“Hey, Lokes,” Tony calls out to Loki from across the workshop where he’s currently working on one of his cars. “Out of curiosity, can anyone learn magic, or is it something you have to have an inherent talent for?”
“Mn. To that question I would attribute the argument of fine art. One is both born with innate proclivities, and charged with perfecting the skills with which one is endowed.”
Loki, curls tied loosely at his nape, glances up from the computer that Tony has gifted him; he has learned, with alarming ease, how to become a coder and hacker, and is currently playing with the secure network of a major bank. It’s perhaps fortunate for civilization that the ingenious billionaire has curried his focus.
“ ‘Curiosity,’ he says. Somehow I anticipate a new project. Are you even capable of learning new information and not being somehow constructive with it?”
Tony straightens from where he’s leaning over the engine, looking back at the trickster god with an unrepentant grin. “Nope, not really,” he answers cheerfully, wiping the sweat from his forehead only to leave behind a smear of engine grease in its stead. “Practically none of all this would exist if I did that.”
Grabbing a rag, he wipes his hands off before heading to the nearest sink to clean up properly. “So how do you know if someone is capable of magic? Is it something that makes itself known at birth, or does it come later in life? What is like, actually having and casting magic?” he fires off question after question, curious and genuinely interested in learning whatever the god will share.
The next questions are spoken with the same enthusiastic interest, but there’s more to them than curiosity and a desire to learn everything he can about everything that interests him. It’s more personal from experience. “Is it possible to keep others from actually using magic on yourself? From getting inside your head?”
Loki appraises Tony in his disheveled, dirty, sweaty state, and heartily approves. His sedentary little smirk speaks volumes, but Tony is too busy strutting around his workshop to notice, and that is just fine by the god. For now.
“It depends upon your race, your upbringing, and yes, innate skill. I was discovered by my adoptive father to already possess healthy reserves of magic. But this is standard for Jotun royalty.”
The questions invigorate him: nothing in life makes Loki happier than his one great subject of expertise.
“Ehm, so: it feels like …well it is personal, for each user … for me, it conjures scents and sensations from my mother’s lemon tree, from her formal gardens, where she most often instructed me. As well as … the sensation of standing in a heavy river current, learning how to flow with the current, and harnessing the water to my own will.”
And as for the final question, he lifts a single finger toward Tony.
“That has long been a goal of mine. Since … Thanos. Let me conduct further research, and get back to you.”
Loki, hunkered over as ever at a computer in the laboratory beneath the main floor, is inanimate as a statue. He remains thusly for the longest time.
When he comes to life, the glint in his eyes is uncharitable: hostile.
Beyond anything else, however, it is suspicious.
“Who put you up to this? Barton? Romanoff? Or someone with a less obvious agenda for cruelty? The Vision, perhaps? Tell me what I’ve done, to have this carrot dangled: heartfelt camaraderie from someone I respect? In my long life I have learned it is too good to be true. So why? WHY? Is it FUNNY, Stark?”
It’s been months, years, since Loki erupted in so volatile a fashion. His fair rice-paper thin skin goes blotchy-red with ungainly emotions.
“Is my lonelinessFUNNY?”
Loki’s incredulity only grows, yet it’s transparently evident from the agony on his face that he’s violently torn between skepticism and grateful belief.
“It took me a matter of years to forgive my brother for lesser slights than I have exercised upon you, and you expect me to believe it has taken you mere months of cohabitation to go from loathing me to … . ?”
Another word beginning with “L” dangles on his tongue, but he doesn’t dare speak it. It is too tender, too crassly sentimental, a word for Loki to speak lightly. Indeed, only members of Loki’s own family have ever heard him utter it.
“I am NOT … ! I am NOT the one you WANT.”
You want gold hair, you want a baritone voice fit for commands on the field of battle; you want someone who defends underdogs against bullies the way you do; you want sweetness and patience; you want guileless sincerity; you want compassion.
I am the one they shuffled into side rooms and behind the adults; I am the peculiar, dark, slender one, the one not fully there, the mystery, the liminal, the thing that is laughed at and derided. I am the one who lies to hide, I am the one who holds still to be invisible, I am the one who shifts shape to be uncatchable.
I am afraid.
I have always been afraid.
Ever his own worst enemy, jaw jutting, teeth clenched, Loki waits, having uttered that one final plea. But Stark is twice as stubborn as anyone he’s ever known, and the God of Mischief buckles.
“Al-RIGHT. Alright. I am your friend. I have ever hoped to be, so here. Here I am, here I stay. I do not pledge my bonds lightly, Tony Stark. When I pledge it to you, you should know that death itself cannot get to you without going through my bare teeth first. And I am venomous.”
It is his way of saying, me too, me too. I care for you too.
Tony’s smile is full of compassion and warm affection as breathes a sigh of relief. “You know, I never actually loathed you. Or even hated you. I wasn’t too particularly fond of you after you threw me out the window, but hey, people have done worse,” he offers, his tone jesting even despite being completely serious. Gods know he has endured far worse at the hands of far crueler than anything Loki has ever done to him.
There’s an undeniable look of gratitude in his eyes at Loki’s final words, though he doesn’t quite know how to respond. He’s just glad he hasn’t accidently run the other off. “I… Thank you, Loki,” he says sincerely, brown eyes meeting green as the weight of his words hits him. The promise of protectionin them clear as day, and it’s nearly overwhelming in the relief it grants him.
He doesn’t move, having promised to stay right where he was in the other’s panic, but he does now reach out, palm up in open invitation to the Trickster.
“So, Rock of Ages, how about that drink? I think we could both use one about now,” he offers, his smile quirking into a slight smirk at the tease.
It takes but a moment for Loki’s emotions, ever too large for the still waters of his outward countenance, to cycle back from grief and shame and embarrassment to gratitude and then to amusement, the way rain evaporates into the sunny sky. As water, ever.
His expression, now, is positively wicked.
“How delightful that you remember that moment. I saw you smiling at me, you know, when I spoke those words. One doggedly determined intellect to another, eh?”
He crosses the distance between them, and, only with slight hesitation, claps a hand on Tony’s shoulder.
Loki’s slim lip quirks up at one end, wryly, like a thin pink snake.
“Well, that is one way to greet a god.”
Logan blinks, dumbfounded, before he asks, “A god? Ya don’ look like the big guy in th’ sky t’ me.”
He is however, curious. That’s something that’s always gotten him in trouble. He always wants tot stick his nose into things. He always wants to know how things tick and what happens if the tock instead of tick. What happens if you break something just so.
He knows who Loki is, of course, given that he wasn’t raised in a cave. ( Though the details on where he was raised are a bit blurry he’s almost certain it wasn’t cave. ) Norse mythology was pretty popular in the day meaning he knows who is standing in front of him. What puzzles him right now is the how.
For a protracted silence, the God of Mischief examines the mutant, mentally tallying the knowledge that Logan is in fact one of earth’s shamefully foisted outcasts. Head tilted down, body in a prepared, predatory crouch, favoring magic over daggers, he cradles a ball of lime green energy.
“Wrong pantheon,” he leers. “But I’ll forgive the slight in favor of safe passage, Mister… . ?”
icyxmischief 