[TWIG] Chapter 9/14: Through the looking glass

[terresdebrume]

TITLE: The way it goes
FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU
SERIES: Standing on tiptoes (1/3)
RATING: Teen and Up
PAIRING(S): FrostIron
CHARACTER(S): Loki, Tony Stark, Thor, Odin, Frigga, Farbauti, Laufey, cameos by multiple others.
GENRE: Alternate Universe (Ballet)
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None, although there is some mildly explicit description of violence in the first few chapters.
SUMMARY: Loki is a ballet dancer juggling between two (or three, or possibly four) different lives. Tony Stark is an engineer's son who goes into theatric props to piss his father off. Then they meet, and worlds collide.

STANDING ON TIPTOES ON LJ: [Series masterpost] Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8,


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Laufey

His real name is Björn Laufeyson, like his father, but he stopped going by that when he was eleven and his mother died (violence without intention to kill, the tribunal said, but Laufey knew better) and he was placed in the care of social system.

He met Fárbauti (Elvira on paper, but like most of the kids Laufey met, she didn’t use her given name anymore) in a police station when he was sixteen and playing with fire.

It was love at first sight.

Theirs was a messy love story, full of small thieveries, shouting matches and banging doors and urgent make up sex, burning bodies pressing on the wall, the pots-peppered floor, elevator doors and even the back of a confessional once, after their third breakup.

(Laufey’s fairly certain that’s when Loki was conceived, even if Far’ used to insist it was the ball-pit three days later.)

At the time he was eighteen, Far’ was seventeen, and neither of them was ready to properly take care of themselves, let alone a kid, not if they wanted him to have a better childhood than theirs at any rate.

So they gave him a name, a blanket embroidered with cartoony snakes, and put him up for adoption, because they thought that was the best gift they could give him (he’s still convinced that was the right decision, even if it didn’t end up as well as it could have for Loki).

Fourteen years later, when Helblindy was four and Býleistr was painfully learning to turn from back to stomach, Laufey was more than a little surprised to find a skinny kid with a shiner on his doorstep, asking if he would mind talking for a few minutes.

He remember holding the door open (with his elbow, because he’d been working on one of the tractors’ motor and motor oil on the handle wasn’t something he wanted, what with Hel’ shoving everything into his mouth) letting Loki in, and the boy turning to him and saying:

“I just want a quarter of an hour. Thirty minutes, tops, and then I’ll leave you alone.”

Twelve years later and Loki still spends most of his Saturdays at the farm.

He’s not a very talkative man, Loki. Keeps his secrets close to his chest.

For all that they see each other regularly, Laufey knows precious little about his eldest’s life. He knows he was adopted by a rich family (though more thanks to the clothes he wears and the car he drives than his own confession) that he has a brother (whom he used as an explanation for his black eye on that very first day) and that his adoptive mother has a crippling fear of snakes (as he mentioned when he was sixteen an lamenting the fact that he couldn’t get one before he was out of the house).

Laufey also knows his son is gay.

It is, actually, one of the very first thing Loki revealed about himself, eyes hard and chin lifted, like a challenge, like he was trying to test Laufey in some odd way… Apparently he passed, otherwise Loki probably wouldn’t have come back after that day, but it still feels weird to think that the kid dared him to say anything about what he was, about who he was, what he chose to do.

There was history there, memories of cutting comments and unmet expectations and dashed hopes, which makes Laufey think that Loki isn’t fully happy in his family, probably isn’t even out to them for fear of their judgment on his sexuality.

From the very beginning, it was very clear that Laufey wasn’t allowed to judge Loki’s life.

Aside from that, what Laufey knows of Loki is mostly based on what he sees on the farm.

He knows Loki loves music: it showed in the way he clutched his walkman on that first visit, the way his whole body relaxes when there’s music playing, the awed looks he can’t help throwing at Laufey’s record collection, the light skip in his steps that looks like dancing every time he’s happy (about what, Laufey rarely knows, but at least he sees his son being happy and that’s what really matters).

Loki lives in music, loves in music, breathes in music, and there is no doubt to Laufey that Loki’s brain provides him with a permanent soundtrack to his life (how else would he keep humming under his breath all the time, uh?)

Laufey also knows Loki is good with pets. Really, he is.

But he’s crap with horses.

He doesn’t know how Loki does it, have the biggest, most aggressive of Laufey’s fourteen dogs eating from his hands in less than an hour, and yet not be able to come near any of the twenty five horses without somehow ending with a not-so-playful nudge shoving him in the walls of the stalls, or teeth biting harder than they should… Loki is the first person Laufey ever had to ban from the stalls, for his own safety.

Well, excepting Sleipnir, Svaðilfari’s newest foal, but this one is obviously a cross with a retriever or something.

(No, seriously. Sleipnir comes at a gesture, sits on command and fetches. Helblindy calls him the fifteenth dog.)

Aside from the horses, everybody on the farm loves Loki.

Far’ teaches him to cook and take artsy photos, and she plays the piano to accompany his cello or his dancing (most of the time, it ends up being a music lesson for her, because much as she loves playing, she never had the occasion to learn properly) and she hugs him even (and maybe especially) when she knows it’ll embarrass him.

Hel’ likes to go to him for his chemistry homework because, surprise, Loki is actually really good at this, and he never misses an occasion to help his future scientist of a brother.

By’ actually looks at his face, which means a lot.

As for Laufey himself well… he gets along with Loki.

They have this sort of instant connection that links people whose nature finds an echo in each other’s: they have the same crooked smile, the same will to reach for more, better, higher. They have this powerful thing between them that allows them to accept their differences easily and feel richer because of it instead of considering them a barrier.

This is also the reason why Laufey knows exactly what goes on in Loki’s head every time they have a kind of father-son moment (when they laugh at the same joke, compliment Far’s cooking at the same moment, when she points out how similar they are, how they enjoy each other’s company) and Loki looks away, nostalgic and wistful and guilty.

To be honest though, Laufey doesn’t need this special bond with Loki to know something is wrong when he hears Far’ swearing hard enough to make a sailor blush from the kitchen.

“What the fu—” he starts to say, but then he reaches the front door and Loki’s there, at nearly midnight on a Sunday night.

He is out of the house in an instant, hooking Loki’s arm around his neck to relieve some weight from the stranger supporting him, and together they bring him to the kitchen. He hears Far ushering one of the boys back to bed, before she comes into the kitchen, kneels in front of Loki and asks in all seriousness:

“Do I need to go kick some ass?”

Loki shakes his head slowly, drunkenly, and he ends up resting his cheek against the other man’s hip, tired and drugged and on the verge of fainting, but he doesn’t say a word.

“He can’t speak ma’am,” the stranger says when Far’ looks ready to ask again. “Doctor’s orders. Can’t pull the stitches.”

That’s when Laufey notices them: four on each lip, almost regular and even spaced, brown with dried blood Loki must have spilt on the way there. His designer shirt is useless, soaked in blood and torn at the rib, even if Loki (thankfully) doesn’t present any sign of serious injury there.

They stand in silence in the kitchen while Far’ checks her son’s injury, calm and practiced from all the times she did that with Laufey when they were younger, but there’s an anger here that didn’t exist back when they were the ones getting beaten; an anger that Laufey feels too as he thinks it is his blood that stands here, his kid, even if he’s only there one day a week, and his hand grip the back of a chair hard enough to make his fingers tremble.

“He said he’d have a room?” The stranger says before Farbauti is done, and Laufey only now sees the dark circles under his eyes, the brace on his nose, the blood on his shirt. There’s tiredness here, born of more than time and staying up late, and Laufey gently pulls his wife up.

“In the attic, the door on the right.”

The guy nods, forces Loki upright and, when it appears he won’t be able to walk on his own, switches to carrying him bridal style, despite the obvious strain it puts on his muscles.

“What’s your name?” Far’ asks.

“Tony. Stark.”

“Well Tony Stark, I expect you to tell me what happened to m— to him before you can get any rest.”

Stark’s face goes solemn and he nods before following Laufey through the house.