[AO3 Crosspost] Tidy is just a way of life

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU
SERIES: The Dots Verse
RATING: Mature
WORDCOUNT: 543
PAIRING(S): FrostIron
CHARACTER(S): Loki, Tony Stark
GENRE: Alternate Universe (Blind!Loki)
TRIGGER WARNING(S): None
SUMMARY: "’Ordered’ isn’t the first word I’d think of when describing you."

THE DOTS VERSE ON LIVEJOURNAL: [Series Masterpost]


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If anybody had told Tony a few years ago that he would learn to do his own laundry, honestly, he wouldn’t have believed it.

As a teen, he used to be methodically disorganized, almost turning it into an art form. His clothes could be found anywhere but the drawers, tools lingering in the bathroom and kitchen, bedsheets in the workshop for when he put off sleep until his only option was collapse on a futon or sleep on the bench. Sometimes he remembers his days of chaos with sharp fondness, nostalgia for the boy he was, despite all the problems he had with his family -being a boy meant he could still have an excuse for his fuck-ups and mistakes, meant he could decide not to care too much about tomorrow and eat ice-cream at unreasonable hours without having to put the box back in the fridge straight away.

Or maybe he just misses the time when Steve didn’t call him a perfect housewife.

“Shut up,” he says as he finishes ironing the bright green shirt Loki got from his editor last crhistmas, “You’re not funny Steve. Pepper, tell him he’s not funny!”
“I’m your sister,” Pepper says, “Not your mother. And you do look like a housewife.”

Tony glares at her as he folds the sleeves and irons them into submission against the chest of the shirt, every part of tissues carefully aligned at its place, just like Loki likes them -not that Tony does it only for him, because he’s not a housewife, thank you very much!
Unfortunately, that point is a bit harder to prove when you find yourself busy sorting a pile of perfectly ironed shirts by their color and length of sleeves, before stacking them on their designated shelf among a lot of similarly-organized garments, each of the shelves labelled with their function in the right hand corner.

“I think it’s cute,” Pepper smiles, “What you’re willing to do for him. I would never have thought you could last more than a month in this kind of place.”

It’s true, Tony has to admit, that the flat is uncannily clean compared to any other space he has ever occupied. Of course, the garage is an exception, but it’s not like Loki spends a lot of time there, unless Tony specifically asks him to -it helps him to have someone he can bounce ideas with.
Still, it doesn’t look sterile either. It’s warm, for one thing, both in temperature and color, the house full of honey-like yellows and touches of red and green, fresh flowers perfuming the living room almost every day. Fenrir’s chew toy is lost under the table, and two of Loki’s current reads have been abandoned on the couch this morning. There are dirty cups on the coffee table, older stains begging to be removed… he’ll have to take care of that soon.

Honestly , the most telling display of Tony’s organization skills are the labels stuck onto the cupboards doors and near the stove, on the fridge handle and next to the light switches in every room. It’s not a sterile house, really, it’s just very tidy.

It’s ordered, and for the first time in his life, Tony finds he doesn’t have a problem with that.