Chapter Text
Tony Stark was dead.
No-one had any idea he was, of course, since this man who looked like him, dressed like him and answered to his name was still walking around in the world, giving snappy remarks and drinking scotch like it was water. But that wasn't him. Not really. That was a ghost. A haunting. A poltergeist, ready to tear shit apart.
Tony Stark had died somewhere in the depths of unknown, uncharted space, carrying a nuclear warhead on his shoulders.
The ghost thought it might have been in the moment that call to Pepper failed to connect. When the last light flickered out inside that helmet. And it might very well have been so, although the ghost didn't really care. It had only one thing on its mind.
Unfinished business.
That's the thing with ghosts, isn't it? The thing that creates them?
The ghost of Tony Stark often dreamed of that visit on the other side of the worm hole. It also often dreamed of a sidewalk coming up to meet him. And in the dreams, that meeting took place. No suit came to snatch him out of the air. It was all just him and the concrete, up close and fucking personal.
He might be dead, but the ghost was starting to think that was actually an advantage. Because the real, living Tony Stark would have stood by and let his unfinished business be taken away, where it could never, ever be finished. While the ghost refused to.
Because the unfinished business had a name and a face, and another thing coming.
This wasn't over. Not by a long shot.
And until it was, the ghost of Tony Stark could never rest in peace. He would walk the earth, wishing his own death avenged, forever if he had to, and nothing else mattered.
His unfinished business was Loki, and by the sheer force of his will, the perseverance reaching from beyond his non-existent grave, the ghost of Tony Stark had been granted his last living wish.
Loki belonged to the ghost now.
Left in the hands of a poltergeist, ready to tear shit apart.