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Tony can't seem to catch a break, these days.
Wanda's mind manipulation did a number on him, and combining that with the scepter? Loki's scepter was a treacherous tool with ambitions of its own. Tony learned that the hard way.
And he learned, all over again, how dangerous his inventions could be, and how badly he needed help figuring out where to draw the line.
He stood by his actions with regards to the Accords - he did what he thought was best, and maybe better, what Rhodey had advised him to do. There was no one he could trust more, right now, to test his judgement against than Rhodey.
And look what had happened to him in the mess that resulted. Rhodey was all he had left, the last thread connecting him to some kind of sanity, and that thread had come so close to snapping.
That was bad enough. But when he'd seen that film -
-that cold calculated hand choking the life out of his mother -
He'd broken. He'd flat-out broken, and lost control, and no one he trusted to talk him down was there to tell him how to handle it. To reason with him in a way he might have been able to understand. FRIDAY was so very young, so very earnest and trusting when it came to the decisions that her master handed down, and she couldn't be expected to stand against him, not the way JARVIS occasionally had. Not the way Bruce -
So many people were gone. His parents, dead, Jarvis Prime and JARVIS Stark, Yinsen, Phil, all dead. Bruce, who knew where. Gone. Pepper, sick of him. Rhodey, in the hospital because of him. Vision, busy figuring his own shit out.
Alone. Alone. Alone.
From Asgard's throne, its ruler can see everything in the Nine Realms. Whoever sits on the throne of Asgard is the only one whose powers of sight equal those of Heimdall.
Lately, Loki and Heimdall have been... attempting to balance each other, as a team, rather than as enemies, because they've both learned that there are worse things than compromise. They've learned that sitting alone in power over the Nine Realms will drive one mad. It drove Loki mad. It drove Odin mad. It drives countless others mad every day throughout the Realms.
After Heimdall made the decision to side with Prince Thor against Odin, after Loki got Odin out of the way to save his brother's life, Loki offered Heimdall the throne. But Heimdall had no desire to sit in that cursed chair, to be the only one with the vision to survey the realms and the power to change them at a whim.
So they began a curious co-rule.
Soon after, Odin slipped away in his sleep, and they began to settle into the arrangement as permanent. Heimdall made what public appearances were necessary but did not need to come directly from the king. Loki did not relish wearing Odin's face, but his own was ruined for the throne of Asgard.
They consulted, of course, a great deal, but as for the rest of his time, Loki had no one he could truly socialize with. He spent many hours sitting upon the throne, simply watching the Realms, as Heimdall did from his place on the Bifrost.
Loki spent a great deal of that time watching Tony Stark.
He remembered when he had envied the man. No longer.
The clarity of Tony Stark's mind has proved just as delicate as that of Loki's. Just as capable of being shattered through loneliness, through shock.
He remembered what it had meant to him, after Thanos, to hear Tony speak. To hear someone so like himself, but bolstered up by friends and allies who understood him well enough, have confidence in the outcome of the oncoming storm.
Loki is not happy, not with his brother believing he is dead and his parents' approval now utterly out of his reach. But with Heimdall to watch, to talk with, to push him a little now and then but not to rule him, he is sane.
And he wishes to return the favor.
When Loki appears in Tony's house, Tony blinks at him for several moments, then pinches himself hard in the arm. The yelp this elicits turns into deranged laughter. "Of course. Of course you're here. I mean, why the fuck not?"
It's... it hurts, to hear the man like this. At least while Loki sat on the throne, distance blunted the effect a little. The way he repeats, never trusting in his own words, his own thoughts, always retreading them to listen again, to see if they will make more sense this time. Because nothing makes sense anymore.
Loki knows all too well how that feels.
"Why do you think I'm here?" Loki asks, asking the man to pull himself together, collect his thoughts, trust them.
Another bark of that painful laughter. "Well, either I've gone completely off the deep end and started seeing dead people even when I'm awake, or you're playing a long game that's gotten past Thor and everyone here on Earth."
"You see the dead in your dreams? Is that what has you waking, screaming?"
Tony narrows his eyes at Loki. "You've been spying on me? Yeah, of course you have. You're here, you're here for me, when no one else knows you're alive. You want something from me. And that's the first question you ask. You want to know what I dream? Yeah, it's about people I've seen die, people I've killed, people who might die if I don't figure my shit out. I hate the dreams. I hate the way they keep coming. I hate the way I can't wake up. But sleep is better because I'm usually not actually killing anybody. So if you're here to make me part of one of your evil plots, then sorry, no, just... just take me out, right now, just blast me out of existence, please and thank you, because I am not. Letting that happen. Again."
Strangely gentle, Loki's voice breaks the resounding silence. "Throwing yourself into the abyss will save no one. Trust me."
"Is that a threat?" Tony frowns at him. "I mean, it didn't sound like it was supposed to be one, but it's hard to tell with you."
"It's not a threat. I want nothing from you. I'm not here to coerce you into anything."
Bitter laughter follows that pronouncement. "Definitely going to need to check your pulse, now. Living beings need things from each other. Living beings manipulate each other to get them."
"That is so," Loki admits.
"So what do you want, Rudolf? Why the fuck are you even here?"
"I... owe you a debt," Loki tells him.
Tony raises his eyebrows. "What, did I play right into your evil hands somewhere along the line? You here to thank me for furthering the cause of chaos? With the amount of shit I've gotten up to recently, I shouldn't be surprised."
Loki takes a breath. "My... evil hands owe you nothing, they go right on being evil without either of our consent." He holds up one hand, and slowly the skin grows blue, then becomes encased in clear crystalline ice. They both watch it happen with focused attention. "I've been watching you," Loki continues, "and I've learned that since you saw the Void, you have had a preoccupation with the world growing cold, as cold as that place. A preoccupation with your ability to either prevent that, or make it come to pass. I submit to you that you are not the only one who holds such power, though of course, from time to time, it does feel that way."
Tony's eyes examine the blue hand curiously, and the ice which encases it. Loki fights not to twitch away, revert to his Aesir form. He still hates his blue skin, his blood heritage, but if this is what it takes to bring the brilliant Iron Man out of his ever-tightening downward spiral, Loki will show him. He knows now that it is what it is. He knows now that two people he has faith in, his brother and Heimdall, know of it, and have faith in him in return, regardless of that heritage, that power.
Tony frowns at the hand, then his eyes come up, frowning at Loki. "Well, if you are... who you say you are, you've changed tacks in a major way with... whatever this is."
"Things change," Loki says, putting his Jotunn skin away, "and if people are to survive, we must change along with them."
"And you're telling me you're here because you feel like you owe me some kind of debt?" Tony scoffs. "If I ever gave you anything valuable, then yeah, I want it back."
"You offered me a drink," says the god, "and you spoke to me as an equal."
Loki can hear the gears turning in his head.
"You wanna buy me a drink and have a little fireside chat?" Tony asks. "You gonna slip me a roofie?"
Loki pulls a small bottle from the depths of his complex, layered clothing. "What is in this," he says, "will have some effect on your state of mind, yes. But I hope to improve it, to sharpen it. Not to dull or control. I think we both have had enough of a taste of that." He swigs from the bottle himself.
"Yeah, blue guy, like I'm gonna trust there's not a poison that could affect me but not you."
The drink hums along Loki's nerves, warming and soothing. It makes it easier to speak of certain things.
"I don't expect a welcome, after the peril I brought to your world," he says. "I only wish to offer a return for what I owe."
"Well hey, at my table, mass murdering is pretty standard, I guess."
"In my experience, it is always so with those who wish to shape worlds. It is not the masses dying that makes for bad neighbors. It is individuals. So tell me, who do you mourn when you look at me?"
"Phil Coulson." His eyes are hard. But Loki thinks that better than the vague hopelessness they had held before Loki's arrival.
"No excuse will be sufficient, I know, but I was... not myself."
"Yeah, I've heard that a lot. You still did it. You're dangerous."
"Aren't we all?"
Tony lets out a breath at that. "Yeah, goddamn gods always are."
After watching Tony Stark all this time, Loki has no doubt that he is the match of any Asgardian, deserves the title as much as Loki himself. So he does not correct, or even question. Instead, he asks, "Is forgiveness possible between people like us?"
"Depends on what you're asking for," Tony answers. "Offhand I'd say probably not."
"Not the way it is for Thor," Loki agrees. "Once I had put myself in danger to save his dear Jane, all was forgotten. But we never forget."
"Well yeah, that's because we're not idiots. People don't change like flipping a switch. Their past? It's still their past. You can't expect it to mean nothing unless you wanna get royally screwed. No matter how much they change? It's still a factor."
"I have killed," says Loki. "I have killed humans in the course of my actions. I did what I thought I had to do to save worlds. Knowing what I know now, some choices I would make differently. But I would not hesitate to kill again if it meant saving a world. And I would never expect you to forget that."
"Yeah," says Tony. "Not something I can really forget. So what do we do about that?"
Loki can hear that, while he is primarily asking about how they might get past the deeds of Loki while he was last on Earth, he is thinking almost as much of his own death toll, and how he might move past it.
"Let me honor the ones I have killed the way they deserve to be honored," he tells Tony. "Let that soothe my guilt, if only a little."
Tony gives a breath of laughter, and reaches over for glasses, pours them each a shot of the stuff from the little bottle. He lifts his own glass in Loki's direction. "To the ones who got in the way," he says. "They deserved better."
The taste is rich, full of fire and spice, more medicinal than intoxicating. It puts a spark of pleasure back in Tony's eye, or perhaps that is the company. Either way, Loki feels that he has done at least part of what he has come here to do.
They drink in silence for a while after that, simply savoring the feeling of being in the presence of someone who understands. The two of them cannot precisely be said to be allied, but neither are they quite as alone as they have been.
Loki has no idea whether together, the two of them will prove less dangerous or more so. But that doesn't matter. The thing is done.
He couldn't help but answer the call, the silent scream underneath so many of Tony's words of late, that sounded so familiar -
Powerful but lost, screaming into the void, Hear me! Somebody hear me! Somebody tell me I'm not alone!