Archive of Our Own ^beta

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He always expected the day he came back to be a happy one, to be a page-turn back to the way things used to be, perfection and friendship and awkwardness and summer all year long, because even though Tony’s a pessimistic person, Loki’s the only thing that’s ever made him smile at the sun or appreciate the color of grass or listen to music for more than just the angry undertones that make him feel like he’s powerful in his loneliness.

Well, the day is awkward, but not particularly happy. It’s actually kind of terrifying, and Tony doesn’t know whether he’s a bad person or an awful friend or whatever when he answers his cellphone and Steve is telling him, “He’s back,” and he knows it’s Loki and that actually makes him feel sick to his stomach instead of overjoyed like he thought he’d be.

When he’s standing in the middle of Thor’s parents’ living room, he feels like he’s in a museum, because Loki’s like some piece of artwork from another country, something beautiful and otherworldly and different, complete with a DO NOT TOUCH sign. Even after the man, taller and with black hair instead of the ginger Tony knew (and adored) before, hugs him tightly and says his name like it’s unfamiliar and missed on his tongue, Tony knows not to touch him without permission, not after he’s probably been touched by every smart man and woman with eyes in New York.

Wait. Was that too bitter?

When he’s walking down the sidewalk with the three of them, like they always used to do when they were young and knew each other, he feels like he’s in the middle of a freeway, because Loki keeps hitting him like a semi with his words, with every turn of his head and his emerald eyes and his too-pale skin and the way he talks with that stupid northern accent, so pretentious and unlike him but so very him all at once, and when Loki looks at him, looks at him like it’s nothing, but it’s everything to Tony when he hasn’t been looked at like that by Loki in five fucking years. Tony doesn’t know how he manages to reply to Loki and Steve and Thor like he does, and it’s like that time the four of them prank called Coach Fury when they were in the tenth grade, and they all didn’t know what to say but they spoke anyway, except then, Tony was good at talking to people.

Now? He just feels like a sunspot on the face of all the brightness Loki brought back from New York, like the moon eclipsed by Steve’s neverending speeches about how they all missed Loki and how they need to do something like, immediately, like a mouse between the jaws of a tiger when Thor glares at him every time he dares speak to his brother, the one who ran away from them, their betrayer.

When he gets home that evening, walks into his goddamned parent paid-for condominium, he feels like he’s a ghost floating into the afterlife, because it’s kind of hard to breathe normal air after being exposed to all that cologne and nostalgia all day long. He decides not to call Pepper or answer Steve, and that’s basically because he doesn’t want to forget how stupid and perfect he felt just minutes ago, because he doesn’t want to stop that onslaught of memories coming his way, because he doesn’t want to forget the last time he saw Loki before today, doesn’t want to forget that it was his bed Loki was in the night before he left, doesn’t want to forget that if his eighteen year-old self had only tried a little harder, maybe Loki wouldn’t have come back today, and that’d be because he would have never left in the first place.

Chapter Text

Monday is the second day, and that’s really kind of a shame because Tony hates Monday more than any day of the week, and he hates it more than any day of the week because that means he has to pick the pieces of himself that are scattered all over his condo and stitch them back together enough to go back to work. It’s not like work is particularly shitty or anything, not when he’s his own boss and he chose to be for the beautiful reason we like to call ‘independence’, but sometimes – a lot of times – it’s more than bothersome to be a human being, especially on the day after the film strip of his life suddenly became tangled and knotted with the return of who he used to be able to call his best friend.

Pepper doesn’t come to work and he doesn’t know how he feels about that, because some part of him is thankful in the most awful way that he doesn’t have to deal with her disappointment and her questions about ‘Why didn’t you call me yesterday?’ and ‘Are you sure you’re okay, Tony?’, and another part of him – the part of him he got from his father – feels wronged and irritated and disappointed, because just because Pepper’s his girlfriend doesn’t mean she can skip out on work whenever she damn well pleases, and you know what? That makes his mood a nasty one in general, because Lord knows if he wants to be like anybody, it’s his fucking father.

Sarcasm is sweet, isn’t it?

His third does come in though, which is pretty typical on a stressful day like Monday, and it’s kind of funny that it’s typical because Steve doesn’t even work for him – he just likes the ‘fruity drinks’ (normal people call them piña coladas) Tony makes him for free and the fact that the tavern is named something as nerdy as ‘Jarvis’ and that Tony will let him talk to him for hours even though he has to be running a business and that a visit to the bar will often turn into a walk on the way home, and a walk on the way home will often turn into spending the night, and they both like/want/need that on Mondays, especially when Pepper doesn’t show up for work and Loki’s just shown his lovely face this side of Mason Dixon for the first time in forever and a few years.

And wouldn’t you know that this walk on the way home turns into a scavenger hunt for such a lovely face the second Steve says, “Thor didn’t want to tell me where Loki went last night.”

“He didn’t stay with his parents?” Tony asks in a dragonlike plume of smoke, his eyes focused on the rosy skyline and not on the side of Steve’s head, his hand in the pocket of his jacket where it won’t brush against Steve’s, because nobody can see that kind of contact when they’re all the eyes of his parents or Pepper or even worse – Loki.

“Nope,” Steve replies in that let-down tone his voice is so used to wearing nowadays. Tony knows the man is looking at him when he says, “I think Thor and their dad were too mad at him to let him stay there.”

“It isn’t even Thor’s house,” Tony grumbles a bit lamely, because even though yeah, it isn’t Thor’s house, their dad means what he says and says what he means, and he doesn’t really doubt the fact that both father and son were unhappy with Loki yesterday, what with their penchant for familial disappointment. And Thor isn’t even a bad guy, really – at least, not the Thor they knew before Loki ripped the sunshine right out of them and dragged it across the continental United States.

“Yeah, I guess,” is Steve’s equally lame response. They’re silent for a few minutes after that, just walking down the sidewalk on a suburban street like they do at least three times every week, and some little man in the back of Tony’s head is telling him that Steve’s coming up with an idea, that Steve’s considering telling him this idea, that Steve is telling him this idea, and yes – “Do you want to go find him?”

In Lafayette?, Tony thinks so skeptically it’s disgusting, and it isn’t until Steve goes, “Yeah, in Lafayette,” that he realizes he didn’t just think it, he said it, and fucking hell, this is why he needs to take his medicine, why he needs to call Pepper so she can remind him to take his medicine.

“He could be anywhere, though,” Tony argues. He doesn’t know why he’s contradicting Steve like he is, except he really does and just finds it very hard to admit that he’s still terrified of seeing Loki and feeling like he’s drowning again, wanting to touch him all over and unwrap him like he’s a late birthday present, needing to peel his face off and see what’s behind that shiny New York mask.

“There are about three motels and two hotels here, Tony,” Steve points out, and Tony feels a little uncomfortable with the fact that he can detect just how eager Steve is to see Loki again, with the fact that he hasn’t felt jealousy of this brand creep up on him since before Loki left and he and Steve fought over him like dogs, with the fact that before, he had the advantage of charisma and money and passion over Steve’s puppylike demeanor and the metaphorical flowers he’d pick, but now? Neither of them can hold a candle to Loki’s new frame of mind, and how could they even think about fighting for him after what he’s seen and heard in that damned city – New York, New York.

“He could have stayed with one of his old friends–” Tony starts to spout, but he knows it’s bullshit and he knows Steve’s going to tell him it’s bullshit, so he just stops himself and lets Steve do his self-righteous little thing.

“We’re Loki’s old friends,” Steve sighs, kicking a stone across the cement. Tony watches the rock bounce into the street with something like empathy in his chest as Steve goes on with, “And did he stay with one of us last night?”

“I don’t know, he wasn’t at my house,” Tony replies. He shoves his cigarette between his lips to shut himself up, because fuck, he never would have said something like that before yesterday. Really, that was a bad thing to say to someone like Steve, who is basically a butterfly antenna in the way he’s sensitive to anything and everything, in the way he reads into things like they’re novels.

Day two and things are already so different.

“I’m surprised,” Steve huffs, and it’s not genuine, the way he says it. It’s wounded and the tiniest bit raw. It’s sarcastic and knowing, knowing of the fact that Tony wins ninety percent of the time when it comes to Loki. It’s not Steve.

Tony’s cigarette is gone too fast, but that’s the way life likes to treat him, and he doesn’t really complain, internally or externally, when he throws the butt to the ground and stops to stomp it out. Steve keeps walking independently of him, and even though Tony knows the man is still going to spend the night with him, he’s also aware of the fact that he’s not above walking into his condo without its owner like the stubborn little bitch he is.

So he catches up with Steve, lets his hand fall out of his pocket, and says, “We can go look for Loki.” He can’t have another person he loves angry at him for his own stupidity.

They find him at the motel Tony’s dad used to have affairs in, and Tony can’t help but feel humbled in the worst of ways when Loki opens the door and he’s just as gorgeous and alien as he was yesterday, with his black hair and green eyes and pale skin and pink lips, with the Regina Spektor concert t-shirt Tony’s never seen before stretched over his chest, with the dampness pooling in his collarbones. Tony knows he just took a shower, and is it weird that he feels comfort in the fact that the scent of Loki’s shampoo is the same as it was before he left?

Before he left and after he left. Like two completely distinct and incredibly descriptive periods of time, like the difference between Before Christ and Anno Domini.

“Hello,” Loki says once he sees Steve and Tony waiting for him like two penguins in the middle of the fucking Sahara on the opposite side of his doorway, and the smile on his face is both beautiful and foreign, and it almost looks like it’s scared to show itself, and Tony wonders if New York taught him to hide himself, and that makes him want to murder.

“Hey!” Steve eventually replies, and excuse the fuck out of him, but Tony kind of wants to punch him in the face for that, because he’s suddenly ten years old again, going Steeeeve, you know I’m the leading man, and the leading man always speaks first. Dear Lord, why must he have a heart that beats with emotions like anger and envy and wanting, all three of which are sins according to that huge book his mom liked to dictate to him when he’d tell her things like ‘I want to go out with Steve, Thor, and Loki after school today instead of doing my homework’ and ‘I think I’d like to move out of this hellhole’.

“Come on in,” Loki says, stepping away from the doorway, and his statement is southern enough to soothe Tony back into humanity. Just to be an asshole, he goes in before Steve and ponders the existence of the phenomenon that is ‘his friends’.

And then Loki hugs him, and even though he did that twice yesterday, it still feels like something fantastic and overwhelming and incapacitating, and that’s probably because Tony’s missed these embraces so much it’s awful, probably because he’s been thinking about this every time he’s hugged Pepper or Steve for the last five years, probably because Loki smells like soap and the galaxy he just returned from, probably because Tony’s filled with the desire to just drag Loki into himself and kiss the breath right out of his lungs, probably because that desire means he’s unfaithful (fuck, wasn’t he already halfway there with the clusterfuck of a relationship he has with Steve?), probably because being unfaithful means he’s just like his father, having imaginary affairs in the same goddamned motel his old man had real ones.

He hugs Loki back really carefully, knowing that if he doesn’t keep himself in check he might just cross the borderline between imaginary and real in terms of affairs, between missing you and needing you desperately in terms of Loki, and between best friend and selfish asshole in terms of Steve. Tony knows Loki notices his caution by the way the man lets his hands linger on his shoulders a few seconds after he pulls away, and through his fear that Loki is a completely different animal after being exposed to the glamour of the Big Apple, a ray of hope/dread shines through and says ‘He can still read you like a damn book, Tony’ and ‘Even though he changed, you didn’t, you idiot’.

Tony watches Loki hug Steve and feels sick at the way Steve tightens his arms around Loki’s slim, lean little torso, so he looks away, looks at Loki’s rented-out bed and studies the mess there, of which consists of a paperback novel, a pile of clothes (probably the ones Loki shed before he got in the shower, oh Lord), a sliced-open journal, and a few Sharpies – red, blue, green, and yellow. The man’s suitcase lies open on the floor beside his bed, and suddenly, Tony’s got his eyes all over the room, taking in the brand-new clothes in Loki’s luggage (only one case and a battered old messenger bag, damn), the journals stacked on top of the TV and the Styrofoam take-out container that sits in the trashcan and the cellphone he’s never seen before on the nightstand, and even though just looking at it all doesn’t tell him much, Tony is intrigued and greedy for knowledge, wanting to know everything about this new Loki, wanting to read his journals cover-to-cover and browse the text messages on his phone and smell his clothes just to see how their scent might make him feel.

“Thor told you where to find me, I’m assuming,” Loki says, and that’s when Tony tears his eyes away from the home Loki’s just barely crafted for himself to look at the man, standing there with one hand in his hair and the other hanging limply at his side, and shit – there goes his breath for the millionth time.

“He didn’t, actually,” Steve admits with a sheepish little smile Loki’s got to love (fuck), stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I tried to get it out of him, but he wouldn’t give.”

Loki frowns, asks, “So you walked all over town to find me?”

Tony knows that if he answered that question, he’d go, ‘Of course’ and smirk like the little boy he used to be, so debonair and superficial and everything everyone wants to hear and see. But he doesn’t answer, because Steve’s the one with the floor and he’s pretty sure it’d be kind of rude for him to, and it’s pretty obvious to him how different he and Steve truly are when the man says, “We only went to the other two motels in town before here. It’s no big deal.”

How could a person so vain and a person so modest stay friends their entire lives? Easy – a long time ago, it wasn’t a dissimilarity in pride that set Steve and Tony apart, it was simply the fact that Tony was bold and Steve was meek, and there’s nothing proud in anything when you’re five and six years-old and you share the same playground at school, nothing wrong with the fact that your best friend is kind of an asshole when he’s been that way since you knew him way back when, nothing wrong with the fact that he’s a better, humbler person than you, even when he makes you look worse in comparison, because you’ve been having sleepovers for the longest time.

“How sweet,” Loki coos, and Tony can’t really tell if he’s being authentic or a jackass, if that’s New Yorker for condescension or an actual compliment he should accept. Steve makes that choice for him and laughs, shrugs, and says, “It’s nothing.”

And then they’re awkward again for just a moment, and Tony’s almost got to force himself to smile when Loki gives him a real good once-over and notes, “You’re quiet, Tony.”

‘He can still read you like a damn book.’

“Sorry,” he manages, and oh God, he’s so fucking dumb he needs to be shot or something. He adds, “Today hasn’t been great,” almost as if to explain himself, but he just ends up looking more vulnerable and stupid than he already does.

Steve shoots him a worried look from behind Loki as Loki himself frowns again, opens his mouth and pauses for a moment, and Tony knows the reason for his hesitation when he says, “That’s a shame,” because how weirdly customary is that to say when they haven’t seen each other in five years? And really, Tony knows he needs to stop dwelling on that, but it’s kind of hard to do that when it’s day two and Loki’s got black hair and a northern accent.

“I’ll live,” Tony chuckles. He wishes he could talk like he used to, endlessly and without fear of retribution.

“Good,” Loki replies, his face softening into another one of those half-hiding smiles, “I don’t want you dying on me.”

And Tony feels a jolt of warmth at that, because that’s something the Loki he knew would say to him, vaguely flirtatious and bashful and reserved in a way that’s not coy or intentionally maddening to Tony’s heart even though it succeeds at being so. He thinks to himself that maybe Loki isn’t as different as he thought he was. He thinks to himself that maybe things can go back to the way they used to be. He thinks to himself that he really is just a pessimist, not a realist, and that his assumptions aren’t to be taken too seriously in the future.

Those thoughts are dashed to the wind by the time the three of them are settled in front of a Hallmark movie, however, and that’s all because when Steve insists that Loki tell them about New Fucking York, all the man can talk about is the great music he got introduced to and the classy cafés he’d spent his days at and the outrageous clubs he’d spend his nights at, and this novel he read the second year he was there and how the sky looks so different and how you can’t even see the stars at night, and how thrilling it is to ride on the subway and how sometimes he’d go at least two days without sleeping and how the quality of the education was so much better than it is here, and how weird it was to not have Mardi Gras and how nice it was when it rained and how the streets were dirty but beautiful, and everything he says sounds so fucking dreamy it makes Tony sick, makes Tony hate himself for not being able to keep Loki from this paradise.

He was supposed to show this kind of stuff to Loki. He was supposed to take him to his first nightclub and buy him novels from Barnes and Novel and vintage records like he always did. He was supposed to move Loki into their first crappy apartment and split the rent with him. He was supposed to kiss him to sleep because he’s supposedly the only one that knows that Loki has a thing about being alone at night, because he has a thing about being alone, too, and because Loki made him promise he would. He was supposed to show Loki the world. That was Tony’s job. Not New Fucking York’s.

But Tony just listens to Loki and doesn’t let it show how very fucking wounded he feels, and something inside him is starting to understand why Thor couldn’t even look at Loki yesterday, couldn’t even say his name without wincing. He listens to Loki and flips through his journals, which turn out to be more like sketchbooks than diaries, with pages upon pages of doodles of waterfalls and cobblestones and emaciated, raccoon-eyed young men and lipstuck young women, taped-in photographs of people Tony’s never seen with their arms draped about Loki and their lips plastered to his cheeks, bottles of beer and vodka and orange juice, the occasional phrase – ‘carbon monoxide’ and ‘an addiction to hands and feet’ and ‘it was the coldest it’s ever been today’ – and only one of those is something straight from Loki’s heart, and Tony can tell because he’s heard those songs before when Loki would play them on YouTube and pick apart their lyrics for his own entertainment.

Tony and Steve stay until a few minutes before nine-thirty. They hug a sleepy, starry-eyed Loki goodnight on their way out, and Tony almost wants to scream in physical pain when he and Loki pull away, when he watches the man close the door behind them, when he hears the latch click. He feels like a bastard for leaving Loki in a motel room for the night. He’s probably going to come get him tomorrow and – I don’t know, let him stay at his place or something. He’s probably not going to tell anybody when he does.

Steve gets into bed before Tony even though Tony’s more tired than he is, probably because he has nothing better to do and Tony would snap at him for lurking around or helping him while he tries to clean up his house a bit. After he’s too aggravated with himself and too exhausted with the world, Tony peels his pants off and crawls into his bed with his cellphone. He lets Steve listen to the broken, fatigue-laced conversation he has with Pepper, and is it unusual or wrong that they’ve done this before, these after-hours phone calls and Steve is there hearing them like an FBI agent or a nosy child?

“I’m worried about you.”

“I know.”

“You’re not worried about you.”

“I know.”

“Tony, talk to me. We were friends before we started this.”

“What’s this?”

“You asshole.”

“Pep–”

“Something happened, didn’t it? You sound different.”

“                          ”

“You sound hurt.”

Steve prods Tony’s side with his thumb, raises his head to stare at him with his wide, knowing gray eyes. Tony stares back and doesn’t say anything.

“I did something, didn’t I? Is it because I didn’t come in today?”

“Pep–”

“I called you yesterday to tell you that I wouldn’t. If you’d answer your phone, you’d know that.”

“It’s not you.”

“Oh? What is it, then? Your parents still bothering you?”

“That’s not unusual.”

“Right.”

“                          ”

“So?”

“                          ”

“What happened?”

Tony watches Steve mouth, ‘tell her,’ to him and ignores him, just lets his mouth fall open and breathes into the mouthpiece as if to let Pepper know that he’s still there – he’s just not going to answer her.

“I’m hanging up, Tony. Goodni–”

“Loki came back.”

Pepper is quiet for awhile, and Tony knows he’s basically said ‘goodbye’ to her with those three words, because she knows he’s in love with Loki even if she doesn’t know Loki himself, and she knows that even though Loki did Tony a terrible awful by leaving, Tony still wants him more than the blood in his veins, more than her, and she knows that she was his Band-Aid, his trusty little pain medication, good for him only until Loki came back to cure the disease that has been rooted inside Tony since the day he left. And that’s dreadful, because Tony does love Pepper, he really fucking does, but not enough to make him stop breathing and not enough for him to look at the sun and think of her and not enough to kiss her breathless or fuck her until she’s sore like she wants him to.

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Ah.”

She means ‘that makes sense’. Tony slides a hand over his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose.

“I’m sorry, Pep.”

“Don’t be. I knew you weren’t going to marry me.”

“I might’ve done it, you know?”

“If he’d stayed gone long enough, you mean?”

She’s bitter. Of course she is. Even angels like Pepper are capable of that. How dare Tony be the demon to make her that way.

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah, you do. If he’d stayed gone five more years, would you have married me?”

Tony’s never had a conversation like this with her in front of Steve. They’ve yelled at each other until their throats were raw and told each other the sweetest, stupidest things like ‘I’d love you even if you had a wonky eye and a snaggletooth’ and ‘Her name would be Ginger, because you’re a spice, so she has to be, too – what do you say, Pepper?’ and ‘Sleep well, moon of my life’, but they haven’t ever told each other anything like this when Steve could hear.

“Yeah. I think I would have.”

Pepper doesn’t say anything to that. Tony gulps.

“I love you.”

“That makes it worse, Tony.”

“I know. I love you, though.”

Pepper sighs.

“I really do. You’re my best friend.”

He’s saying all the wrong things and he knows it. Tony can feel Steve’s eyes on him, knows he’s somehow hurt the man with his words, and he really isn’t even sure if he’s telling the truth or not, because on some days, Pepper is his best friend, the one he can talk to about anything and everything, the one who’ll take care of him when he’s sick of soul, but other days, days when she’s distant and unavailable and bothersome (like yesterday and today), Steve is his best friend and Steve shares his bed and Steve reminds him of that time when they did this and when they did that forever ago and Steve is really warm and soft when he’s holding Tony, when Tony wakes up in the middle of the night, coming out of a dream that’s horrifying in its beauty and in its lack of reality, and other days, days when Tony takes train rides back into himself and back in time, Loki is his best friend, with his ginger hair and the way he smiles for Tony and Tony alone and the whisper of breath against his ear when he’s telling him a secret and the way he’ll let Tony touch him like no one else can, brushes of fingers  down his abdomen and pokes in the belly button and tickles down his spine, with the way Tony hovers over Loki the night before he leaves, presses kisses down his backbone and swallows the sounds Loki’s making because they’re full of pain and because Loki’s muffled Tony’s own moans of pain in his chest and with his lips before, and goddammit – Tony should just not have any friends, because they float away or he pushes them away, and honestly, he can’t tell the difference between them sometimes, and he only knows that he needs to kiss Pepper like he kissed Loki that night and that he needs Pepper to hold him like Steve does and that he needs Steve to criticize him as harshly as he possibly can just like Pepper does and that he needs Loki to be in his bed again, holding him, kissing him, criticizing him.

“Shut up, Tony.”

He does.

“You’re my best friend, too. You’re also the man I’m in love with, but I guess that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It does.”

“Yeah.”

Steve whispers for him to, ‘end it, Tony,’ and when Tony aims a hurt, affronted look his way, Steve frowns and adds, ‘you’re tired’. But Pepper’s talking again.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t good enough for you.”

“Pepper, no.”

“Don’t lie to me, Tony. I’m not as good as Loki. I never was.”

“But… you’re asking me to compare birds to fish.”

Pepper laughs.

“You’re two completely different people.”

“Is Loki the bird?”

Tony scowls.

“Why do you ask that?”

“He flew away from you. And you were always more interested in things that fly than things that swim.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that.

“You swim through my veins.”

“Like a tranquilizer?”

Pepper, stop, he thinks, but he’s not going to say that. Don’t ever tell Pepper to stop, because she’s going to do it and you’re going to hate yourself.

“Like blood.”

“Oh.”

“I love you, Pep.”

“I love you too, Tony. And I’m gonna go to sleep now, before it actually hits me.”

“Are you coming to work tomorrow?”

What a dick question.

“I’ll try.”

He can’t help but smile, even though he knows that he’s a terrible person and that he probably made tomorrow that much harder for both himself and Pepper.

"I love you.”

“Goodnight, honey bear.”

Yeah, she’s still allowed to call him that.

Steve lets Tony lay his head against his chest and listen to his heart and talk to him about bullshit until he falls asleep, because believe it or not, they aren’t fucking. They haven’t even kissed before. They just sleep together, because everybody has a thing about being alone at night, whether they want to admit it or not.

Chapter Text

His first instinct is to kiss her on the lips when she comes in, well ahead of the morning rush that is customary on weekdays and wearing an Aztec print sweater that’s probably around number three on Tony’s Favorite Things That Pepper Wears List, and he’s got his hand on her arm and his nose an inch or two from hers before he realizes that a gesture like that might not be socially or emotionally acceptable. So he turns the kiss into something more chaste and awkward and presses it to the corner of her mouth, where her lips have a slight downward tilt and his eyes immediately go because Pepper’s mood determines his mood more often than not nowadays. Pepper turns into him and kisses his cheek, brief and uncomfortable and restrained, and Tony knows she’s not ready for him to kiss her again, not anywhere, that he has to wait for her to be herself again before they do that friendly smackering they used to be so accustomed to before.

God, he hates himself. Especially because he loves Pepper, the only girl he’s ever seen himself having a life with someday if fate took him down a somewhat happy, scarcely difficult route, and he’s sort of-kind of broken up with her. Especially because he’s in love with Loki, who just might be dead or possessed by a ghost of what he used to be by now, and Tony doesn’t have much experience with mourning the dead, and he’s never really loved or cared about a person or a people enough to feel grief at their passing – at least, not until Loki died out of his life, and not until last night, when Pepper the Girlfriend kind of died, too.

“Morning,” he says, and he wants to catch her around the waist and hold her close like he used to, and a part of him suddenly realizes that they might as well have been boyfriend and girlfriend that whole time they were ‘just friends’ because he could do that to her before their romance began and it wouldn’t have really been a problem, and he’s also remembering that Pepper was a lot like what Loki was to him before he left, even though she’s a fish and Loki’s a bird.

Tony just squeezes her hand, though. That’s not romantic, is it?

“No ‘good’ to go with that?” Pepper asks, raising a brow and letting her hand hang with Tony’s in the space they’ve somewhat awkwardly created between them, more because of the fact that she’s got a bag she needs to hang up and a card she needs to punch than any antagonistic or unfriendly feelings. Oh yeah, she’ll be okay.

“Well, I didn’t want to pressure you,” is what comes out of Tony’s mouth, and it comes out of his mouth smooth and lilting and just a tad sarcastic, like words used to when he was younger, harder around the edges, sure of himself. And his mouth smiles when he says it, easy and unpredictable, and he’s noticing the way Pepper’s looking at that smile like it’s something rare, because it is rare when they’re out in the open and Rhodey, Natasha, and Justin are all watching them in the discreet, mousey way they like to do.

“You’re so good at that, Tony. Why would you stop now?” Pepper retorts. Her voice is vague and slightly impassive, and Tony doesn’t know whether she wants him to let go of her hand yet or not.

“Didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, I guess,” he says, unhurt and almost scarily unaffected by the borderline insult she just threw at him. He releases her hand then, watches the way she keeps it in the air for a few moments before letting it fall to her side, where she balls it into a loose fist.

“Thanks,” Pepper eventually says. She holds Tony’s eyes for a half-second more before turning away to do her card-punching and bag-hanging. Tony doesn’t keep looking at her for longer than necessary, because watching her while she’s not watching him reminds him of what he did and he just doesn’t like to deal with guilt any more than he absolutely has to.

The next hour is probably the most awkward period of time that has ever existed in Jarvis, even moreso than the day Natasha walked in to make her wages for the very first time, and all Rhodey and Justin could do was shuffle around the tavern and watch her like she was a fucking flamingo at the zoo, and all Pepper could do was pout and complain to Tony about how they never reacted like that around her, and all Tony could do was tell her things like ‘it’s just because they know they’d be fired if they did’ and ‘their opinions don’t matter’ and ‘do their eyes matter as much as mine?’, and there were too many accidents made and not enough work got done and Tony felt like he had just crawled out of a blender by the time his day was over. Anyways.

Tony spends this awkward hour avoiding everybody and trying to make it look like he’s getting shit done, which he somewhat accomplishes by hanging around in his office and sitting behind his computer and glaring at e-mails from his parents and glancing at the telephone and contemplating the thought of calling his house to wake Steve up unnecessarily early and talk about the curious case of his livewire nerves. Rhodey and Pepper do a bang-up job of getting business started without his help, so it’s not like he needs to lurk around them like his father would him whenever he decided to destroy and rebuild yet another car. Besides, Pepper probably doesn’t want to interact with him too much right now (and he doesn’t really blame her for that), and Rhodey is going to dawdle around and try to pull words out of him just like Justin and Natasha would, so Tony is mostly content with just leaning back in his desk chair, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about Loki.

He wonders what he’s doing right now, alone and with no one to talk to. He thinks that if Loki hadn’t ever left in the first place, he probably wouldn’t be alone, and if he was, he’d be where Steve is – in Tony’s bed. He thinks he might be conceited and greedy and lustful for thinking that, and he thinks he might be self-aware for thinking that, and he thinks he should be a little proud of himself for being self-aware, but he isn’t ever proud of himself so that thought just dies really quickly.

Rhodey and Justin will poke their heads in the doorway and tell him they have a question for him, and every time they do, Tony will expect them to just come out and ask him what they’re all obviously dying to know but too scared to get from Pepper for fear that the wrath of God will rain upon them – ‘Did you and Pepper break up?’, which could also translate into ‘Is this going to be a sad day in paradise?’, or ‘Are you going to make us do unnecessary stuff while you mope around all day?’, or ‘Is Pepper still the mother figure in this establishment?’ (the answers to these questions are ‘kind of-sort of yes maybe I don’t know yeah’, ‘yes’, ‘maybe’, and ‘of course’, respectively), and every fucking time they do, Tony will prepare a coherent, composed, dignified response to this question, only to be asked something completely inane like, ‘Do you have change for a five?’ or ‘Indie or classic rock today?’.

Yeah. How fucking clever of you, you guys.

By the time they open, though, everybody is a little less distracted and twitchy. Pepper waits on customers just like she’d do on a normal day, Rhodey keeps to his books without complaint, Natasha waits right alongside Pepper, Justin acts annoying and procrastinates and complains as usual, and Tony works the bar with a mindlessness that’s comforting and unhealthy and natural to him – that is, until Steve walks in.

And it’s not a problem or a bother to Tony, really; it’s just a bit atypical that Steve would come in to see him two days in a row, and when he does do that, it’s usually because something’s amiss. Tony considers the fact that this week truly is quite far from normal (and it actually hasn’t totally sunk in with him how very abnormal it’s been, despite the generous dose of depressive monologues he’s been mentally feeding himself since Sunday, despite the fact that his relationship status has just changed, despite the fact that he’s been wondering a lot more than he used to, despite the fact that a star dropped out of the sky and landed in his backyard – Tony doesn’t feel it all yet, doesn’t feel the wave of shock or the realization that things are irreversibly different even though they clearly are, doesn’t feel much more than miniature epiphanies and bursts of hurt and love and self-loathing through the wall of numbness that’s closed up around him) when he starts to question Steve’s presence, and it takes him a few delayed moments to break up the ice cage that holds him enough to register that friends are good things and that they’re even better when they’re with you.

Steve is wearing an worn old hooded sweater that belongs to Tony and the same holey jeans he had on yesterday, his cheeks and forearms smeared with grease, and something about his appearance alone tells Tony that he’s going to stay the night again, but he doesn’t know why Steve would want to do that or how that makes him feel.

“You look lost,” is the first thing Steve tells him when he gets close enough to the bar, and then Tony does the weirdest thing and just dissociates all of a sudden, and he sees himself standing behind the bar with a rag in his hand and the most distant look on his face, and it occurs to him that Steve’s right and that Steve is almost like a mirror to him sometimes and that he can’t really imagine his life without having Steve there to tell him, ‘you look lost’.

“I feel lost,” he replies. Rhodey glances at him from over the crossword puzzle he’s working on. Justin looks at him, too.

Steve studies him rather coolly for a few seconds, and then, Tony automatically knows that this whole thing that constitutes himself and his behavior has come to the point where something needs to be done about it. He and Steve have been friends long enough to know each other’s modus operandi when one of them is in trouble, and while his simply consists of the near-autonomous compulsion to interrogate, panic, apologize profusely, and panic when he senses even the smallest sign of danger, Steve has a little more tact and patience than he does. Steve will wait a day or two before confronting the problem, and when he does go about said confronting, he does it gently and softly and carefully and not at all aggressively, much unlike his younger, darker counterpart.

“You’re still upset about last night,” Steve says. It’s a statement, not a question, but he says it in a way that allows Tony to correct or invalidate it if he wants/needs to.

“What about last night?” Tony asks. He makes the mistake of looking away from Steve then, and I say that this is a mistake because of how easily it exposes his rawness, his heart that hasn’t been touched in the right way for such a long time, his bitterness, his ugliness. He swipes his rag across the counter a little too roughly, his eyes on a dark, pretty, imperfect little whorl in the wood that reminds him of Loki, that he thinks Loki would like if he got to see it, that he thinks Loki would take a picture of if he was anything like he was before, and he adds, “Last night was pretty long, if you didn’t notice.”

Steve doesn’t deserve his childishness, and he knows it. That doesn’t stop Tony from hanging on to his Peter Pan syndrome, nor does it stop Steve from taking it like an expert (which he kind of is after all these years).

“Okay, let’s start from the beginning,” Steve prompts, taking a seat at the bar and basically forcing Tony to stay put and stop his nervous cleaning (because it’s hard for Tony to move if Steve isn’t, and that’s more out of instinct than choice). The blond rests his oil-stained cheek against a closed fist, his elbow propped against the bartop, and Tony grabs a new, clean rag as he asks, “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” Tony replies. He doesn’t care what he looks like when he leans across the bar and dabs at the grease on Steve’s exposed cheek, but he’s very much aware of how many eyes are on him as he executes the action. Steve takes the cloth from him and finishes the job himself just shy of irritably before throwing the rag back at Tony, and it hits the man’s stomach before falling to the floor, where Tony will leave it until it bothers him enough.

“Are you lying?” Steve asks. That’s the question he usually catches Tony with, and Tony hates him in that moment for voicing it.

“No?” he goes, because he’s not even completely sure if Steve did something wrong or not, and sometimes there’s absolutely no correlation between his feelings and what’s actual and factual, and he’ll occasionally get mad at Steve for stupid reasons like being a better man than he is and liking Loki and being concerned for him and never getting upset over shit that doesn’t matter, and Tony’s always so quick to point out his own flaws in others that he might as well just say ‘no, I hate myself, so it’s not you I’m mad at, it’s the me I see in you that I’m pissed off with’. He’d be telling the truth if he did say that, but that’s kind of wordy and his mind has a thing about working faster than his mouth can handle, so he just doesn’t say much more and makes this frustrated little noise in the back of his throat in a shoddy attempt to articulate his feelings.

“That’s a question – not an answer,” Steve points out. “Are you asking me to answer for you?”

“No,” Tony replies with a growl, and that’s the third negative he’s spit out during the course of this conversation.

“What are you saying, then?” Steve inquires, blinking rather meaningfully. This is how the man confronts problems – he just asks a lot of questions really impassively until the person he’s asking gets pissed off and/or emotional enough to just vent anything and everything that might be found inside them, and Tony’s been on the tail end of these interrogations, crying like he never thought he ever could or would, more times than he can count on both he and Steve’s hands.

“I’m saying that I’m an illogical jackass,” Tony sighs. He glances away from Steve for a moment to look around the tavern, and when he does, he finds that every single one of his employees are looking at him with varying levels of discretion, worry, and confusion. Pepper’s gaze is the most intent, so Tony ignores her more than he does anyone else, because he knows what Pepper’s thinking, knows she thinks he’s about to go off on Steve or break down right there because of some gem of guilt inside him, and while he is pretty remorseful right now, that’s not the only thing bothering him and he doesn’t want to entertain her assumption that yes – he’s just a guilty ex-boyfriend.

“Why do you say that?” Steve pushes.

“Because–” Tony starts to say, and then his hand flies up to latch onto his head, his fingers tearing through his thick, messy hair roughly and painfully because goddammit, he needs to think slower if he’s ever going to answer Steve correctly and he shouldn’t have to tell Steve things that he knows will upset or hurt him, even if he forces him to, and that’s basically because of the fact that they’re friends and friends shouldn’t think offensive thoughts about friends, you know?

Steve doesn’t say anything while Tony composes his reply. He has an uncanny talent for staying quiet and not looking around, he does.

“Because I get jealous of you?” Tony begins, and fuck, that was really horrible and uncertain and not at all what it sounded like in his head, so he immediately scraps everything he planned to say and runs in the direction he started off in. “And I mean, that’s a good thing, right? Because obviously you’re doing something good if I envy you for it.” He looks at Steve. “Right?”

“Well, there’s a difference between jealousy and envy,” Steve points out, and Tony kind of wants to punch him out for that, more because of the fact that that’s such a Loki thing to say than because he’s being aggravating and nitpicky.

“Enlighten me,” he snaps. Steve smiles.

“Jealousy is experienced when you believe that someone is giving something that you think you deserve, like attention or affection, to someone else,” Steve explains in his markedly nerdy, matter-of-fact sort of tone Tony’s been hearing since forever ago. “Envy is resentment caused by the want of what another person has, or the fear or assumption that said person has what you want.” He crosses his arms on the bartop. “What is it, then?”

Tony processes Steve’s words at least a hundred times over, and it takes him a little while to make his thoughts and feelings fall in line with Steve’s logic, and even when he does, the cogs don’t fit together perfectly. “I guess it’s both,” he goes, “But more envy? I don’t know. I’m thinking about two different things at once, now.”

“Uhm, then take them one at a time?” Steve suggests, and the fact that the thought of focusing on one thing and one thing only hasn’t even crossed Tony’s mind and yet it’s simply common sense to Steve says something pretty fucking profound about the two of them. God, do you see how little they’ve progressed in this conversation so far?

Tony sighs a long, drawn-out sigh, pulls a stool up to the counter, sits on it, and hides his face by creating a sort of archway around it with his hands and arms. He says, “I’m jealous of you because…” he swallows, prepares himself for the backlash of what he’s about to reveal, then lets it out in a rapid, gusty exhale. “BecauseyoulikeLokiandthat’snotfairtome.”

And Steve doesn’t say anything for a few long moments, and it’s almost worse to listen to the silence when Tony can’t see his friend’s face or know what the silence even means, and he’s imagining that the silence is a brick wall he’s about to run into because he’s blind and he’s forgotten his walking stick at home, or that it’s icy air Steve’s about to blow in his face, or that it’s a bomb ready to go off, even though Steve really isn’t an angry person, and the only time Tony ever saw him get pissed off enough to start yelling was the time his dad accidentally said ‘faggot’ when they were in ninth grade, and Loki just started crying in the middle of Steve’s living room because Mr. Rogers said it in a derogatory way and he’d just started to figure out that boys were just as beautiful as girls were to him, and Steve was just so angry when he screamed at his father like that, and Tony doesn’t want to be Steve’s father. No.

But when Steve opens his mouth and speaks, he’s not yelling. He asks, really quietly and slowly, “Are you sure you’re jealous of me? Or are you jealous of Loki?”

“No,” Tony replies, but Steve’s changed his perspective, and suddenly, he doesn’t know, so he says that. “I don’t know.” He mentally reviews Steve’s definition of jealousy for a second, and that’s when he realizes that it kind of doesn’t make any sense to say he’s jealous of anything, because you don’t get happy of people or mad of people – you just experience emotions in response to them.

“I guess I just don’t like the fact that you like him and he pays attention to you,” Tony mumbles. He knows that that’s a shitty thing to say. He knows that that’s a shitty way to feel. He knows that Rhodey’s listening to their conversation from where he sits, and that even though the man is at least six feet away from them, he’s eavesdropped on Tony and Pepper enough to know how to catch every mutter and whisper that might come out of Tony’s mouth.

And suddenly, everybody in the tavern knows that Tony is unfaithful, in love with some boy he hasn’t seen in five years, and a horrible friend.

“He paid attention to you last night, too,” Steve points out in a voice louder than what makes Tony comfortable, and oh shit – he said ‘last night’, so now Pepper knows that last fucking night, the night he called her and sort of-kind of broke up with her, he and Steve were hanging out with the bird - Loki. “Maybe that would have been more apparent to you if you actually gave him more than three-word sentences to work with.”

“I know,” Tony whines/hisses, pressing his palms against his face.

“And I’ve always liked Loki, remember?” Steve points out (this is just getting worse and worse), “Remember, Tony? Remember when we were in the fourth grade and I wrote him that long poem about everything he liked? Remember that?” Tony does, but he doesn’t say anything because the memory makes him uncomfortable and shameful and just a tad bit irritated.

But then Steve says the most awful thing, and Tony seriously wonders why the man hadn’t denounced their friendship years ago, because he’s just the biggest asshole and he knows it and he doesn’t do anything to stop it, even when Steve’s feelings get hurt.

“How do you think I felt every time you and Loki would run away because you had to show him something cool or because he had a secret to tell you, huh?” Steve asks, his voice strained and bitter. “How do you think I felt every time I woke up the morning after you guys spent the night and I saw you two all huddled together and knew you fell asleep like that? How do you think I felt every time someone asked Loki who his best friends were, and yours was the first name out of his mouth? Tell me, Tony. Tell me how you think I felt.”

Pepper walks behind the bar and into the back room. Tony knows it’s her and not Natasha because he knows how Pepper’s shoes sound on the floor and he’s memorized the rhythm of her step after hearing it so much.

“Awful,” he whispers.

“And it’s not just that, Tony,” Steve goes on. “I also happen to be Loki’s friend, you know. Friends pay attention to each other.”

“I’m sorry I’m not you, Steve,” Tony murmurs, peeling his hands away from his face to look at this man he’s lucky to call friend, this man he’s lucky to have to hold him at night and talk him into sanity, this man who’s been his rock since before they were men at all, since they were only boys on a playground, since he was just bold and Steve was just meek, since before Tony knew anything about being in love or being in love with Loki.

Tony knows Steve’s not going to stay upset with him, and that makes everything worse. He knows what Steve’s going to say, and he lowers his head and thumbs a tear out of his eyes when he hears it, just as clear as he did in his head – “It’s okay, Tony.”

“No it’s not.”

“Tony, shut up,” Steve orders. He lowers his head to catch Tony’s eyes, damp with barely-shed tears, and his whole face just melts into a mask of compassion and worry and adoration when he sees the pain there, when he sees that yes, that wall of numbness is breaking down now, that Tony’s feeling something deeper than he has in five years, and oh Lord does he hurt. Tony didn’t fully realize it until just now, but Lord does he hurt.

It’s been five years since Loki left, and Tony doesn’t know how he’s been dealing until today, until this very moment, when he realizes that he’s been declining as a human being and he doesn’t feel guilt or happiness the right way and he’s been kind of ignorant to emotions and he sees Loki in everything and everybody and he can’t breathe or talk like he used to and his personality is different and he needs medicine to feel normally and he’s been afraid to grow up and he’s been declining as a human being, been declining as himself. And something is wrong with him – something has to be wrong with him, because even though Steve loves Loki, too, Steve hasn’t been falling down inside himself every day since he left.

(Why did he have to leave?)

“I get it, Tony,” Steve says, “You’re human. It’s fine.”

“I’m not,” Tony whispers. Rhodey stands up.

“Yes, you are,” Steve insists. He reaches out to touch Tony’s hand, and it flies up as if it’s been burnt, presses against Tony’s right temple and peels his eyelid back, and Tony is gasping silently and desperately, because he forgot his medicine and he cannot breathe.

“I don’t feel like it,” he rasps. Steve stands up, reaching across the bar to take his wrists in his hands, but Tony is pulling away, rushing into the back and into his office, where his jacket is, where his computer needs to be turned off, where he can hyperventilate and wipe his eyes for five minutes before he’s out of there, dragging Steve home so he can take his medicine and lie in bed while the man makes him tea.

And that’s exactly what they spend the rest of the afternoon doing. Nobody asks Tony why he’s leaving, one – because this isn’t the first time Tony’s had a panic attack at work, and two – they did witness his whole world break and crumble. They don’t say anything; they barely even react beyond a meaningful look or two, but Tony knows they care by the way Justin gives him a grudging, knowing little nod on his way out the door, by the way Natasha’s already manning the bar by the time he’s emerged from the back, by the way Rhodey claps a hand against his shoulder before he’s even out of the back, by the way Pepper stops him in the doorway of his office to give him a brief, comforting hug that Tony knows is a favor to him and not something she’s doing totally of her own will. He still appreciates it.

Tony falls asleep in his freshly-made bed after he’s taken his medicine and finished two mugs of chamomile and green tea, and he only finds peace is by pressing his back against Steve’s side while the man fills six more pages in his brand new sketchbook with wood grains and tea leaves and heart monitors and angled, piercing eyes. All he does is dream of the past.

“Do you feel better?” is what he wakes up to, and Steve’s voice is distorted and soft and Tony wonders if he’s mentally ill when he hears it, wonders if he’s developing schizophrenia, because he’s always paranoid and he thinks he’s hearing Loki ask him that, thinks that if he leans up Loki will kiss his forehead and lay down beside him and ask him about his dreams and about the stars and about his favorite flavor, which Tony will tell him is him.

“What time is it?” Tony mumbles against his pillow. His bed is warm and his comforter is pulled tightly around him, so he still feels like he’s half-buried in a tomb of sleep, and the only thing that tells him otherwise is the color of the light in his peripheral vision, incandescent yellow instead of the red he’d see in his old room, the green he’d see in Loki’s, the blue he’d see in Steve’s.

“Like, seven-ish,” Steve replies. He repeats his question in his distorted, old video tape voice. “Do you feel better?”

Tony neglects to answer, just groans at Steve’s record of the time and brings a hand up to cover his face, his fingers pressing into his head, and fuck, he’s suddenly aware of the fact that he’s never going to live normally ever again, that he may just spend every day of his life having panic attacks and not working and thinking about Loki and sleeping and considering weird things like suicide and the color of Steve’s hair and Pepper’s freckles, and he feels so awfully stuck and so helpless, and this feeling of dread is getting to be unbearable, and he really just can’t do a thing to change that, you know? He’s unable. That’s just it.

He’s unable.

“What’s wrong?” Steve asks. The mattress shifts when Steve moves, and Tony can feel where the man drives his elbow into the bed as he leans over him. His mind is suddenly assaulted with thoughts of everything that’s wrong, including things like world hunger and the state of the government and the ozone layer, and he lets out a small, nearly silent whine.

“Tony,” Steve pushes, mistaking the man’s lack of a verbal response for stubbornness (which is completely understandable when you remember who Tony is).

“I was gonna go see Loki today,” Tony mumbles into his hand, and what do you know – he’s still being an asshole. How surprising.

Just to make things a little worse for him, Steve remains the better man and says, “We can visit him. It’s not that late.”

“No,” Tony huffs. He covers his head with his comforter.

A beat of silence, then Steve asks, “Why not?”

“I can’t,” Tony sighs. He listens to the groan that escapes Steve and recognizes the source of his aggravation, recognizes that Steve’s irritated with the fact that Tony’s unable more than he is with his actual answer.

“Why not?” Steve repeats, and he’s basically telling Tony that he knows he’s about to say something selfish and awful, that he knows Tony’s flawed and hurting and unable, that he knows his feelings might get hurt by whatever’s about to come out of Tony’s mouth, and, more than anything, that he doesn’t care.

“I was gonna take him back here,” is what Tony replies, peeling his comforter off of his head and balling it up in his hand, and he admits that more because he’s tired of playing word-tennis than because he actually wants to reveal how much of a selfish douche he is. He adds, “So he can have a place to stay for free,” to the end of his statement when he realizes that it sounds like he wants to have sex with Loki, and even though he does (no sane person wouldn’t, what with the legs and the ass and the mouth and the everything on that man), that’s not the only reason why he’d prefer to have him under his roof than crammed in a motel room and wasting Lord knows how many funds he has under his thumb.

“Oh,” Steve replies, his whole form deflating with what could be anything that lies between realization and disappointment. He kind of just sits there and looks at Tony for a few long, quiet moments, and Tony gets the vague feeling that Steve is waiting for him to say something self-deprecating or humbling or at least a little apologetic, but he has no idea what to give him, and here comes that feeling of helplessness and inability again, that realization that he can’t move forward without Steve pushing him to be a better man or his parents pushing him to be angry all the time or Pepper pushing him to care about things or all the people around him pushing him to change and evolve out of the mold Loki set him in when he left, and jeeze, he should be more resentful about this, but all he can feel is tired and blind and unable.

And then Steve asks, “Why can’t you do that with me here?”, and even though the way the question comes out of him isn’t particularly bitter, the question itself kind of is, and Tony just hates himself for pushing Steve like this, for inciting him to be this way and get all underhanded like he never does under normal circumstances.

“I don’t know, Steve,” Tony huffs, and they’re throwing words at each other again and they’re getting all aggravated with one another and they’re not even having a real conversation anymore, because all Tony can say is ‘I don’t know’ like the child he is and all he can be is avoidant and passive aggressive, and even though it’s probably very obvious at this point, let it be known that Tony’s inability is about seventy-five perfect his fault despite the fact that he keeps blaming it on Loki with only a fraction of the anger he should have.

“Yes, you do,” Steve argues, and when Tony raises his head in an abrupt snap to glare at him like an irritated adolescent lion, his short mane a sleep-tousled mess atop his head, Steve pushes up off of his elbow and sits up and looks Tony in the eyes and says, “You just don’t want to hurt my feelings.”

“Well, of course I don’t!” Tony cries, his voice louder than it’s been in months (the last time he ever said something with so much volume, he was caught in an argument with his mother about the affairs and dealings of his father). He inhales a shallow, shaky breath, watches the way Steve’s face contorts into something reminiscent of anger but a lot more like sorrow and frustration, and asks, “Is there something wrong with that?”

Steve half-opens his mouth once before he’s closing it just as rapidly and exhaling fast and hard through his nostrils, pursing his lips together, and fixing Tony with a look that seems to function as a yellow light of warning. Tony feels like he’s just been socked in the jaw when the man says, slowly and softly, “I’m not a child.”

“Yeah, but you’re my friend!” Tony retorts, his breath suddenly a whole lot shorter than it was a few seconds ago. Of course, Steve has a much better argument, and of course, he isn’t hesitant to throw it at him like a fastball flying in the direction of an unprepared, physically disabled batter.

“Exactly, Tony! I am your friend! I expect you to tell me the truth, even if it does suck!” is what Steve tells him, and listening to that is so exhausting that Tony can’t help but lie his head back down. He doesn’t say anything, but that’s only because he’s lost, only because he’s scared, only because Steve told him to speak and he has a really bad peeve about following directions.

Steve’s voice is uncharacteristically hard and confrontational when he asks for a second time, “Why can’t you bring Loki here when I’m here?”

“I want him to myself. That’s why,” Tony mumbles into his hand where it rests over his mouth almost on accident. He’s six years-old and drowning in the sea of his bed again, because he’d rather die of comfort than face monsters like responsibility and honor and live through the battle, and he remembers his father telling him that he wasn’t ever going to be ready for when life attacked at the slow, selfish, scared rate he was going, and he agrees with him, you know, he really agrees with him when he’s lying around having panic attacks and avoiding his best friend for no good reason other than the fact that he’s fucking unable.

Steve’s response is heart-stopping. Tony can actually feel his chest clench with emotion and dread and guilt and fuck when the man says, totally upfront and not at all embellished or sugar-coated, “Why would you even worry about that when you already have him all to yourself?”

It’s not that Tony believes him or anything, but Steve’s words force him to pay attention to perspective, something he’s learned that privileged people are virtually incapable of having or appreciating. He knows exactly where Steve’s coming from in his assumption that he’s got it in the bag, this whole winning Loki thing, but he also knows that Steve only thinks that because he’s been institutionalized to by the way they both grew up – Steve a lower-middle class and Tony a modern-day Tutankhamen –, by the way Tony’s always been concerning Loki, brash and possessive and charming and irresistible, by the way Loki’s always been concerning Tony, starry-eyed and pliable and impossibly devoted and eternally dependent, by the way things have always worked in Tony’s near-complete, radical favor and in Steve’s give-or-take-but-mostly-take contentment. Tony doesn’t blame Steve for thinking what he’s thinking, but he does wish that Steve would see that Loki’s star to him now, too, and that he’s never had that much experience with losing things or wanting things he can’t really have, not like Steve has.

So he sort of-kind of sums all of that up in three words. “It’s different now.” Steve’s smart. He’ll get it.

And he does get it. He gets it so goddamn well that he can keep arguing, which is totally unlike Steve but also very understandable when he’s gone such a long time not arguing with Tony or Thor or anybody worth arguing with.

“Yes, it’s different.” He does that a lot when he debates – agrees with his opponent before shoving their opinion back in their face all dressed up in shiny new clothes that are all kinds of ‘fuck you’ and ‘you’re wrong’. “That doesn’t mean you still haven’t won.”

Tony doesn’t even know if Steve’s not in his favor anymore, and holy shit, this is what makes their arguments so frustrating, what makes Tony hate himself and doubt he and Steve’s friendship and inflate his own self-worth too often, this – this habit Steve has of making him the constant winner even when the price or its consequences are pretty shitty or even when he’s losing inside or even when winning would be a tragedy in more ways than it would be a victory. God, this situation sucks, god, this world sucks, god, god, goddammit all to hell (goddammit all to New York?).

“It’s fine, though,” Steve goes on when Tony refuses to do anything but stare at the ceiling with his broken irises and his palm quietly suffocating him. He looks away from him, then, crosses his legs and grabs his sketchbook and props it up on his knee and starts to press lead into his page and says, “I just want to be allowed to be Loki’s friend.”

That jolts Tony into speech.  “I’m not your keeper,” he says through parted digits. “You don’t need my permission to be Loki’s friend.”

Another beat, then Steve says, “I know. I just don’t want to piss you off.”

What a kick in the teeth. Here Tony is, selfish as can be and guilty as a murderer and not doing a thing to change that, and Steve doesn’t want to piss him off.

“Don’t feel bad,” Steve adds before Tony can unscramble his thoughts enough to start to come up with something to say. “I’m fine.” He pauses, and Tony listens to the sound of Steve’s pencil scratching along his paper in one long, likely beautiful stroke. “We’re okay.”

Tony is tempted to disagree with Steve just because he also has a peeve about listening to others, but he seriously appreciates his friend’s desire to drop the subject and make up too much for him to do something as stupid as pushing the limit would be, so he just inches closer to Steve and pushes himself up and rests his chin on the man’s strong, firm shoulder to watch him capture the lovely face of a woman in her twenties, someone obviously real in her excess and her perfect imperfection. He thinks about how lanky and thin Steve used to be when they were younger when he notices the gracefulness with which he handles his pencil, and maybe it’s just in an artist’s nature to be careful like that, but Tony thinks it’s a rarity for someone as large and strong as Steve to be so tender with everything, like the world is full of baby birds and glass animals for him to hold. Tony also notices the stubble dusted along Steve’s chin, jaws, and upper lip, and it’s almost odd to see that there when Steve is usually so clean-shaven, so he takes it upon himself to point it out.

“You didn’t shave this morning,” he says. Steve’s eyelashes, long and thick enough to have women green with envy, flutter a bit with thought or acknowledgement or that thing he has that makes him soft and pensive and wistful and beautiful.

“I didn’t,” he agrees. He darkens his graphite woman’s lips with the side of his pencil tip. “I think I’ll try a beard out for a little while.”

“That’s my thing, though,” Tony whines rather childishly. Steve’s pencil tip freezes at the corner of his woman’s mouth as he turns his head to level a look at Tony, and Tony smirks and wiggles his chin along Steve’s shoulder and brings an arm over to rest in a loose curve around Steve’s middle in response, and it’s obvious that he’s kidding, obvious that he’s joking and obvious that he’s not upset, not anymore, not for now, and hopefully not for the rest of the night.

“You don’t own facial hair, Tony,” Steve laughs, turning back to his portrait. “Just because yours is awesome doesn’t mean you can dictate everybody else’s.”

“Except I actually can,” Tony retorts, moving to cradle his head in the curve of Steve’s neck and shoulder and sighing softly. He lets his eyes fall closed. “I patented it.”

“Bull,” Steve snorts. He smells like soap and oil right where Tony’s got his nose tucked into the place where his neck meets his shoulder, and Tony is suddenly thinking about Loki and his citrusy fresh scent, and his mind does this thing where it shows him an image and he’s stuck between being human and enjoying it or being godly and rejecting it. He’s seeing the back of Loki’s shoulders after he’s gotten out of the shower and the dampness lying on his skin like a blanket and his hair curling up to reveal his neck and the dark little freckle on the crest of his left shoulder, so kissable and missable unless you’re Tony and you’ve seen it time after time and Loki’s let you run your fingers over it until his skin tickles. And Tony thinks that New York probably missed that freckle, because it’s much too small and much too trivial to notice if you aren’t looking for it, if you aren’t dying to press your lips to it and watch as Loki shivers.

New York probably didn’t miss Loki’s eyes, though. Loki’s eyes are killers – the first obvious attraction in the show that is him, green and blue and gray all at once, pale enough to be angelic, stormy enough to be devilish, rimmed with the darkest, prettiest lashes and accented with the most elegant of brows. New York had to notice Loki’s lips, too, and his legs and his hands and his hair and his neck, and New York had to notice Loki’s words, so powerful and elegant and beautiful, and New York had to notice Loki’s voice, rich and sweet and smooth like honey, and New York had to notice Loki when his feet hit a stage, had to notice how he seemed to fall away from everything mortal and turn into this god of infinite personalities and souls and hearts when he got his hands on a monologue, and fuck, Tony’s pretty sure New York noticed everything about Loki but his freckle, because everything about Loki but his tiny, insignificant little freckle is spectacular, and that makes him so angry he could cry for years.

A freckle. That’s all he has.

“What do you want for dinner?” Steve asks, unintentionally breaking Tony’s train of thought. Tony can only watch as it crumbles into the sea, as the waves of reality crash and beat against it until it’s nothing but foam and vapor.

“I don’t care,” he mumbles. He can feel his cheek sliding down the back of Steve’s shoulder and his skin catching along the fabric of his shirt as gravity starts to take its toll, and he opens his eyes and hooks his chin securely over the ridge of Steve’s shoulder again, gropes around in the emptiness of his mind and tries to latch onto something that will make him either wildly ecstatic or terribly depressed.

Unsurprisingly, he can’t be moved by anything, not one damn thing – of course, with the exception of Loki.

“Is take-out alright with you?” Steve pushes. He’s treating Tony normally again, and Tony knows that Steve knows that that’s about the best thing he can do for him at this point – just treat him like he would on any other day until the day that is any other day finally comes along, a day without panic attacks and unexpected arguments and unnecessary tears and no more than eight hours of sleep.

“Yeah,” Tony says. He thinks to himself that he’s going to go get Loki tomorrow for certain, even if God himself came down from Heaven and ordered him not to, and he closes his eyes again and sighs at that thought, lets it fill him up with cool, refreshing air until his head grows light and his heart grows heavy, and he leans his forehead against Steve’s neck and he forces himself to breathe slowly and steadily. Somewhere between then and when his shrimp fried rice goes cold and Steve is threatening to eat it, he falls asleep again. All he does is dream of the past.