[TWIG] Chapter 14/14: Epilogue

[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, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13.


--------------------------------------------------------------------

Howard

The dogs are barking, running around as a little girl in a white dress tries to grab at their tails.

The Utonagans are merely trotting, a courtesy to the paling fur on their backs, but the blue Dane progresses by leaps and bounds, occasionally coming back to headbutt the girl in the chest, making her giggle in a loud, happy fashion. From time to time, she stops and waves at the big blonde man who sits on a bench in his grey suit, his arm around a pregnant brunette –he assumes they are the parents. The girl looks to be… what, six? Maybe seven, but she’s certainly not eight. Her eyes are blue, and her smile is dimpled as she goes to a young man around twenty and takes him by the hand.

The boy is black of hair with reddish-brown eyes, and he looks perplexed but happy to be invited to play with the little girl. Behind him are two other men and a woman –the men look like they’re twenty-five-ish and somewhere around fifty… a brother and a father to the other one, then? The woman is red-haired, her face smooth despite the streaks of paler hair on her head.

He makes his way around the park, trying to pass himself off as a random passerby. He still hasn’t made his mind, still doesn’t know what he is going to do. In his pocket, his left hand if curled around a cell phone that has been lying on a workbench for eight years, right next to a leather jacket and an old tennis ball. In his pocket is the most meaningless thing he could find, the most ridiculous pretext he could have to be here, because he doesn’t know how to voice the real reason why he decided to cross half the city on foot today.

He walks in a wide circle, passing very close to a man in a wheelchair with a blonde woman on his lap. They’re watching a brown-haired woman with a strong jaw sign something, and the blonde woman laughs:

“Wait, wait, not so fast! Volstagg! Volstagg, come here, I can’t understand what my girlfriend is saying!”

He sees a man with a wide red beard hurrying from where a large white tent has been set, followed by a thin blonde man with a hedgehog-like beard and another one, Asian, who looks like he wants to scowl but can’t. They tug on his memory, vaguely, as if he’s seen them somewhere before… and maybe he has. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know very much, actually.

He’s not sure if it’s tears or sweat tickling at the corner of his eyes as he leaves the path and crosses the grass.

He spots a teenager with the blonde woman’s brown eyes scurrying from the tent, and passes by a bulky man covered in tattoos who looks absorbed in a conversation, before he hears it: the sound of someone arguing. The voices, he knows, belong to one of the groom, and someone he has to assume is his mother. He never forgot the sound of that voice. Eight years aren’t nearly enough to make him forget about the man who chose to throw his son’s sexual life in his face.

They haven’t noticed him yet, so he stands there and watches. The man’s face lengthened, he looks fully adult now, and not like an elegant teenager anymore. His hair is slicked back and his suit a pale, pale shade of green that looks almost blue. The woman is as elegant as he remembers it from countless glimpse in the corridors of the Valhalla, her hair done in an old-fashioned way he can’t help but approve, even though it is slightly at odds with her cream-colored gown.

“All I’m saying,” she says, “is that having your own children….”

“Oh for the love of—we’ve been over that already! I don’t give a damn about where my kids come from! They’ll be mine and that’s all I’m asking for!”

“Yes but the blood connection….”

“Which we don’t have,” the man says angrily, and that makes his mother close her mouth. “Look” the man says after a beat, looking like the words are torn from his mouth, “I know you’re worried because Charles and Erik had trouble settling with Alex and Scott. Maybe Tony and I will get a kid who’s had issues before, or maybe we’ll get a crack baby, we don’t know yet, but you know what? It can work. We’ll make it work.”

“How can you be so sure of that?” the woman says. “Your father—don’t look at me like that, I will not refer to him as ‘Odin’ when talking to you and you know it!” The man’s mouth twists, as though uncertain of the response he should give to that comment, and his mother continues: “Loki, your father and I thought it would work out seamlessly, and look at what happened!”

“Yes, now I have an example of what not to do.”

“Don’t, Loki. Don’t to that, I’m only trying to help.”

“Yes, by trying to convince me to rent a uterus instead of adopting a kid… which one is the most potentially disturbing, I wonder? Look, no. Tony and I talked about it, and we’re going for adoption, and that’s final.”

The woman sighs behind her son, and he decides to step forward, his left hand clenching around the battered cell phone, and the right one digging in the soft package containing a leather jacket and an old tennis ball.

He clears his throat, curses himself for his nerves –it’s not like he’s a young fool anymore, damnit!- and says:

“Loki Laufeyson?” He can see the woman’s lips thin, her brow furrow, but the black haired man turns and frowns, trying to identify a face that has taken more than a few wrinkles since he last saw it.

“Yes?”

“I—I think I have something of yours.” He all but shoves the jacket –wrapped in white paper- in the younger man’s hands, and then takes the phone out of his pocket. “This, too.”

Loki

He still feels angry at his mother for her insistence.

Loki doesn’t want to use a surrogate mother. As much as he still resents Odin, nearly ten years after he died, he knows what he owes to adoption. He could have been like Laufey or Farbauti, going from foyers to police stations and get himself neck deep into trouble on a regular basis. He could have been a crack baby, or a thief. He could have grown up in poverty and failed to get out of it, like so many others. Instead of that, he got wealth, comfort, education, safety. He’s been lucky, extremely lucky, and he knows it. He wants to give that to another child. He wants to share.

What’s the use of having a fortune if you’re not going to spend it on your family? After all, Tony’s enterprise is running smoothly now, better than he expected –and he expected it to have work. As for Loki himself, he is in the fullest of his career, his name recognized even beyond the somewhat closed network of ballet dancers and classical musicians… but he is thirty four, and he knows he is getting closer to retirement every day that passes –that’s the price to pay when you pick a profession that relies heavily on physical prowess.

Loki has always wanted children. He knows it’s a risk. He knows there are issues in his families, and he knows he will need to keep himself in check, to make sure he doesn’t reproduce the same patterns with his own children. He knows that there are other lives than his at stake if he fails, but he feels confident that he can avoid this.

After all, he has Tony with him. It counts for something.

Still, he is angry at Frigga, and he blames this for the long moment it takes him before he recognizes the man in front of him. His hair has gone completely white now –or maybe he just stopped dying it, who knows. His flesh is starting to sag around his neck, but his back is straight and his eyes are clear… Howard Stark is ageing well, and Loki surprises himself by thinking he hopes to be in as good a shape when he reaches his seventieth birthday.

He looks at the battered cell phone and that, too, takes a moment to come back to him. Right. It’s the phone Tony threw at the wall the first time they shared a bed. (Loki remembers how he loathed having to put his personal and professional contacts in the same phone afterward). And there, in the white package, he can make out the texture of a leather jacket he hasn’t seen or worn in eight years.

All in all, it doesn’t take a genius to know these aren’t the real reason Howard Stark is here.

“Tony isn’t here right now,” he says cautiously. “He had to go check something for the fireworks tonight.”

It’s Tony who suggested the fireworks, but Loki refused them on the basis that they were too extravagant… it’s Sif who convinced him when she said she’d like to ‘hear’ part of the merriments. (She can’t, off course, she’s been completely deaf since she was born, but she can feel the shockwaves of fireworks, and so Loki yielded.)

“Actually,” Howard says, “it’s you I wanted to talk to.”

Well, that was unexpected. Loki feels Frigga straighten up behind him, almost bristling, and even after all this time, there is still a part of him that feels cynical at the sight of her trying to protect him. People are weird creatures, he supposes.

Still, he doesn’t think this can go well if she stays, so he turns to her and says:

“Mother, would you mind checking in on the cake?”

“Loki I told you, the cake is perfect and—”

“I know,” Loki forces out, because he said no almonds and the cake is lathered in it. “I just need you to make sure it stayed that way.” Frigga gives him a distrustful look, and he has to resist the urge of rolling his eyes. “Please?”

“Fine,” Frigga hisses. “If you don’t want me here, I’ll go.”

Why did I think letting her organize my wedding was a good idea again? Loki wonders. He blames it on their first fight about the best way for him to become a father, and his stupid need to offer an olive branch afterward. It’s the lesser of two evils, he tells himself. I can concede the wedding if I keep the kids.

God, but families are exhausting. (And to think Farbauti still hasn’t unveiled what she prepared for his honeymoon… Loki loves both his mothers, but sometimes he wishes he could just kick them out of his life for a day or two.)

Loki doesn’t bother apologizing to Howard when he turns toward him, focusing on keeping his arms uncrossed instead.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“Congratulations,” Howard blurts, and it’s surprising, coming from as composed a man. “And thank you. For sending an invitation my way.”

“My father died before I could try to make peace with him,” Loki says, careful to keep his voice calm, steady. “I figured eight years may be enough for the both of you to have cooled down.”

“Yes,” Howard agrees with a sad twist of lips. “But we’re still as stubborn of before, and I don’t think Tony will be very pleased to hear I was here today.” He chuckles as Loki tilts his head because he’s right: Tony won’t be pleased. “I was hoping… I hoped you might agree to…ah… ease my way back in, maybe?”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Loki says truthfully. Then, when Howard seems to deflate –and with the likeness between him and Tony, the image is downright disturbing, because Tony would never do that in public- Loki adds: “I mean, I love your son, obviously. But he can be a stubborn mule when he wants to.”

“Will you try though?” Howard asks with hope in his eyes.

“I…” Loki spots Frigga coming up behind his guest, Thor and Volstagg trailing after her as she clutches the green and gold leather bound book that Loki and Tony chose as a guestbook (it’s the only thing Laufey kept of his mother, and Loki has always loved it, but Frigga ruled it out on the ground that the colors didn’t fit the color scheme.) “You know what, if you buy me enough time to make an emergency phone call, you have a deal.”

Howard nods, and Loki barely has time to register the flirtatious smile the man puts on before he hurries into the tent to borrow Darcy’s cell phone.

Tony

Ororo yelps in surprise at his exclamation, and Loki soothes her with a hand on her back. Still, he doesn’t look any better than Tony right now, cheeks flushed with surprise and awkward discomfort.

“This is a joke,” Tony says. “Seriously, uncle Steve, tell me they’re joking!”

He can feel Thor squirming at his side, as surprised as the rest of the table, while Jane and Farbauti are both doing extremely poor attempts at stifling their laughter –Loki gives them the stinky eye, and Laufey grins at him.

“I think it’s a great idea,” Helblindy says from behind his girlfriend Angrboda (Tony has no idea where they get their names, in case you’re wondering).

“I hate you,” Loki retorts, petulant as a child, and Tony can’t help but echo the sentiment. “And it’s only been a year!”

“When you’re as old as us, you won’t want to wait either,” Steve remarks, which doesn’t help Tony, at all.

“Oh come on,” Peggy says, “It’s not that big a deal!”

“That’s because you’re not the one who’s going to endure the two of them together!” Tony protests.

“Double dose of headaches,” Loki adds, before he turns to his mother: “Seriously though, Mother, why?”

“I fell in love, son,” Frigga says, and Loki’s answer comes in a whine:

“Yes but why did you have to fall for my father in law?”

Howard guffaws –guffaws, seriously, someone kill Tony now, or at least take his father’s botched clone away because he’s going to die of weird soon anyway- and Loki whimpers.

Tony glares at him.

“That,” he hisses, “Is entirely your fault.”

Jane and Farbauti burst into laughter, and Loki lets out a pitiful whine.

Tony doesn’t follow him, but it’s a close thing.

(The evening ends up in a shouting match, and both Tony and Loki agree that it says something very sad about their lives when it reassures both of them. And besides, as some would say, at least now their families are communicating.

Even if Heimdall gives them weird looks from behind the bar.)