[SEADLA] Chapter 2/24: Reaching

[terresdebrume]

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU
RATING: Mature
WORDCOUNT: 2 013
PAIRING(S): -
CHARACTER(S): Tony Stark
GENRE: Angst
TRIGGER WARNING(S): Mentions of suicide and generally low self esteem (Check the AO3 listing for a glimpse of what’s to come)
SUMMARY: In which Tony wakes up in the hospital and finds the most unexpected guest sitting by his bedside.

DEDICATION(S): Again, to the first version’s readers, to the people who leave comments on the fic three years after its last update, and to 2012!me, who needed to write this fic a lot.

SEADLA ON LJ: Chapter 1,

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At first it almost feels like he fell asleep in the middle of an ER marathon—there’s the heart monitor beeping and quiet shuffling further to his left, the pungent smell of obsessively clean spaces and antiseptics, and the barely-there weight of perfusion tubes tugging at his skin when he moves his wrists…the light from the monitors make him close his eyes almost as soon as he opens them up.

Tony takes a deep breath in and, with far more caution than such a simple thing should require, opens his eyes again to the faint green glow of a light blinking in darkness. Every inch of him hurts, heavy and slow like a lazy morning, and the bed under him doesn’t feel quite that stable. He can hear just fine, though, and doesn’t miss the quiet voice on his left when it says:

“I was beginning to think you would never wake up.”

The tone tickles at Tony’s memory, the familiarity of it wrapped in the wrong voice, and by the time he finally grasps the message his eyes have gotten used to the dark enough that he can make a silhouette out against the wall.

He squints at it, head pounding as he tries to figure out what’s going on. God, he’s stiff as a board, and not in the fun way. Doesn’t remember any sex happening recently though, or a fight for that matter. Surprisingly similar effects. Anyway. No cause for hurting except—

It’s the touch of a finger at the edge of bandages that put it all together, and Tony tenses.

He was, indeed, alone in the tower yesterday. Or whenever he was last conscious, really—he’s pretty sure he’d feel different if it was that recent.

And okay, he was kind of drunk. That doesn’t help with rational thinking.

Still. Pretty sure he was alone. At least on his floor. There was Pepper for a while, but he sent her home early so she could go back to Happy and their domestic life-that-works-better-without-Tony-in-it and then…yeah.

The downward spiral.

More booze.

The razor.

Ugh.

Tony flexes his fingers—ignores the sting of stitches stretching under the gauze—and the fingers on his arm take off and away from him.

He’s careful to keep his eyes off whoever it is as he says:

“Didn’t think I would.”

It’s too late, he knows, but at this point there’s nothing much he can do but stare in the dark above him and swallow the lump in his throat.

“So I gathered. You were fairly upfront about that in your letter.”

Tony’s brain, still stuck in the cushiony dullness of whatever it is he was given to stay asleep, takes entirely too long to put two and two together—the annoyance at that feels distant. Detached. Like knowing he should be bothered but being incapable of actually managing the sentiment.

“Loki?”

“Vicky, for now.”

Tony frowns at that, turns his head toward the visitor as a dim golden glow blossoms in a thin and impeccably manicured hand.

The movement unleashes a small tsunami in Tony’s head and he has to close his eyes until it calms down, but eventually he manages to catch sight of “Vicky”. She’s…pretty much the archetypal bimbo. Thin, white, blonde, with skin-tight clothes and large breasts. She could have been pulled off the pages of a tabloid if it weren’t for the vivid, poison-green eyes. Tony squints at her—him? He’s not sure—and the way her hand glows with what must be magic.

Somewhere, at the back of his brain, Tony wonders if maybe he’s still in the tower, delirious with blood loss—he’s not sure that’s one of the symptoms, but it’s probably more plausible than having the god of mischief sitting at his bedside table.

(The way his wrists keep throbbing, though, tends to weigh in favor of this whole circus being real, but still. Loki is sitting at his bedside table.)

“I may have failed to enlighten your doctors when they assumed you and I had sexual intercourse prior to your lapse in judgment. I believe it would be in both our interests if you played along.”

Tony manages the tiniest nod before his head starts hurting again and he has to close his eyes.

In all honesty, he’s still not completely sure what’s going on, but he’s still grasping at the most basic concepts and, frankly, probably exerting more effort than he should right now. It must show on his face, too, because Loki says:

“I’m a very convincing liar.”

The face really is all wrong, but the expression is a perfect—if less manic—replica of what Tony remembers. If at all possible, it makes everything feel more surreal.

“How long?”

“About forty-eight hours. Self-Righteousness Incarnate and that captain of yours visited you earlier.”

It takes several seconds for Tony to realize Loki meant Thor and Steve—they have, after all, been working together for a couple of months by now, and even if they’re having some trouble making the whole friendship thing work, it’s not how Tony usually thinks of his colleagues anymore.

He’s too tired for the spark of amusement blooming in his chest to blossom into a smile, but it’s pleasant knowing it’s there anyway.

“How was it?”

“I don’t think they like Vicky very much. The others I haven’t seen, and considering I don’t have a private way of contacting them I figured I would leave it to your other visitors to inform them.”

Tony manages to blink in acknowledgement, and sighs in relief when the light vanishes from Loki’s hand, leaving them blessedly blind.

Loki didn’t mention Pepper.

Rhodey, of course, is out with the army on a mission so secret even Tony didn’t manage to get his location before he left…but Pepper is in New York. True, she has a life outside of the Avengers—of him—but still, it's—Tony swallows and blinks against an abrupt influx of tears, and if Loki—Vicky—notices, she doesn’t comment on it.

Silence stretches over the room, lulls Tony’s eyes into closing over the emptiness of his chest and the thick cotton of his mind. Most likely, he falls asleep at some point—if nothing else, it feels like no time at all from then until Tony’s eyes snap open again, mind caught on a question he probably should have asked sooner.

He claws his way back to awareness—it takes too long, it’s sluggish and everything smells and feels wrong—and manages to croak out a feeble “why”.

At first, silence is his only response and he thinks, maybe, Loki—Vicky—he really is too tired to figure this thing out—is gone until the god’s real voice answers:

“Because you assume too much about people.”

Tony can’t manage anything beyond a confused grunt.

“You presumed I couldn’t possibly understand what went on in your head, Stark,” Loki says, and Tony may remember something along those lines.

Or not.

It’s blurry.

“You forgot who I grew up with. Who I had to measure up to.”

A pause.

“Asgard, too, has its comedians.”

Tony has to chew on that for a moment, and not just because of the fatigue—though it certainly doesn’t help.

It all seems so…impossible.

Loki, who once tried to invade Earth with his ego and not much else, who is one of the most feared criminals of the planet—whose havoc-wreaking activities have contributed to an economic boom the likes of which America hasn’t seen in decades and what may well be the resurrection of paganism in the States, Loki, who is quite literally a God has…insecurities?

Everyone knows Loki has issues—Tony better than most. There’s probably more crazy in his pinky than in Tony’s entire brain, but this?

This crippling feeling of worthlessness, this bone-deep conviction that nothing you say, to or are will ever be enough to make you worthy of anyone’s attention—that no matter what kind of affection you receive it’ll always be borrowed, stolen, or scammed out of others?

Honestly, it’s not like anyone can blame Tony for trying to stare at Loki through the darkness of the room.

“I’m hallucination, aren’t I?”

There’s a tense silence during which Tony strongly considers trying to apologize, the instinct faster than any coherent thought his brain can manage at any given time.

“As I said,” Loki/Vicky says, tone ice-cold, “You presume too much about people. You may not believe it but I do know what it is to be…different.”

It’s the ellipsis that does it.

Tony’s heard them in Thor’s mouth every time he tried to discuss his brother—heard the silence that said Thor couldn’t find the words to encompass the places where the brothers’ histories run parallel but never encounter.

It’s always been so easy to fill them in, too.

Tony wasn’t there to witness any of it, that’s true, but he knows what it means when people say someone is “…different” or “…complicated” or “…difficult”, knows the weight of those three fucking dots that say so much more than the word they precede.

Those three stupid dots cover entire lifetimes of “I don’t get you” and “why aren’t you more like me?” and “why won’t you act the way you should?”

There are eternities in those pauses, things unsaid and pains unhealed, and the weight of them presses against Tony’s chest as he tries to work through the lump in his throat—swallows hard against the welling of tears in his eyes and draws a shaky breath in.

“Actually,” he says, watery lines of water cooling down on his temples, “I think I do believe you.”

He knows there’s no real use looking at Loki now—even if he could really see his face, it’d look all wrong anyway—but he can’t help trying to catch the god’s eyes, establish some kind of connection, maybe, like a reassurance that there is at least one person on this shitty planet who really gets what it’s like to live in Tony’s head.

He gets nothing but a rustle of clothes and the vague sense that Loki moved, sensing the move without being able to see it properly. Maybe he should say something at that point—like ‘thank you’ or 'thanks for saving my life’, which he isn’t sure he’d mean but at least it’d be somewhat polite, or maybe even just 'thank you for sharing’, though he doubts that one would really be appreciated.

In the end, he doesn’t get to say anything: the rattle of a chariot pushed along the corridor fills the room and breaks the moment—easy as a bubble—and, in a flash of green light, Loki’s gone.

In the morning, after the nurses made sure everything was going as fine as it could be and the doctors gave Tony a long talk about his vitals and his possibilities once out of the hospital, after Pepper and Bruce and Nat and the rest of the Avengers have come to do their dance of shuffling feet and barely restrained questions—after, even, the army sent a message from Rhodey that only contains the words “don’t you dare” in capital letters and must have required insane amount of determination to be sent—Tony doesn’t have much left to do but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.

(He could, technically, watch TV, but that would require moving to get the remote. He doesn’t have the strength, so he just lies there and tries not to think about the ache in his wrist, the tiredness gnawing at his bones or, really, anything at all.)

He’s trying to figure out how to explain his gesture while thinking about it as little as humanly possible—mostly just succeeding in wishing for a drink—when something vibrates under the covers.

It takes some shuffling and the alien feel of stitches pulling against his skin for far too long before he manages to retrieve his phone—which, he’s fairly sure, isn’t supposed to be there—and read the text displayed on the screen.