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Tony always hated going to the Biolab.
To be fair, most other crew members of the USS Avenger felt the same way, though Tony knew that most of them had different reasons to his own. He actually didn’t mind the smell of chemicals, or the strange sounds that were usually emitted from varying plant specimens, finding them an almost welcome deviation from the usual sounds of the humming ship. He didn’t mind the different coloured lights or the way that different pockets of air would suddenly change temperature depending on the environment needed for the samples. No.
What bothered him was the door.
You see, while they might be something that ground-based people take for granted, doors are rather important on ships—and it is absolutely critical that they all work perfectly well. For if one malfunctioned in an emergency, you could have a whole area blocked off, or perhaps people trapped. In order to ensure the safety of the crew, Starfleet tested every door again and again, and every door on the Avenger was perfect.
Every door, that is, bar one.
The door to the Biolab had a bit of a nasty hiss to it, a small, hiccuppy sound as it opened. You wouldn’t notice it, if you hadn’t been going in and out of identical—but perfectly in order—doors of the same type a hundred times a day for several years on end.
The flaw originated from a minor emergency near the start of their five-year voyage, a breach in the hull which had been quickly fixed. The door had done its job, slamming closed to protect the rest of the ship, but it seemed that the pressure had done something to the seal. No matter how many times it was fixed in flight, it wasn’t getting any better.
And every time the hiss came back or the thing became sticky, they always seemed to call the same engineer to come and fix it.
“Back again, Tony?”
Tony almost smiled as he looked up from his examination of the door, though he made sure that he accompanied the expression with an eye roll and a grumble. “Yeah, for the fourth time this week,” he complained. “Why do you guys have to keep calling for me?”
“Maybe we just like seeing your face.” Bruce’s voice was as friendly as always, his smile open and kind. “You barely venture out of engineering, otherwise.”
“I’m busy,” Tony defended. “Too busy to deal with a temperamental door. Are you sure you’re not doing something to it? I swear I fixed it last time—”
He was interrupted by a new voice.
“Perhaps you’re just not as good a mechanic as you think you are, Stark.”
Tony didn’t have to turn his head to know who was standing behind him, but he did anyway just to make sure that Science Officer Friggason got the full blast of his glare.
“I am as good as I think I am,” Tony shot back. “There’s just something seriously wrong with this door. Perhaps it’s all your damn plants, giving off spores, or something.”
“If it were the plants, it would be engineering’s job to fix the ventilation,” Friggason replied. He was wearing a smirk that cut across the lines of his face, his green eyes gleaming with mirth that just rankled Tony the wrong way, making his skin prickle with what could only be annoyance.
“Something in the mechanism is damaged,” Tony said, speaking through his teeth, and he felt a flush of—of anger—rising in his cheeks as his words only caused Friggason’s smirk to deepen. “It can’t be fixed unless I take it apart completely, and Captain Wilson deemed it too risky. If we were to have a Red Alert with a door dismantled…”
“I am sure it is not the first time a door has been damaged in the history of Starfleet,” Friggason cut in.
“We should have gone back when it broke in the first place,” Tony shot back. “We weren’t that far out. But it has been getting worse. I’ve informed command that I’ll be taking it apart the next time we’re planetside for long enough.”
“It seems like a lot of fuss, for a single door.”
“Well, there’s someone I care about in this lab,” Tony replied with a lift of his shoulders. Then he grinned, glancing left. “Bruce is a good friend.”
Bruce rolled his eyes—and when Tony looked back, it seemed like Friggason was matching the expression.
“We’re a research ship. It’s fine.” Friggason looked like he would also have been shrugging, had he been the kind of person to do such a common thing.
Tony grit his teeth, and tried not to snap back, regardless of how much he wanted to.
Of how much he would have, had it been literally anyone else.
Fuck.
What was it about Friggason that just made him so angry? As long as Tony had known the guy, he had always just managed to touch on every nerve, his smooth voice and targeted words getting to Tony more easily than anything else ever had. And he always liked to dig into Tony’s patience, coming over every time Tony was there, not giving him a moment’s peace. There was always something he felt the need to comment on.
It was like nothing that Tony ever did was good enough.
But, no. No. Tony was better than this.
Friggason couldn’t get under his skin.
He hadn’t.
Tony turned his back, ignoring the smirk and the half laugh and the sparkling green eyes to focus on the door instead. He poked at a few more wires, and twiddled with it in a slightly different manner than he had the last fifteen times he’d been forced to come and fix the damn thing. When he was done, he stood back, and glared at the door as he slammed his hand against the button to close it, as if that would force it to operate normally.
It hissed with the usual, ear-grating sound.
Tony’s teeth gnashed as he heard a snort from somewhere behind him.
Yeah.
It was definitely the door that left him feeling frustrated.
Nothing else.
.・。.・゜✭・🚪・✫・゜・。.
Tony had known Loki Friggason since they were both in the Academy.
They hadn’t been in all the same classes of course, but there were several courses that every cadet had to take, regardless of their specialty—and there was a fair bit of overlap between the courses for biological science and for engineering. It was certainly enough for them to develop something of a… rivalry.
Tony felt more sorry for Bruce, though. He’d had to share every class with the guy. Being on the same ship was bad enough, even working in different departments.
Friggason was a knowitall and an asshole to boot, and Tony couldn’t stand him.
And when Tony received the next message that the door in the Biolab was only opening two out of three times, he almost went and slammed his head against a wall to put himself out of his misery.
There were so many other mechanics on the ship. Why couldn’t someone else go and fix the fucking Biolab door?
Why couldn’t someone else go and deal with Friggason?
“Biolab again?”
Tony held in the groan as he turned to look at Parker, an Ensign who had only joined the crew at the start of this voyage. “Yeah,” he said.
“Do you want me to take a look at it? I know you’ve been up there, oh, how many times already?”
“Too many.” And it was tempting, but. Tony had already picked up his tools. He’d manage. “Nah, it’s all right. I think I know that door better than any other part of the ship, at this point.”
Parker let out a laugh. “Are you sure that’s why?”
The question confused Tony a little, but he gave a shrug. “Sure. And I wouldn’t want to subject you to Friggason’s icy glare.”
Parker snickered at that, and Tony left with the happy knowledge that he wasn’t the only one who found Friggason irritating.
.・。.・゜✭・🚪・✫・゜・。.
When the ship went into a Red Alert for the first time that voyage, Tony was waist-deep in one of the vents. He was just doing some routine maintenance, tightening a fitting that was coming loose with age and use when the sudden blaring of an alarm had him jumping in surprise and smashing his head against hard metal.
“Oh, for the love of—”
His words were cut off as the ship gave a violent lurch, turning suddenly and very, very hard. Tony braced himself even as he frowned—because the ship’s gravity stabilisers should have prevented them from feeling such a lurch. The moment the ship was steady, he pulled himself out of the vent, only for everything to jarr to the side once again. Thankfully, everything heavy in the engine room was bolted down, and the only things to go flying were stationary, notepads, tools—and people.
It could have been worse.
“Ouch,” Parker groaned, pulling himself up from where he’d fallen to the ground. “What the hell was that?”
“Probably not anything good,” Tony replied, rubbing the newly forming lump on the top of his head.
And as if extinguished by his moment of negativity, the power seemed to decide that was the moment to give up on life—for in that very second, all the lights on board turned off, all the monitors went dark… and the engines stopped working.
“Ah, shit,” Tony swore. “Yeah, that’s definitely not good.”
As if on perfect cue—and of course it was perfect, Tony was in charge of maintaining the system—the emergency power kicked in, identifiable by the dim lights accompanied by the tinge of red and slightly less blaring alarm.
Tony called out for his team, the gnawing worry in his throat lessening as he heard a verbal response from each one–but before he could run any diagnostics on the engine, his comm beeped with an incoming signal.
“Bridge to engineering. This is Captain Wilson. I need a report, immediately. There seems to be no structural damage, but enough has been done to our systems that we can’t tell the extent of it from here.”
Even before Captain Wilson stopped talking, Tony was already tapping away at a monitor. Despite the obvious damage to the ship the readings were clear, but not at all good.
“Fuck,” he groaned.
“What is it, Mr Stark?” Parker asked, hurrying over.
Tony glanced at him, but didn’t reply directly, speaking instead into the comm.
“Captain, it seems like it was some kind of electrostatic storm—”
“I know that already, Stark, it was moving too fast, we didn’t detect it until it was already too late. What’s the damage report?”
Tony didn’t begrudge the captain his tone. Sam Wilson was known for keeping his head in a crisis, but that didn’t mean that he had the time to be patient in an emergency.
“It took out all our primary systems,” he replied. “The whole ship is running on backups, but the damage is extensive. They’re not going to last long.”
Wilson’s voice was grave. “How long have we got, Stark?”
“Twenty minutes until total shutdown. At best. And, Captain…” Tony swallowed. “That’s everything. Power, gravity, oxygen… all of our life support.”
“Is there nothing that can be done?”
Tony considered. “I could try to reboot the engines, get them turning again. But without knowing what the damage is on the inside—if the wires are fried, or there’s anything out of place… if it’s anything more than just a stall—”
“You’re saying you don’t have enough time.”
“I’m saying that I don’t know how much time a repair will take—and betting it’ll take me less than fifteen minutes will mean gambling every single life on this ship.”
There was a moment where the Captain did not say a thing in reply—and then, when Tony heard his voice again, it came from the ship-wide speakers, rather than his personal comm.
“This is your captain speaking. All crew to the escape pods immediately. We have approximately fifteen minutes until total system failure. I repeat, all crew to the escape pods immediately.”
It was a clever decision. Once everyone was off the ship, a few engineers would be able to return in EV suits to conduct repairs safely. Still, there was a part of Tony that didn’t want to leave, a part of him which thrilled at the thought of staying behind to try and fix the engine. But he’d told the captain the truth—he didn’t know the extent of the damage, and had no idea how long it would take to fix.
Besides, while the escape pods ran on their own separate systems, and therefore should be fine, there was no guarantee. They may need as many engineers at the pods as they could get.
So, with one last, wistful look at the engine, Tony grabbed his phaser and his tools and followed Parker out of the door.
There were pods on almost every deck, so it didn’t take long for them to get to their nearest set. There was a very familiar commander there, calling orders and making sure procedure was followed, that people were getting into the pods without panicking. Tony sighed in relief at the sight of his friend.
“Rhodey!”
Rhodey didn’t even bother with the usual friendly glare he reserved for when Tony called him by his nickname, rather than his title as First Officer. “Tony, thank the stars, we’ve got a situation–”
“Tell me,” Tony said quickly, already half turning to the pods. “Are they powering up?”
“No—I mean, yes, the pods are fine. But there’s a problem in the Biolab.” Rhodey grimaced slightly. “When the doors closed, they jammed, and there’s someone stuck inside.”
The slight pinch to his usually calm-under-pressure expression told Tony all that he needed to know about exactly who was stuck behind that famously faulty door.
Tony didn’t even hesitate.
He just went running.
The Biolab, thankfully, wasn’t too far from the engine room. The turbolifts weren’t working on the minimal power, so Tony had to use the emergency staircase, a small, cramped thing that was set between two walls. He hurried as quickly as he could, his heart pounding in his chest, his breath short with exertion as he finally opened the door to the correct deck.
When he reached his destination, it was to find Bruce outside the Biolab door, tapping rapidly at the keypad.
“Bruce?” Tony asked, forcing the word through his panting breaths.
“Friggason’s stuck in there,” Bruce said, voice quick and harried. He got out of the way as Tony took his place by the control pad, putting in emergency release codes. “We were all out, but he went back for a specimen,” Bruce continued. “I told him not to, but he didn’t listen, and then the door closed, and now—”
“It’s not opening.” Giving up on the codes, Tony’s hands went to his tools, selecting one which would allow him to wrench the control pad from the wall. “Bruce, get to an escape pod. We’ll follow you.”
“Tony, I—”
“Bruce. Now.” He turned to look at his friend, leaving no room for argument. “You’ve done all you can. Get to a pod, we’ll be right there, I promise.”
Bruce’s gaze hardened with a certain level of determination, and he gave a sharp nod. “I know you will.”
Then he spun and hurried down the corridor.
Knowing Bruce would get to safety, Tony turned his attention back to the control panel, expertly prying it from the wall. But no matter how much he poked and prodded at it, no matter what he did, nothing made a difference.
It would seem that he had been right in his original assessment—there was something wrong with the mechanism itself. He could reprogram the system all he wanted, but nothing would make a difference. Tony could even hear the building pressure in the gears as the door tried to open, as the programming tried to fight against whatever piece of dislodged machinery was holding it closed.
No matter what Tony did, the damn thing was not going to budge.
Tony drew in a deep breath, steeling himself, before he activated his comm.
“Friggason?”
The response was immediate. “Stark?”
“I’m outside the Biolab, I’ve been trying to open the door from this side, but nothing’s working. What have you tried from in there so far?”
Tony was expecting that Friggason would have tried something, as he was far from the sort of person to just sit and accept his fate—and he was right. He listened as Friggason quickly explained what he’d tried from his side, including various codes and poking at the control panel with the tools available to him in the lab.
But, unfortunately—
“Nothing is making a difference, it just won’t open.” Friggason paused. “I think perhaps you should—”
“I am not leaving,” Tony immediately spat out, already knowing what the bastard was about to say. “Don’t you even think it. This door has been my responsibility, and I’m the one who hasn’t managed to fix it. I’m not leaving you in there.”
“Stark. No one would blame you. Better one of us survives than the both of us die.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Tony hissed. “We’re both getting out of this.”
“You said yourself, the mechanism is broken—”
“So I did,” Tony said, feeling a touch of despair that he near despised himself for. “There’s something jammed, stopping the door from sliding open properly. It’s not going to move.”
“Then it is hopeless,” Friggason said.
Tony ran his hands through his hair, a spark of desperation itching along every nerve, clawing at his throat.
“Do you have an EV suit in there?” Tony asked. “Maybe you’ll be able to wait this out—”
“There have never been any in here, Stark,” Friggason replied. “This is a lab.”
“What about the stuff you use to adjust the environment for the plants? Can you use one of those?”
“Stark, those require power just as much as the life support does. It’s a lost cause. I’m a lost cause.” Friggason let out a shuddered breath. “You should go.”
Tony did not even deem that worthy of a reply. He tried to focus, tried to think past the blaring of the alarm and the panic in his mind. There had to be a way out of this. There just had to be.
He couldn’t let Loki die.
“Anthony,” Friggason said—and Tony stopped in his tracks. “You need to leave me here. It’s all right. I would rather… I would rather that you be safe, than waste your life trying to get me out of here. It’s okay.”
“I’m not leaving you, Loki,” Tony said, his voice cracking a little somewhere in the middle. “No matter what. Starfleet wouldn’t be—I wouldn’t be the same, without you.”
There was a moment, probably only a fraction of a second but—in the stress of the crisis, the moment felt like it was stretched across an hour. It was a moment of clarity, a moment of certainty, a moment where Tony knew that what he’d said, even spoken in the heat of it, was the absolute truth.
Loki had been there from the start, his presence always pushing Tony to be better. He’d always sought Tony out, just as Tony had always sought him, even though he tried to convince himself otherwise. He’d volunteered to be on the Avenger even though he griped and complained, and not just because he wanted to be closer to Rhodey. Even the thought of being assigned to a different ship from Loki had rubbed him the wrong way, and not because he would have lost his favourite verbal sparring partner.
You know, if he was being honest… Tony had never disliked the Biolab because of the door. He’d never disliked it at all, really.
The strange twisty feeling in his stomach, the quick beat of his heart, the flush in his cheeks… had never been dislike.
And he knew, with complete and utter conviction, that he would not be leaving Loki—
At least… not until he had tried everything.
“Loki,” Tony said, dropping the wrench in his hand in favour of drawing his phaser. “Step away from the door.”
The reply was quick and almost urgent. “What are you doing? You won’t be able to shoot through, they’re blast doors—”
“Just do as I ask. Now.”
Tony stood as close to the door as he could manage, his shoulder propped against it.
He had studied that fucking door for weeks. He’d listened to its hiss a hundred, a thousand times, and he believed that he’d pinpointed about where the fault must be.
Tony raised his phaser, aimed at the inside of the doorframe, and set it to disrupt.
“Anthony—”
He pulled the trigger, shooting straight between the door and the wall itself.
The charge hit with a sound piercing enough to cause his ears to ache, the shock of it pushing him backward. The force of the detonation destroyed the already damaged mechanism. The doors, which had been set to open in every way possible from both sides, lurched with a dangerous speed—and Tony, who had been leaning against them, fell straight through—
Only to be caught in the arms of the person waiting on the other side.
He felt a little dazed. The force of the blast was still ringing in his ears, the blinding light of it burning behind his eyes. He blinked up at the blurry shape above him, managing to make out a mass of blue and black.
“So, do you think I’m a good mechanic now?” Tony asked, attempting to give a grin.
Loki rolled his eyes. “Only you would ask such a thing after making the biggest mess of a door that I have seen in my life,” he replied. Tony supposed he had a point—but it seemed that he wasn’t done. “But you have also, it seems, saved my life. Thank you, Anthony.”
Tony’s blinking seemed to have worked, for he was able to make out Loki’s face—though it was much closer than it should have been. His expression was also more open than it should have been, for Tony thought that falling into Loki’s arms would have resulted in him becoming rather annoyed, and making some kind of joke about Tony’s ability to stay upright.
But, Loki’s usually sharp eyes were soft, and he was almost… smiling. It made Tony want to lift a hand, to brush his thumb along the length of Loki’s lower lip.
Tony cleared his throat, and looked away before he did something he would regret.
“You’re not saved yet,” he said. “We need to get off this ship. Quickly.”
Tony felt something close to loss as he pulled out of Loki’s arms, but it turned to exasperation as Loki paused to pick up a small, potted plant from the ground. It looked like some kind of square-shaped cactus.
“I can’t believe—”
“I thought you said we were in a hurry?” Loki said, pushing past him through the finally opened door. “Come on, or all the escape pods will be gone.”
Thankfully, they didn’t need to go far to reach the nearest set, where a pod was waiting for them. Bruce was standing near its door, arguing into his comm, and he looked up in pure relief when he saw them.
“Oh, thank the stars,” Bruce groaned. “You made it. Get in here, now, we’ve got seconds—”
Neither Tony nor Loki wasted any time, stepping straight onto the pod with fast steps and no hesitation. Bruce followed, closing the door behind him—and then the pod began the sequence to jettison, leaving the darkening ship behind. Tony watched through the viewport, still half wondering if he could have done more–
But if he’d tried, Loki might not have made it out in time.
“Anthony.”
Tony turned back, meeting Loki’s unexpectedly serious gaze. For some reason, it had Tony feeling unusually self conscious.
“Yeah?”
“In regard to what you said back in the Biolab… well, whether or not you are a good mechanic was never in question. I was always merely glad that the persistence of the door in refusing to be fixed meant that I got to see you more often.”
Tony, uh, wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that. Loki’s face was so earnest, and the meaning was clear, but. Tony, was a little…
Well, he decided to stay in familiar territory.
“That fucking door,” Tony groaned, pretending that he couldn’t see the flicker of disappointment in Loki’s eyes. “I told you it was dangerous.”
“And I told you that we would be fine,” Loki replied, still holding Tony’s gaze.
“Is that why you went back for that plant? Because you thought we’d be fine?” Tony asked, suddenly feeling the need to comment on that fact, and glaring at said specimen for good measure. “I mean, isn’t that emergency procedure 101? Items can be replaced, crew cannot?”
Loki looked a little sheepish as he lifted the potted cactus he still held in his hand. “Not this particular specimen. It’s an endangered species, and this is the only sample we took, so that we could try and breed it. The number on its planet is limited, and I… I couldn’t leave it behind.”
Tony couldn’t help it. He’d never seen such an expression on Loki’s face, such open honestly mingled with something close to compassion. It was as if his body moved on its own as he grasped the front of Loki’s blue shirt in both hands, stood up on his toes, and pressed their lips together.
For the first time in, possibly ever, Loki was a little slow to get with the program. His lips parted in what was probably shock, and he froze under Tony’s touch—but then fingers buried in Tony’s hair, the side of a plant pot pressed into his hip, and Loki began to kiss him back.
It probably wasn’t the best moment for a first kiss. The escape pod was a little cramped, and the flight was far from smooth. They were both out of breath, Loki was clutching a cactus, and Tony was pretty sure that somewhere in the background, he heard Bruce say, “Oh, finally.”
But he didn’t care about any of that. Because Loki’s hand in his hair was tugging him closer, their lips were sliding together like they had been made to do so, and–
Well, perhaps he did get stabbed by the cactus when Loki adjusted his grip, but. Worth it.
And the kiss still felt utterly perfect.
Tony knew that the ship would be salvageable—she’d lost life support, but the damage wasn’t overly extensive. After their pods were picked up, they would likely have little trouble getting the USS Avenger back on her feet once more. No lives had been lost, though Loki hadn’t been the only one with a close call. And as Bruce got the communications up and running it became clear that there was a Federation cruiser not far from their position, which would be able to give them assistance.
All they needed to do was wait—
And while waiting had never really been Tony’s strongpoint, he had some idea of how he and Loki might be able to spend the time.
(Although at that thought, he did, once again, find himself feeling somewhat sorry for Bruce.)
(Oh well. Still worth it.)