silver mckellar and tony stark are (silverandsteel) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-03-10 13:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, iron man, loki |
Who: Loki and Tony Stark
What: Witty banter. Threats to life and limb. Good stuff.
Where: The construction site of Stark Tower.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: None.
The problem with the doors was that there wasn’t just one. They kept changing. Tony had walked through the same hotel with the same key four times now, and he’d arrived in different places all four times. They were all places that were familiar to him, inherently important, places he knew and felt safe. If he bought all this magic woo woo stuff, then sure, that would make absolute sense, but he didn’t. The doors had to have some kind of logic, and Silver, with his ‘it will all make sense in the end, Tony’ bullshit, could shove it. This most recent time, he’d ended up on top of the new building he’d been working on in New York, and he’d chosen here to start some of his testing.
Technically, according to building code, he shouldn’t be up here; the work wasn’t complete. He had his own work to put in, however, and he happened to be generating quite a lot of energy up here at the top of the world, so it was better to do it when it was too dark for even the prying eyes of S.H.I.E.L.D. to be watching. Tony hit a switch and generated enough power to create a miniature lightning bolt on earth. All he got was a snap of electricity to rival thunder and the smell of melting tin cans. No door reopening in the frame he’d built. Nothing.
The crack of lightning and flicker of ozone veining through the air didn’t open the door, but when the current snapped closed, there was a shape standing in the doorway. The shape lacked horns, or a burst of light and sound to announce his entrance, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that he had appeared out of thin air on the roof of what had to be one of the best secured complexes in the country in one of the most populous cities in the world, he might have even seemed ordinary.
But if there was one thing Loki was not, with the unholy fire of his being, it was ordinary.
It was as if he’d been summoned there by the little electric toy, and he turned his head to regard the edges of the doorway. He slid a finger, over the inside of the frame, rubbed it against his thumb, and looked at the tips of his fingers as if divining. “No,” he said. He looked up at Tony Stark, genius of the world of men, and smiled. “But your effort was admirable. Truly.”
He was dressed for the weather and the world, black suit clad, a green scarf hanging from around his neck. He looked neat, and wouldn’t have been out of place down on the street below. But Loki no more carried himself like a mortal than he behaved like one. His eyes gave him away without fail, a little too green, mulled with something unpleasant, black spots on the iris. He was casual, really, not worried about Iron Man’s inevitable bluster, or SHIELD, or anyone else in the least. It begged the question of why he’d come if it wasn’t to get the jump on Tony Stark, one he anticipated, but didn’t offer an answer for.
He stepped down from the doorway, peering over the building edge. Loki was fond of Midgard. He hadn’t spent much time on it in the last hundred years or so, but when life in Asgard had been insufferable, and he’d wished to practice his own techniques for moving between worlds like stepping stones in the vastness of space, he’d often come here. Watching the little people move on the street below soothed him. “It’s a little like watching fish behind glass,” he said, in an accent that could be likened closest to the received pronunciation of the wealthy British, each syllable sliced impeccably from the next. “Or ants, scrabbling in the dirt. Predictable. Without sound, without meaning. Without thought.”
The skeleton of what would soon become the Stark Tower penthouse was lit by LED, though as the man-made lightning faded, none was brighter than the triangle of light gleaming through Tony’s old AC/DC shirt as he straightened up slowly from the set of switches he’d rigged in the last few hours for the experiment. He didn’t recognize the man that had come through the door, and it took a few counts of narrowed eyes for him to come to the conclusion that whoever it was had not come from the Passages Hotel. Because Tony had never met Loki personally, nor even had he time to spare a thought to his future colleague’s freaky little brother, he had no idea who he was talking to. Fortunately, he didn’t much care.
“Well, you’re a big disappointment for me, too. I would have preferred wrinkled ET to last year’s fashion show. The exit is over there, but you can just jump if you want to take the faster route.” Tony rubbed his fingers together against the spring nip in the New York air, and then he turned away toward the desk installation that was the beginnings of a new lab. JARVIS was installed, but he only had a few of the old relic suits here.
Loki glanced pointedly up at the LEDs flashing the Stark name in bright, rippling LEDs for the city to gaze upon and revere.
"And clearly, subtlety is not your strong suit. I'd suggest not throwing stones," Loki said, with an amused twitch at the corner of his mouth.
"Disappointed is an overstatement," Loki said, the wind ruffling the long coat he wore despite the unseasonable warmth. He was beside the door, and then he was beside the old suits. The air didn't so much as ruffle at his passing. He studied the suits, walking around them. He never seemed to stop moving - when his feet halted, his eyes kept roving, and when his eyes fixed, he walked.
"I did expect more. Tony Stark, the master of all machines he surveys, part machine himself." The titles were relished thoroughly. "That thing in your chest sets you apart from the ants. It makes you better. Your dependency on technology advances you. Funny," he said, and showed the closest thing to a real smile he likely had in his repetoire, "Isn't it?"
"It's a wonder you spend your time trying to keep them from murdering each other. That is what you do, isn't it?" Loki asked. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're the peacekeeping soldier of fortune, silver and gold. The pacifist prince."
Loki snapped a black fingernail against the outside of one of the suits, and it straightened, all the joints locking into place, a ripple of electricity wandering across the outside before dissipating. "What a waste."
The last time other people had gotten friendly with the Iron Man suits, Pepper had almost gotten killed. The time before that, too. Tony stopped his analysis of the statistics running by on his temporary screens as soon as he saw the man move--or, rather, saw where he ended up. He couldn’t be sure if the man was just moving very fast, or if he really did vanish and reappear again. What he was calling his meta-memory (not that it was superhuman, just that it was not normal, and “meta” sounded cool) was supplying some limited names of people who could do that--teleportation, accelerated speed. Tony rounded a safety railing and dropped down onto the second terrace where the suits appeared to stand guard in silent, shining glory. “Get away from those. You’ve heard of me, but I haven’t had the pleasure.” He laid the sarcasm on thickly.
Had Loki ever been standing beside Tony at all, or had he always been down here, circling the reliquary foundation of the man’s later accomplishments? Hard to say. But getting a rise out of the billionaire-philanthropist-playboy amused him endlessly. “Don’t be so harsh on them. I doubt they bite,” Loki said, scanning the one he’d touched up and down with his eyes. He flicked it again, before Tony could attempt to stop him, and the suit burst apart. Every tiny metal joint rusted and corroded, and the pieces fell to the ground, thousands of metal scales and wires winking out of turn under the flashing LEDs over their heads. In a few moments, there was nothing left but metal dust, blackening and disappearing into nothing.
Then the suit was back. It hung up where it had been before, all its joints slackened again, as they had been before he’d touched it the first time. It was immaculate, apparently totally unharmed, not even the dust on the shoulders disturbed.
“What is it I’m meant to say?” Loki asked, feigning a search for the appropriate word. “Voila? Behold?” He flicked the end of his scarf away from the corner of his pocket, straightening it into smooth submission again. “I’m surprised you don’t recognize me,” he said. His voice dripped with barely concealed ire under the sarcasm. He gestured to himself with a sweep of his hand. “You don’t see the family resemblance?”
As soon as the suit’s weight disintegrated off of its place, alarms seemed to manifest in all directions. Everything from Tony’s phone to the tiny ruby lights leading down into the recesses of Stark Tower started blinking in serious notification of imminent theft, and deep in Washington DC ten panicked people made a dive for their phones. S.H.I.E.L.D’s response was probably more efficient, and likely more military too, and Tony was actually curious what would show up now that the alarm had gone off. The alarms didn’t cease even when the suit was returned to its former glory, and rather than accelerate his pace to interfere, Tony slowed down. He stepped down off the pad he was designing to remove the armor in pieces and put his hands in his pockets. He was dealing with someone that wasn’t going to be stopped by alarms, and he knew it.
He didn’t look afraid, though. He gave Loki one eyebrow as he looked him over. Family resemblance? “Ah,” Tony said, smiling as he got it. “We haven’t met in person, but I’ve...” Tony’s eyes rolled up in his head as he shrugged to approximate the thought, “sort of--heard of you. I think I was expecting you to be taller.” Loki was already taller than Tony, and from Tony’s smile (a little boy’s smile that dug into either cheek) he knew it. “Or,” (brightly!) “maybe you just need a new tailor?” He made a little gesture toward the Mark IVs. “None of those will fit you. So what do you want?”
There would be men with guns suiting up to come arrest him for his dangerous act of touching a hunk of metal, Loki assumed. It frightened him about as much as he frightened Tony. In fact, the very prospect entertained him immensely. Let them come, if they liked. “Those alarms might say otherwise, but we both know I’m not here for your tin soldiers,” he said, inclining his head a little toward Tony. He smiled a little, after a moment, like he’d seen something he recognized, and his head tipped back again. “You smile like my brother,” he said. “The smile the beloved have. Just as sure of how deserving your skill makes you as you are of the love bent toward you at the top of the heap.” His smile had taken on the cast of a sneer.
Vaguely, in the distance, he heard shouting. “That was quick,” Loki said, eyes gone slightly wide in feigned surprise. “Little boys and girls,” he said. “All coming after me. How many, do you think, just jumped to your rescue? Not capable of watching over your own possessions? Need a small army to come combat one solitary trickster? I should be flattered.” He side-stepped away from the suits, a mark of his pure intentions. “Well, I came for you, Mr. Stark. I wanted to make a good first impression, and make sure we stayed on good terms.” He peered over the building’s edge. “It seems to only be the two of us currently circulate in these worlds, the rest lost on the other side of that door.” His expression flickered, briefly, to annoyance, then smoothed out again, with the same sort of intense precision that he applied to everything else, the sort that masked an unpredictability and a danger in all that energy. “Rest assured, though, I’m going to take excellent care of this place, now that all the misguided heroes have been removed from it.”
All the little horses and all the kings men weren’t concerned about Tony as a person all that much. Now, the weapons of mass destruction hanging in his penthouse, those they were worried about. Tony tried not to take it personally. “That chip on your shoulder has got to be uncomfortable there, Igor.” Tony reached an arm around and dusted at his own shoulder’s invisible chip demonstratively, leaning forward with that annoying look on his face that made Fury roll his eyes regularly. (Or... well, it would. If Tony had met Fury. Fuck, this was confusing.)
Tony swaggered on down the platform toward his visitor. “Really? Vegas-side, huh? That’s got to be hard for you and your world conquering plans.” Tony grinned widely. “Hard to conquer one day at a time. I can’t even get an experiment done. And it’s hell on the lovelife.” Smug, smug.
Loki smiled. “I like your assumptions,” he said. “They’re so...illuminating.” He did, after all, prefer to be underestimated. And he loved the fact that his adversary seemed completely unaware of what sort of influence he might be capable of when they were both on the other side of the door, the sort of slow build havoc he had planned. He moved closer to Tony even as Tony did the same, crossing the distance between them without fear, stopping only when he stood within arms’ reach of him. He was unconcerned about getting into his personal space, and unworried about any danger to his person. “Experiments and an active love life, conquering women from coast to American coast,” he observed. This close, the thin scar on his forehead was visible, the mark of how far and how hard he fell. “It’s difficult to imagine that an intelligent man like you doesn’t get bored to tears with such things.”
Tony rarely had expectations of people. Too busy with his own doings, too used to the people around him being slow and without his imagination. Even more rarely did those people surprise him with their ability to keep up, and even (occasionally) jump ahead. Tony stopped when Loki came close and smiled up into the other man’s pale face. “Not so bored that I’m available to old gods in bad suits. You can try the next time I’m really... really drunk, though. You never know, my standards might take a plummet.” The scar only told Tony that the god could be hurt, and that was good news. If he survived this conversation, that is.
Loki laughed, more a huff with a smile just as smug as anything the other man was capable of producing, on the surface at least. "Now you flatter yourself," he said.
The men were still oncoming. Just a few minutes more before they burst out onto the roof, Loki guessed. He studied Stark, searching for the slightest sign of weakness. There was darkness in him, surely. Loki knew traces of shadow when he saw it, as the expert in pulling it to the surface in others where ever he could. But it was the sort of darkness without root in malice, the kind tied to guilt that could be debilitating if amplified, but not outwardly destructive. Pity. "You're nothing without that suit," he said. "And yet here you stand, unafraid, even though I could throw you from this building right now if I chose to. Why is that?"
“Not quite nothing,” Tony said, tipping his head just slightly to one side and drawing his mouth together at one corner. “There’s the... lifetime of technological accomplishment, the stunning good looks... oh, right, and all those friends you don’t have.” Tony snapped his fingers up near his head as if he’d just made another of those amazing accomplishments standing right there. “For me, that’s sure saying something. Wow. You got to be bad at making friends for me to beat you at it. Then there’s the brother. No more bro. You had to put some effort into that one, but I hear you did! Congrats.”
If Loki hadn’t become good at letting the jibes of others roll off his shoulders - or, at least, thinking he was - he wouldn’t have survived this long. They didn’t elicit his immediate ire, no, but they tended to stick in his pride and fester, never forgotten, always returned with interest. “You do know what pride comes before, don’t you Mr. Stark?”
At that moment, a group of well-armed and unearthly quiet SHIELD agents joined them on the rooftop, ready to fire. Almost as one, they turned their attention to the opposite end of the unfinished construction. Somehow, Loki was standing there in full regalia, black coat and gold and green armor, the helmet with the immense, curved horns, immediately recognizable if the agents had been doing their homework. They didn’t turn toward the end of the rooftop Loki and Tony were standing on except to verify Tony was alive, weapons trained en masse on the apparition on the other side.
“Don’t let my brother fool you,” Loki said, continuing the conversation as if nothing had happened. “He fancies himself a hero of the world of men, when he’s just a fool with a hammer and the strength to wield it. He is weak. He will falter, and I will be there to see it happen.” He stepped up on the edge of the roof and looked down at the long, glittering drop below. “How long do you think it will be before those guns are turned on you?” The SHIELD agents were slowly advancing on the apparition, who was saying something to them. “When they figure out how to get your inventions out from under you, and you outlive your usefulness and become nothing more than a liability with the skill to construct weapons of devastating power? You purport to be a man of intelligence, for all your crude behavior. Don’t pretend you haven’t thought of it. The day when your Colonel Fury decides he’s put up with your ego and your stranglehold over your invention long enough.”
Loki closed his hand into a fist, and drew it upward, closer to himself. The ghostly figure opposite them disappeared, and one of the agents fired a few shots into the empty air. Loki chuckled. “They’re frightened, you see. Powerless, frightened people don’t like difference, or someone being treated as if they are special. It reminds them of what they don’t have.” The soldiers turned around to face them, but instead of firing or advancing with weapons raised, lowered them instead. “Attention!” he snapped, and they all straightened, much as the suit had done when he laid hands on it, their weapons at their sides, awaiting orders.
They, of course, saw Colonel Fury, who had been standing here all this time beside Tony Stark, his weapon trained on the god on the other side of the landing.
Loki turned to his companion, smiling. His eyes almost glowed, like a child who had learned a very, very good magic trick. “Shall I tell them to fire on you, and save you the anticipation?”
Tony watched the theatrics with obvious concern. He wasn’t accustomed to hiding his emotions and he almost never bothered; now was not an exception. He watched the miniature army infiltrate his home-to-be with standard tactics, frowning under slightly narrowed eyes as the smirking armored figure draws all the attention. Under the patter of boots, a faint humming is barely perceptible, but it gets louder as Loki carries on with his speech, and even as Tony took a half-step away from the man beside him, there was something waking up under the floor.
“I can take care of myself. You’re so sweet to worry, though.” Tony didn’t have a smile to match Loki’s. He just had a quirk of brow, and he glanced sideways at the men pointing their guns at him. His hand was over his chest. “...JARVIS,” he said, calmly. The hum turned into a unspeakable zing.
The huge electromagnet was so strong that it made the structure of the Tower creak around them. The Iron Man suits all collapsed downward, sucked toward the floor. The weapons from every SHIELD agent in the building were yanked summarily out of their hands to cling, quivering, to the floor. “Mm,” Tony said, giving a little tip of his head and a chipper twitch of his shoulder. He forcibly dropped his hand from his chest. “So much for that. I’ve got some cleaning to do... nice meeting you, Loki. Remember what I said about the tailor, okay?”
Loki liked a challenge, and while to rule was always best, to face opposition on one’s way was always better, particularly when it came in the form of the overconfident and the intelligent. Breaking Tony Stark was going to be a pleasurable experience indeed. He made another swift gesture, and there was a faint crackle in the air of magic working, separate from the hum of electricity. “Likewise. And don’t hesitate to call for me when the rest have turned on you. You’ll find that, unlike them, I’m a man of my word.” He dropped the facade of Colonel Fury for the angry SHIELD agents, and then disappeared before a single one could try to pry their gun off the floor.
Tony waited for as long as he could, but then he staggered and nearly fell. “JARVIS,” he gasped. “Turn off the magnet.” JARVIS issued a polite acknowledgment and the buzzing stopped. There were faint clicks as all the weapons and a myriad of lab equipment released from their quivering holds on the floor, falling over sideways. The chestpiece did a job keeping the shrapnel out of Tony’s heart, and it wouldn’t be much use if it wasn’t insulated from magnets (considering how much equipment was flying around in the Iron Man suits) but that didn’t mean he could isolate the shrapnel itself from magnetic effects; that would nullify the effect of the chestpiece itself. The SHIELD agents spread out, but two dropped down at Tony’s side as he rolled over and tried to recover from the splitting pain cutting through his heart. He didn’t even have breath for a witty comment.