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All things considered, it was probably incredibly lucky that Tony never developed a phobia of confined places. Of course he’d never really given himself the space (ha) to develop that fear, since he regularly stuffed himself inside a tin can which was fitted more like a wetsuit. But the Iron Man suit was freeing more than confining, most especially because the very first time he’d donned the armor, he’d escaped the Ten Rings cave. All in all he’d walked away from that with relatively little long term psychological damage. As far as anyone could tell, anyway, he never let anyone really check. Cold showers were a thing of the past, though.
Still, claustrophobia or not, working in places where his movements were restricted was more than a little irritating.
“Dammit!” The ratchet he’d been holding skittered across the floor and out of reach, his fingers still stinging from where they’d been knocked.
He sighed, and wondered if he dared to ask either Dum-E or U to lift the car he was under a little higher. Knowing his luck he’d be crushed when the well-meaning but clumsy bots slipped. Briefly he wondered if it would be worth it to rig up a system where the car was lifted and tilted so he didn’t have to crawl underneath it at all.
Tony was just beginning to shimmy his way out from under the vehicle when the ratchet reappeared, held in a long fingered hand.
“I believe this is yours?” The face was hidden from sight, but the voice was unmistakable.
Tony couldn’t help the smile that came to his face as he took the proffered tool. “You believe correctly. Thanks, Lokes. You know for a second there I thought the kids were actually being useful.”
“Oh, they were on their way to fetching your discarded equipment,” Loki said, sounding amused. “I just happened to be closer and beat them to it.”
“Poor kids.” He thought about coming out to talk to Loki face to face, but decided against it and scooted back into position under the car. Loki had been a part of the team long enough, and around him enough for Tony to trust him. Besides, there were plenty of cameras and suppression systems in place to make Loki rethink any mischief. “So what’s up, longshanks? You come down to take the bots’ place as an apprentice grease monkey?”
A snort floated down to Tony, and he watched out of the corner of his eye as Loki’s boots strode away and towards one of his worktables. “As much as I enjoy observing your tinkering from time to time, I have absolutely no desire to join you on the floor in service to such a primitive machine.”
“Hey, now, no calling my babies ‘primitive.’ Or anything I work on, come to that. I’ll have you know that anything I touch gets an automatic sophistication buff.”
It earned him a small chuckle, at least. It was nice to hear and made him smile again.
“No, I found myself at something of a loose end, and decided that your company was the least irritating of all of the available options.”
“You know, I’d thank you for that in a sarcastic tone if I didn’t know for a fact that that is an actual compliment coming from you.”
“You’d never be able to prove that, I’ll have you know.”
“No worries, your secret is safe with me.”
For a while Loki didn’t say anything else, and the workshop just had the sounds of Tony working on the old car to fill it. It was one of the rare times when he wasn’t blasting music, so the little clicks and clacks of metal on metal, of the ratchets going back and forth, and the occasional ‘tink’ as nuts and bolts were put down were loud in the silence. Tony didn’t try and initiate a line of conversation, trusting instead that there was something specific Loki would want to talk about. It was relatively rare that Loki decided to do anything without a goal in mind, including spending time with others, so he waited.
He didn’t have too long to wait.
“Why is that you insist upon repairing these old vehicles? I would have thought that any challenge they might have once presented you with would have long since evaporated.”
Tony paused, considering the question and the reason it might have been asked. It had been a question he’d been asked before, more or less, and he usually gave some sort of BS answer and moved on. Then again, most of the people who asked him that were either the rare interviewers who actually got a sit-down with him, people trying to get a cheap rise out of him, or both. Loki’s tone didn’t suggest that he was asking from a place of mockery, or that he was setting Tony up for a jab later. He sounded genuinely curious.
“It can’t be that weird a hobby,” he replied, deciding to go noncommittal for now. “Considering where you come from and all of the ancient stuff that’s still lying around. These cars are from my father’s generation, I’m sure the old vaults back home have got stuff dozens of times older than that.”
“Hundreds in some cases,” Loki agreed, no hint of superiority in that statement. “But I believe there to be some differences in how Asgardians choose what to keep and how you go through that process. What is kept in the Asgardian vaults are those things which are considered either too useful or too dangerous to discard. Or are trophies of some past victory,” he added, the merest hint of bitterness tinging the words. “These old cars appear to fit none of those categories. They provide no service which any other vehicle you might purchase or build yourself couldn’t do – and more. I doubt that any of these cars would be considered particularly dangerous, and none of them would be considered trophies.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Tony muttered, concentrating on a hard to reach nut. “These are all considered vintage and classic cars, so they could be considered trophies of a sort.”
“Status symbols, then?”
“Exactly.”
“You have more than enough of those, without extending to pointless vehicles. Besides which, there are many others on your planet who are also able to afford such symbols. Why put yourself on their level?”
The nut really wasn’t coming loose. How long had it been since the last time he’d worked on this car? “Maybe I’m less concerned with the theoretical prestige of just owning the cars,” he ground out, putting muscle behind the ratchet. “And just like having them around to work on.”
Loki paused, seeming to consider that. “And yet you still have many other avenues with which to satisfy that need. You’ve created from nothing machines hundreds of times more complex than anything in this shop.”
The nut finally loosened, and this time Tony managed to stop his momentum in time to not crack his knuckles on the undercarriage or lose his grip on the ratchet. “True, and thank you for noticing. But that’s kind of the point. Everything I’ve ever made is complex and intricate – usually. These old cars… they’re relatively simple. It’s relaxing to work on them.”
Loki paused again, and Tony could practically hear the wheels turning in his head. “I can see the attraction in that, at least,” he eventually allowed. “Simple solutions to simple problems, it allows you to distract your thoughts without fully engaging them.”
“Uh… yeah. Close enough, at least.” He couldn’t quite shake the impression that Loki was teasing him about his hobby. He was willing to bet that there was a quip in there somewhere about how he liked to think as little as possible.
“I also rather suspect that you use this old mechanical technology of the past as something of a touchstone. A reminder of the past even as you push forward. And…”
Tony turned his head, giving up on the pretense that he was actually still paying attention to the work in front of him. He still couldn’t see anything other than Loki’s boots from his position, and they didn’t tell him much, other than Loki wasn’t facing him directly. It looked as though the mage were leaning against the worktable he’d strolled over to, and Tony’s imagination suggested that he was also holding one of Tony’s tools and fiddling with it as he spoke.
“And?” he prompted.
“… and I suspect that you really are more sentimental than you like to admit.”
Tony stared at Loki’s boots for a minute, and then scoffed, turning his head to stare blankly up at the underside of the car. He didn’t start working on it again, he wasn’t even sure he could remember what it was he’d been doing in the first place. “If that’s what you think, then you’ve got some wires crossed, Lokes. Sentimentality would suggest attachment, and these are just cars. The only attachment I have to them at this point is all of the labor I’ve put into them so they run even better than the day they were first put together.”
Loki hummed in response, but didn’t actually answer. It almost annoyed Tony enough to get him to scrabble out from under the car and scowl at the man directly. Instead he settled for snapping, “And what about you? Why is it you keep coming here over and over again?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Why do you keep coming to see me?” Tony groused, annoyance making his words come out harsher than they normally would have done. “Have you decided that I’m your simple problem to find a simple solution to?”
The silence which followed was the longest yet, long enough to make Tony begin to worry. Banters with Loki were frequent, and sometimes they would stray over into more cutting remarks, but they’d managed over the months to strike a kind of balance between play and legitimate insults. It was something of a necessity, considering how their first meeting had gone, made somewhat easier by their personalities. Occasionally, though, a poorly worded sentence or thoughtless reference on either part would bring back old tensions.
“No,” Loki said quietly. “I don’t think I would ever classify you as a ‘simple problem.’”
There was a muffled thump as Loki put down whatever tool it was he had picked up from the table, and Tony watched as his boots weaved their way back to the door and out.
Tony lay on the concrete, the initial relief that Loki hadn’t sounded angry or even irritated dissolving into confusion. Loki’s tone had been weighted, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on lurking behind them. What exactly had gotten under Loki’s skin? If he wouldn’t call Tony a ‘simple problem,’ then what did that make him?
Moving slowly, Tony went back to work on the car, but with only half of his focus on what he was actually doing. He was going to have to do a lot of thinking before he saw the Asgardian again.