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cap_ironman2013-06-16 12:25 pm
elspethdixon.livejournal.com) wrote in cap_ironman2013-06-16 12:25 pm
Entry tags:
Reassembled, chapter 13
Title: Reassembled, Chapter 13
Authors:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
seanchai and elspethdixon
Universe: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work.
Beta:dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching (most of) our many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.
Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
Authors' Note: Because we initially started outlining this fic back when Lady Loki hadn't yet been revealed to be possessing Sif's stolen body (I know, I know, that was literally years ago), Loki in this fic is occupying a female version of his/her own body. Why this makes a difference ought to be apparent by the end of the chapter ^_~.
Chapter Thirteen
Months ago, when he had first rejoined the Avengers, Thor had sworn that he would never again sleep under Tony Stark's roof. Then he had begun staying in Stark Tower overnight, because the journey from New York to Nebraska was long even for an Asgardian. He had told himself that he was not accepting Tony's hospitality, but merely bowing to necessity because it would have been foolish to do otherwise. Meals were a different matter; it was Jarvis's bread and salt he ate, not Tony Stark's.
Then he had sworn that he would not move back into the Avengers mansion, that doing so would be to symbolically forgive Tony and Hank Pym their betrayal, just as treating them as the shield-brothers they had once been would be.
Visiting the mansion in order to speak to Jarvis, or Captain America, or another of his teammates, or to discuss strategy with them, or to perform any number of other duties required of him as an Avenger... He had decided that those did not violate his oath. Not as long as he still slept elsewhere.
As he stood alone in Tony's old living quarters, at the top of the tower that bore his name, and stared out at the city lights, it occurred to Thor that perhaps such hairsplitting had been unworthy of him. His friends had acted without honor, yes, but they had not done so with deliberate ill intent, and while he had not-quite — forgiven Tony, he had already made the decision to treat him as an ally once more, if not a brother. There was no dishonor in accepting hospitality from an ally.
There was, if anything, dishonor in refusing it.
Sleeping in this hollow shell of a dwelling place out of pride was as foolish as refusing to speak to Tony or Hank had been, and served as little purpose.
"When morning comes, I shall remove myself from this place." He spoke the words aloud, to give further weight to the decision. "I shall sleep tomorrow night in the Avengers' old home."
"How touching." The voice was as familiar as it was unwelcome; the change in timbre from male to female had altered only the pitch, not the cadence of the words, or the sly hint of mockery that forever underlay them.
Thor reached for Mjolnir's handle, the leather wrapped metal fitting easily against his palm. "Show yourself, Loki," he growled.
"With pleasure." A ghostly feminine form blurred into being in the window before him, uncomfortably close to his own reflection.
Thor whirled, hammer at the ready, only to find the room as empty as it had been before.
"I've been attempting to contact you for weeks, you fool," the hateful voice went on. "You don't look in mirrors often, do you?"
"Unlike some, I am not so enamored of my own reflection that I must gaze at it constantly." It was an unfair charge — Loki was indeed vain, but his vanity had always been for his cleverness rather than his face or form — but saying the words might provoke his quick-to-anger stepbrother into revealing himself.
Loki's reflection still shimmered in the great, floor-to-ceiling window, the lights of near bye skyscrapers shining through her body. In many ways, his stepbrother had changed little with this new incarnation; the same angular face, the same ice-green eyes, the same smirk on her scarred lips.
The reflection was too blurred for that detail to be visible, but Thor had seen the old scars from needle and torn-out stitches with Don Blake's eyes and knew them to be there. Not even sewing Loki's lips shut had been able to halt the flow of lies that spilled from his tongue like poison.
"This city is drowning in chaos. My chaos. Were that power once again under my control, I could make it cease."
The days when he had fallen for Loki's tricks were long past. "And what would you do with it then, brother?" Thor asked. "Whom would you slay? Which of the Aesir would you make a feast for the eagles? Where else on Midgard would you sow chaos and destruction?"
Loki folded her arms, the gesture emphasizing the lush curves of her breasts, and pouted. "What must I do to earn your trust, thunder-god? What further assurances of my goodwill can I give you?"
Thor folded his own arms across his chest and glared sternly at her reflection. "The last time you and I spoke, you threatened to rip my eye out."
"That fragile mortal shell you insist on donning is just too tempting." Her smile was no doubt meant to be flirtatious, and so it might have been had it not revealed the merest hint of pointed canines.
The jotunn, the frost giants, ate the flesh of men, and did not always trouble to cook it first.
"Leave me be," Thor ordered. "You will find no willing ear here for your lies." He turned his back to the windows, knowing it would infuriate her, and went to the fireplace to kick ashes over the coals of the fire. He would leave this room and go elsewhere, some place deeper inside the tower, with no windows.
"You have no right to keep the spear from me!" Loki's snarling face appeared in the mirror over the fireplace mantle, mere inches from his shoulder.
Thor was a battle-tested Asgardian warrior, and therefore he did not flinch. "I have every right. Indeed, if it belongs to anyone, it ought to be Baldur's, not yours. You made certain he became intimately familiar with it."
"Must you take everything from me?" Loki demanded, leaning forward so that she was practically hissing in his ear. He ought to have been able to feel her breath on the back of his neck, feel her heat pressed against his back. The fact that he could not was almost more disconcerting than her actual presence would have been. "You have Valhalla, you have your father's throne and all his power, and you cannot spare me this one small thing? Baldur yet lives, for you and all others in Asgard to fawn over. Must I be punished forever for his sake?"
Thor clenched his fingers around Mjolnir's handle, and curled his left hand into a fist. "He lives, yes, but not for lack of effort on your part. And he is far from the only one whose death you have sought." Jane Foster, Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg, his father, nearly every one of the Avengers at one point or another. Thor himself, countless times.
"So protective of these mortals. It doesn't become you, stepbrother. They live out their lives in the blink of an eye, weak and pitifully easy to deceive. What virtues do they possess that drives you to side with them against me?"
Thor ground his teeth, trying to ignore the crawling sensation on the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades, the knowledge that were Loki physically present, she would be perfectly positioned to slide a knife through the gaps in his armor. "Some of them are capable of honor, which is more than anyone has ever been able to say of you." The words held the weight of truth. Captain America lived and breathed honor, and demanded it of all who fought beside him. Much as Thor had wished to deny it, even Tony and Hank did possess honor of a kind, though not by the same code as his own.
Tony had begged his pardon and sought forgiveness. Hank had not, had in fact flaunted his misdeeds in Thor's face, but he had not committed them out of spite and malice. Loki was warped inside, treacherous as rotten ice; perhaps she always had been, even in the days when Thor had considered her a brother.
Iron Man and the Wasp did not know what dangers they courted when they urged him to accept her aid.
Loki's eyes narrowed to green slits. "You speak of honor to me?" she spat. "Your father slew mine. He and the rest of you treated me like tainted goods, good enough to serve and aid you, but never truly one of your own. Your precious All-Father wouldn't even let me keep my own children, and you call me traitor for opposing him?"
Loki's 'children' had been monsters, one of them fated to slay Thor himself, again and again at every Ragnarok. The three of them had been as vicious as their sire, Fenris most especially. "I call you traitor because you are one. Go. I tire of listening to you."
In the mirror, Loki's fingers curled around his neck, the gesture at once both seductive and threatening. She was powerful enough to kill mortal men through their reflections thus. "I am not your enemy this time, Thunder God, despite ample provocation," she said, the words still something close to a snarl. "How many times must I swear it?"
Of a sudden, Thor felt tired, the sort of tiredness that weighed on the soul and made him think longingly of the Odin sleep and letting Don Blake face the world in his stead for a while. "You may swear it a thousand times, with any oath you care to name, and I will not believe it. You are kinslayer and oathbreaker and your word means nothing to me. Nothing."
Loki leaned in and licked the edge of his reflection's ear with a long, pink tongue. "I would be your friend, Thunder-god," she purred, as Thor suppressed a shudder. "The halls of Valhalla must be empty without Sif beside you."
Enough. Thor stepped to the side, pulling his reflection away from hers, and forced himself not to rub at his ear. Loki had bedded everything from giantesses to stallions in order to further her ends, he reminded himself. She was not truly interested in him, not in that way. Not like Amora. "Your friendship comes at too high a cost, stepbrother."
Jarvis would be upset were he to break the mirror. Thor settled for turning his back on it and leaving the room in search of some place deeper within the tower, without mirrors or windows. He was careful not to look into any reflective surfaces on the way.
* * *
"And then he said that there had been complaints from parents that I wasn't a good role model, and they were going to have to reject my offer to volunteer and have someone else fill in during that time slot."
Tony didn't respond. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lab, fiddling with a partially assembled anti-teleportation device, his head bent forward over a laptop. There were two StarkTablets lying on the floor on either side of him; a single portable computer was apparently an insufficient replacement for having the Extremis running at full capacity. He typed something into the laptop, machine-gun-fire fast, muttering, "If I increase the strength of the energy field until it can penetrate lead or two feet of concrete, the radiation it gives off goes above fifty millirems, and that's unacceptable."
"You're not listening, are you." Steve said.
"No, I'm listening," Tony said absently. He rubbed at his forehead with one hand, reaching for a tablet with the other. "You should sue them."
"That wouldn't solve anything." All the lawsuits Stark Industries' legal department could dream up wouldn't change people's attitudes. According to an unspecified number of parents whose children attended PS 58, an 'openly gay' superhero was not family friendly enough to be involved in their after school art program for struggling students.* Steve suspected — hoped — that only one or two people had actually complained, but apparently even one concerned and angry parent had been enough.
It wasn't surprising, exactly, especially given the response Peter had received from the school district when he'd revealed himself as Spiderman, but it was still disappointing. It probably didn't help that the press had still not gotten tired of the shocking revelation that he and Tony were a couple, something they seemed to find more newsworthy than anything the Avengers had actually done over the past month, which only seemed to spur various self-appointed 'moral guardians' on. The last time he'd called the team in LA, Simon had answered the phone with "West Coast Avengers; we don't give interviews about Tony Stark's sex life." He'd been embarrassed and apologetic when he'd realized who he was talking to, killing Steve's hope that he'd recognized the Avengers Mansion's number on the caller ID and was only joking.
"You'd run out of money and lawyers long before the world ran out of idiots," he told Tony.
Tony lifted his head, putting the tablet down again. "I thought I was the cynical one."
"It's the twenty-first century; people should be better than this!" He knew it was ridiculously naive as soon as he said it; for all the social changes for the better than had happened while he was on ice, human nature itself never changed. He had known what they were letting themselves in for by making their relationship public, but he hadn't been able to stop himself from hoping that people would be better than his expectations. They'd failed to be on more than one front. "It's not just this, it's... you've seen what that columnist in the Post has been writing about all those mutants getting their powers back." Newspaper columnists calling for a return to mandatory registration of superhumans because of "the renewed mutant presence" was just a mildly irritating symptom of a much larger problem. Violent crime had been steadily rising all over Manhattan and the parts of Brooklyn closest to the East River for weeks, but the string of attacks on visible mutants and people who happened to look vaguely like they might have been mutants in Staten Island couldn't be blamed on Chthon's influence, unless his reach extended even farther than they'd assumed.
Tony was poking at the anti-teleport device again. Had he been this bad at putting work down for five seconds before the Extremis? "I try to avoid the New York Post. Do they still run that awful picture of me from six years ago every time they mention me?"
"This isn't something to joke about, Tony."
"Just try to ignore it," Tony said, his voice tired. "They've been recycling the same anti-repeal articles since this summer, and they'll probably keep doing it until the primaries start in the spring."
And in the meantime, people were being hurt, and the Post's editorials were encouraging it. Steve gave in to the impulse to pace — Tony wasn't looking at him anyway — and made a circuit of the lab, picking his way around a quinjet engine, partial suits of both Iron Man and War Machine armor, and a half-dozen pieces of welding and machining equipment. A purple tuft of feather that looked suspiciously like part of one of Clint's arrows was caught on the corner of Tony's drafting table; Steve pulled it free, smoothing the barbs back together.
"The public will start to trust superhumans again," he said, as much to remind himself as anything else. "They already have. This is just a temporary setback."
"Right," Tony agreed. He picked up a small tool and made a few minuscule adjustments to a piece of circuitry. "Maybe if I add more shielding..."
His laptop made the pinging sound that announced a new email, the tablet chiming in so closely afterward that the sound was almost a single electronic chirp. Tony glanced at it, then groaned, rubbing a hand over his face. "I've gone over that contract three times already," he muttered through his fingers. "What do they want to change now?"
Contract? "It's eight-thirty at night. Couldn't that wait until morning?"
"Apparently not," Tony said. He kept rubbing at his face, fingertips pressing into his temples. "And it's not eight-thirty in Japan."
"You have a headache." It came out sounding like an accusation. "And you didn't come to bed last night, or the night before," he added, trying to soften his tone. "You can get back to them tomorrow."
"I was planning to," Tony said, not quite snidely. "I caught a couple of hours of sleep at the office today, at lunchtime. I can go to bed after I finish this for SHIELD and go over today's security scans from the cathedral and run a probability scan on where the next subway accident is likely to be." Which meant he'd skipped lunch.
Even with a healing factor, pushing himself like this would have been wearing Tony down, and without it, he was going to end up working himself to the point of collapse.
"If you don't get some sleep, I'm going to get Jan to take you off active duty until-" Tony had his eyes closed, Steve realized, and was frowning thoughtfully, fingers still pressed against the side of his face as if to hold his skull together. Steve stopped pacing abruptly. "Are you using the Extremis?"
Tony's eyes snapped open, and he glared at Steve. "No. I am closing my eyes because my head hurts and my eyes hurt from staring at computer screens all day, which I used to not have to do. Contrary to what the Post and the Bugle have been printing about me, I do have some self-control."
"You promised you wouldn't-"
"I know," Tony interrupted. "I haven't touched the damn thing despite how much easier it would make getting through the work day or how much it means to our ability to monitor Chthon's effect in the city. You said my word was good enough for you, so stop asking!"
Steve took a deep breath, throttling back irritation. "I only ask because I'm worried about you."
"Apparently because you don't trust me," Tony snapped back.
"With your own health? No, I don't." When did this turn into a fight?
"Well, that's flattering." From the tone of his voice, Tony was more than willing to have this fight, and there was something oddly satisfying about hearing the confrontational edge in his voice, and seeing him toss down the micro-tool he'd been holding and shove himself to his feet. Even obviously tired and headachy, with circles under his eyes and late-night stubble blurring the edges of his goatee, he moved gracefully. "I gave you my word, Steve."
After they'd shouted themselves hoarse, Steve decided, he'd drag Tony to bed and wear him out further with make-up sex. Then maybe he'd get the sleep he was too stubborn and self-destructively stupid to get on his own. "Your word isn't worth as much as it usually is when it comes to the Extremis. Or taking better care of yourself, apparently. If this is you not trying to hurt yourself, how did you make it to thirty-five?"
Tony's eyes narrowed, and his left hand curled into a fist. "I did my best not to get past twenty-seven, but you and Rhodey and Bethany thwarted me."
The prospect of a nice, loud argument vanished as the sick thrill of fighting with Tony soured in his stomach. "Don't joke about that."
"About what? Being a suicidal drunk for most a year?" Tony flung both arms out in a needlessly dramatic gesture. "Why not?"
"Because it's not funny," Steve said — shouted, really. The labs were soundproofed; he could yell as loudly as he wanted. He took a step closer to Tony, into his personal space, where Tony would have to look up fractionally to meet Steve's eyes. "And we didn't stop you. You stopped yourself. When you're determined to destroy yourself, you don't let anything get in your way, especially not the people who care about you."
"Well, then we're lucky that's not what I'm trying to do right now, aren't we?" Tony shoved past Steve roughly, his shoulder colliding with Steve's. It would have been the work of a split-second to grab that both shoulder and his wrist and put him in an arm lock, but that would have taken the fight into physical territory, and even angry, he knew that wasn't a good idea. He could almost see Tony rounding on him, punching him in the jaw, and then thoroughly losing it as he had some kind of flashback to the hallucinations he'd suffered while under the influence of AIM's toxin.
"I'm too busy trying to run my company and pull my weight on the team and keep the people in DC who hate me even more now that I've debauched Captain America happy to have time for anything else," Tony was snarling, as he snatched his laptop and tablet off the floor. "Get out of my lab. I have work to do."
"Fine," Steve threw back. "Gladly. When you pass out on your workbench, I won't come looking for you." He turned his back to Tony and stomped toward the elevator, stabbing the 'up' button viciously and wishing it came equipped with a door he could slam. The quite swish of the elevator doors closing wasn't nearly as satisfying.
The elevator started to climb, and Steve glared at his distorted reflection in the polished metal doors and silently cursed at himself. He'd come down here hoping to make himself feel better, and maybe convince Tony to take a break long enough to eat dinner. "Good luck with that," he told himself. "You sure handled that one well, Rogers." Why did Tony have to be so stubborn? So infuriatingly flippant about his own well-being? So good at knowing exactly which buttons to push to turn what should have been a simple argument into something nasty?
The elevator doors opened with a discrete, expensive-sounding chime. It was a far shorter ride than it had been in the tower, but by the time he stepped out into the ground floor hallway, Steve's frustration had shifted focus from Tony to himself. Why had he let himself get sucked in to such a pointless argument? He knew Tony hadn't been using the Extremis — if nothing else, he wouldn't have been typing so fiercely if he had been — but he still couldn't help worrying, or the momentary flash of suspicion he felt whenever Tony closed his eyes and rubbed at his face or temples while working on something. He'd seen that gesture so often while they had been trying to take down the Red Skull and the Mandarin, when Tony had been so completely and continuously immersed in the Extremis that he'd forgotten to eat, stopped sleeping, and begun having the first few of what had become a long series of nosebleeds.
Sitting around kicking himself and moping wasn't going to accomplish anything, Steve decided. He might as well go find something productive to do and kick himself and mope while doing it.
He'd been telling himself that he was going to unpack the things Jarvis had boxed up while he was gone 'eventually' for months now, and Tony had started to complain about tripping over them. Maybe he should go through a couple of boxes; by the time he was finished, Tony would probably have calmed down.
The half-dozen boxes still stacked in the corner of his and Tony's room had acquired a thin layer of dust, and a few clumps of the orange fur that seemed to coat everything in the house these days-Patton shed almost as much as Beast had. The first box he opened was full of books, the ones he'd looked through when they had first started to move in and then never gotten around to actually putting on shelves. He'd been meaning to give Bucky that copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn back for over a month.
As little as Steve had left from his life before the ice, Bucky had even less. He shouldn't have let this sit for so long.
Everything smelled of dust and old paper, and half the paperbacks had cracked spines and yellowed, dog-eared pages. Half of them had come from the Strand, or other second-hand book stores, because you couldn't find Rafael Sabatini, Fritz Leiber, or Grant Stockbridge anywhere else. Or Victor J. Banis, whose books didn't have to be carefully hidden behind something safely boring-looking anymore. Tony might mock his taste, but he was hardly going to complain about the content.
Two-thirds of the bookshelves were already filled with Tony's books, carefully shelved by subject. Steve slotted his own in and around them, deliberately re-arranging everything alphabetically by title. It would probably take anywhere from days to weeks for Tony to actually notice, but when he did, the whining about 'why is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea shelved right next to Max Plank's Treatise on Thermodynamics?' would be worth the effort.
The next box was clothing, which Steve closed back up to go through later, followed by a box of items that had once decorated his DUMBO apartment. A vintage ad poster for war bonds; an old radio that Tony had promised to fix up for him and never gotten around to; a framed photo of Steve and Sam in costume, back when Sam had still worn red and green; one of Tony's old helmets, autographed to 'the only person whose head is harder than mine.'
There was a small earring caught in the corner of the box, a silver ball on a straight post, missing the earring back. Sharon's. She'd helped him box up his stuff when he'd moved into the warehouse in Dumbo, then helped him unpack.
He set the earring carefully on the bedside table, then reconsidered and tucked it in his pocket where Patton couldn't get at it.
When he reached for the next box, picking it up to set it on the bed for easier access, it was unexpectedly heavy. How many books had he had?
Like all the other boxes, this one was unlabeled. The packing tape holding it closed had been sliced open and taped over again at least once, and was curling up at the edges. Steve didn't bother with the box cutter this time, just gave the edge of the right-hand flap a sharp jerk.
The tape snapped, the flap unfolded, and Steve stared down at a framed pen and ink drawing of an Avengers quinjet. The glass in front of the drawing was cracked, and one corner of the paper was scorched, but it wasn't so damaged that he couldn't recognize it immediately. He would have known that particular drawing anywhere.
The perspective on the wings was wrong, among other things, and he'd asked Tony not to hang it in Stark Tower's lobby, telling him that he could draw something better, something that wouldn't make him cringe every time he walked in and saw it hanging over the reception desk in all its slightly lop-sided glory. Tony had insisted that he liked it, and put it up anyway.
Steve picked it up, careful of the broken glass. Underneath it was a framed pen and ink sketch of the city skyline that had once hung in the tower's kitchen.
He'd thought Tony had thrown that out along with the rest of the drawings and paintings that had once decorated Stark Tower, when he'd tried to erase Steve's presence in his life during the registration fight by erasing all evidence of him from his living quarters. Why had he kept these two when all the others had been disposed of?
Because, Steve realized as he lifted the picture frame out to reveal the smaller items under it, he hadn't disposed of them. They were all here. Every piece of Steve's art that had once hung in the Avengers tower or Tony's office, from pencil and ink sketches to charcoals to watercolors. At the bottom of the box, two half-filled sketch pads sat on top of a stack of loose bits of paper — sketchbooks he'd left behind when he'd left the team, the cartoon of the Avengers as characters from the Wizard of Oz that Jarvis had once had tacked to the front of the refrigerator, even doodles that Steve had tucked inside the pages of books he'd borrowed from or lent to Tony and forgotten about.
Tony hadn't destroyed it. He'd kept it, all of it.
Steve stared down at years' worth of his own work, spread across the bed, and wasn't sure how to feel.
Tony had boxed all of this up and hidden it away, like something shameful. Or something precious; Steve himself wouldn't have bothered keeping those stupid scrap paper doodles at all, much less reverently packaged them away between layers of tissue paper.
It probably should have been creepy, but instead Steve found himself blinking hard, touched by the careful treatment of his carelessly discarded sketches in a way he couldn't describe.
Damn it. It had been easier when he could just yell at Tony, stomp off and sulk for a couple of days, and then pick up afterwards as if nothing had happened. A single stupid fight was hardly going to damage their relationship, but where a good shouting match with Tony had once been just another way to blow off steam, now it was more complicated.
The corner of the Wizard of Oz drawing was crumpled. Steve carefully flattened the soft, slightly yellowed paper out.
He'd drawn this years ago, not long after he'd joined the Avengers. Long before Wanda had been possessed — she and Pietro had still been with Magneto then — and before Hank's problems had started. Tony's drinking hadn't gotten bad yet, and... and Tony had also been hiding a serious and potentially fatal heart condition, and Steve himself had still been shaken up from the war. Hank's powers hadn't worked properly half the time, and they'd all been so new at what they were doing that Jan had nearly died just months after they'd formed the team.
It never did any good to romanticize the past. It usually wasn't that different from the present, and in some ways, it had been worse.
What was he going to do with all this art? The framed pieces should probably go back on the walls. Unless Tony didn't want them there — he was the one who'd taken them down in the first place. Probably because he'd been sulking, just the way Steve had been when he'd come stomping up here and re-arranged all of Tony's books.
Steve rubbed at his face with both hands, just managing to stop himself from getting dust in his eyes. He'd as good as announced that he didn't trust Tony. There were things Steve didn't trust Tony to do, or not do, but he'd never doubted Tony's word, or the fact that he could always, would always be able to trust Tony at his back when it counted.
He wasn't going to go downstairs and apologize, he told himself. He'd had a point, and completely justified reasons to worry.
He'd wait until Tony finally dragged himself out of his lab and came back up here. Then he would apologize.
* * *
"I will skin her slowly," Doom muttered to himself. If SHIELD did in fact possess the Dee manuscript, they would guard it all the more closely now that Sin had so spectacularly tried and failed to seize it from them.
Winter was approaching, and the months until the spring equinox ended his narrow celestial window of opportunity were fast slipping away. The book was not his only option — there were powerful forces that might be willing to lend their aid against the Sorcerer Supreme — but all alternative involved compromises Doom would rather not make, and debts he preferred not to incur. Sin's bungling had set him to investigating still other avenues for breaking or sliding around Strange's protections to claim the spear, and some of those might eventually yield fruit, but it would take time.
Time was limited, however, and the need to divert some of his attention away from his plans was a constant hindrance. Still, Latveria would not rule itself.
The Latvarian franc had fallen against the euro, he saw, as he read the latest report from one of his more loyal ministers. Completely unacceptable; he would have to arrange for several bombings in France and Spain, and perhaps a bubble on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. That should bring world finances into a more appropriate state. Perhaps the assassination of the president of one of Greece's major banks...
"I believe the Avengers have something you desire."
The voice came from directly behind him, low and sultry and unmistakably feminine.
Doom spun around, bringing a weapon to bear on the source of the sound. The laser fire sparked harmlessly against an invisible shield, and the woman behind it smirked at him.
He considered her for a moment, taking in the green gown, the larger than life stature, and the great, curving pair of golden horns that topped her headdress. Her face was unfamiliar, but...
"Loki," he said flatly. "What brings you to this place? I took precautions to prevent anyone from teleporting in." He had not designed them with a god in mind, even a minor one, but they should at least have given him a warning. Alarms should have sounded, defenses been triggered.
"And had I been a mortal mage, or some pathetic human scientist, I'm sure they would have worked." She gestured airily at the laser pistol still trained right between her breasts. "Why don't you put that away, Victor von Doom? I'm here to help you. My enemies have something you need, and you can give me access to something I greatly desire."
It grated to follow another's suggestions, but Doom did as she said and lowered his weapon. It was useless anyway. "Baldur's Bane will be mine. You lost any claim to it long ago."
"And how do you plan to obtain it without the proper spells? I know where the grimoire you seek is, mortal. Chaos is my element; no artifact infused with it can be hidden from me. And for only a small price, I will tell you where you may find it."
Did she think him as blindly stupid as Richards? "What price?" he sneered. "My soul? My eternal servitude?" He would find the grimoire on his own in a matter of weeks, with no need to sell his allegiance to any more dark gods.
Loki raised an eyebrow. "I have no need of human souls. No, what I propose will cost you nothing. I will aid you in getting the spear, and then you will give its power to me."
A fool's bargain. Loki must be desperate to regain the power the spear held; how much had she lost when Valhalla had fallen? "And how would I benefit in this little scenario?"
She smiled, revealing teeth just a little too sharp to be human. "You would have the gratitude of a god. After I reabsorb the spear's power and use it to slay my step-brother and assume the throne of Valhalla, the Odin-force will belong to me. I will have power beyond your imaginings, and the ability to grant you great favors."
"I can imagine quite a bit of power." The mask did not permit him the luxury of a sneer, but Doom had had years to practice conveying emotion with his voice. "I do not need your aid to gain possession of the spear; once the book and the ritual it contains are mine, all will fall into my hands. Why settle for the favors of a god when I can become one?"
Loki swept the heavy fur cloak she wore back over her shoulder, revealing a dagger long enough to serve as a short sword tucked into a heavy, golden belt, and crossed the room toward him, coming uncomfortably close. Despite her lush curves and the revealing neckline of her gown, she moved like the warrior she was; she clearly intended to intimidate him rather than seduce.
It was not often that Doom found himself matched for sheer physical and magical power, though both circumstances were far more common than his being matched in intellect. Even so, if Loki thought something as childish as looming over him would secure her a psychological advantage, she was an even greater fool than he had previously assumed.
She leaned in toward him, and Doom found himself staring up into ice-green eyes that were anything but foolish. "Even with the powers of a god, you cannot stand against Chthon."
Chthon? Doom felt an unwelcome sinking sensation at the name. Loki could be dealt with once he possessed the spear, as could Strange, and several of the dark powers Doom owed unfortunate debts to. Chthon was another matter altogether. If he were interested in Doom's spear, it would complicate matters considerably.
Loki smiled slightly; it was too much to hope that she hadn't noticed the way Doom had stiffened upon hearing Chthon's name. "He plans to use the spear's power to return himself to this dimension and crush it beneath his feet. His pawn is on the game board as well, and you will find him an even deadlier opponent than myself."
Inarguably true, but, "If he can defeat gods, how do you plan to deal with him?" Doom demanded.
Loki's left hand brushed the hilt of her dagger. "I have ways."
She looked larger than life, leaning casually against the edge of Doom's desk as if she owned it. Some trick of otherworldly power made her seem more real than her surroundings, turning the rich gleam of the desk's polished wood dull and the glow of the LED desk lamp thin and watery. The barbaric splendor of all that armor and fur should have looked silly alongside the sleek, expensive computer and other electronic equipment. Instead, she wore it with as much aplomb as Doom did his own armor.
He was not impressed. "I doubt that," he said. "You've never been able to defeat Thor, and the only god you ever slew, you killed by trickery. You need my help as much as I need yours, or you would not be here." Now that she was here, however, her presence opened up intriguing new avenues of possibility.
"Do not underestimate trickery," she snapped, and beneath his mask, Doom smiled. Lesser minds were so easily manipulated. At least Loki, unlike Sin, represented something of a challenge.
"I do not. And you should not underestimate me. You wish to rule Valhalla, Trickster. Must you do it alone?"
Loki gave him a long, speculative look. "I would prefer to," she said, "but ruling by another's side would be better than kneeling at the Thunder God's feet as his humble subject."
"Then kneeling to that idiot? Anything would be." He reached out and placed one mailed hand over hers — accounting for his gauntlet, their hands were nearly the same size. That failed to be as off-putting as it perhaps ought to have been; power, in any form, was always more attractive than weakness. "Give me the spear, and when I have ascended to godhood, I will face Chthon at your side. Once we have sealed him away from this realm once more, we can kill Thor together and rule Valhalla and the earth itself as king and queen."
And Reed Richards would finally have to acknowledge that Doom was his superior in every way that mattered. It would make the even the months of waiting patiently at Loki's side until he could eventually betray her and rule alone sweet.
Perhaps he would have Richards kneel naked at the foot of his throne with a chain around his neck. But only if he begged for his worthless life first.
Loki stared first at Doom, then down at his hand where it touched hers, staying silent just long enough for Doom to begin to fear that he had overstepped. Then she met his eyes, a cruel smile on her lips. "This plan of yours has merit, Victor von Doom. You have ambition, you lust for power. And, of course, you plan to betray me and rule alone." She leaned down, until her lips were inches from his mask, and purred, "I like that."
There was nothing to be gained through timidity. "As you will no doubt plan to betray me," he agreed.
Loki made a faint, pleased humming noise, and her smile deepened. "I am the rotten ice that breaks under men's feet. I am the fire that burns the hand that wields it. Betrayal is my nature. Just as it is yours." She pulled her hand free of Doom's and straightened from her slouch against the table, closing what little distance there was between them in a single step. "Take off the mask, and let me look on the face of the man who will rule at my side."
The smile froze on Doom's lips. She didn't intend to kill him. She had accepted his offer. She was reaching for his mask.
He turned his head to the side, away from her hand. "I think not."
Loki laughed, the sound sharp and mocking. "I have spent centuries chained to a rock in Hell. I have slept in the arms of giantesses. My children are called monsters. Do you think I will balk at a few mere scars?"
One cold hand gripped his jaw, just under the edge of the mask, holding him in place like a vise. Doom started to grab for her wrist, then made himself stop. Failing to meet her challenge would be showing weakness. He was Victor von Doom, and he did not back down from a challenge; he had revealed his bare face before when it served his purposes, and he could do so again.
He reached up, brushing Loki's free hand aside, and removed the mask himself.
The air was cool against his skin — he had not bothered to turn on the heat in the hotel room, since by Latverian standards the weather was still warm — and the feel of it made his face itch, as if he could actually sense Loki's eyes moving over his scars.
She pulled him towards her, nails digging into the edge of his jaw, and kissed him.
The kiss was long and hard, almost bruising, and when she pulled back several long moments later, Doom could taste blood from a stinging bite to his lower lip.
"If you even think about killing me and wearing my skin," Loki hissed, her breath hot against his bare cheek, "I will make you scream as no mortal man ever has before you die."
Doom smiled, the sting of his torn lip still sharp, and kissed her again.
* * *
*The NYC public school number was picked semi at random based on a Tales of Suspense issue number. If there's an actual PS 58, we're sure the parents and administration are good, principled people who would all be thrilled to have Captain America talk to their students regardless of sexuality.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen, part one | Chapter Fourteen, part two | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Epilogue
Authors:
seanchai and elspethdixonUniverse: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work.
Beta:
dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching (most of) our many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.
Authors' Note: Because we initially started outlining this fic back when Lady Loki hadn't yet been revealed to be possessing Sif's stolen body (I know, I know, that was literally years ago), Loki in this fic is occupying a female version of his/her own body. Why this makes a difference ought to be apparent by the end of the chapter ^_~.
Months ago, when he had first rejoined the Avengers, Thor had sworn that he would never again sleep under Tony Stark's roof. Then he had begun staying in Stark Tower overnight, because the journey from New York to Nebraska was long even for an Asgardian. He had told himself that he was not accepting Tony's hospitality, but merely bowing to necessity because it would have been foolish to do otherwise. Meals were a different matter; it was Jarvis's bread and salt he ate, not Tony Stark's.
Then he had sworn that he would not move back into the Avengers mansion, that doing so would be to symbolically forgive Tony and Hank Pym their betrayal, just as treating them as the shield-brothers they had once been would be.
Visiting the mansion in order to speak to Jarvis, or Captain America, or another of his teammates, or to discuss strategy with them, or to perform any number of other duties required of him as an Avenger... He had decided that those did not violate his oath. Not as long as he still slept elsewhere.
As he stood alone in Tony's old living quarters, at the top of the tower that bore his name, and stared out at the city lights, it occurred to Thor that perhaps such hairsplitting had been unworthy of him. His friends had acted without honor, yes, but they had not done so with deliberate ill intent, and while he had not-quite — forgiven Tony, he had already made the decision to treat him as an ally once more, if not a brother. There was no dishonor in accepting hospitality from an ally.
There was, if anything, dishonor in refusing it.
Sleeping in this hollow shell of a dwelling place out of pride was as foolish as refusing to speak to Tony or Hank had been, and served as little purpose.
"When morning comes, I shall remove myself from this place." He spoke the words aloud, to give further weight to the decision. "I shall sleep tomorrow night in the Avengers' old home."
"How touching." The voice was as familiar as it was unwelcome; the change in timbre from male to female had altered only the pitch, not the cadence of the words, or the sly hint of mockery that forever underlay them.
Thor reached for Mjolnir's handle, the leather wrapped metal fitting easily against his palm. "Show yourself, Loki," he growled.
"With pleasure." A ghostly feminine form blurred into being in the window before him, uncomfortably close to his own reflection.
Thor whirled, hammer at the ready, only to find the room as empty as it had been before.
"I've been attempting to contact you for weeks, you fool," the hateful voice went on. "You don't look in mirrors often, do you?"
"Unlike some, I am not so enamored of my own reflection that I must gaze at it constantly." It was an unfair charge — Loki was indeed vain, but his vanity had always been for his cleverness rather than his face or form — but saying the words might provoke his quick-to-anger stepbrother into revealing himself.
Loki's reflection still shimmered in the great, floor-to-ceiling window, the lights of near bye skyscrapers shining through her body. In many ways, his stepbrother had changed little with this new incarnation; the same angular face, the same ice-green eyes, the same smirk on her scarred lips.
The reflection was too blurred for that detail to be visible, but Thor had seen the old scars from needle and torn-out stitches with Don Blake's eyes and knew them to be there. Not even sewing Loki's lips shut had been able to halt the flow of lies that spilled from his tongue like poison.
"This city is drowning in chaos. My chaos. Were that power once again under my control, I could make it cease."
The days when he had fallen for Loki's tricks were long past. "And what would you do with it then, brother?" Thor asked. "Whom would you slay? Which of the Aesir would you make a feast for the eagles? Where else on Midgard would you sow chaos and destruction?"
Loki folded her arms, the gesture emphasizing the lush curves of her breasts, and pouted. "What must I do to earn your trust, thunder-god? What further assurances of my goodwill can I give you?"
Thor folded his own arms across his chest and glared sternly at her reflection. "The last time you and I spoke, you threatened to rip my eye out."
"That fragile mortal shell you insist on donning is just too tempting." Her smile was no doubt meant to be flirtatious, and so it might have been had it not revealed the merest hint of pointed canines.
The jotunn, the frost giants, ate the flesh of men, and did not always trouble to cook it first.
"Leave me be," Thor ordered. "You will find no willing ear here for your lies." He turned his back to the windows, knowing it would infuriate her, and went to the fireplace to kick ashes over the coals of the fire. He would leave this room and go elsewhere, some place deeper inside the tower, with no windows.
"You have no right to keep the spear from me!" Loki's snarling face appeared in the mirror over the fireplace mantle, mere inches from his shoulder.
Thor was a battle-tested Asgardian warrior, and therefore he did not flinch. "I have every right. Indeed, if it belongs to anyone, it ought to be Baldur's, not yours. You made certain he became intimately familiar with it."
"Must you take everything from me?" Loki demanded, leaning forward so that she was practically hissing in his ear. He ought to have been able to feel her breath on the back of his neck, feel her heat pressed against his back. The fact that he could not was almost more disconcerting than her actual presence would have been. "You have Valhalla, you have your father's throne and all his power, and you cannot spare me this one small thing? Baldur yet lives, for you and all others in Asgard to fawn over. Must I be punished forever for his sake?"
Thor clenched his fingers around Mjolnir's handle, and curled his left hand into a fist. "He lives, yes, but not for lack of effort on your part. And he is far from the only one whose death you have sought." Jane Foster, Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg, his father, nearly every one of the Avengers at one point or another. Thor himself, countless times.
"So protective of these mortals. It doesn't become you, stepbrother. They live out their lives in the blink of an eye, weak and pitifully easy to deceive. What virtues do they possess that drives you to side with them against me?"
Thor ground his teeth, trying to ignore the crawling sensation on the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades, the knowledge that were Loki physically present, she would be perfectly positioned to slide a knife through the gaps in his armor. "Some of them are capable of honor, which is more than anyone has ever been able to say of you." The words held the weight of truth. Captain America lived and breathed honor, and demanded it of all who fought beside him. Much as Thor had wished to deny it, even Tony and Hank did possess honor of a kind, though not by the same code as his own.
Tony had begged his pardon and sought forgiveness. Hank had not, had in fact flaunted his misdeeds in Thor's face, but he had not committed them out of spite and malice. Loki was warped inside, treacherous as rotten ice; perhaps she always had been, even in the days when Thor had considered her a brother.
Iron Man and the Wasp did not know what dangers they courted when they urged him to accept her aid.
Loki's eyes narrowed to green slits. "You speak of honor to me?" she spat. "Your father slew mine. He and the rest of you treated me like tainted goods, good enough to serve and aid you, but never truly one of your own. Your precious All-Father wouldn't even let me keep my own children, and you call me traitor for opposing him?"
Loki's 'children' had been monsters, one of them fated to slay Thor himself, again and again at every Ragnarok. The three of them had been as vicious as their sire, Fenris most especially. "I call you traitor because you are one. Go. I tire of listening to you."
In the mirror, Loki's fingers curled around his neck, the gesture at once both seductive and threatening. She was powerful enough to kill mortal men through their reflections thus. "I am not your enemy this time, Thunder God, despite ample provocation," she said, the words still something close to a snarl. "How many times must I swear it?"
Of a sudden, Thor felt tired, the sort of tiredness that weighed on the soul and made him think longingly of the Odin sleep and letting Don Blake face the world in his stead for a while. "You may swear it a thousand times, with any oath you care to name, and I will not believe it. You are kinslayer and oathbreaker and your word means nothing to me. Nothing."
Loki leaned in and licked the edge of his reflection's ear with a long, pink tongue. "I would be your friend, Thunder-god," she purred, as Thor suppressed a shudder. "The halls of Valhalla must be empty without Sif beside you."
Enough. Thor stepped to the side, pulling his reflection away from hers, and forced himself not to rub at his ear. Loki had bedded everything from giantesses to stallions in order to further her ends, he reminded himself. She was not truly interested in him, not in that way. Not like Amora. "Your friendship comes at too high a cost, stepbrother."
Jarvis would be upset were he to break the mirror. Thor settled for turning his back on it and leaving the room in search of some place deeper within the tower, without mirrors or windows. He was careful not to look into any reflective surfaces on the way.
"And then he said that there had been complaints from parents that I wasn't a good role model, and they were going to have to reject my offer to volunteer and have someone else fill in during that time slot."
Tony didn't respond. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lab, fiddling with a partially assembled anti-teleportation device, his head bent forward over a laptop. There were two StarkTablets lying on the floor on either side of him; a single portable computer was apparently an insufficient replacement for having the Extremis running at full capacity. He typed something into the laptop, machine-gun-fire fast, muttering, "If I increase the strength of the energy field until it can penetrate lead or two feet of concrete, the radiation it gives off goes above fifty millirems, and that's unacceptable."
"You're not listening, are you." Steve said.
"No, I'm listening," Tony said absently. He rubbed at his forehead with one hand, reaching for a tablet with the other. "You should sue them."
"That wouldn't solve anything." All the lawsuits Stark Industries' legal department could dream up wouldn't change people's attitudes. According to an unspecified number of parents whose children attended PS 58, an 'openly gay' superhero was not family friendly enough to be involved in their after school art program for struggling students.* Steve suspected — hoped — that only one or two people had actually complained, but apparently even one concerned and angry parent had been enough.
It wasn't surprising, exactly, especially given the response Peter had received from the school district when he'd revealed himself as Spiderman, but it was still disappointing. It probably didn't help that the press had still not gotten tired of the shocking revelation that he and Tony were a couple, something they seemed to find more newsworthy than anything the Avengers had actually done over the past month, which only seemed to spur various self-appointed 'moral guardians' on. The last time he'd called the team in LA, Simon had answered the phone with "West Coast Avengers; we don't give interviews about Tony Stark's sex life." He'd been embarrassed and apologetic when he'd realized who he was talking to, killing Steve's hope that he'd recognized the Avengers Mansion's number on the caller ID and was only joking.
"You'd run out of money and lawyers long before the world ran out of idiots," he told Tony.
Tony lifted his head, putting the tablet down again. "I thought I was the cynical one."
"It's the twenty-first century; people should be better than this!" He knew it was ridiculously naive as soon as he said it; for all the social changes for the better than had happened while he was on ice, human nature itself never changed. He had known what they were letting themselves in for by making their relationship public, but he hadn't been able to stop himself from hoping that people would be better than his expectations. They'd failed to be on more than one front. "It's not just this, it's... you've seen what that columnist in the Post has been writing about all those mutants getting their powers back." Newspaper columnists calling for a return to mandatory registration of superhumans because of "the renewed mutant presence" was just a mildly irritating symptom of a much larger problem. Violent crime had been steadily rising all over Manhattan and the parts of Brooklyn closest to the East River for weeks, but the string of attacks on visible mutants and people who happened to look vaguely like they might have been mutants in Staten Island couldn't be blamed on Chthon's influence, unless his reach extended even farther than they'd assumed.
Tony was poking at the anti-teleport device again. Had he been this bad at putting work down for five seconds before the Extremis? "I try to avoid the New York Post. Do they still run that awful picture of me from six years ago every time they mention me?"
"This isn't something to joke about, Tony."
"Just try to ignore it," Tony said, his voice tired. "They've been recycling the same anti-repeal articles since this summer, and they'll probably keep doing it until the primaries start in the spring."
And in the meantime, people were being hurt, and the Post's editorials were encouraging it. Steve gave in to the impulse to pace — Tony wasn't looking at him anyway — and made a circuit of the lab, picking his way around a quinjet engine, partial suits of both Iron Man and War Machine armor, and a half-dozen pieces of welding and machining equipment. A purple tuft of feather that looked suspiciously like part of one of Clint's arrows was caught on the corner of Tony's drafting table; Steve pulled it free, smoothing the barbs back together.
"The public will start to trust superhumans again," he said, as much to remind himself as anything else. "They already have. This is just a temporary setback."
"Right," Tony agreed. He picked up a small tool and made a few minuscule adjustments to a piece of circuitry. "Maybe if I add more shielding..."
His laptop made the pinging sound that announced a new email, the tablet chiming in so closely afterward that the sound was almost a single electronic chirp. Tony glanced at it, then groaned, rubbing a hand over his face. "I've gone over that contract three times already," he muttered through his fingers. "What do they want to change now?"
Contract? "It's eight-thirty at night. Couldn't that wait until morning?"
"Apparently not," Tony said. He kept rubbing at his face, fingertips pressing into his temples. "And it's not eight-thirty in Japan."
"You have a headache." It came out sounding like an accusation. "And you didn't come to bed last night, or the night before," he added, trying to soften his tone. "You can get back to them tomorrow."
"I was planning to," Tony said, not quite snidely. "I caught a couple of hours of sleep at the office today, at lunchtime. I can go to bed after I finish this for SHIELD and go over today's security scans from the cathedral and run a probability scan on where the next subway accident is likely to be." Which meant he'd skipped lunch.
Even with a healing factor, pushing himself like this would have been wearing Tony down, and without it, he was going to end up working himself to the point of collapse.
"If you don't get some sleep, I'm going to get Jan to take you off active duty until-" Tony had his eyes closed, Steve realized, and was frowning thoughtfully, fingers still pressed against the side of his face as if to hold his skull together. Steve stopped pacing abruptly. "Are you using the Extremis?"
Tony's eyes snapped open, and he glared at Steve. "No. I am closing my eyes because my head hurts and my eyes hurt from staring at computer screens all day, which I used to not have to do. Contrary to what the Post and the Bugle have been printing about me, I do have some self-control."
"You promised you wouldn't-"
"I know," Tony interrupted. "I haven't touched the damn thing despite how much easier it would make getting through the work day or how much it means to our ability to monitor Chthon's effect in the city. You said my word was good enough for you, so stop asking!"
Steve took a deep breath, throttling back irritation. "I only ask because I'm worried about you."
"Apparently because you don't trust me," Tony snapped back.
"With your own health? No, I don't." When did this turn into a fight?
"Well, that's flattering." From the tone of his voice, Tony was more than willing to have this fight, and there was something oddly satisfying about hearing the confrontational edge in his voice, and seeing him toss down the micro-tool he'd been holding and shove himself to his feet. Even obviously tired and headachy, with circles under his eyes and late-night stubble blurring the edges of his goatee, he moved gracefully. "I gave you my word, Steve."
After they'd shouted themselves hoarse, Steve decided, he'd drag Tony to bed and wear him out further with make-up sex. Then maybe he'd get the sleep he was too stubborn and self-destructively stupid to get on his own. "Your word isn't worth as much as it usually is when it comes to the Extremis. Or taking better care of yourself, apparently. If this is you not trying to hurt yourself, how did you make it to thirty-five?"
Tony's eyes narrowed, and his left hand curled into a fist. "I did my best not to get past twenty-seven, but you and Rhodey and Bethany thwarted me."
The prospect of a nice, loud argument vanished as the sick thrill of fighting with Tony soured in his stomach. "Don't joke about that."
"About what? Being a suicidal drunk for most a year?" Tony flung both arms out in a needlessly dramatic gesture. "Why not?"
"Because it's not funny," Steve said — shouted, really. The labs were soundproofed; he could yell as loudly as he wanted. He took a step closer to Tony, into his personal space, where Tony would have to look up fractionally to meet Steve's eyes. "And we didn't stop you. You stopped yourself. When you're determined to destroy yourself, you don't let anything get in your way, especially not the people who care about you."
"Well, then we're lucky that's not what I'm trying to do right now, aren't we?" Tony shoved past Steve roughly, his shoulder colliding with Steve's. It would have been the work of a split-second to grab that both shoulder and his wrist and put him in an arm lock, but that would have taken the fight into physical territory, and even angry, he knew that wasn't a good idea. He could almost see Tony rounding on him, punching him in the jaw, and then thoroughly losing it as he had some kind of flashback to the hallucinations he'd suffered while under the influence of AIM's toxin.
"I'm too busy trying to run my company and pull my weight on the team and keep the people in DC who hate me even more now that I've debauched Captain America happy to have time for anything else," Tony was snarling, as he snatched his laptop and tablet off the floor. "Get out of my lab. I have work to do."
"Fine," Steve threw back. "Gladly. When you pass out on your workbench, I won't come looking for you." He turned his back to Tony and stomped toward the elevator, stabbing the 'up' button viciously and wishing it came equipped with a door he could slam. The quite swish of the elevator doors closing wasn't nearly as satisfying.
The elevator started to climb, and Steve glared at his distorted reflection in the polished metal doors and silently cursed at himself. He'd come down here hoping to make himself feel better, and maybe convince Tony to take a break long enough to eat dinner. "Good luck with that," he told himself. "You sure handled that one well, Rogers." Why did Tony have to be so stubborn? So infuriatingly flippant about his own well-being? So good at knowing exactly which buttons to push to turn what should have been a simple argument into something nasty?
The elevator doors opened with a discrete, expensive-sounding chime. It was a far shorter ride than it had been in the tower, but by the time he stepped out into the ground floor hallway, Steve's frustration had shifted focus from Tony to himself. Why had he let himself get sucked in to such a pointless argument? He knew Tony hadn't been using the Extremis — if nothing else, he wouldn't have been typing so fiercely if he had been — but he still couldn't help worrying, or the momentary flash of suspicion he felt whenever Tony closed his eyes and rubbed at his face or temples while working on something. He'd seen that gesture so often while they had been trying to take down the Red Skull and the Mandarin, when Tony had been so completely and continuously immersed in the Extremis that he'd forgotten to eat, stopped sleeping, and begun having the first few of what had become a long series of nosebleeds.
Sitting around kicking himself and moping wasn't going to accomplish anything, Steve decided. He might as well go find something productive to do and kick himself and mope while doing it.
He'd been telling himself that he was going to unpack the things Jarvis had boxed up while he was gone 'eventually' for months now, and Tony had started to complain about tripping over them. Maybe he should go through a couple of boxes; by the time he was finished, Tony would probably have calmed down.
The half-dozen boxes still stacked in the corner of his and Tony's room had acquired a thin layer of dust, and a few clumps of the orange fur that seemed to coat everything in the house these days-Patton shed almost as much as Beast had. The first box he opened was full of books, the ones he'd looked through when they had first started to move in and then never gotten around to actually putting on shelves. He'd been meaning to give Bucky that copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn back for over a month.
As little as Steve had left from his life before the ice, Bucky had even less. He shouldn't have let this sit for so long.
Everything smelled of dust and old paper, and half the paperbacks had cracked spines and yellowed, dog-eared pages. Half of them had come from the Strand, or other second-hand book stores, because you couldn't find Rafael Sabatini, Fritz Leiber, or Grant Stockbridge anywhere else. Or Victor J. Banis, whose books didn't have to be carefully hidden behind something safely boring-looking anymore. Tony might mock his taste, but he was hardly going to complain about the content.
Two-thirds of the bookshelves were already filled with Tony's books, carefully shelved by subject. Steve slotted his own in and around them, deliberately re-arranging everything alphabetically by title. It would probably take anywhere from days to weeks for Tony to actually notice, but when he did, the whining about 'why is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea shelved right next to Max Plank's Treatise on Thermodynamics?' would be worth the effort.
The next box was clothing, which Steve closed back up to go through later, followed by a box of items that had once decorated his DUMBO apartment. A vintage ad poster for war bonds; an old radio that Tony had promised to fix up for him and never gotten around to; a framed photo of Steve and Sam in costume, back when Sam had still worn red and green; one of Tony's old helmets, autographed to 'the only person whose head is harder than mine.'
There was a small earring caught in the corner of the box, a silver ball on a straight post, missing the earring back. Sharon's. She'd helped him box up his stuff when he'd moved into the warehouse in Dumbo, then helped him unpack.
He set the earring carefully on the bedside table, then reconsidered and tucked it in his pocket where Patton couldn't get at it.
When he reached for the next box, picking it up to set it on the bed for easier access, it was unexpectedly heavy. How many books had he had?
Like all the other boxes, this one was unlabeled. The packing tape holding it closed had been sliced open and taped over again at least once, and was curling up at the edges. Steve didn't bother with the box cutter this time, just gave the edge of the right-hand flap a sharp jerk.
The tape snapped, the flap unfolded, and Steve stared down at a framed pen and ink drawing of an Avengers quinjet. The glass in front of the drawing was cracked, and one corner of the paper was scorched, but it wasn't so damaged that he couldn't recognize it immediately. He would have known that particular drawing anywhere.
The perspective on the wings was wrong, among other things, and he'd asked Tony not to hang it in Stark Tower's lobby, telling him that he could draw something better, something that wouldn't make him cringe every time he walked in and saw it hanging over the reception desk in all its slightly lop-sided glory. Tony had insisted that he liked it, and put it up anyway.
Steve picked it up, careful of the broken glass. Underneath it was a framed pen and ink sketch of the city skyline that had once hung in the tower's kitchen.
He'd thought Tony had thrown that out along with the rest of the drawings and paintings that had once decorated Stark Tower, when he'd tried to erase Steve's presence in his life during the registration fight by erasing all evidence of him from his living quarters. Why had he kept these two when all the others had been disposed of?
Because, Steve realized as he lifted the picture frame out to reveal the smaller items under it, he hadn't disposed of them. They were all here. Every piece of Steve's art that had once hung in the Avengers tower or Tony's office, from pencil and ink sketches to charcoals to watercolors. At the bottom of the box, two half-filled sketch pads sat on top of a stack of loose bits of paper — sketchbooks he'd left behind when he'd left the team, the cartoon of the Avengers as characters from the Wizard of Oz that Jarvis had once had tacked to the front of the refrigerator, even doodles that Steve had tucked inside the pages of books he'd borrowed from or lent to Tony and forgotten about.
Tony hadn't destroyed it. He'd kept it, all of it.
Steve stared down at years' worth of his own work, spread across the bed, and wasn't sure how to feel.
Tony had boxed all of this up and hidden it away, like something shameful. Or something precious; Steve himself wouldn't have bothered keeping those stupid scrap paper doodles at all, much less reverently packaged them away between layers of tissue paper.
It probably should have been creepy, but instead Steve found himself blinking hard, touched by the careful treatment of his carelessly discarded sketches in a way he couldn't describe.
Damn it. It had been easier when he could just yell at Tony, stomp off and sulk for a couple of days, and then pick up afterwards as if nothing had happened. A single stupid fight was hardly going to damage their relationship, but where a good shouting match with Tony had once been just another way to blow off steam, now it was more complicated.
The corner of the Wizard of Oz drawing was crumpled. Steve carefully flattened the soft, slightly yellowed paper out.
He'd drawn this years ago, not long after he'd joined the Avengers. Long before Wanda had been possessed — she and Pietro had still been with Magneto then — and before Hank's problems had started. Tony's drinking hadn't gotten bad yet, and... and Tony had also been hiding a serious and potentially fatal heart condition, and Steve himself had still been shaken up from the war. Hank's powers hadn't worked properly half the time, and they'd all been so new at what they were doing that Jan had nearly died just months after they'd formed the team.
It never did any good to romanticize the past. It usually wasn't that different from the present, and in some ways, it had been worse.
What was he going to do with all this art? The framed pieces should probably go back on the walls. Unless Tony didn't want them there — he was the one who'd taken them down in the first place. Probably because he'd been sulking, just the way Steve had been when he'd come stomping up here and re-arranged all of Tony's books.
Steve rubbed at his face with both hands, just managing to stop himself from getting dust in his eyes. He'd as good as announced that he didn't trust Tony. There were things Steve didn't trust Tony to do, or not do, but he'd never doubted Tony's word, or the fact that he could always, would always be able to trust Tony at his back when it counted.
He wasn't going to go downstairs and apologize, he told himself. He'd had a point, and completely justified reasons to worry.
He'd wait until Tony finally dragged himself out of his lab and came back up here. Then he would apologize.
"I will skin her slowly," Doom muttered to himself. If SHIELD did in fact possess the Dee manuscript, they would guard it all the more closely now that Sin had so spectacularly tried and failed to seize it from them.
Winter was approaching, and the months until the spring equinox ended his narrow celestial window of opportunity were fast slipping away. The book was not his only option — there were powerful forces that might be willing to lend their aid against the Sorcerer Supreme — but all alternative involved compromises Doom would rather not make, and debts he preferred not to incur. Sin's bungling had set him to investigating still other avenues for breaking or sliding around Strange's protections to claim the spear, and some of those might eventually yield fruit, but it would take time.
Time was limited, however, and the need to divert some of his attention away from his plans was a constant hindrance. Still, Latveria would not rule itself.
The Latvarian franc had fallen against the euro, he saw, as he read the latest report from one of his more loyal ministers. Completely unacceptable; he would have to arrange for several bombings in France and Spain, and perhaps a bubble on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. That should bring world finances into a more appropriate state. Perhaps the assassination of the president of one of Greece's major banks...
"I believe the Avengers have something you desire."
The voice came from directly behind him, low and sultry and unmistakably feminine.
Doom spun around, bringing a weapon to bear on the source of the sound. The laser fire sparked harmlessly against an invisible shield, and the woman behind it smirked at him.
He considered her for a moment, taking in the green gown, the larger than life stature, and the great, curving pair of golden horns that topped her headdress. Her face was unfamiliar, but...
"Loki," he said flatly. "What brings you to this place? I took precautions to prevent anyone from teleporting in." He had not designed them with a god in mind, even a minor one, but they should at least have given him a warning. Alarms should have sounded, defenses been triggered.
"And had I been a mortal mage, or some pathetic human scientist, I'm sure they would have worked." She gestured airily at the laser pistol still trained right between her breasts. "Why don't you put that away, Victor von Doom? I'm here to help you. My enemies have something you need, and you can give me access to something I greatly desire."
It grated to follow another's suggestions, but Doom did as she said and lowered his weapon. It was useless anyway. "Baldur's Bane will be mine. You lost any claim to it long ago."
"And how do you plan to obtain it without the proper spells? I know where the grimoire you seek is, mortal. Chaos is my element; no artifact infused with it can be hidden from me. And for only a small price, I will tell you where you may find it."
Did she think him as blindly stupid as Richards? "What price?" he sneered. "My soul? My eternal servitude?" He would find the grimoire on his own in a matter of weeks, with no need to sell his allegiance to any more dark gods.
Loki raised an eyebrow. "I have no need of human souls. No, what I propose will cost you nothing. I will aid you in getting the spear, and then you will give its power to me."
A fool's bargain. Loki must be desperate to regain the power the spear held; how much had she lost when Valhalla had fallen? "And how would I benefit in this little scenario?"
She smiled, revealing teeth just a little too sharp to be human. "You would have the gratitude of a god. After I reabsorb the spear's power and use it to slay my step-brother and assume the throne of Valhalla, the Odin-force will belong to me. I will have power beyond your imaginings, and the ability to grant you great favors."
"I can imagine quite a bit of power." The mask did not permit him the luxury of a sneer, but Doom had had years to practice conveying emotion with his voice. "I do not need your aid to gain possession of the spear; once the book and the ritual it contains are mine, all will fall into my hands. Why settle for the favors of a god when I can become one?"
Loki swept the heavy fur cloak she wore back over her shoulder, revealing a dagger long enough to serve as a short sword tucked into a heavy, golden belt, and crossed the room toward him, coming uncomfortably close. Despite her lush curves and the revealing neckline of her gown, she moved like the warrior she was; she clearly intended to intimidate him rather than seduce.
It was not often that Doom found himself matched for sheer physical and magical power, though both circumstances were far more common than his being matched in intellect. Even so, if Loki thought something as childish as looming over him would secure her a psychological advantage, she was an even greater fool than he had previously assumed.
She leaned in toward him, and Doom found himself staring up into ice-green eyes that were anything but foolish. "Even with the powers of a god, you cannot stand against Chthon."
Chthon? Doom felt an unwelcome sinking sensation at the name. Loki could be dealt with once he possessed the spear, as could Strange, and several of the dark powers Doom owed unfortunate debts to. Chthon was another matter altogether. If he were interested in Doom's spear, it would complicate matters considerably.
Loki smiled slightly; it was too much to hope that she hadn't noticed the way Doom had stiffened upon hearing Chthon's name. "He plans to use the spear's power to return himself to this dimension and crush it beneath his feet. His pawn is on the game board as well, and you will find him an even deadlier opponent than myself."
Inarguably true, but, "If he can defeat gods, how do you plan to deal with him?" Doom demanded.
Loki's left hand brushed the hilt of her dagger. "I have ways."
She looked larger than life, leaning casually against the edge of Doom's desk as if she owned it. Some trick of otherworldly power made her seem more real than her surroundings, turning the rich gleam of the desk's polished wood dull and the glow of the LED desk lamp thin and watery. The barbaric splendor of all that armor and fur should have looked silly alongside the sleek, expensive computer and other electronic equipment. Instead, she wore it with as much aplomb as Doom did his own armor.
He was not impressed. "I doubt that," he said. "You've never been able to defeat Thor, and the only god you ever slew, you killed by trickery. You need my help as much as I need yours, or you would not be here." Now that she was here, however, her presence opened up intriguing new avenues of possibility.
"Do not underestimate trickery," she snapped, and beneath his mask, Doom smiled. Lesser minds were so easily manipulated. At least Loki, unlike Sin, represented something of a challenge.
"I do not. And you should not underestimate me. You wish to rule Valhalla, Trickster. Must you do it alone?"
Loki gave him a long, speculative look. "I would prefer to," she said, "but ruling by another's side would be better than kneeling at the Thunder God's feet as his humble subject."
"Then kneeling to that idiot? Anything would be." He reached out and placed one mailed hand over hers — accounting for his gauntlet, their hands were nearly the same size. That failed to be as off-putting as it perhaps ought to have been; power, in any form, was always more attractive than weakness. "Give me the spear, and when I have ascended to godhood, I will face Chthon at your side. Once we have sealed him away from this realm once more, we can kill Thor together and rule Valhalla and the earth itself as king and queen."
And Reed Richards would finally have to acknowledge that Doom was his superior in every way that mattered. It would make the even the months of waiting patiently at Loki's side until he could eventually betray her and rule alone sweet.
Perhaps he would have Richards kneel naked at the foot of his throne with a chain around his neck. But only if he begged for his worthless life first.
Loki stared first at Doom, then down at his hand where it touched hers, staying silent just long enough for Doom to begin to fear that he had overstepped. Then she met his eyes, a cruel smile on her lips. "This plan of yours has merit, Victor von Doom. You have ambition, you lust for power. And, of course, you plan to betray me and rule alone." She leaned down, until her lips were inches from his mask, and purred, "I like that."
There was nothing to be gained through timidity. "As you will no doubt plan to betray me," he agreed.
Loki made a faint, pleased humming noise, and her smile deepened. "I am the rotten ice that breaks under men's feet. I am the fire that burns the hand that wields it. Betrayal is my nature. Just as it is yours." She pulled her hand free of Doom's and straightened from her slouch against the table, closing what little distance there was between them in a single step. "Take off the mask, and let me look on the face of the man who will rule at my side."
The smile froze on Doom's lips. She didn't intend to kill him. She had accepted his offer. She was reaching for his mask.
He turned his head to the side, away from her hand. "I think not."
Loki laughed, the sound sharp and mocking. "I have spent centuries chained to a rock in Hell. I have slept in the arms of giantesses. My children are called monsters. Do you think I will balk at a few mere scars?"
One cold hand gripped his jaw, just under the edge of the mask, holding him in place like a vise. Doom started to grab for her wrist, then made himself stop. Failing to meet her challenge would be showing weakness. He was Victor von Doom, and he did not back down from a challenge; he had revealed his bare face before when it served his purposes, and he could do so again.
He reached up, brushing Loki's free hand aside, and removed the mask himself.
The air was cool against his skin — he had not bothered to turn on the heat in the hotel room, since by Latverian standards the weather was still warm — and the feel of it made his face itch, as if he could actually sense Loki's eyes moving over his scars.
She pulled him towards her, nails digging into the edge of his jaw, and kissed him.
The kiss was long and hard, almost bruising, and when she pulled back several long moments later, Doom could taste blood from a stinging bite to his lower lip.
"If you even think about killing me and wearing my skin," Loki hissed, her breath hot against his bare cheek, "I will make you scream as no mortal man ever has before you die."
Doom smiled, the sting of his torn lip still sharp, and kissed her again.
*The NYC public school number was picked semi at random based on a Tales of Suspense issue number. If there's an actual PS 58, we're sure the parents and administration are good, principled people who would all be thrilled to have Captain America talk to their students regardless of sexuality.
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven | Chapter Twelve | Chapter Thirteen | Chapter Fourteen, part one | Chapter Fourteen, part two | Chapter Fifteen | Chapter Sixteen | Chapter Seventeen | Chapter Eighteen | Epilogue
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The Tony and Steve part was also really nice. I really adore the way you guys write them. They're in love, but of course there will be fights over some real problems and personality clashes. And Steve finding the box with the drawings! (Of course Tony saved them; he's ridiculously sentimental about stuff like that. I was flashing on him buying Steve's old Avengers card by proxy when Steve discovered that even his doodles were saved in between tissue paper.)
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Of course Tony saved them; he's ridiculously sentimental about stuff like that.
*grins* He saved them all, including the little doodles, but it's actually Jarvis who packed them all up neatly for him (way back in the beginning of RR&R when he still thinks Steve is dead, Tony tells Jarvis to take all Steve's art down off the walls and burn it, because he can't handle seeing it anymore. Jarvis put it in storage for him instead, because Jarvis is a) smarter than Tony about these things and knew he'd want it again someday, and b) also sentimental).
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2. There is, in fact, a PS 58 (http://www.ps58.org/), which is, in fact, in Brooklyn. It's quite a nice school, from what I've heard of it. Schools in NYC tend to be very tolerant, gay-wise, especially in neighborhoods as rich as Carroll Gardens/Red Hook. Marvel Comics!NYC is a bastion of ridiculousness, though, so I tend not to identify with it, even as a native New Yorker. Especially as a native New Yorker.
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Of course there is. That's what we get for just pulling a number from old Tales of Suspense issues without actually looking it up (Carroll Gardens is practically walking distance from our apartment, too).
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And Steve and Tony... Silly boys, but I just love them ♥
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http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/24/Q058/default.htm
Oh! Tony would like it too, they have a special program for Lego Robotics!
http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/24/Q058/AboutUs/Overview/Special+Programs.htm
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And it's nice to see Thor move on from his grudge. He is, after all, a mostly sensible guy, even if one with a temper.
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Which maybe is a strange thing to say, because Steve and Tony argued, but... I enjoyed it. It was so them. You could see they love each other and are frustrated at the same time.
I love your Thor.
Loki and Doom, though? Ominous.
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I am now off to read. Will wax poetics later :D
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I also had a question for you guys; do you have any plans to continue with the classic universe series? I'd understand if not, you did leave it at a very good conclusion but I would be thrilled if there's more :) I absolutely adore that series and I reread it regularly.
Thanks for still writing awesome 616 fics, there's not enough of them ^^.