and Anansi’s faces, like revealing a secret one is slightly embarrassed by...or afraid of, maybe.

 “Human faith created us,” Lorna continues, “it shaped us. The stronger the faith, the harder it is to resist its pull—to defy its expectations. We were created in your image—we feel things the same way humans do, but at the same time—well. We do have to conform to what you are expecting to see.”

“That means,” Anansi continues when Tony fails to come up with a properly understanding expression, “that if the majority of our followers think we gain power from human sacrifices, we can’t just decide to get it from smoked pepperonis instead.”

“Oh.”

 There isn’t much more to say—not much more to express the surprise and disbelief—in response to that, and Tony is about to leave things at that when he remembers a conversation not so long ago—a story of Asgard, and how it used to be.

 “That’s what you meant when you talked about taking your freedom, right? You meant when people stopped believing in you.”

“Yeah,” Coyote agrees with a painful-sounding yawn, “now we can live our lies more or less as we want, so long as you remember us. If you forgot we’d be toast, but in the meantime, well. We can change things.”

 Tony watches Lorna’s face shift through sadness, fear, relief and a warm sort of determination as Coyote speaks, eyes rimmed with a thin line of tears.

He hasn’t studied any text about Thor or any other Asgard resident—didn’t have any interest for it before, and figured he’d get the intel from the source after he met Thor. As it is, he’s got no idea what’s in store for them—how much of what he heard is in keeping with sacred texts and how much is brand new, but it doesn’t really matter.

He knows what it’s like to feel like your entire life has been scripted out for you.

On instinct, Tony loops an arm around Lorna’s shoulder and pulls her closer to him, Coyote and Anansi chuckling when it only serves to highlight their height difference in a way that, Tony can admit, probably wouldn’t look very flattering for him on a magazine cover. It’s a good thing that’s not his main concern right now.

 He lets Lorna bend to rest her head on his shoulder, presses her closer to him, and is surprised to feel Coyote and Anansi join the improvised hug pile after a few seconds. The whole thing is a little too warm for the weather and stains his armpits with sweat, but if this is the price to pay for that kind of comfort, well.

Surprised as he is, he’s still ready to pay it.

 {ooo}

 Tony is practically singing when he reaches the tower—hums through his elevator ride and all but bursts into the room as soon as the doors open to let him out. Even Thor’s absence—after he left with the shortest note about family matters on Tuesday—doesn’t bother him, that’s how good his mood is. He whistles his way through the corridors, half-ready to dance in celebration of whoever knows what, until he steps in the kitchen.

 The whole team—minus Thor—has gathered there with somber faces and solemnly squared shoulders. That, in itself, would be enough to set Tony on edge—is more than enough to raise the hair at the back of his neck—and Fury’s presence stabs at his nerves like a chainsaw on metal.

His stomach doesn’t entirely drop until he realizes Bradin-Kevin-Gavin is all but hiding in the corner, bouncing on the balls of his feet with jittery movements. That’s when panic settles in.

 “So,” Fury says, arms crossed over his chest, “I hear you have a thing going with Loki.”

[terresdebrumestories]

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]

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.”

[terresdebrumestories]

New Arrival

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s Cinematic Universe SERIES: SEADLA Verse (5/11) RATING: General Audiences  WORDCOUNT: 134 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Hel, Phil Coulson GENRE: New Place TRIGGER WARNING(S): - SUMMARY: Winter used to be the busy season. DEDICATION(S): - NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in February 2013. Spoilers for SEADLA.

✗ THE FIC

Winter used to be the busy season. Back before the Three-Faced Bastard appeared, Winter was her busiest season, people coming in for all sort of reasons: famine, frostbite, avalanches, fallen in frozen ponds, eaten by bears -the small ones, especially- lost in a snowstorm… they used to see all kind of men, women and children come in and, during the harshest years, Hades would send some of his minons over to help with the influx, in return for some extra hands during summer, to help with his busy months. Now, winter or summer makes no difference: almost nobody believes in them anymore, and the kingdoms of the dead can only ever welcome those who believe in them. Well, Hel remembers when the latest arrival is announced, believers, and direct kills. Phil Coulson almost smiles.

[terresdebrumestories]

Sad people smell of salt

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU  SERIES: SEADLA Verse (11/11) RATING: General Audiences WORDCOUNT: 838 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Fenrir, Peter Parker GENRE: Hurt/Comfort... of sorts. TRIGGER WARNING(S): - SUMMARY: Outside is the place that makes Father cry. DEDICATION(S): - NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in February 2013.

✗ THE FIC

He's napping in front of Tony’s fireplace with his cuddly polar bear toy and his favorite pacifier, listening to the sound of Tony working in his workshop a few floors down, when the young spider warrior strides into the room with his red and blue costume, face covered as usual. Fenrir doesn’t move --he learned a long time ago that if people don’t want to notice him, they won’t, no matter what he does. The men who guarded his prison never did.

The spider-man turns though, and when his head tilts to the side it makes him look like he is trying to fold his neck in two. “What are you doing there alone bud?” he asks. “I thought your Dad was supposed to take you guys outside?” Fenrir gives his pacifier a nervous suck, the plastic of it breaking between his teeth before closing again as fast as Father’s magic can make it. Fenrir is still wary about strangers, especially those whose face he can’t recognize. And Fenrir doesn’t like covered eyes either. They remind him of someone he sees in his dream sometimes, a scary man with a black square over his right eye. Fenrir chews on his pacifier again and curls up on himself, his bear tucked safely under his nose. (It still smells of Mommy Sigyn and Father and Hel and Sleipnir, and even a bit of Jorm, too, mingled with the twins’ smells over the fainter, older stench of polar bear and grease under the skin. It tingles against Fenrir’s face in a way that would make him close his eyes if he were alone. In the lab, Tony is hammering something down.) “Cat got your tongue?” The spider-man asks, walking closer. Fenrir is on his feet and three steps back before the human boy can do anything about it, heart beating hard and fast in his chest --he does not like masked men, does not like strangers, does not like the smell of warmth and stone and metal he brings with him from outside. Father always used to smell of that, and salt too. He always smelled of salt when he came to see Fenrir, and he said it was the ocean, but Fenrir knows he lied because the ocean doesn’t smell of salt like that, only sad people do. “Oh. You’re a shy one?” The other says. “I didn’t think a kid with a dad like yours could be shy.” The fireplace is warm behind Fenrir’s back but he feels cold inside, and his tummy aches like it always does when people are about to say something bad. People always say something bad about Father. They don’t like him very much. When father disappeared they said he was a traitor and a bastard and a liar --Fenrir isn’t sure what traitor or bastard mean, but liar he knows because Father often says he is a liar. He says you’re allowed to lie sometimes, because sometimes it helps and it protects you -he always put his hands on his thighs when he says that- but he also says you musn’t lie about important things. By the time Father came back, Fenrir almost believed the guards, almost thought Father had left him and didn’t care.  (He explained why he left though, and Fenrir believes him, and still loves him.) “I mean, from what I’ve seen, he doesn’t seem to be a shy guy.” The spider-man who reeks of outside takes a step forward and this time Fenrir growls, hackles rising on the back of his neck, almost the same as they do when he’s a wolf -Fenrir likes it better when he’s a wolf. Then he’s big and scary and nobody picks on him. The human boy tilts his head again, the other side this time, and says something Fenrir doesn’t really hear, but he’s sure it’s something mean. So when the human takes something on his costume and bends his head, Fenrir bolts and run to the stairs, then all the way to the floor he shares with Father and into his room. It’s filled with flowers, pebbles and pieces of wood, starfishes and bird feathers, and even a dreamcatcher that uncle Coyote gifted him after he came to Midgard. Behind him, the door is locked, and no smell of the outside comes in. Fenrir goes to his bed where father left his nightshirt in case comfort was needed, and he wraps himself into the faded fabric, warm sunlight flowing in through the windows against his spine. When he closes his eyes, the outside world vanishes, replaced with the warmth of the sun on his face and the sound of Tony working several floors below him. And all around him, the faint murmur of something wet and warm envelopping him like water, and two spots of warmer flesh rest against his back. Fenrir, appeased, soon falls asleep to the sound of a voice singing something beautiful and very sad, and the foolish hope that he’ll never have to go outside again.

[terresdebrumestories]

The things you can't do

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU  SERIES: SEADLA Verse RATING: Teen and Up WORDCOUNT: 599 PAIRING(S): Pre-Sygin/Loki CHARACTER(S): Loki, Sygin, Cameo by Fandral and a few OCs. GENRE: Defining moments. TRIGGER WARNING(S): Medical Trauma, Blood, Potentially a bit gore-ish? Ymmv. SUMMARY: The first time Sigyn sees Loki up close, he is in female form, covered in blood, and almost dead. DEDICATION(S): - NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in February 2013.

✗ THE FIC

“You’re lying.” It’s all she can say -all she can think of, all she can feel. No. No. No, never, such things can’t— but of course they do. Of course it happens. Of course it is real. No, her heart screams, no, I can’t do this, I’m merely an apprentice… but the head healer is absent, and she is the oldest of her apprentices: what is Sigyn supposed to do? Run and leave the prince to die? “I’m telling it as I saw it,” Lord Fandral is saying, “And they’re bringing him here, you’d better ready yourself before they….” The door to the healing rooms bursts open and armed men rush past her, shouting for someone to fetch a healer, alcohol, healing stones, something, and Sigyn realizes they’re just as terrified as she feels. Their armors are covered in blood and deep gashes, the metal torn to shreds with a single stroke, and Sigyn thinks no, it can’t be, I can’t do this. They lay the youngest prince on the healing table, Alma staring with big frightened eyes while the twins Valdis and Vedis put hands on their mouth not to get sick on the spot. There is too much blood. It’s like a sea of red pouring forth from between the prince’s legs, his face barely recognizable, though it comes more from the grime and gore than any magic trick -the paleness of it is telling enough though, and Sigyn’s heart keeps screaming no, no, no. Silence, she tells it, I will do this. With her hands, she ties her hair in a single knot behind her head, but her mouth is already spewing commands -hot water, wine, cloth, iron in the fire and threads readily available, all the long list of things Healer Ingveldur made them learn and recite times and times again. The girls straighten themselves at the commands, remembering now that their vows are worth more than their capricious stomachs, and soon they are back with all material, ready to help. “Start with his legs first,” Sigyn tells Valdis as sternly as she can, “Clean the wound and stem the flow. Alma, go back to the dormitories and rouse the others, I wager we’ll have need of them before long. Vedis, fetch two whole men in case we need to hold His Grace down.” Sometimes, Ingveldur told them the other day, people wake in the middle of operations. Best hope they have some ready muscles when that happens. “Make sure they’re not too green!” Sigyn shouts over her shoulder. I cannot do this. I will faint. Surely I will faint in just a moment now. But she doesn’t. She works her way through torn flesh and broken bones and exposed ribs, pushes bowels and womb back into the prince, sews it all together and never once stops to wish the healing stones weren’t locked away. She works and heals and grunts and swears, and by the end of it she has blood up to her elbows and on her face, and her legs feel about as solid as wool, but the prince is alive and maybe, just maybe, he will live to see another day. I can’t do this, Sigyn thinks, I can’t. But then Healer Ingveldur comes in, red and panting from a hard ride from the other side of the city -no doubt the messenger birds took time before they reached her- and when she goes to Prince Loki’s bedside and studies the poultices and bandages and burned-shut wounds, she nods with an encouraging smile. “Congratulations my lady,” she says, “You did it.”

[terresdebrumestories]

Shadows for the foggy mind

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU  SERIES: SEADLA Verse RATING: Teen and Up WORDCOUNT: 1 205 PAIRING(S): Pre-FrostIron  CHARACTER(S): Loki, Tony Stark, Coyote. GENRE: Time travel TRIGGER WARNING(S): Mentions of hospitals, vague references to suicide attempt SUMMARY: The ship, he will learn later, is called a Drakkar, and the eagle’s land will later become America… but at present, none of that matters half as much as the feeling of wind rushing beneath his wings. DEDICATION(S): - NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in February 2013.

✗ THE FIC

It’s kind of like dreaming, except a dream usually feels better.

There’s the heavy bass of his heart in his ears and the low hum of an oxygen machine telling him to stay quiet (hhhu husssssssh, hhhu husssssssssh) as if there were any other available option. His chest feels like lead and his limbs are heavier still, and everything around him look like it’s bathed in moonlight, the dim silver of a foggy winter night when it’s not really summer anymore but not quite autumn just yet. Hhhu husssssh the machine whispers, and it sounds like the hull of a sea he never knew, the beating of his heart a drum he never heard, the darkness of the room that of a moonless night in a time he never lived. He floats. The sea beneath him is inky blue, the waves not so high as to be fearsome, but there is a promise of rain in the air, perhaps a storm. Wind blows in his feathers and under his wings, and when he follows the sound of a drum near the water, he finds a long boat oared by two dozen men with meaty arms and thick necks, most blonde and fair of skin. At the front stand two men. He has never seen them before -he would recognize their fiery hair, their beards, their plaits. Still, they tug at his memory, the strong one with his booming laugh and the lithe one with his burning green eyes, and as he preens his feather clean, he cannot help but watch them from the corner of his eye. The strong one speaks with a voice like thunder, and although the words are foreign, the meaning comes to him easily: “Look, Brother! Father watches over us!” “This is no Muninn,” the lithe one answers, “Merely a Midgard raven.” “It may be you are right, but even so if there is a bird there must be land near.” “Aye,” the lithe one grunts as fog rises from the sea to their feet, coating the deck in fat coils of white smoke, “But Midgard’s Serpent is breathing tonight, and the men are nervous.” The two men look ahead but see nothing more than what he does: the silvery-white veil of a spirit’s tears, or maybe the cool but treacherous breath of some great beast. The visibility beyond their figurehead, a great serpent sculpted into the wood, is practically nonexistent, and he wonders how they plan on reaching any coast at all in this weather. Someone urges the lithe one to work his magic, another begs for him to call onto the All-Father himself, while some ask for a God named Thunderer -that one makes the strong red-headed man chuckle. The lithe man with emerald in his eyes and fire in his hair climb on the figurehead, right next to him, and throws him a look that bears deep secrets and more years than any living man could recall. They are fools, the green gaze seems to say, foolish men calling the wrong names. But at last, he cups his hands around his mouth and bellows: “JORMUNGANDR, GRANT US PASS!” The sound is so violent he nearly sheds all his feathers right then and there, wings bristling with the potency of a voice he would have otherwise overlooked. “Must be a bloody deaf fellow for you to shout that loud,” someone says. Next to him on the figurehead, a tall bird has elected to land on the lithe man’s thigh. Its body is a deep brown but his head is covered in gleaming white feathers, and its yellow beak and talons shine like small suns in the night. “Useless though,” the bird continues, “he’s not like to grant you any passage to my lands.” “Yours?” The fiery man says, eyebrow arching. “Who is he then?” The lithe man points to him then, and the white and brown bird considers him carefully. “A skinwalker,” he says at last. “A man in a raven’s skin. One of mine, through and through, I can tell. He was born in these lands, and in these lands he shall make his way to the next world.” “How do you know that?” He asks, curious. He is a raven, not a man; of that he is sure. “I know many a thing,” the other bird says simply. “I know you have never slipped your skin before and I know there is not enough of the gift left in you to do it again. I know you never knew you were capable of this, and that something -or someone- stronger than yourself sent you to this time and place.” The bird tilts its head and for a brief moment it looks as if his beak wore a smile. “I know, too, that it is time for you to go back to your own body and your own time, Tony Stark.” Tony opens his beak to protest, but already things are blurring around him and the world spins, turning to smoke, to haze, to dust. His eyelids feel heavy as stone when he tries to look at the ceiling, but all he sees is the piercing green gaze of a man with a red beard and runes tattooed on his face, as lithe and tall as he was on the boat. “I was a crow,” he says, throat parched and mind confused by the sudden change in scale and setting. Everything looks a lot smaller now. “I know,” the man says, a small smile playing at the edge of his lips as the lines of runes tattooed on his face move like snakes -a semi-circle on his brow, two lines from either eye, four below his chin. “I was the one who sent you.” “Why?” Tony asks, trying to puzzle out the solution to his dilemma, but his wits elude him as quick as goblin gold slips from the fingers of a fool -somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders where that image  comes from. The man’s eyes shine in the moonlight, a deadly shade of poison green ready to strike. Still, his voice is soft when he says: “I just wanted to make sure I’d know to come to your rescue.” “Who are you?” Tony asks, speech slurred by the cloud of morphine coursing through his veins -it reminds him, dimly, of another hospital, another time, and the light of a reactor in his chest… The blue glare is absent now, but somehow Tony doesn’t find it strange. “Why did you want to make sure I’d be saved?” “I’m just a dream,” the man says. He bends to kiss Tony’s lips, and the scrape of his beard, the oh-so-faint scars at the edge of his lips, the warmth of his skin feel oddly familiar. He straightens up, something soft and a little scared dancing in his eyes in the moment before he says: “And one day, I hope to be more than that.” He puts a hand on Tony’s eyes, sending him straight to sleep. When he wakes again, it’s light outside, and he remembers nothing past the cold kiss of a knife on his wrists. “I was beginning to fear you would never wake.”

[terresdebrumestories]

A brother, by any other face...

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU  SERIES: SEADLA Verse RATING: General Audiences  WORDCOUNT: 1 397 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Loki, Thor, Fenrir GENRE: Family ties TRIGGER WARNING(S): Some body horror at the beginning. SUMMARY: Treason is only one way to look at it. And in the end, it isn’t so much who you betray that matters, but who you decide to be faithful to. DEDICATION(S): - NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in February 2013.

✗ THE FIC

Traitor. The word twists and grates at Thor’s soul, ugly and slimy and dark, bitter bile washing the back of his throat every minute of every hour. Traitor, the soldier repeats, and Thor’s fingers squeeze his throat, twist it until his face turns black and his eyes bulge out of heir socket and finally -thankfully- he stops talking. (The flesh of his face melts and shrivels away until it is Odin’s eye staring at Thor’s soul. He wakes up screaming.) Traitor. Traitor, traitor, traitor. Thor has tried to escape the word, tried to hide away from it but how can he? Here in this cave with its nameless rooms and rough corridors and its windows full of fishes Thor has never seen before, Jormungandr is the only master, and he is not one to spare his uncle a little suffering… And so the whispers endures, nagging and insistent at all time of night and day. Traitor, it names him, and well it might, for blood was spilled. Thor never had the blood of an Asgardian on his hands before, or at least not so plainly. He has made mistakes in his battle plans, it is true, and men have died because of them. All the same, he has wounded soldiers in training, too enthusiastic in his sparring to control his strength -or too angry at his brother to care… But he never meant to harm them, never swung Mjölnir with the intent of taking their life. Yet, for two days now, it is what he has been struggling with. He spilled the blood of Asgard and all that for what? A Frost Giant trying to free Odin’s prisoner? No wonder they called him a traitor! He betrayed his king and his country, and for that Thor thinks he deserves the name he was given. He has no idea, still, of what made him do what he did. In any other circumstances, a Jotun in Vanaheim would have been slain on sight, and Thor would have gone to bed with a clean conscience. Of course, this one was no ordinary Jotun, the blue of its skin swallowing the pink of fondly remembered and beloved features but even then… Thor could have stood aside. He could have let time run its course and the Jotun, exhausted by the fight against Hermes, would have been caught. A tricked trickster, ensnared and condemned to face Odin Father of All for the crimes he committed against Asgard and Earth both… And Jotunheim, too. Thor fought instead, fought with a fury he did not know slept inside of him -not he bloodlust of his other battles or the excitement of the training grounds but pure, blinding hatred fast as lightning and fierce as a dragon. Sometimes, one of the soldier’s face would remind him of Odin’s and instead of staying his arm it made him strike harder, and the memory frightens him beyond anything he thought possible. Traitor, traitor, traitor. A traitor he is then, in truth as well as name. Thor knows this and although it pains him, he has accepted his new condition with all the calm he could muster, but he is not yet at peace with his status, knows he will not be until he understands why. Maybe it is what brought him to Loki’s door tonight. Loki is pink when he opens, pink and black of hair and green of eyes, not a drop of Jotun blue on his skin -or is it a sneer hanging at the corner of his nose? (Loki looked shocked when Mjölnir zoomed past his head to behead a guard instead, so much so that it took him almost half a minute before he would leave the battlefield and go to retrieve his son from the cave Odin had him imprisoned in.) “Have you come to correct your mistake?” He asks in a hushed tone, door opened no further than necessary. He doesn’t sound afraid, but when has either of them sounded afraid? (There was a tower, Thor remembers, and a split moment no longer than the blink of an eye and ‘it’s too late’ before the cold of a dagger pricked him deep enough to hurt and the moment lay crumbled beneath the rumbles of a world he seems doomed to save from his own kin.) “I only wish for a word, in private.” Thor opens the fold of his cap to prove he means no harm. “The walls are too thick for me to call upon Mjölnir,” he points out even as he knows Loki doesn’t need him to come to this conclusion. “Come in,” he says at last, “but be quiet. Fenrir is asleep.” Thor follows Loki inside the room he claimed for himself, and the furnishing is so alike to his bedroom in Asgard that Thor is convinced this room has been occupied for much, much longer than Loki has been exiled. In the massive bed, covered with bear pelts sewn together, Thor spies a boy with flaming hair and chaffing marks around his mouth and nose… The traces of chains, Thor knows. The child would look six or seven to a human, perhaps eight, but he is still chewing on a gold and green pacifier, skinny frame curled in a tight ball as he whines in his sleep. “He will bear the scars all his life,” Loki says when he notices Thor’s gaze, “both visible and hidden.” Slowly, carefully, Loki traces the outline of the marks the muzzle left, moving down to the boy’s neck where a collar bit deep into the flesh. All the while, his other hand rests on his lower belly, the place where a child would grow if he were to be impregnated again. “What do you want,” he asks without taking his gaze off his son, “if not finish me?” Thor wasn’t quite sure when he knocked, but now he knows, and so his voice is steady when he asks: “Change.” He sees in Loki’s suddenly rigid posture that he does not need to explain what sort of change he means. “Why?” Loki asks with his ambassador’s voice, “We both know you hate the blue as much as I do.” “I did not have a chance to see you back there in Asgard. I want to see you now.  You owe me.” Loki’s eyes flash with anger, the reddish tint of fire plainly stating it was Thor who owed Fenrir his freedom, not the reverse… Three days ago, Thor would have agreed without question, but now he has seen what lay beneath his brother’s skin, and he doubts. Still, Loki does not protest, merely steps well away from the bed and closes his eyes. He is still wearing the traveling tunic he favors when not forced to appear princely, so he change is mostly visible in his hands at first, fingernails blackening as the blue creeps up past his knuckles and ridged lines appear where his red-headed form bears moving tattoos of lined runes. The blue climbs up and up until it bleeds over Loki’s neck, his chin, his cheeks, his forehead… Then he opens his eyes and blood pools in, chasing the green, and Thor’s fingers prickles with Mjölnir’s absence, itching for the heavy feel of a handle he cannot seize. Loki sees it and he chuckles, the bitter little laugh that has been his ever since Sleipnir and Fenrir and Angrboda, and Thor can feel his eyes widen in response to this, his mouth to slack. “Have you had your fill now, Odinson?” Loki asks, and that sounds bitter too, as he did so long ago after countless encounters with father, as he did on the Bifrost and on top of a nameless rock in Midgard. “Have you seen enough of the monster?” “No,” Thor says, reaching for Loki’s cheek -Loki flinches away with a look of fear and incredulity, as if to ask if Thor has taken leave of his wits- “I see only a brother I wish to know again.” Loki doesn’t return his smile, but Thor recognizes the way he pinches his lips easily: he used to wear the same expression when Frigga paid him a compliment he did not know how to handle. Traitor, traitor, traitor, the voice in his head keeps saying, but Thor is starting to like the sound of it a lot better.

[terresdebrumestories]

Stumbling in love is a painless process (but the pains it brings are endless)

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU  SERIES: SEADLA Verse (9/11) RATING: Teen and Up WORDCOUNT: 502 PAIRING(S): FrostIron  CHARACTER(S): Loki GENRE: Introspection  TRIGGER WARNING(S): None  SUMMARY: They’re not a couple. They are not, they are not, they. Are. Not. A. Couple. DEDICATION(S): - NOTE(S): Repost from before I lost my blogs. Originally written and posted in February 2013.

✗ THE FIC

They are not a couple.

Loki doesn’t even have to remind himself of that: he needs only look. Twice he was wed, and that thing he has now with Tony feels nothing like it. They are no couple, for Tony doesn’t -shouldn’t- trust him, and if he does it is only because he allows himself to be mistaken on Loki’s identity. What does it matter that they walk together down the streets and let their shoulders bump together when Tony seldom uses his name anymore? Perhaps wearing the same appearance twice was a mistake. Loki let himself be lulled into comfort by the illusion of Lorna, too. She looks like Serrure, a bit, with a wider nose and thicker hair, and more ink in her skin. She is more confident, too. Lorna was the body Sigyn used to touch, the one she awakened to love with her lips and skin, and Loki likes this skin all the more for the faint tingling of love spells branded into his very bone. Watch, this body says, there was once one person who loved Loki as a man and a woman both. Tony doesn’t do that. He smiles and listens and gives comforting pats on the shoulder but he doesn’t see -refuses to see what truly lies beneath. In their stolen moments together, Loki spills secrets he never told Thor or his parents, but everything he says here Sigyn has heard first, with all the tears and pain he could not yet keep at bay -all the things he had no need or desire to hide at the time. There is nothing here that marks Tony as a confident, for Loki knows he can’t -shouldn’t trust him. And yet. Loki is not such a fool as to mistake desire for love, not since Angrboda, but there are… Signs. Little shivers of the soul when Tony speaks and smiles, a fluttering of the heart when he chuckles and Loki is the source that betray the truth as surely as a beacon chases the night. Loki’s neck burns and his hands shake, and even as he plunges them in the pockets of Lorna’s cargo jeans, and shrugs with a self-confident air, the beating of his heart increases as he chastises himself for the way his stomach flutter when he thinks tomorrow is Monday again. Fool, he thinks, seven times a fool is what you are. Love is never more than the beginning of your troubles. He berates himself all night, but when Monday comes and with it the time to see Tony Stark, Loki’s heart flutters anew and even the fear he feels can’t prevent him from walking to his doom with a spring in his step. When he doesn’t get a reply to the text he sent celebrating Tony’s first month sober, Loki’s breath catches in his throat as violently as it did wen his body would not leave his mare form and he realizes, too late, that his problems started a long, long time ago.