Chapter Text
"—ir? Sir." The thump of heavy rock music stops thudding against his ribs. JARVIS' voice is taut and exasperated.
"Hey! I said no-one can override—" A screen blooms in front of his face, a blue-tinged reel of security footage from...
About half a minute ago.
"Uh, JARVIS? What's this?"
"It is urgent. There has been a breach in security, sir," JARVIS' deadpan delivery is punctuated perfectly by the crash on the security footage as a body falls through his roof.
"What?" Tony says, blinking rapidly. He squints at the screen. "Very funny—"
"Should I call an ambulance?" JARVIS asks swiftly. "Scans complete, vitals critical, massive blood loss, multiple fractures and broken—" Tony throws down his tools and darts out the door, mind racing. Someone fell through his roof.
"How the hell—"
"Sir, should I call an ambulance?"
"Yes. Fuck. Do it." Skids to a halt in his living room, where, sure enough, shattered shards of skylight, metal supports, and debris are dusted by a thin coat of plaster. The glass panel that water runs over has shattered, and the floor is choked with broken glass, water, and—and blood. Tony swallows hard, expecting—well, he isn't sure. JARVIS' prognosis hadn't been dead on impact, but it'd been pretty fucking close.
There's a bundle of black and blue on his floor, in the middle of the glass and the water and the blood and the white plaster. It takes a moment for Tony's eyes to process what he's seeing; that he's looking at a person, dressed in a stained-near-black green shirt that's more rags than shirt at this point, an unruly, matted mass of tangled hair down their back, and miles of abraded, bleeding, bruised, and mangled blue skin. Not blue like bruises, blue like blue. Dark, rich blue. "What the fuck," Tony sputters, a little, under his breath, and tries (and almost fails) not to trip over himself as he steps over the wreckage of his living room.
"What's their uh, status, JARVIS?"
"...unchanged."
"Run it again," Tony demands, wincing as he kneels down in the sharp mess that is now his floor, reaching out to grip what looks like an arm. Whatever they are, they're face down on his carpet. Some small, childish part of him is in the back of his brain jumping up and down with glee; an alien has crashed in his living room! The rest of him is vaguely sick and very shaken at the sight of them.
These aren't the kind of wounds you get from falling through a building , Tony thinks grimly, wincing as he makes contact with blood-slick, freezing skin. These look deliberate. Calculated.
He grips a bony shoulder and, after a moment of hesitant thought and JARVIS' reassuring, "No damage to the spine or neck detected, sir," turns them over.
He gets a flash of a tense blue face—of strangely raised lines and dark lashes—when a cruel, far-too-strong hand grips his wrist and vivid red eyes snap open.
Tony thinks most men would've pissed themselves. As it is he settles for an embarrassingly warbled yell and jerking back in instinctual terror.
Then he sees the pain, terror, and fear staring back at him, and his blood pressure levels out just a little. "Shit," he hisses, flexing his fingers; he can feel his bones grinding together. Wild red eyes dart over his face, dark blue lips part with desperate, wet, wheezing breaths, and the hand that grips his wrist is shaking violently, but no less strong for it. "Hey, hey hey hey, it's okay," Tony raises his other hand in what he really hopes is a universal sign for I mean no harm. They jerk, eyes snapping to his hand, chest still heaving fitfully. At least they're still breathing. "I called an ambulance," Tony says, trying to enunciate clearly, and make his tone as clear as he can. What are the chances that blue men that fall from the sky speak English?
Maybe he's just a mutant? Some sort of superhero? Fury mentioned—
They open their mouth, and a foreign series of sounds spill out frantically. Tony's eyes round. Well. There goes that idea.
"Closest match is Old Norse," JARVIS says, before he can ask.
"Closest?"
"Different dialect. Very removed. Archaic."
He can, strangely enough, see the wheels turning behind those red eyes, darting around to try and find JARVIS' voice. "He's an AI," Tony says, even though he knows he's probably not being understood. "Artificial intelligence, his voice comes out of speakers wired into the house." He hopes he can at least distract from the pain until the ambulance gets here—but then, will they even be able to help? Their blood is blue. Tony swallows hard, and tries not to look at the nauseating deformation of obviously shattered ribs and torn open skin and visible bone. Wide, rounded eyes watch him desperately.
Again, they open their mouth, and this time— "Midgarðr." Eyes shut tightly, face twisting into an interesting expression, a cross between agony and exasperated despair.
"Midgarðr is the realm of men in Norse myth," JARVIS says.
"My name—" they say, startling Tony further as the grip on his wrist is replaced with desperate hands clutching at his arms, "—my name is Loki, of Asgarðr—"
A holler interrupts him—and Tony knows enough of those stories to guess he's a him, at least, until told otherwise—and a rather round-eyed couple of firefighters jog into his living room. "Your um, house said...holy shit." Any wonder about JARVIS is quickly replaced by professionalism in the face of how urgent this looks, at least.
Tony watches them go through the steps of strapping him onto a spinal board and then hauling him over the the gurney. He dogs their steps the whole way, but Loki has fallen silent and still.
Not unconscious, though. Those red eyes meet his own, and Tony again sees not fear in them but terror , pure and instinctual and entirely too familiar. "Are you riding along?”, one of the EMTs asks. She sounds surprised, and he tries not to let that sting.
"Yeah," he rasps. "Yeah, I am."
Loki does not like it when the gurney is rolled up into the ambulance. And by he doesn't like it Tony means he locks up so hard that the fucking spinal board cracks under him, startling the EMT's. His red eyes are growing a little hazy, though—heavy lidded, gaze wandering a little more. Tony assumes the blood loss and pain might be catching up to him. "Sedative?" One of the EMTs asks. Another hands Tony a rag, which is when he realizes his hands are slick with blood. The third is helping setting up an IV, and the fourth is staring at Loki like he's, well, either a corpse with a pulse or an alien. Tony can't tell which, given that both pretty much apply. He takes a steadying breath, and looks up just in time to watch the port they're putting in Loki's arm snap clean in two, and Loki rip his arm out of their grip with a raw noise of absolute fucking primal fear. He tries to sit up, feet pushing him back, to get away, though where he would go in a moving ambulance Tony doesn't know. He rips the straps of the damn spine board out of the wood entirely, bone crunching, blood spilling—
"Hey!" He exclaims, "Hey, it's medicine—to help you. To make it stop hurting." Tony, on rather stupid impulse, reaches out to keep him from falling off the gurney entirely.
" Nei!" Loki chokes, staring around like a cornered animal, and that sounds like a negative if he's ever heard one, language barrier or no. Bruised, broken fingers clutching at the arm they'd tried to put the IV in, and he cowers closer to Tony, away from the professionals.
Tony can understand the sentiment. "You're hurting yourself. Lie down. They won't try that again. See?" He gestures emphatically, and the EMT hesitantly puts away the kit.
###
Pain rouses him; it's always pain that rouses him. A different bent of it, sometimes, but always pain nonetheless. He carefully, gingerly inhales, feels the catch-and-pull in his chest, every sickening shift of his ribs, and when he shifts agony seizes every muscle in his body for one long, horrible moment. He opens his eyes what little he can, and finds the violent white of the room dimmed reasonably.
Voices speak to his left, in soft tones. Midgarðrian voices, the words struggling to sift through the All Speak in this haze of pain and death. "—Stark, I figured I'd see you today."
"Am I getting predictable? Damn. Hate being predictable. Never a good thing. How's sleeping beauty?" Stark. Loki mulls over how familiar that name has become, at the measly comfort it brings him. Stark visits him often, providing noisy company in the monotony of agony and white walls and terrible, itching sheets.
"The instruments you provided us with worked better than the last, at least. We've finally made some progress."
"Really?" Stark asks.
"Yes. Though the incisions we make still close very quickly, our surgeons are optimistic—they should be able to at least re-align his ribs and put everything to rights enough that his own healing factor can do the rest."
"So he'll live?"
"We're optimistic," the healer repeats. The light in the room shifts—both the healer and Stark move into his line of sight.
Both freeze when they see him looking at them—and he wonders how they can tell, before disregarding it as irrelevant when Stark's eyes light up. "Back in the land of the living, Roswell?"
Loki frowns as much as his aching face allows, and opens his mouth to correct him, but all that comes out is a dry wheeze. He's taken to remembering Stark's name despite his circumstances, and yet the man can't do him the same basest of courtesies?
He wants to be sourer about it, but Stark leans over and pours him a glass of water, and his ire dissolves. Even when Stark—very carefully—helps him drink from the glass, all he can feel is grateful.
All the others, the healers and their apprentices, Stark's friends—a woman and two men Loki cannot recall the names of—their touch drags his shattered psyche right back there. ...not Stark. Perhaps—perhaps because he was the first person Loki saw. The first kind touch in...in however long. Decades. Millennia. Months. He knows not.
Stark had found the medicine that allowed him to be put under for their "surgeries." To keep him mellow enough that he did not strangle any of the healers—he still feels remorseful for that, shame roiling in his belly when he sees that particular apprentice. "Thank you," he croaks, when the glass is pulled away. Then, disgruntled and hoarse and trying for indignant—can you be indignant when you have no dignity left?—he says, "My name is not Roswell."
"I know," Stark hurries to say, "It's a reference. In '47 there was this—"
Loki senses a tangent coming on, but now that he's lucid enough, and has enough energy to interrupt with questions he wants to seize the opprtunity to do so. Better than dwelling on the constant, breathless ache. "'47?" He repeats, more faintly than he meant.
"Uh, yeah. 1947?"
"Do these numbers hold meaning?"
"The year," he says, as if Loki is particularly slow.
"And what year of your calendar is it now?"
"2010," Stark answers promptly. "What's it for you?"
Loki shakes his head weakly. He does not know, and even if he did... "It would mean little to you. If we remade the calendar every two thousand years, it would change thrice in a single lifetime."
Stark blinks owlishly at him. "Hold on, what?"
Loki stares back tiredly, mute.
"No, seriously, what? How old are you?"
He does not know, not without knowing the year, without knowing how long it has been since he fell into that wretched place, into that creature’s grasp—the machine beside the bed begins to wail, and with much effort, Loki focuses on slow, shaking breaths. And he thinks. The calculation into their calendar year is not overly complicated for him—numbers come naturally to him, usually—but he is exhausted, and it takes a moment. "One thousand and forty four of your years. Give or take."
Stark makes a strange little noise in the back of his throat.
Loki shifts on the bed—monitors shriek, as do his nerve endings—and says, "So, what is this 'Roswell'?"
###
The hospital staff don't seem surprised to see Tony anymore, even beyond the residents and the specialists. Loki's physical therapist waves at him from down the hall, nurses smile... it sets him on edge. Too many people know he's here, know he's involved with Loki. It's dangerous—Loki is, for all intents and purposes, a civilian, and one who can hardly walk unassisted, even if he is scary strong. He should install security. Talk to Pepper about it. He raps quickly on the metal frame of the sliding door as he walks in, sidestepping past a scurrying nurse in garishly patterned scrubs.
Loki's sitting up today, more or less, book in his lap and softly curling hair spilled all across his shoulders. He didn't lose as much of it as Tony had assumed he would when they finished de-matting it the other day: it falls near the middle of his back at its longest, and around his shoulders at its shortest points. His sharp blue face seems a little less gaunt today, and the cut on his upper lip has almost disappeared. The simple cotton T-shirt and navy sweatpants the hospital put him in look out of place on him, somehow. "Hey Bambi," Tony greets, grinning as Loki's nose wrinkles, ruby red eyes narrowing as he tilts his head up to pin him with a disgusted look.
Loki's eyes catch on the vase in his hand—and the flowers within—and Tony sees something crumble slightly behind his eyes. Some strange waver of emotion that disappears as swiftly as it rears its head. "Flowers?" He asks. His voice is hoarse from disuse and lingering damage, though the doctors say he'll recover fully, in that regard. His accent is still strange, antiquated and carefully refined. Almost Shakespearean.
"Yep. Pepper and Rhodey say hi. I think, anyways. Haven't read the card, you know." He sets the vase on the bedside table, and Loki twists, book snapping shut. His face pinches with pain with the movement as he reaches for the card in question.
A long, tense beat of silence. Loki's eyes narrow, mouth pursing. Then, quietly, with a helpless sort of frustration: "I cannot read this."
Tony blinks. "But you can read that?" He nods to the book in Loki's lap. The man's hand curls over it possessively, but he can still catch the title—
Not English. He leans closer, heedless of Loki's personal space—it doesn't even cross his mind—and frowns. "Who gave you this? What is that, Scandinavian?"
"Icelandic, the doctor said," Loki admits haltingly. He runs his thumb over the cover. It's brand new.
"Well," he says, "Give me the card," then, quickly, "Ah-ah, I don't like being handed things," he reminds him. Loki eyes him pensively, then sets the card down on his knee. "Right." Tony clears his throat dramatically, "To the lovely, esteemed, and magnificent Loki of Asgarðr—"
"It does not say that."
Tony's eyes glimmer with mirth, "Hey, a little embellishment? Good for the soul. Somebody's said that before. Probably."
Loki narrows his eyes at him, but his mouth is tensing at the corners in an effort not to laugh, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Your embellishing needs work to fool me, Stark. I am your God of Lies, after all."
Tony snorts, " My God of Lies?"
"Humanity's." Loki rolls his shoulders lazily, and Tony doesn't miss his sharp inhale. The microscopic wince.
"But not Asgarðr's?" Tony prods, leaning forward with open curiosity. He's been needling Loki for information from the very beginning, but never too much, never too hard. Well, maybe once too hard, but Loki had very viciously and promptly shut him down. He assumes if he hasn't done that again that he isn't crossing the line, honestly.
Loki's face darkens ever so slightly, eyes growing a little far away. "Nay," he hums. "Not quite. There are kennings, domains, titles—associated with us. Certainly I was known as a liar to some, as a convenient scapegoat to others," he smiles at him, a faint, bitter smile, "But a liar loses their effectiveness when they are known to all, no?"
"Boy who cried wolf," Tony agrees with an easy nod. He sits down, hand very, very careful where it briefly settles on Loki's knee, spasming slightly with nervousness. He doesn't want to hurt him. He's still in awe that it healed so quickly; a femur broken in three places should not be nearly fixed by now. Especially with little more than a very rigid metal brace and a few pins.
"Another human analogy?"
"Yeah, it was—" he stops himself, "No, wait. The card. Uh." He fumbles a little, and tries to get back into his melodramatic voice, but Loki pokes him in the thigh with one bony finger, and he smiles sheepishly. "Well, it really just says get well soon. From Pepper and Rhodey—uh, Happy too, down here at the very bottom. Late addition, probably. Sloppy."
Loki snorts, "Is neatness a requisite of well-wishing?"
"Ah, no," Tony chuckles, "Gues not. The thought that counts. Or something like that. Listen, I uh—I wanted to talk to you, actually. Seriously. If you're up for it."
Loki frowns at him; he'd re-opened his book, and now he closes it again. Pretty face lined with dread. Haunted eyes. His soft hair falls around his face as he tips his head at him. "Yes? Out with it."
"Well, um, I mean, I just—I know you don't have anywhere to go after you get out of here. And the docs've been talking, you know, about that. Not too far off now, they think, but you'll need help. With things. For a while. And—uh," he clears his throat. "I don't want this to be, uh, weird. I've been footing the bill for your care—no problem, seriously, given my ceiling was the perp in this case—" Loki locks eyes with him, then, and Tony sees in his face that neither of them believe that, really. Of course. Tony saw his wounds; even beyond a chicken-before-the-egg argument- fall before the ceiling argument?- the fact of the matter is the fall wasn't the issue, really. "—but I figured you could come live with me, if you wanted."
Loki blinks at him owlishly. Then his face shuts down. "What do you stand to gain?"
"Uh, how about a scary smart alien roommate? Dream come true, honestly. Win-win. I get to pick your brain—not literally, don't look at me like that, God—about outer space, and intergalactic science, et cetera, you get food and a roof and a whole suite—honestly? A wing, if you want—to yourself."
"What other choice do I have?" Loki doesn't seem particularly upset by the idea, not by his tone, nor by his expression, but the words set Tony on the backfoot anyways.
"Hey, no, if you don't want to—I mean, I get it," Tony smiles, "I'm hard to be around, but, uh, we can get you set up. Money isn't an issue, here, I can just... find you a nurse, an apartment, something. Pick a spot on a map and I'll sort it out."
Loki shakes his head, “tis fine," he murmurs. "If you would have me—willingly, genuinely—I would ask for naught more than that." He seems touched, and a little uncomfortable about it.
And exhausted, if Tony's honest. The dark marks around Loki’s eyes catch Tony's attention not for the first time. They make his whole face look harrowed and sickly, not to mention his eyes themselves are lidded and struggling valiantly to stay open, let alone focused. He—gently, he has to remind himself—pats Loki's knee. "Hey, no need to decide right now. Should probably get some shut-eye, Lokes. C'mon."
He sighs with some frustration, groggily allowing Tony to help him adjust to laying down fully. Tony tugs the sheets up, accidentally knocking Loki's book to the side. He fumbles for it, putting it on the bedside table by the vase of lavenders, linomium, and bunnytails Pepper had picked out. "I cannot recall the last time I was not exhausted," Loki grouses, sounding supremely irritated. Tony finds himself smiling awkwardly, sympathetically.
"Yeah. Pain'll do that. It only gets better from here."
Loki huffs a weak breath, crimson, half-lidded eyes glinting with annoyance. "Nay. That is only one option. I have experienced the other."
Tony feels his heart seize, just for a moment, and thinks of a cave, and a death, and a good man, and a hole in his chest—he reaches out and squeezes Loki's hand. "Yeah well, this' the only option I'll allow, okay? Over my dead body."
Loki smiles a slow, deadly smile, "You know not who you pledge to."
"I know enough," Tony says. He does. He does. Loki's—brilliant. So fucking smart, and that's saying something, for Tony. He's finally found someone who can keep up with him. And besides, Loki's... he's kind, to him, to the nurses—maybe less so to the doctors—and he doesn't care about Tony's status at all. Really, it seems like Loki sees Tony as being lower class than him, though that's just a feeling. An itch at the back of his head, in the way Loki speaks to people, the way he carries himself even laid up sick in bed. There's a rigidity there. An antiquated formality Tony would put to fairy tale kings and queens, if he had a mind to do so.
Loki's hand is frigid under his, the kind of freezing that makes your skin prickle with pain and heat before it goes numb. The skin is rougher, courser, soft in the way of fine, worn-thin sandpaper, a barely-there rasp. Tony thumbs along one of the raised lines on his skin and smiles reassuringly.
Loki waves a magnanimous hand. Shooing him out. His eyes have lost the fight now, closed, lashes shadowing dark blue skin. "You must have other duties to attend to, ones that do not involve gawking at me until I fall asleep."
"Right, yeah. I do. I'll see you soon, though."
"Hm."
