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Loki was very young when he scuffed a boot against the frozen surface of a lake and spun the reflection of stars and nebulae into the blue-white. The delighted gasp the sight drew from Thor, standing at his side, was more rewarding to him at the time than the accomplishment. It was more important because his brother’s face was bruised and scraped, and every step Thor took resulted in his jaw clenched defiantly against pain. He’d wanted to distract him from the intensity of their childhood’s first lost fight, and by a small fraction, he’d succeeded.
Beneath their feet, Loki painted a glowing universe and spent the evening’s middle hours reciting information about each known star that Thor touched. Together they made plans for all the places they could go, followed the thread of conversation and wove a lifetime’s worth of adventure.
As they grew older, they made good on those plans, systematically fulfilling every oath they’d spoken to one another, until, finally, Loki learned the truth of why he hadn’t felt the cold on that night above an icy lake, and the rest of their promises began melting to nothing in their hands.
---
The shadow looked like a leech, and in its center were rows of small teeth occasionally flickering into sight through the black. It was placed delicately over Loki’s chest, and it sank through skin and bone, spread out like smoke to saturate his heart and lungs, embedded itself there.
When a Chitauri tossed any simple gesture towards him, the magic of it clenched, tightened like twine until he couldn’t breathe, his pulse stymied, and fear turned his thoughts toxic. He tore himself apart, and all they did was give him the occasional nudge.
Its removal nearly killed him, but he fought the battles necessary to regain sovereignty over the parts of himself that still recoiled from every flick of an alien hand. He maintained the lie of fear, but he did not retain their conditioning. The situation was almost nostalgic: feigning weakness with a biddable smile until he was so thoroughly underestimated that he barely had to disguise his ambitions.
Failing in the invasion of Midgard burned him through, seared much of him away but spared a saving clarity that showed him what a blessing it all was. He couldn’t have power while in someone else’s shackles, not the sort of power that he needed.
He escaped before he’d even reached Odin’s halls, the width of Thor’s fingers on his arm familiar and bittersweet as the seal Loki had carved decades ago into his own skin snapped the muzzle and freed him. There was raw, desperate pain on Thor’s face in the moments before Loki vanished, and Loki could see nebulae in the sky over his shoulder.
---
Midgard was not as vast as other worlds, but in its own way, it was varied in land and life. This variance was illustrated in extremes and in subtleties, and Loki saw its evidence in those that his brother associated with. On Asgard, Loki had grown accustomed to seeing only one sort of power truly lauded, in the mere dress of different personalities. The Avengers represented a spectrum, and Loki smiled at the thought of dragging the point of a blade across it. They were all so delightfully breakable in ways that Loki felt especially qualified to appreciate.
He toyed with the spider and the hawk, and they responded as predators would.
He toyed with Banner, and the Hulk reacted.
He toyed with the captain and was presented with a sermon.
He toyed with Stark, and the man smiled.
When he thought of them, it was the latter that he remembered.
---
He had his hand wrapped around Stark’s throat when he learned there was a laugh to match that smile. The pulse beneath his palm beat fast and thin, but that voice would not falter.
Loki wanted to swallow it whole.
Good aim on the part of Romanov forced him to let go, but the abruptness of that want was markedly more difficult to evade.
It chased him through burning buildings, panicked crowds, screens of smoke, and a hail of rubble, and Stark met him in all paths of destruction. Loki left dents in plates of armor; Stark scorched into him the memory of defiance, was vivid in ways that branded the afterimage of crooked smiles on the insides of his eyelids. He made every effort to strike Iron Man from the skies, but after each survival, Stark only became a greater source of fixation. He was an aberration from the Midgardian standard, intelligent, fascinating, and well aware of these attributes.
Loki fought Thor and etched pain deeper in them both. The Avengers were there to defend him, reminding Loki of times when friendship, when promises, had meant something. Clearly, they still meant something to Thor, and the constant question in his brother’s eyes nearly drove Loki to give an answer betrayal had only partially obscured.
Stark proved to him that he was not frozen through, but his brother made him suspect that he wanted to be.
---
The talent Loki possessed for determining the inner workings of those around him had been a double-edged blade for much of his life.
Evidently, Stark had experience with the same weapon, as revealed by the confidence with which he surged up in Loki’s grip to kiss him and the vulnerability its sweetness betrayed. His mouth was quick, honest, brash, but gentle, and Loki followed it as it was pulled away. Stark let him, and he should have known better than to give Loki an ounce of permission when Loki sought constantly to define and corrupt.
He pressed Stark into the wall of a burnt husk that had once been a home and took whatever Stark consented to give until thunder sounded in the distance and wrenched them apart. When Loki unwound his hand from where it cradled a carotid, Stark’s eyes were deliciously bright, his skin was bruised, and there was blood welling up at one corner of his mouth. The armor had given an indication, of course, but Loki was still shaken, captivated by how beautifully red accented that raw expression.
Without a word, he left Stark there. Perhaps, if Thor had not been approaching, then he might have said any number of things that had occurred to him in those moments. But Thor had been near, and there were only so many secrets Loki could wear in the lines of his face at once.
---
Finding Stark in the midst of any fray became second nature to him, a parasympathetic reaction to battle. Inexorably, they met in the center point of where they began, clashing together with a force that Stark’s comrades could not hope to match, if only because the emotion behind it would never be on the same frequency.
The armor Stark wore did not spark from Loki’s magic with the same frailty it once had.
Through this knowledge, Loki’s obsession was born anew.
Not only had Stark ensnared his thoughts; he’d experienced the violence sewn therein, and he had learned.
The realization drug a laugh from Loki’s mouth, blood in his teeth, and when Stark removed the faceplate, they kissed like another strike.
---
Thor never surrendered the notion that Loki could be reached, that the distance between them could be crossed, healed. It was the childish want of a boy still comforted by painted nebulae, and Loki no longer had any interest in stitching the lie.
The occasions that Loki could not quite deliver the killing blow, however--- that, at least, was honest.
---
There were days when they studied how best to damage one another, and there were days when the minutia of details that comprised their lives outside of battle took precedent. Rather like revisiting the favorite scenes of a beloved book, Loki absorbed the entirety despite his fondness for particular aspects.
He knew Stark’s preferred defenses, the tactics he was most likely to utilize, the wounds he would survive.
He knew who Stark was when the armor was far away.
Stark had been disillusioned by space as well, it seemed, some leftover horror from a war Loki had lost and that Stark had nearly died to win. Loki was perfectly content to look to the sky with a man whose eyes did not search out the stars with ignorance. They did so, in the singularly uncommon stretches of time they were not occupied with conflicting ethics, conflicting weapons, conflicting mass. Silence from Stark was a somber, bitter, liquor-thick thing, and Loki found he could appreciate its eccentricities. Moments of peace between them were so few, stretched so thin, that they had to be held delicately or crumble away.
Sound from Stark felt more natural in all its incarnations. Loki inspired it in any way he could, if only because that was how he’d learned to not fear the dark, and it was a lesson he could teach.
---
SHIELD whispered traitor, the Avengers defended from their vantage point of friendship, and Loki watched and wondered, wearily, how many more promises he could break or coax to be broken in one lifetime. It was a question it would kill him to answer, and so Loki did not pursue it overly much.
Stark, it so happened, had no intention of breaking any promises whatsoever, making that particular case moot.
They did not halt or change the intent of their meetings.
They did not interfere with one another’s objectives.
They did not help one another against an ally.
They were utterly civilized or utterly antagonistic depending on the environment, and Loki delighted in the dichotomy.
---
He did not think of Thor (not when morning light lit a cityscape in gold, not when a riot lifted cries like a battle into the air, not when he caught a glimpse of a storm on the horizon, and not on cloudless nights when he could not endure the sight of stars).
---
He was never certain when his ambitions shifted from conquering Midgard, to conquering Midgard with the exception of Stark, to conquering Midgard with Stark.
He only knew that it wasn’t merely an aim that Stark would not share; it was an aim he would readily oppose.
With a hand clenching one of Stark’s wrists and the other curled around his throat, Loki bit a kiss that drew blood beneath his jaw and said, You knew what I was.
Stark agreed and fed the words back to him, aligned on his tongue, etched them into him with bared teeth and breath--- and a smile that made Loki want to either present him with a sword or run him through with it; he was never certain.
---
The sun hung low over the horizon in the moment when Stark was forced to deliver a potentially-fatal blow.
It was a singularly enlightening experience.
As Loki drew magic into himself to prevent a lung from collapsing, to pump blood through the damaged chambers of his heart, he found the abrupt onslaught of revelations more staggering than the agony of the wound itself: even when Stark saw the necessity of killing him, he did not truly desire his death, or a second strike would have followed the first; his provocation of Stark in this particular instance was rooted in the realization that perhaps his only hope of securing Stark at his side was to remove those who had him at theirs; he craved Stark’s heart and mind, but not his misery, and so this unconscious motivation was inarguably flawed; the modulated tremor in Stark’s voice when he had shouted, Loki, before the impact imparted in two syllables that Stark had already drawn these conclusions for himself.
---and these were not lies. These were not pale imitations of nebulae cupped between a child’s hands and set to rest in ice.
These were truths, hard-won and scored into their bones with little more than the assurance of blood, deadly contention, understanding, and an uncertain future.
---
Loki fled, and he healed. When Stark found him on the roof-top of a modest apartment building, the man stepped beneath the cloak of Loki’s magic and held a warm palm against the burn scar before kissing the inside of his wrist.
It was not an apology. It was not a promise.
It was a simple affirmation: here we are, with no compulsion to avow where they might one day be.