en það besta sem guð hefur skapað

[laevisilaufeyson]

Who: Loki Laufeyson, Tony Stark
Where: The lighthouse.
What: In which important lessons are possibly learned.

The whys and wherefores of the peculiar deal Loki had sought to forge are manifold, complex things, occasionally self-contradictory (if looked upon from the right perspective, which clearly isn't Loki's), often, perhaps, unexpected. It makes perfect sense to him, though, to seek knowledge both for its own sake and his own gain. It makes perfect sense to explore possibilities in terms of weaponry, defense, possible augmentation of his own already profound magical knowledge and prowess, while enjoying the process of acquiring that knowledge for its own sake. For its own sake and as an aspect of what is currently a rather contented retirement from the pressures of godhood, of prophecy and conformation to it both forced and chosen. Of the difficulties of defining choice when one is old enough to have been privy to long chains of circumstance, of causes and effects stretching back thousands of years, themselves not beginning at Loki's birth but rather at the initial unfolding of all things, if ever such an occasion occurred, and time immemorial since.

The point ultimately being, at this point in time, that there's nothing wrong with being prepared, seeing as the schedule for Ragnarök has, apparently, been pushed back indefinitely. One must do something with a schedule this suddenly and blindingly, to use an unfortunately apt turn of phrase, free. All the more so as what had filled it before was centuries more of agony and isolation with nothing to see but blackness, nothing to hear but his own screaming and the ragged wetness of his breath, nothing to smell but the slowly decaying entrails of his own child, binding him to hard stone, nothing to feel but pain and discomfort, nothing to taste but bile and stale air and his own blood.

After that, the simple pleasure of sitting on his own with a warm drink and something to read, however puerile, is profound, but it's bound to become disappointing with time, as all things do. After all, Loki is a sensual and hedonistic creature, but he is not immune to boredom.

And so this. And so waiting here, with the faint scent of the sea, of metal, of human things and human beings come and gone and come again in a long and weary cycle, much of which he has witnessed, one way or another. Not intolerable today. One sunrise more.

Loki waits, staring out a small and grimy window at the sea, the blurriness in his vision fading slowly but fading all the same. Specks of dust catch the light as they drift, idle, calm, and perhaps Loki would envy them were he prone to anthropomorphising the inanimate, that oh so human quirk, but he doesn't. Dust is dust. Nobody ever waxed poetic about dust being the means by which the universe experiences itself.

Loki thinks of himself as something similar, in his moods most grandiose or morose. An agent of entropy, nothing more, just one more thing contributing ultimately to universal disorder, an irrevocable process. Fate. The only fate, not like that dreamed up by the Æsir and then crafted by their own foolish hands. Just an agent. Just doing as he was made to do.

Which makes now what, exactly? Self-indulgence? The desire, as an agent of the universe to experience itself, to take in, therefore, all that there is, was, ever will be? Sating a thirst? A man lost for days in the desert solves nothing by drowning himself, and Loki's hunger for knowledge was packed away and hidden long, long ago, when he was taught it was less acceptable than the pursuit of strength, power, rulership, as is the Asgardian way. The Asgardian way, therein being the inherent problem. He is not. Never was. And at least two amongst the Æsir were aware.

So this, then, is a reclamation, perhaps. Old things in new tongues. Fitting, for a man whose every last thread has been cut. The reestablishment of foundations. So Loki, Son of Laufey, rightful king of Jǫtunheimr, awaits Anthony Stark in a rusting tower by the sea, and is content.

Comments

[laevisilaufeyson]

Loki can't feel it, no, can't sense it in anything more but the sparking of neurons in particular areas of the brain. Pleasure, there. Amygdala, that's the name – there's the brief flash of the page of an old anatomy textbook, dusty-smelling even then, so many years ago. There, the constant sparking in the frontal lobe. Processing. Thinking. The seat of sentience, this amalgamation of electrochemical impulses.

And this, this is what amusement feels like in a mind so ancient that it's become tangled impossibly up in so many other things, prerequisites, related concepts, the whole of them so tightly bound together that amusement isn't anymore. Nothing so pure exists. The name is just an overtone, blended not-so-subtly with both gratification and pity, affection and disdain. It's a glimpse, perhaps, into what makes him so very fickle and contradictory: at any moment the balance could swing in another direction, impressions change and his mood along with it. His reactions follow them, manic and subdued, delighted and furious, pleased and disgusted, so rarely reaching a comfortable stasis.

But he smiles. Some things are contagious no matter the stretch of time, and whatever might hide behind it, however many complex things it might encode, it's still there.

“Generous of you. Suspiciously generous of you, in fact.” Teasing. Something that is distinctly flirtation. There's a great deal of that, when he's in a good mood, but that's all it is. Not strictly a lie, but not insistent, either.

“If you wish me to see, then by all means: show me.” Oh, he's curious, yes, but right now the curiosity comes second to what is almost a playfulness, this desire to be irritatingly evasive, which is not a game he's been able to play in a very long time. It simply doesn't work when he's on his own. There's only so far he can take lies to himself.

[manofiron]

"There's a picture of you in the dictionary next to the entry for mixed signals, isn't there?" There's a teasing lilt to his voice, a subtle quirk of his lips and a gleam in his eyes that says that he's not completely put off by it. It's frustrating, yes. Especially for Tony, who's never really had to try to get anything out of someone else, be it a straight answer, time, or something more substantial. But there's a part of him, the part that isn't impatient and spoiled, that has to admit that it's kind of fun to play the game.

In a world where practically everyone caves to his whims, where next to no one is willing to stand up to his nonsense and call him on it, those rare few who do are valued above all others. There aren't many; Pepper and Rhodey come to mind the fastest. And Loki's nothing like them. They care, they're his friends, practically the only family he has. But Loki's an alien, fascinating, complex, dangerous, and he does whatever he does for reasons Tony can't begin to fathom.

It's fun. This exchange is fun. And Tony craves that almost as much as knowledge.

"Sure. Okay." He dips his head in the semblance of a bow, adopting a stuffy, overly formal tone that's completely ruined by the smirk that keeps trying to disrupt his expression of fake gravity. "I will so unfortunately waste your time and subject you to the viewing of this most dull of objects."

He doesn't let go of Loki's hand, unwilling to give up the connection until he's made to do it. Instead, he uses his free hand to unbutton the first couple buttons of his shirt. "It probably says something unflattering about me that I can do this one-handed so easily, right? That's okay, you don't have to tell me." The amusement drains out of his voice as he pulls back the fabric so that Loki can get a clear look at his artificial heart, his entire demeanor becoming quiet and serious. "Be very careful. Our kind hosts tampered with it somehow and I haven't figured out what they did yet."

[laevisilaufeyson]

"Of course they have," Loki responds faintly distractedly as he bends closer, squinting. "Much too dangerous. Too difficult to contain you if you have access to that."

A pause. "Or any of the rest of us, should we desire to take it."

His vision is still blurred and doubled, apparent through the connection between them, but he can process well enough. At this range it's not too bad, anyway; the relevant details of the device are still clear enough.

Curiosity comes through the link between them, genuine interest, the itch to let the threads of his magic reach into the arc reactor and explore, though he refrains. Other,eez abstract things too: scents that Loki associates with human in general, which one might expect him in all appropriateness to find unpleasant, but he doesn't. Simply alien, different, not of the self or the family or the species, the way the scent of an animal can be both familiar and yet alien to a human. Others associated with Tony in particular, the detergent on his clothing, his shampoo, faint traces of soap on his skin, so on. Metal, faintly, underlying it all. The sounds of breathing, of the sea.

Stray, disjointed thoughts drift by in a collection of languages. His own native tongue makes up the bulk of it, comfortable, musical, but there's English too. German, French, words and phrases pilfered here and there.

And then the desire to press his fingertips to scar tissue, Tony's, his own, compare perhaps the texture of the flesh, the sensation of it under his fingertips... a curiosity, but only a small one. He knows how human scar tissue feels. He knows what it feels like to create it.

In any case, it's not ugly. Not like that botched work with the awl that ruined his own flesh. Impressive. Creative. A lovely object in its own right. Not simply a bad joke. Loki taps a forefinger absently against his lips.

"You aren't the only one with whom they've been tampering, though." The quality of the information flowing across the contact between them changes, becomes what is clearly memory, both less immediate and more coherent than the stream-of-consciousness transmissions of before. The scene changes, slips away to some long-ago evening on Asgard, golden halls and a bed strewn with furs upon which Loki sits as all the cosmos spin around him. He can sense it all, for light years in all directions, stars and planets and obscurer things. Slowly it fades and now slips back in again, and Loki's consciousness shrinks startlingly down to the space of a few miles, just enough to encompass the town and its environs, no more. The effect is... suffocating. But still better than the box.

"I haven't yet worked out how," he says, but he doesn't sound particularly perturbed. After all, for him, it's only a matter of time. Rome fell. He knows. He was there.

[manofiron]

"If you're going to take it, would you do me the courtesy of killing me first? I'll die without it anyway, and it's a horrible way to go." He knows this from first-hand experience. Maybe it isn't information that he ought to be giving away, but it isn't like Loki doesn't know about the reactor. He knew about it before this and no doubt he's clever enough to put two and two together. After all, who would mutilate themselves like this on purpose?

It's been a long time since anyone's studied the reactor like this. It makes him nervous, not because it's Loki, but because it's a part of him that he doesn't share with other people. Having eyes on it makes him feel raw and exposed in a way he doesn't like, and he can feel the nervous energy starting to pool in his stomach, urging him to fidget or shift or do something to expend it.

He focuses on what he's getting from Loki instead, letting the sights and sounds and things he cannot hope to understand distract him. It isn't difficult to do, and soon he's losing himself in them. For an instant he's there, sitting in the center of the universe, feeling it spinning around him. It's breathtaking and as awe-inspiring as it is humbling, and he feels again the insignificance he felt as he hung there helpless and suffocating in the emptiness of space, watching the Chitauri disintegrate in a ball of fire. Dimly, distantly, he hears Loki say that he too has been tampered with and suddenly the vastness of existence narrows down so fast to almost nothing that it hurts to lose it.

"Do..." He trails off, blinking as, without warning, the obvious solution to one of the problems he's been faced with since his arrival practically slaps him in the face. "Loki, can you--Are you seeing what I'm seeing too? Can you? Because if you can..."

He doesn't have a pen and a sheet of paper on him. He doesn't know where the cameras are in here, or even if there are any, but he assumes that there's at least one, and lest their captors overhear him, he can't ask. A quick glance around reveals nothing he can use to communicate properly, so he settles for improvising. Laying his free hand over their joined ones, Tony painstakingly draws the letters to the words he isn't saying on the back of Loki's hand with the tip of his finger.

We can talk without them hearing us?

[laevisilaufeyson]

Loki waits patiently as the letters are traced against his skin, head tilted to one side. Well...

“I'm afraid not,” he says aloud, without missing a beat, but...

No. But yes. Sort of.

I can project things to you, but the output you produce is much too complex for me to read in such detail, and even this much is difficult to accomplish without direct contact. A matter not of the limitations of magic but of the limitations of Loki's own mind, a matter of scale. Large-scale magic is just that, large-scale, and it may be incredibly complex but at least the raw material, or raw energy as the case may be, can be sensed from afar. Something as complicated as the human brain and as small as a neuron is another matter entirely.

I could... relay messages to consenting parties, should it become necessary, but I don't expect you'll find many of those. Some can be discounted out of hand. Banner. Coulson, likely. Barton. All the others who know him and plenty of those who don't, if word's already been spread about who and what he is.

It's for the best, likely. To trust Loki is to open oneself up to the potential of disaster. Such a network would give him easy access to entirely too many people.

Yet it would work. As long as he decided to play nicely, it would work.

An interesting dilemma, one of which Loki is entirely aware and one he has far more interest in simply watching unfold than he does any investment in a particular outcome, and so he lets that much stand. Either Stark will turn the world on its head... or he won't. Both outcomes are likely to be equally interesting.

[manofiron]

“Damn.” It’s a low mutter under his breath, one that he’s not overly concerned with their hosts hearing.

He can’t say that he’s disappointed, per se. It would have been an easy solution if magic could have solved their privacy dilemma, but it’s never been a part of his life. He’s never had to rely on it for anything, never even believed in it until Loki had come to Earth with the Tesseract. Not utilizing something he’s never had isn’t that great of a loss.

“It would be too complicated,” he says a moment later, speaking because it’s easier than trying to write out each letter onto Loki’s hand. “And probably the kind of hassle that would have you throttling us before we really got anywhere with it. Some of them don’t even trust me. Imagine that.”

Catching himself starting to absently drum his fingers against Loki’s hand, he pulls it away and forces himself to be still. “I’ll think of something else that won’t end up giving you a massive headache. Unless, I don’t know, are there any people here you actually like? I could ask them.”

[laevisilaufeyson]

I could enchant something... perhaps. A set of objects, I would have to invent a method. It would take time. A great deal of energy. Enchantments take... investment. And it would leave him weak, likely.

Then, aloud: "I rather like the lot of you; have from the start, but that's nothing to do with anything. Reciprocity is equally important."

And liking something doesn't mean one would much regret breaking it. "My ire is directed at one of your number nearly exclusively, and as he happens not to be present I take no issue with the presence of yourself or your friends. On the contrary, you're all quite entertaining."

Where else would anyone dare chain him to a railing, cut his hair, and write obscene things on his face all in one day? Barton was a good agent when Loki needed him to be and he's a commensurately entertaining personage, if rather a terrible prankster. There's still time to fix that, anyhow.

"I doubt most of you find my presence equally so, as is wholly understandable, if rather short-sighted." Though also wise, likely. A good man he is not, if such a thing as good exists. Relying on a man without much in the way of a conscience, however content he may be at the moment to play nicely, isn't the best idea. Even Stark is a safer gamble than Loki would be.

[manofiron]

Feigning scratching at an itch on his forearm, Tony removes his hand by way of passing over Loki’s and lets it rest there atop it again while he carefully writes out a short message in response to his unspoken words. I would repay you.

Not that Tony has the first clue how he could repay someone like Loki, who has everything at his fingertips already. But he keeps his promises when he can be bothered to make them, and he always pays back everything he owes.

“We’re kind of like a soap opera, aren’t we? Only slightly more volatile and capable of leveling large cities. I can see why you find us entertaining. I would too.” He shrugs a little, tone as light and airy as though they’re talking about the weather on a lovely spring day. “Sometimes I even do. A little controlled violence is good for the soul.”

Provided no one gets killed, anyway.

“And for the record, if that’s you fishing for a compliment, I don’t hate you. I don’t like some the things you’ve done, but then again, I don’t like some of the things I’ve done either. And when you’re not strangling me and chucking me out of windows, or trying to kill the people I know, I might even like you.” Loki has a sense of humor Tony can appreciate it. He saw it once in Stark Tower, after the fight was over and he was beaten but not cowed. And he just saw it again here, in the comment about the paisley wallpaper. “So, if you need reciprocity, you at least have it from me.”

[laevisilaufeyson]

I will experiment. The problem intrigues me; payment is unnecessary unless the cost of success is high. As it might just be. Still better than sitting around and staring at the sea all day, though.

"How much of their trust I'll need to secure will depend entirely upon how much you're willing to lie," Loki adds, aloud. Let them think him a fickle and dangerous thing, these watchers; better than to think he might be helpful. Liminality is important. All this talk of mixed signals skirts around a rather serious issue: the fact that as an outsider, as a sometime enemy, Loki is more useful than as a full-time ally.

Best that you speak little of me, particularly in front of the cameras -- and speaking of controlled violence, we would do well to arrange a bit of that as well. As a distraction, of course. A feint. Start banging on pots and pans and nobody's going to be interested in listening for whispers.

This, here, this distance, this subterfuge, is Loki's greatest use. What he has made of himself, what he has been made, is a creature that straddles boundaries. Thor may be able to stand with the rest of his team, and would were he here, no doubt, but Loki never will. His own fault, of course, and perhaps to his own detriment -- but, and this is of course the greatest irony in all of it, the others do. Any atrocities committed before are only likely to serve them now.

In that regard Loki is pleased. Aesthetically pleased above all else; contradictions please him. Disorder pleases him. The isolation does too, though it also doesn't. It's safer, though it may be lonely. Lastly it pleases him because of its value, because of the room he has to breathe and to act when he isn't bound by mores and obligations.

It should please Tony, too; he may not act with much of it, but he surely must know the value of subtlety. He certainly knows the value in distance, in being capable of operating and willing to operate both within and without established rules and boundaries. Loki is more than willing. That much should have been clear from the start.

"I'm not fishing for compliments, incidentally. Merely outlining an inevitable operational difficulty which is easily enough worked around with a bit of subterfuge... should you wish to walk that path."

[manofiron]

How much is he willing to lie? It’s the question of the day, and later, when he examines it, he’ll find that he answer is somewhat troubling to him. The truth is, if it protects the people of the town, if it gets them home - all of them – then he’s willing to lie as much as he has to lie. Just like he’s willing to do whatever needs to be done to see them home safely. Whatever it costs him, he’ll pay. Whatever sacrifices he must make, he will.

Better that it’s him than anyone else.

“I’m kind of a celebrity,” he admits, answering the question with a statement that he only belatedly realizes might lose its meaning when told to an alien. “Even before the whole Iron Man thing, actually. I’ve spent most of my life in the public eye.”

Are there celebrities on Asgard? Tony doesn’t know, but he thinks that surely there are great warriors and heroes and whatever else a warrior world that takes its cues from Shakespeare must venerate. Maybe they don’t get hounded by the press and followed around by cameras wherever they go, but there’s got to be an equivalent somehow. Still, he accepts that it might be a human conceit, building people up so high only to tear them down again for the entertainment of the masses, and explains a little further.

“I’ve been lying for years. I’m actually pretty good at it.” He rolls his eyes, feigning indifference to what he’s just said. “I don’t think you really need to worry about me having a crisis of conscience.” For the greater good, he’s willing to set that conscience aside if he absolutely must.

You’re on, he traces against Loki’s hand, dovetailing the silent communication with the last bit he’s speaking aloud. Subterfuge, violence, and all. Let’s see where that path goes.