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- TONY
Tony doesn’t sleep.
He tries to. He sits in the bed and forces himself to close his eyes, but seconds later, he snaps up at the rustle of Pepper shifting in the bed next to him. He’s sometimes convinced in the wee hours of morning that the glow of the activated suits by his bed are eyes: monstrous eyes that leer like the Cheshire Cat, or the harsh flash of tungsten industrial lamps in his face, the sensation of a rotted car battery attached to his chest.
He’s certainly not sleeping tonight.
Behind his eyes, Amora is screaming something, and buildings are falling on him. Doom is peeling off his mask, but all that is underneath is smoking, raw flesh: charred and blackened. Ultron stands above a writhing mass of robotic bodies, squirming around each other like a bowl of maggots, crawling from holes in the wall on all fours and cocking their heads, blinking technological buttons twitching—flashing in the gloom. Loki…
Loki is staring at him with wide, gouged-out eye sockets, blood pooling from the holes in his skull like a half-tipped wine glass. Loki is laughing, smiling with murder in his eyes—Loki is curled into a couch, shaking like a blender at high speed.
There’s something looming on the horizon, looming with thick hands and dark eyes. He almost looks like Obadiah, and his expressionless face is a classical painting of memitem, destroying angels. Raw power…and haunting, cold, thick fingers press to the back of Tony’s neck—
He sits up, gasping. One hand is clenching the backboard of the bed frame, the other clutched to his chest. The arc reactor buzzes under his arm, and between his fingers, the bright blue glow turns the veins inside his hand purple.
“Sir?” Jarvis asks. He jolts, and tries to pretend he didn’t. “Are you well? Would you like some light?”
“No,” Tony shakes his head and combs back his nightmare-sweaty hair with a hand. His fingers are clammy. “No, don’t worry about it.” He forces himself to breathe in through his nose. “I’m just going to go grab some water.”
“It is exactly 3:30 A.M, sir.”
Tony looks over on the other side of the bed. In the gloom, all he can see in the color of Pepper is the faint glimmer of her hair. Her face is turned to the side, her expression loose with well-gained dreams. One hand is folded under her head, and the other trails off the side of the bed. God, she’s so beautiful. Tony is afraid to come too close: she looks like paintings of old British queens. Untouchable and underlaid with gold.
“Yeah, sure, whatever.” He scooches to the end of the bed, and levers himself upwards with a grunt. “Get the coffee machine started, won’t you? If I’m not going to sleep, I might as well get things done.”
“Very well, sir.”
He stumbles down the hall, absently regretting not getting those heated floor tiles back in 2015 that Pepper had found a deal on. That would be sick. He’d turn it way up and make the Avengers play a literal game of The Floor is Lava.
On second thought, that would suck. He doesn’t want to do that.
The lights in the hall flicker on as he walks through it, courtesy of Jarvis, but stay at a low yellow tone. To his right, he can see Clint’s room, which is clearly being well-used. The gap below the door looks like has a night light on. Clint, heroically, can't sleep without a night light. Down a few doors is Thor’s quarters, emanating a loud, rumbling snore. Tony is fairly sure that he’s the only one awake.
But when he reaches the kitchen, there’s someone else already there.
“Lo—oh. Hi,” He stops in the doorway, and the demigod perched at the countertop stool looks up at him.
Loki’s eyes are red; that’s what Tony first notices.
His eyes are red, rubbed raw like he had just been crying or had really bad allergies, and his hair is incredibly curly, which is strange to see. He’s wearing green flannel pants that are oversized enough that they cover his socked feet completely, and a simultaneously large, worn out long-sleeved shirt. His hands are curled around a steaming mug of tea.
“Hello,” Loki replies, watching him. He looks exhausted, and barely manages to hide a little shiver that Tony isn’t stupid enough to miss. “I left your coffee machine alone. Jarvis turned it on and said that he was brewing it for you.”
“Thanks,” Tony says, and then remembers how to walk and makes his way over to the machine. He pulls the mug out from under it and takes a deep whiff of human motor oil. Delicious. He can feel his brain cells turning into fried circuit boards already.
He turns around and leans against the counter. Loki is staring at the mug in his hands with an absent expression, much like every finals week student Tony had the misfortune of (dis)associating with at MIT. “You okay?”
Loki gives a little jolt, like he had forgotten Tony was looking at him. “Yes—fine. Fine. I woke up and I couldn’t fall asleep…I thought I might as well have some tea.” He rubs his thumb down the side of the ceramic handle and makes another odd shiver. “What about you?”
Tony shrugs and sips his coffee, subsequently burning his tongue. “Probably the same.” He puts the mug down. He’ll deal with searing off his taste buds later. Loki looks like he’s going to crack like an eggshell, just barely restraining himself from physically vibrating. Tony has a feeling that it has to do with nightmares, and he does not want to know what Loki’s dreams are like.
“You wanna come down to my lab?”
“What?” Loki’s eyes meet his, wide and confused.
“You wanna come down to my lab? I’m not going back to sleep, and I’m sure you aren’t either, so might as well get something done.”
“And you,” Loki points vaguely at him. “Want me. In your lab.”
“Yep,” He pops the ‘p’.
“Me.”
“You know, when you keep saying it like that, it makes me nervous.” Tony complains, picking up his coffee and putting his hand over the top to feel the heat. “Now I’m starting to reconsider.”
“You should,” Loki protests. “Why are you even here? The last time you spoke to me was to tell me to get my ‘shit’ out of your living room so you could focus on calling your partner without the added distraction of me summoning demons.”
Tony jabbed his thumb at the coffee maker in response. “And for the record, I didn’t know you were summoning demons and I would definitely have let you continue if I did.”
“I wasn’t, I was attempting to turn Fury into a cow over FaceTime.”
“You can do that?” Tony says, aghast.
“I could have, if you didn’t oust me from the premises.” Loki retorts, but his voice lacks the usual barb.
“No, but that’s something you can do? Just, like,” He waggles his hands in a poor imitation of magic, which makes Loki roll his eyes. “Imagine Agent Phil going into his office and just seeing a full grown cow with an eyepatch sitting on the chair. Oh god,” He laughs. “Please come down to the lab with me, I gotta figure out how you do that.”
“I can’t.”
“What?” Tony looks at him more closely. Loki’s eyes are tight around the corners. His fingers rub the mug erratically.
“I just. Can’t.”
“It’s only for a few minutes, come on. I’m not sticking anything into you. Yet.”
“I can’t use my magic right now,” Loki lets out a breath. “It’s—it’s not—it’s too dangerous. I need to reserve any strength I have, now that he’s…” His hand drifts up and he absently bites the skin of his thumb, his gaze distancing. His eyes look a little too wide and too pinched at the same time.
Oh. Tony is not equipped to deal with this. He nods because he doesn’t know what else to do, and leans his elbows on the countertop so he’s a bit closer to Loki. “He…as in the Big Bad?”
Loki gives a motion with his head that could probably count as a nod. His hand drops back down and he moves his other thumb across it in an obsessive fidget. He needs to move his hands, move his body. He can’t stay still. Tony can understand.
It’s clearly taking a toll on him to bring up the exact subject that spurred tonight’s insomnia, and Tony selfishly (hey, he’s never pretended to be anything otherwise), privately wishes he wouldn’t, because Tony doesn’t know shit about dealing with that. “He—I can’t let my guard down now, not so close to the—“
“Endgame,” Tony supplies. Loki frowns at him, tilting his head slightly to the side. “That’s what this guy is, right? Everything we’ve heard from you so far, he’s not like anything else we’ve ever faced. Clearly.”
Loki slowly nods, his fingers twitching on the table. His next breath feels forcefully mediated. “Stark, I…“ He stops and swallows.
“What?” Tony puts a hand over his mug to check the warmth.
“If I don’t—” Loki seems to struggle for words, even though Tony is starting to know exactly what he’s planning to say. “If it doesn’t go well, keep an eye on Thor. He’s…we’ve lost enough already.”
Shit, that’s depressing. Tony tries to deflect back into a zone he’d understand. “Hey, hey,” He garners Loki’s attention back. “What makes you say that? You’re going to survive, you’re going to kick ass with the rest of us and look good during it too.”
“You don’t understand,” Loki says, the faintest tone of pleading in his voice. “The Titan knows me, he’s dug my life out of my mind, nerve by nerve. If I’m not lucky—which I rarely am,” He lets out a dry chuckle. “Some puppet strings may be left over. I don’t know how far his reach extends.”
“Loki, you can’t know that he’s got some ability to mind control you outside the Nine,” Tony argues.
“Yes, exactly!” Loki’s hand slaps against the table like he’s made some point. His chest heaves. “You can’t know. That’s how he works, feeds empty promises and never lets anyone know anything. It’s a horrible dance not to trip on the cords of the web he’s strung up.” The hand twitching on the table goes up and runs through his hair, knotted between strands of black. “I’m putting everything on this plan, and if it doesn’t work, I don’t know what I’ll—“ He stops himself and rubs at his closed eyelids, trying to force his breathing in an acceptable position.
“Well, then we’ve got to go back to our years of Glee and high school theater,” Tony supplies, and sighs at the blank look on Loki’s face. “Come on, you seem like such a theater kid.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Loki says slowly, his brow wrinkling.
“Alright, fine, not the point,” Tony carefully takes a sip of coffee, and then chugs it once he finds it to his satisfaction. “You know the rule of Yes, And? The games are unpredictable. You gotta roll with the punches, my dude.”
“I don’t follow,” Loki says.
“Yes, the Titan guy is a huge, abominable being at the end of the universe.” Tony ignores him. “And! We’re the shit fucking Avengers. Yes, he’s got power we don’t know about, and if we play our cards right, he won’t know ours either.”
“We’re getting handed a shitty deck,” Loki argues, totally playing into the gambling metaphor.
“Loki, listen,” Tony sighs. “If life was a poker metaphor, everyone would be cheating. Life isn’t a poker metaphor. Life’s like Go Fish. And what do we do in Go Fish?”
“I’ve never played Go Fish.”
“Not helping. What do we do in Go Fish? We steal cards from other players right under their noses.”
“You’re obscenely bad at metaphors.”
Tony makes a face at him. Loki makes it right back, and just like that, his tension is bled out, just a little bit. His knuckles are no longer dead-white around his mug of tea.
After a moment, Tony tries again. “Still up for a midnight mechanical spree?”
“Are you going to interrogate me about my scheme to transform the Director of SHIELD into a heifer?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
The corner of his cheek twitches. “Then I believe I shall.”
“Okay, do all Asgardians actually talk like that?”
“Talk like what?” He says innocently, cocking his head like a dog trying to convey no, mom, I didn’t shit on the floor.
“You’re horrible,” Tony waves Loki away, who flashes him a wry grin and gets up to follow him.
As Tony takes a sip of his slightly disgusting coffee and watches Loki pull the palms of the sweater over his hand as he stands up, he wonders how he had ever thought of this guy as the villain.
- STEVE
Loki hasn’t moved a muscle in about…say, fifteen minutes. Steve’s starting to get worried.
Actually, scratch that. Now that Steve is paying attention, there’s a pen in Loki’s hand that is being spun around his first and middle finger, in a blurry speed that is clearly talent taught from centuries of knife work. It’s just Loki’s expression that is so blank, so haunted, that has Steve put down his binder and scooch his chair just a little bit down the table to check in on him.
Natasha is going over a Google Slides presentation up on the projector, which carries pretty much everything they know about this Titan guy, from his closest confidants to the levels of Chitauri foot soldiers sent out first during invasions, all on neat, black and white slides of dark little text and the occasional drawing of floor plans, strategies, notes about some alien weapon.
Almost everything they have comes solely from Loki, who has spent days just talking through entire meetings, scribbling half-assed diagrams on the screen or going silent for uncomfortable periods of time as he tries to remember some little detail about the layout of the Sanctuary. The structure of Thanos’s base was the worst for the Avengers to learn, because Loki knew some very specific details about certain rooms and they all knew why but didn’t dare voice it. Or Loki would trail off in the midst of a briefing and itch some scar hidden under a sleeve, or hesitantly label something because the last time he was there, he was blindfolded or unconscious. Nat and Steve would share looks, but they didn’t talk about it out loud. None of them did.
Eventually, after about a week straight of lectures and tight cacography curdling around the edges of the whiteboard, Loki had exhausted his horribly extensive memory, and Natasha had taken over the actual battle planning, telling Loki to go sit down and drink some water. Loki was too drained and raw to resist. Now Natasha runs the meetings themselves, occasionally asking Loki for some tidbit or a memory boost, but mostly giving him space to write his own notes. Everyone, including Loki, ignored the slight shake to his hands that he often forgot to quell.
Planning the death of a semi-god that could control the universe felt a lot like studying for university finals, if Steve is being honest. So many notes, so much anxiety, a concerning amount of shitty coffee, and not nearly enough sleep.
Thor is sitting on Loki’s other side, just slightly too close, so their legs brush up against each other’s. He has an expression like at any moment he might either throw his hammer at someone across the room, or put his arm around Loki’s shoulder like an overprotective bodyguard.
Loki doesn’t seem to mind. He’s now chewing on the end of his pencil, his knee bouncing against the chair. Then Thor stands up and squeezes Loki on the shoulder before telling him, “I’m going to grab some coffee. What would you like?”
Loki looks up, a dazed expression passing his face. “What?”
“Coffee,” Thor repeats. “Do you want any?”
“Oh,” Loki turns back to his notes, spinning the pencil back and forth again, almost obsessively. “No. No—thank you.”
“Okay,” Thor says, looking a bit worried, and he sends Loki’s hunched form one more glance before he leaves the room.
Loki turns back to his notes. A lick of unwashed black hair falls in his face and he pushes it back behind his ear. Steve can see that his lips are silently moving, muttering something as he jots down another miniscule note.
Steve decides to take his chance. He scoots his chair closer and puts his hand on the arm of Loki’s chair. “Hey.”
He immediately feels bad because Loki jolts and flips the pencil into a motion like he might stab someone with it, whirling around. As soon as he realizes it’s just Steve, his shoulders drop slightly. “Oh. Rogers.” He lowers the pencil and swallows thickly, clearly trying to act nonchalant.
“Are you okay?” Steve sends him a sympathetic look, angling his chair so Loki could have an out, scoot away if he didn’t want to answer.
He finds that he’s fortunate and it’s one of those days that Loki is too tired to push him away. Instead, Loki drops his pencil on the table and rubs at his face with his hand, letting out a long, weary sigh. Steve gives him a moment. It takes a while for Loki to admit anything.
Sure enough, Loki hesitates, glancing at Steve to check if he’s serious before leaning nearer so he’s close enough to whisper away from Natasha’s earshot. “I really want a sandwich,” He admits solemnly.
Steve blinks, and fights the urge to laugh. Here is talk of torture and planning, and Loki’s been craving a sandwich this entire time. He forces his face steady and asks, “What kind of sandwich?”
“I don’t know,” Loki shrugs half a shoulder. “Any sandwich, really. I forgot to eat earlier.”
That explains it. Wait.
“You didn’t eat at all?” Steve asks sharply.
Loki sends Steve a kind of look where he isn’t sure what the correct answer to that question is. “No, I was too…busy. I’ll grab something after the meeting.”
Steve has a plan. “Move over,” He tells Loki, who inches to the side, bemused. Steve pulls out his cell phone under the table. Loki watches in curiosity as Steve swipes around and navigates until he can locate the DoorDash app. Of all the things in the 21st century, Steve might like food that can be delivered straight to your door the most.
“Are you…buying me food?” Loki asks skeptically.
“Absolutely. What do you want?” Steve asks, casually scrolling through the extensive menu.
“I don’t know what there is to want,” Loki blinks, looking bewildered. “There seems to be a vast selection.”
“Well, you got to filter out the good stuff,” Steve explains, and consequently slows down, longingly, once he reaches the selection of pizza, particularly his dearly beloved Brooklyn style. Pizza is one thing that has only gotten better since he went into the ice. “Here…oh! There we go. Sandwiches.”
He holds the phone out to Loki, and lets Loki peruse the menu before he taps at a panini with several types of meat. “I want that one,” He says, and Steve chuckles when he hands the phone back.
“Alright, I’ll get some drinks and we can go sit somewhere to eat it?”
Loki is staring at him. “What?” Steve asks, frowning at the uncomprehending look on Loki’s face.
“We have the meeting,” Loki gestures at Nat, who is locked in a half-debate with Tony and Bruce over some science component. She hasn’t realized that Steve and Loki are ignoring her.
Steve gives him a petulant look like really? “Do we, though?”
Loki stares at him, but to Steve’s silent victory, the corner of his lip twitches up. “I like the way you think,” He says, and drops the pen into his bag.
They both sneak out into the lobby. Steve buys Loki a sandwich, and they spend the next half an hour sitting at a coffee table and talking about how much better Midgardian life had been before the procurement of useless shit like cryptocurrency and fast fashion companies. Steve sits there for a stringent of minutes, his chin propped up against his hand as he watches Loki go off into a rant about the differences between Midgardian and Aesir leather.
In the back of his mind though, he feels uneasy. He isn’t entirely sure why, but he’s had a sick sense of trepidation for the past week, since they started planning the demise of a god. How long will this last, the voices in his head whisper. Will either of you even make it out of this alive?
“—Rogers? Are you listening?” Loki snaps his fingers in front of Steve’s face, who blinks and comes back to reality.
“Yeah,” Steve says stupidly, blinking and refocusing on Loki’s skeptical expression. “Sorry—I zoned out. What were you saying?”
Loki tilts his head slightly. “It’s…not really important. Are you alright?”
“Yep,” Steve says firmly, shaking away the dark thoughts and offering Loki an encouraging smile. “I wanna hear what I missed. Come on.” He likes to see Loki talk.
Loki is actually very entertaining, his hands gesticulating wildly and going off into random tangents about small things he remembers. A rambling entanglement of surprisingly eloquent words. He has an impressive vocabulary for someone who isn’t technically even speaking English. Once Steve offers encouragement, Loki carefully prods his way back into his earlier rant, and suddenly goes off again down the rabbit hole. Steve listens, forgetting entirely about the drink in his hands.
He can’t dwell in the dark spaces, this fear of the future. Even as it creeps up on him, he is not going to let it win. If Steve let every loss punch him in the gut, he wouldn’t have intestines anymore.
He bites back a grin when Loki forgets what a specific word is, and takes a moment mumbling under his breath for the best way to phrase it. For now, he forgets the Titans and growing war, and watches the sun flash through the trees outside the lobby. The photosynthetic light from the branches turns Loki’s hands green, the shade making ripples of dark and light across the table.
It’s beautiful. But not because Steve is trying to snap a mental picture to save later, afraid of the loss. Beautiful because Steve is letting himself breathe.
We’re all going to live through this, he tells himself firmly. Then we’ll look back at and laugh at our fear, wondering how we ever thought we’d lose in the first place.
- THOR
It’s the night before the Endgame, and all through the house, absolutely no one is sleeping and they’re all pretending they are.
Except Loki.
He’s not sleeping, he’s just decided to forgive any pretense of calm and has spent the last twenty minutes pattering around the kitchen of the Stark Penthouse in search of coffee.
His hands shake and he mumbles erratically to himself as he takes down mugs and restocks them in a hyperactive manner. They should be in rainbow order. but when he tries, that looks wrong. Perhapss by the shape of their handle. He murmurs a swear, and just starts jabbing them into the cabinet at random.
“That doesn’t seem profitable.”
He whirls around, nearly dropping a mug on the floor. He just manages to catch himself from swinging a fist at the man standing in the doorway, and halts his arm a few inches from Thor’s nose. Thor blinks.
“Oh.” Loki pulls his arm back. He looks to the cabinet and finds many faults in his organization. He looks away from the cabinet. Thor’s hair has a large and persistent cowlick. “What are you doing up?”
Thor slowly levels him with a gaze that implies that if Loki doesn’t ask, Thor won’t either. Thor reaches around his brother and catches a hold of two more mugs, which he hangs on a silver rack behind the stove. It looks better that way. But now Loki has nothing to do with his hands. Thor lowers himself onto a barstool. They both slouch in heavy silence for a moment. “Do you want to—“
“I keep thinking about what will go wrong.” Loki blurts.
Thor nods. His expression remains placid, but his eyes wander his brother as if watching something come alive that has been dead for a long time.
“I keep mapping out accidents like constellations, Thor. Everything that can and will go wrong. And perhaps it should.”
“Perhaps it should…what?”
“Perhaps…” Loki’s hands drift to his hips, but his gaze remains locked mournfully on something midair. He chews on his inner cheek. “Perhaps I am not meant to live this one. Don’t look at me like that—it makes sense, to a point. My tragic ending, to die fighting. To die for the universe, after all my life is spent despising my place in it. It’s almost poetic.”
“It’s not. It’s bloody sad, is what it is.” Thor looks deeply worried. “You are not marked for death, Loki. You are not our sacrifice.”
“So you would choose me? If it was a choice tomorrow. Between the world and me, you would choose me?” The doubt is thick in Loki’s voice.
“You did, for me.”
Loki seems struck for a moment. He quickly clears his expression, and looks away, one hand fidgeting with the cut of his shirt.
“I do not know if it was a place of virtue or selflessness.” He admits. “And I do not—equate to that,” the words seem to be choked out of him.
“Equate?”
“I am not your equal, Thor. You are…a more logical choice. You have this whole team, you have Asgard. She needs you.”
“Loki, have you considered that I need you?”
“Yes, fine, but you’ll—for lack of a better word—survive, Thor. I was gone for years and there was hardly any noticing. I don’t…your team doesn’t need me, not after this. Asgard is gone, the nobles hate me—Norns, I’m probably not, legally, allowed within a light-year of Earth. These people are strings, Thor, attached to you like orbit. And I am not tied to any of them.”
There is a penetrating silence. Loki had placed his hands on his hips, and now his thumb is tapping a rhythm. His fingernails are chewed up. He slowly drags his gaze somewhere to the right of Thor’s eyes.
Thor opens his mouth. Loki winces. “How dare you.”
“Pardon?” Loki looks so baffled it’s almost funny.
“Do I matter so little to you, Loki? We are brothers. Nay, not by blood, but if blood is what ties me to our murderous sister, I see no legitimacy in blood,” Thor runs a hand back through his hair and lets out a little sleep-deprived laugh. “How dare you! Try to squish me down into an emotion, a fleeting pain. It’s easy for you, if this happens. Which it won’t! You’re dead, Big Brother Thor is sad, but you’re up in Valhalla and he has one less thing to worry about. But how dare you pretend that I will not grieve and grieve you, Loki.
How dare you assume that I do not love you as fiercely as I know you love me.”
Loki is slapped speechless. He mouths something, and almost starts, but swallows it back and shakes his head to himself.
Thor grunts, and gets to his feet, coming around the counter. He stands close to Loki, in front of him, and then puts both hands on the sides of his shoulders. He bends his head towards Loki’s and they knock skulls together in the middle, a ferocious love almost like juvenile rams. Loki’s hands drift to Thor’s shoulders. And then to his back, and then for the first tim in at least two centuries, not counting that once a few months ago, Loki genuinely initiates a fierce embrace, burying his face into Thor’s beefy shoulder. His hands clench the fabric of Thor’s sleep shirt so tightly it could be tearing. Thor wouldn’t care.
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- AFTERWORD
Loki died in the Marjory-Clemense Hospital on Bleeker Street, New York, on June 28th. Just a day after Thanos tried–and failed–to invade New York City. He died with a human oxygen mask strapped to his face, and he died when Thor was just outside the door.
The amount of effort he had spent in their final battle with Thanos (hardly a battle, just a bunch of dirty, desperate people trying to make a god bleed) had wiped him dry. In his determination to save the human race he used to be so intent on obliterating, Loki ripped a hole so deep in the space-time fabric that for a moment, he saw the eyes of another world. He hardly had any seidr left in him, but to weakly send a pulse of warm, green light to the back of Thor’s mind before collapsing.
Thor hadn’t been allowed in to see him yet, when Loki died. He was told there was a chance that he might survive. But the bleeding had been too great.
And so Thor sat on the chair in the lobby, listening to the Beatles, and waiting.
Waiting for a long, long time.