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“Seven AM waking up in the morning. Gotta be fresh. Gotta go downstairs.”
It’s worse than any alarm. It’s worse than when JARVIS alerts them to a call in the middle of the night with harsh, blaring horn blasts and flashing red lights.
“It’s Friday! Friday! Gotta get down on Friday!”
Loki sits at the kitchen table, eying his plate of poptarts and waffles with a grimace. This song plays over the speakers once a week, loudly and on repeat. To say that it is subpar, well, that would be a compliment. It grates his ears and leaves him with a sense of despair not only for humanity, but for all of existence.
“Well,” Thor says uncertainly, standing above Loki as he delivers the boy a tall glass of juice. “I suppose it is a ballad in honor of Mother.”
“It shames her,” Loki says weakly.
“At least it thinks of her,” Thor says, but he too winces as the song begins anew.
Out in the living room, Steve sits on the couch, staring blankly out the window. Bucky is curled up beside him, his head in his lap as he tries to cover his ears and drown out the terrible noises.
Down in the workshop, the music plays just as loudly as it does through the rest of the tower. Half buried under a vintage car, Tony, hardly aware of the world around him, bobs his head along with the beat. “Sir, do you even hear what is playing,” JARVIS asks. There isn’t any answer. “I envy your ability to block out distracting white noise, sir.”
“Partyin’! Partyin’! YEAH! Partyin’! Partyin’! YEAH!”
Bruce glares at Clint, who is dancing through the entertainment rooms. “You’re an awful excuse for a human being, you know that?”
“Fun, fun, fun, fun! Looking forward to the weekend!”
“And you have the gall to make fun of me for reading Twilight!”
It’s perfect weather in Malibu, a temperate seventy-eight degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Natasha, reclining by Tony’s pool, accepts the offered frozen daiquiri. She arches her neck, basking in the warm sunlight. “You’d think that they’d eventually just realize that they can leave the tower.”
From the chair next to her, Pepper takes a liberal sip of her piña colada. “Men,” she says, popping the pineapple slice into her mouth. The two women clink their glasses together with a laugh.