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Tony flinched a little as the Asgardian soldiers let the door slide closed behind him, followed by looking a little offended that they locked him in there with the mass-murdering psychopath without even asking him. “Well…that wasn’t polite,” he said to the prisoner, “Anyway, I owe you a drink.”
The prison was solid stone – all solid squares and light from a non-specific source. All the furnishings, but nothing anyone could hang themselves with or on. It was oddly practical.
“Rarely have I seen a knight who arms himself as easily with spirits and ice as he dons his armor,” Loki challenged from the far corner. His arms were bound in front of him, and he leaned into the wall. He looked subdued, stunned, and shell-shocked, staring into the wall like he was willing a window to be there. “Also, you are glowing.”
“Oh yeah. That,” Tony muttered. The room was lit without light. It was all weird, and a bit eerie, and his arc reactor was glowing a little more than he would have liked. “Don’t worry. It’s not contagious.”
“What purpose does it serve?”
“So, how are they killing you?”
Loki jolted, hands shaking with fear, and Tony almost felt bad, but then Loki glared death in his direction. It vanished instantly, to be replaced by a smirk, a bounce in his step as he moved towards Tony, and a sarcastic bow. “Beheading, if you must know. Normally a traitor of my caliber would have been drawn and quartered or fed to the sacrificial wolves, or, as a sorcerer, I should have been chained to a rock by the sea until the tide took me. The Allfather was kind enough to give me a merciful death.” He spat the word out bitterly.
“That all sounds…gross, actually. I’m sorry I asked.” He noticed the look on Loki’s face and redirected. “That’s supposed to be more dignified, though, right?”
“I do not want dignity,” Loki snarled, long strides bringing him almost to toe with Tony. Amazingly, stupidly, he didn’t back away. “I want my life.”
“Fun fact – so did all those people you killed. You gambled and you lost, it’s really that simple. Now, do you want the drink or should I just keep this for myself?”
Loki stood, staring at him, fingers flexing under the shackles, before forcibly turning away. “Take your drink and gulp until you hemorrhage.”
Tony suddenly wasn’t sure why he’d come. The guy was gonna die tomorrow – he sure as hell didn’t feel bad about it, but he felt responsible. He was reminded that Loki wasn’t the kind of person who reached out or wanted to be reached out to. Tony also reminded himself that Loki had made his own grave, wet with blood and a lousy attempt at world domination. On the other hand…guy was gonna die tomorrow. “You see, I think you did it all because you were just desperate to run from this – to run from your people, your family. You had nothing left; you couldn’t face it, so you ran from it and dug a deeper hole and now, I think you’re exactly where you would have been otherwise, the only difference is that there was a little more destruction.” Tony inclined his head. “Sound about right so far? Good, because I’m just gonna keep talking – say, do you mind if I drink, if you’re not going to?”
“You talk too much,” Loki’s back was still to him, and the words were echoed to him by the room.
“Sometimes I think the same thing, but then I remember I’m adorable, so why the hell not?” Tony moved over to the perfectly rectangular outcropping that passed for a table, placing two glasses down. Nimbly, he grabbed metal container he’d brought the ice in, tossing the perfect amount into each glass. He felt Loki watching him, or rather, he felt Loki glaring at the back of his head while he made the drinks.
“I told you I did not wish to partake.”
“I know. They’re both for me,” he shot back as he poured the scotch. He turned around, both in hand, to find that Loki had positioned himself very sneakily directly behind him. “Are you scary on autopilot now?”
He held up his bound hands…and they were very bound. Tony could see long vines of metal reaching from the shackles to Loki’s fingers, twining them together in a terrible mockery of the prayer position. “As you can see, I cannot hold a glass.”
Scowling, Tony took a drink out of his own glass, and Loki slid over to the stone bench beside the tabletop. “Sorry, couldn’t tell.” He twirled the other glass in his hand, letting the ice clink and jostle musically, casting his eyes nervously from the drink to his doomed enemy. Goddamn it. So much for not wanting to be reached out to. He held the glass in front of Loki’s face. When doubt flashed across his green eyes, Tony sighed heavily. “Please just drink it so we can never speak of this again.”
Hesitating, Loki bent forward until his lips pressed against the glass, watching Tony carefully. Slowly, Tony tilted it upwards, letting the amber liquid touch the other man’s lips. He closed his eyes, suddenly seeming starved, desperate as he gulped the liquor, head tilting further and further. When he coughed a little, Tony pulled back. Loki’s breaths came out in rasped waves, heavy, and he wiped a drip from the corner of his mouth on his sleeve. “Don’t worry. I shall take it to my grave.”
Tony’s own drink turned to ash in his mouth while he finished, placing it on the table.
An awkward silence followed, with Loki gazing off into nothing again and him not knowing what to say to the condemned man he’d helped put there. “I’m honestly not sorry about that, if it means you won’t hurt anyone else.”
“Master Stark, Man of Iron,” Loki began formally, “tell me, have you ever been dragged into the darkness by monsters?”
Flashes of the cave he’d been kept in in Afghanistan came to him, along with the necessary shake along his shoulders and back. “You know I have. It was on the news and everything.”
Loki smiled, bitterly. “I fell into the world-tree, and I saw…things, light and darkness and galactic engines beyond imagining. How could I think your puny race significant, find any individual significant after seeing that? There’s just us, just this, above a shimmering, hungry abyss. Out there, there is no law, no justice, no such thing as good or evil, just the writhing and drumming of the universe.” He smiled, and there was something brutal and manic in it. “Then they found me. They fished me from the nothing. They poked and prodded and tore my secrets from me. I went from the peace of eternity to the hard, cold world of the Chitauri – just me, just them, just being pinned and controlled until I found my mind and told them who I was.”
“They tortured you?” Tony asked, before catching himself. “The soliloquy expects me believe you trying to invade my planet was just Stockholm syndrome? I’m not buying it.”
“No,” Loki replied with a chuckle, rising to his feet again, “that was my survival. The Chitauri were my bane and my balm.” He smirked. “I understood the way of things, then, and found my purpose.”
Those words stopped Tony’s reply, smothered it under a wave of shock. “I found something in the dark, too. I came to a drastically different conclusion with the same material, mind you. It’s like English class all over again.”
Loki was quiet for a long time, processing that.
Tony quietly began gathering up the liquor and glasses. He’d done what he came to do. “You…will you be okay tomorrow? Other than dying, I mean.”
“That is an idiot question,” Loki replied, but the anger lost its edge, and for the first time, Tony could see how wide his eyes were, how scared and uncertain he looked. It made him uncomfortable. He tried to remember that the fucker deserved to fry for everything he’d done. Still, he just wasn’t feeling it.
He ran a hand through his hair. “Well then, I hope your little calling was worth it.”
Loki slid into place next to him, long body close to Tony’s. “No, not as things turned out, but that hardly matters now. Tomorrow, I will have died in the pursuit of power to end all power, and I am proud of that.”
Tony opened his mouth to respond, but Loki shifted himself into position in front of Tony, cutting off any coherent thought he might have had about not believing that load of bull for a second.
“This is as warm as I’ve felt in a very long time,” Loki said. While Tony was still struggling to figure out where the hell he was going with this, Loki pressed his body inwards until they met, catching his lips in an aggressive kiss. Tony was too surprised to protest, and for a few confusing, genuinely tortuous seconds, all he could think about was the taste of burning scotch still clinging to the other man’s lips.
Tony stood, stock-still and uncertain how to react. He knew it was a kiss, and he knew it was a good kiss, which boggled him. Fortunately, a shock of rationality ran through him somewhere between where his blood was flowing and his thinking-brain, and he managed to break away, grabbing Loki’s shoulders and forcibly detaching him.
“Um, okay,” he stumbled as he eloquently gathered his remarkable wits, which were remarkably failing him, “okay, not that you’re not nice and everything. But, you’re, ah, not quite my type…I’m more into redheads.”
Loki looked surprised the instant before a sharp, wolfish grin split his lips and a mad little cackle broke out. “Don’t worry, you may take what you want, and I shall take it to my grave.”
Tony tried to pretend that Loki didn’t look so damn stung by his refusal. He covered it up with a laugh and a bold statement, but Tony realized with a sickening sensation that Loki had literally thrown himself at him because, right then, he had no one else. No other body. No hope of an eleventh hour reprieve. In his own twisted way, Loki had reached out to him, desperate for contact and love and to be noticed.
As a result, he’d left Tony had no choice but to slap it back in his face and run for the hills. The person he needed was also someone who would certainly reject him, and Tony couldn’t shake the feeling that the masochistic little shit had done that to himself, knowingly. It was so much easier to stand on the scaffold and face his death alone justified in thinking no one cared, that even if someone were with him, they wouldn’t deserve the right. Tony hated that he’d allowed himself to be used in another person’s little mind game with themselves, their last personal delusion. Loki forced people to break him, and then blamed them for his downfall.
Tony knew, because in the same position, he wasn’t sure wouldn’t have done the same thing. That scared him. A lot.
“I just figured out why I feel so damn sorry for you,” Tony bit out heading to the door and knocking twice to let them know he was ready to go. “Back home, we don’t execute the mentally ill.”
Loki grinned at his back, sharp, proud, and ultimately arrogant. As the door slammed shut with a thunderous boom, he heard him call out, “See you tomorrow, Stark!”