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Tony is six hours old the first time someone sells information about him to the tabloids.
They'd been waiting for the Stark heir for months, had speculated on everything – gender, names, birth weight, time, date, hair or no hair – everything but the one thing they really want to know: if his wrist will bear a soulmark, and the name if it does.
It's the last that earns one of the midwives thousands of dollars and makes headlines the next day.
There is a mark on Anthony Edward Stark's (male, 5lb 2oz, 03:27 a.m., 29th May 1970, wispy black curls) wrist.
It is not a name.
In Asgard the story told of how soulmarks came to be is this:
Nine days and nine nights did Odin hang upon the World-Tree, a sacrifice of himself to himself, seeking wisdom.
From the void he grasped the runes he sought and fell back screaming, but through his fingers one fell among Yggdrasil's tangled roots that no man knows the origin or the end.
Cut by the spear that pierced Odin Wayfarer, stained with his blood, offered with his sacrifice - bright shone the rune as the tree took it back and spread its woken power through its branches.
Every soul henceforth would know their match by their name upon their wrist – for what greater knowledge can there be than that?
(Do you understand yet, or what more?)
Head resting upon Frigga's shoulder Loki curls his fingers about his wrist, the shifting rune that marks the space of his yet-born heartmate warm beneath his sleeve.
As a child, before he understood its purpose, his mother had wrapped his wrist in silver, the band of one who has their mate's name but seeks enjoyment first – "It is good to know you will be able to please your spouse when that blessed day arrives," – and Thor had worn gold, though he exchanged it for silver as soon as he was old enough to choose for himself – "Patience and restraint are virtues it would do you well to learn."
Both were kinder choices than the band of the expectant widower, the iron that marks a god tied to a mortal, rusting away with every moment.
When he asks his mother if his father meant to give the nine realms such a cursed gift she is silent.
(The story is very different in other realms, of course.)
As a child Tony had loved his mark, the elegant curling patterns that tricked the eye into seeing movement, like the slow drifting of glaciers.
He'd understood other people – boring people – had names, but his mark was different. Special. He'd liked running his fingers over it - trying not to lose his place or let it blur the way it did when he didn't concentrate absolutely - and was convinced he'd never reached the end the same way twice. He'd thought it was beautiful, had been proud of its uniqueness – right up until the night he asked his mother to make up a story about his match, the way the kids at school had said their parents did when they asked about their soulmarks.
His mother had simply crumpled into herself and cried and cried and the pity in her eyes had been terrible.
He'd taken to wearing a mourning band after that.
People used to argue that there were more things in heaven and earth, that just because it wasn't in a language anyone recognized – and his father hired translators from all over the globe – didn't mean it wasn't a human language, a debate somewhat damaged when it was pointed out that even those very rare people born with symbols that didn't quite match any known language – some sort of runes, typically – could still find some similarities – enough to at least know it was a name.
There are still conspiracy theories that his soulmark is an alien language, that on his wrist is proof that humanity is not alone in the universe. Sometimes he seeks out and reads the 'best of' theory collections on the internet, unsure if he wants to laugh at them or himself.
(He's thought it himself once or twice, but the arguments he makes for are the same as against – vast as the universe is, what does it matter? How would he ever know?)
Somewhere along the way, though, the conclusion was reached that the most obvious explanation is that Tony's mark doesn't mean anything at all.
His father had wondered if the illegibility of Tony's mark was in some way related to his work on the Manhattan Project – Tony had heard his mother accuse him of it once, hysterical after yet another article about it being 'God's punishment' for their war-profiteering. There were even studies about it (though no one actually said it was about his mark) but no link was ever found – none of Howard's Project colleagues had children that were Blank or – or defective the way Tony was, so obviously the fault is Tony's.
To have a blank wrist is one thing, as people like to remind him – it happens, and sometimes they receive a name later in life, sometimes they never do, and it's a pity, but to have something where a soulmark should be is different. Even people with multiple names are less looked down upon.
God looked away when He was writing on Tony Stark's wrist, certain detractors like to sneer. He couldn't condemn anyone to having Stark for a match so He made sure to fill the space so there could never be one.
Well, Tony doesn't believe in God, any god, and he doesn't need a soulmate.
When other kids go through the phase where they study everything about the probabilities of meeting soulmates and how to increase them, Tony does the reverse. He looks at how many records he can find of Blanks, he looks at their relationships and whether they failed or succeeded, he looks at how many people have a name but never find their match, he runs the numbers and tells himself it's not a big deal.
28.7% of the registered population is Blank. 68% of soulmarked meet their mate, a great increase upon historical figures, rising particularly sharply with the growth and popularization of the internet. Of those fortunates, 33% of matches are platonic in nature. 20% of matches occur between siblings, with a noted frequency among twins in particular.
Tony's mark, to the best of his knowledge, remains unique.
("Why our son? Why couldn't he have no name at all instead of – of – whatever that is?")
He takes the mourning band off after his parents' deaths. Journalists tend to consider it 'flaunting' his marred wrist, but really, it's a reminder. He's Tony Stark, and it's always been his differences that make him.
If in the middle of the night he sometimes traces his fingers over his mark like a child, it doesn't mean anything.
He's doing just fine.
Among the Æsir, the fashion regarding soulmarkings is to cover them. With lives so long there is no hurry – why not seek pleasure and fun first? Who knows, it could result in being life-long friends – as it often does, for it is absurd to mourn or be angered by the end of something all knew would not last.
There are those who choose to be faithful to their future intended and cover their name in gold, of course, but they are regarded as naïve and somewhat self-defeating – how can you truly appreciate the ideal if you have not known imperfection first? How else will you learn to be a good mate, to handle the vagaries of a relationship, if not experience?
Mortals may leave their wrists bare and seek out their soulmate the instant they are of age – how can they not, when they will only ever have decades at best to know the truest love the realms have to offer, poor creatures – but the Æsir have millennia. Even the Jötnar cover their wrists – though of course, nobody knows whether they do so or not among their own people – and they seem to object to clothing on principle.
Loki doesn't even know when the name appeared. He could go decades, even a century or two without looking, too long used to the emptiness of his wrist – a dozen names could have been and gone and he wouldn't know. He glances at his wrist one day upon removing the silver band and it is simply there, as if it has always been – Anthony Edward Stark.
The construction is somewhat familiar, taking him a moment to parse with centuries old information to go upon. He vaguely recalls being told that the people of one of the realms had taken to wearing longer, divided names, to separate themselves from others that share similar, to make them easier to find…
Midgardian then. Mortal.
Loki finds himself smiling at it nonetheless, because here is proof at last that the Norns do not entirely overlook him, have at least one bright thread to give his tapestry.
For centuries he has longed for this name with a fervency that would surprise most, though given the resentment read into his every action it truly shouldn't: his soulmate would obviously be the one being who would choose Asgard's second prince first – why wouldn't envious, spite-hearted Loki long for that?
(He wants to know the smile on his mother's face when she strokes her wrist; he wants to wear it himself. He wants the tenderness Odin shows nowhere else, the contrast so sharp witnessing it leaves him breathless. He wants to know the name of his heart.
Of course he won't tell anyone – he is not such a fool as to give away a blade to strike him with. It hurt enough that Thor mocked his sentimental wonderings when they were children.)
It is not the done thing to share such blessed knowledge with any other but the one meant, but he shows his mother anyway. She congratulates him, even when he points out that his match is a mortal, testing – if she reacted as Odin would... but no, she is so sincerely delighted for him it hurts, and it means more than even his silver tongue could put into words.
She kisses his forehead, her eyes shining in a way he associates with the ørlǫg she knows and never tells.
"I am sure you will meet," she says, and what from anyone else would be a platitude from her becomes a promise. He lets out a long slow breath, shuddering a little with something he would be ashamed to call relief.
He takes to wearing gold, reaches out absently to trace the dark letters hidden beneath whenever he finds himself feeling alone, which is more often than he would care to admit, even to himself.
He will give his mortal time to grow and learn, and when things are calmer – for there have long been rumors of Thor's potential coronation, and already Loki can see it becoming a terrible reality – he will seek him out.
(Mortal, mortal, mortal runs through his head, and he holds tight to his mother's words. They will meet.)
It cannot be too hard to find an Anthony Stark with Loki's runes upon his wrist.
The soldiers are laughing at his mark, teasing, but can't quite hide their pity. Tony doesn't mind; let them laugh if it makes them feel better about being so far from home, always faced with the possibility that fighting for their country might turn into dying for it.
The boy next to Tony – and he is a boy, Jesus, no wonder Tony can't sleep at night for thinking of his cheerful face – shows him his soulmark. It's so blurred as to be unreadable and Tony glances at his own wrist only to find his indecipherable mark is sharp and bright, the clearest thing in the world.
He opens his mouth to speak and lets the water in.
Far away someone barks words he can't understand and he's back in the cave, chest cracked open and stoppered with a magnet, shuddering at the electrical feedback the battery in his hands sends through his system, at the way his heart stutters, lurching further and further out of rhythm.
The water closes over his head again, fills his nose, his mouth. Darkness begins to creep into the corner of his eyes leaving a ring of bright burning blue, and Tony imagines the curving waves encircling his wrist burning with the alien light of his father's arc reactor.
He clings to the shape of it, the promise of it (in his delirious state he thinks someone wants me to live) and vows that in exchange for water he'll give his captors fire.
He's dragged out, gasping, and drowned again.
All the gods of Asgard are gods of death and war, all but Loki.
Sometimes he thinks this is the reason he can never quite fit into Asgard's halls, for he alone does not have a half for battle, talented though he is at it. He cannot help but curl his lip at the hypocrisy of it all – he loves his father, but he reads his histories and the same man who claims that wisdom is to be prized above all is the god of berserkers, for like them he can go battle-mad and witless with the desire for slaughter.
Even Freyja, she who gives, goddess of beauty, love and prosperity claims war and death also as her domain and sees no inconsistency.
Beneath Asgard's gold there is the stench of blood and not a single Áss minds it, save when it is Loki's trickery that causes or averts it.
He has to laugh. He has to, or he will truly go mad the way he is often accused of being, but Loki's laughter is liked even less than his tricks.
(Can he truly do nothing right in anyone's eyes?)
A wise king never seeks out war, father tells them, and then he prepares to crown Thor, still as quick to anger as a child, thinking every problem can be solved by a hammer blow.
Thor would have the nine realms upset ere the crown had rested a second upon his golden head, and Loki can guess where he will take his war.
There is no glory in taking Niflheim, land of the dishonored dead, and Svartalfheim and Jotunheim both lie still in ruins, already destroyed with varying thoroughness by the line of Bor.
Vanaheim is loyal enough already - perhaps they can consider themselves lucky, considering what Asgard tends to do to other realms it wars with - and there can be no honor in destroying Alfheim in the manner of their father and grandfather, for the light elves are considered 'soft', pleasure-loving people and Asgard likes to think they defend such 'innocence'. (Strange, how rapidly they gained such a reputation after the destruction of Svartalfheim. Why, it's almost as if they took notes.)
Thor should know better than to challenge Surtr his rule of Muspelheim so early in his crowning, and the dwarves of Niðavellir are too useful even for Thor to provoke – who else will craft armor and weapons worthy of the einherjar?
Of the nine realms, then, there remains only one.
Midgard… Midgard is the gate by which the other realms are met - there is a reason Asgard punishes incursions, little though they care to visit the place themselves. Midgard, though its people be short-lived, is a realm of warriors, subjects worthy of ruling. Loki can already see how the histories will frame it – how he would tell them to frame it, for it will be his role as the throne's shadow to make everything palatable to the people while Thor busies himself with glory and war – Midgard had lost its way and needed Asgard to once more take it under their protection, as they did centuries before when the Jötnar attempted to take it for their own.
If not for the name on his wrist, Loki would probably thwart Thor's coronation solely from a desire to be wilful and prove to others what he well knows – that Thor is not yet ready. (Is that not his function? He who of all of Asgard is not in some shape a war god, from the way he is regarded he must instead be a jester and tell the truths no one cares to hear.)
If not for the name on his wrist he might even do nothing at all, let Thor blunder as he would and succor himself as ever with the bitter knowledge of being right.
Perhaps he is being pessimistic, perhaps he underestimates Thor's control (or at least, willingness to listen to Loki's counsel) – but he cannot risk even the slightest chance he might lose his Stark.
If he does... if he does – well, he is not a god of death or war, but chaos often brings them in its wake.
(It will not happen. It doesn't matter what he has to do, he will not let it.)
When Tony first realizes and admits to himself that he's dying – as in, feeling his death creep progressively closer, crawling through his veins, not the way everyone is dying every minute of every day – he laughs.
After everything he's lived through his own genius is going to do him in. Which he somewhat expected, to be honest, but he was anticipating something more explosive than a slow lingering poisoning.
He goes through his life carefully, tying up threads, cutting others, attempting to free himself from a web he hadn't really noticed himself gathering before, all so that he can crawl away like a cat and die in private, or the closest thing an international celebrity gets.
It's fine. It's fine. Despite what his addled brain insisted while drowning, Tony Stark doesn't have anyone to really miss him – oh, his money, his electronics, his crazed leaps of science, the military's still lingering hope of getting more weapons out of him, the end of all that will be mourned. Tony, though, Tony is an asshole and he knows it – glories in it – and he's pretty sure there's going to be a lot of people throwing a huge party or two. The only question is whether they'll bother to try and claim it a celebration of his life rather than his death.
Even Pepper, who he might have loved in another universe where they didn't have soulmarkings to make sure he knew how futile it would be, even Rhodey, who is his best friend in any universe he can imagine – even they'll probably be just the tiniest bit relieved to be free of his douchebaggery. He hopes they will, anyway, or thinking about it really would hurt.
Fury, of course, would have to fuck up all his plans.
Here are your ashes; get back in your pyre and rise.
There are no words capable of expressing the void.
Probabilities and perceptions are layered on themselves endlessly, twisting on their axis until blinded by fullness, crippled by infinite repetition.
Loki thinks he dreams of how he fell.
He thinks he is still in the moment of choice before he fell.
With the Bifröst destroyed, it was not that he could not go to Midgard, find Anthony - it was that he could not bring Anthony to Asgard as he should, as a prince's consort –
(monster, false prince upon false throne, thrice-damned fool)
He could not bind Anthony to him in the ways of his – no, not any more, not ever his people – in the ways of the Æsir; they would not acknowledge him, Odin would not. He could not proudly and openly give Anthony the golden apples that had such strange effects upon mortals as to make them near Æsir in longevity and resistance to damage, the apples that should have been his right as Loki's mate.
(fitting your mark be mortal, Loki Gods' Bane, for even if it weren't you'd make it so, World-Destroyer.)
He had a brief, terrible moment of clarity – he had caused such wanton destruction and in return Thor had destroyed the only thing that mattered –
There was no point holding on, so he didn't.
He thought he was choosing death, thought it would mean peace, and freedom from his pathetic existence, his terrible mistakes.
The void is not an end.
The void is –
The void is.
He is the moment and the moment is eternal. It is death, as he longed for, but it is the death of a wave as it breaks across the shore, the death of an exhalation of breath as it meets the air, and it is terrible beyond measure. He is broken and remade endlessly, ceaselessly, and clings to the remnants of the person he thought himself to be but is no more, the knife-edge of self. It is a battle he loses more often than he wins, so recently revealed to be the opposite of what he believed for millennia.
Sometimes he has just enough understanding to grasp the futility of it and he clasps his wrist instead.
He thinks he screams.
He thinks he prays.
And oh, how the Norns just love to answer Loki's prayers.
He is found.
"Imagine you set out upon a journey," Thor had said, explaining to a curious Bruce and Tony the concepts Asgardians felt lay behind soulmarkings. "Ørlǫg consists of the pathways set out long before you ever thought to leave your home, infinite ways to wherever you could go. Wyrd is your choice of route, the moments you may go one way or the other to same destination. Hamingja is luck, the conditions along the road – it doesn't change your plans, but makes your way harder or easier.
"Your mark is ørlǫg, what you might call Fate, but meeting them is a matter of choosing the right path, trusting they also have chosen one that meets yours, and hoping that neither your luck nor theirs causes your gaze to be turned away when they cross."
Tony isn't sure there's a nice neat word to encapsulate meeting Loki face to face and unarmored, but it feels like there ought to be. If he lives, he'll have to ask.
He's... rather doubting his chances of survival at present.
Loki had smiled in his cage, all feverish eyes and sharp tongue, but his smile then was nothing like the one he's wearing now.
Tony hadn't been close enough to smell the crazy like Bruce claimed you could but he could see the sickness and pain – he knows that look, he wears that look every night he wakes from a nightmare crying out for Yinsen – and Loki plays a good game but he's not as in control as he tries to present himself. He's doing the same thing Tony did in that cave, clinging to his self by the skin of his teeth – no wonder Fury wanted to torture him, anyone could see he's broken once already –
"Anthony Edward Stark," Loki says before Tony can even begin with his quick showman's patter and Tony stops, diverted from his own misdirection.
"Yes?" He says warily. "It's Tony, though. Nobody uses full names to address someone, come on. Or do I have to say Loki Odinson – Laufeyson? – every time?"
"Odinson and Laufeyson both are but one type of many kennings. They do not define me as your names define you. Among the Æsir only one name goes upon your wrist."
"Wow, this conversation has gone off track. Pretty sure we were going to threaten each other?"
Loki shakes his head, leaning that – staff? Spear? Fine, glowstick of destiny it is – in the crook of his arm, unbuckling a vambrace one-handed. Tony snaps on the homing bracelets for the newest armor while he's preoccupied and doesn't feel any safer.
Beneath the vambrace, beneath the long sleeve shoved up – hadn't Foster said something about Asgardians considering the bare wrist erotic, Thor averting his eyes every time he saw someone sleeveless? Tony is not prepared for alien come-ons, even if the giver has glorious bone structure – there's a thin cuff of gold that moves more like silk than the solid metal it has to be to clang so loudly as it hits the floor.
Tony is momentarily distracted by the thought – what is going on in Asgard that they can change the properties of metal like that? Is it not gold, but some alien metal that resembles it? – but it doesn't stop him from taking a step back at the sight of the name scrawled there.
Anthony Edward Stark
Anthony has been the eleventh most popular boy's name in the states in the last decade alone, Edward the hundred and thirty first. Stark is ranked 858 out of nearly 89,000 surnames – 88,799, to be exact – and Tony knows that there was a surge in them being combined after he was born, so it could mean nothing. Coincidence.
But... there's something...
(Is this why Natasha gave him that worried little aside about Barton saying Loki had paid an unexpected amount of attention to anything he said about Tony? Did Barton know? Did he not explain how names could be shared?)
Loki's hand closes on his wrist and drags him closer, and Tony has a confused moment where he thinks Loki's realized what the homing bracelets are for –
"Show me," Loki says and his eyes are the definition of hungry, desperate.
Tony opens his mouth to say something like 'is this really the time', or, more likely, just plain what, but Loki's hand tightens and he quickly removes the bracelet partially covering his mark, afraid it'll be crushed by accident and impatience. He's almost certain that he is really going to need it in a second.
They both stare at Tony's mark, the elegant curling waves that look nothing like the runes Tony noted on Thor's armor, and Tony raises his gaze in time to catch the way Loki's expression falls – it's not just disappointment, it's devastation. Tony almost wants to apologize – apologize to the alien would-be conqueror who's using his tower as starting point for an invasion – but Loki lashes out, his pain getting the better of him before Tony's mouth can, throws him through the window.
(If he's paid as much attention as Barton says he did, he knows Tony can fly –)
How much must you want a soulmate, Tony wonders, to look even as a battle begins around you – and how much must it hurt, to think you'd found them after so long waiting and then be wrong?
"He's not mine," Loki tells Thor dully. "I did not think the Norns hated me quite so much as that."
"Brother?" Thor says gently, a worried note in his voice.
(Still?)
Loki closes his eyes, bites his lip to keep from screaming. "It's his name upon my wrist," he says, not as easily as he would tell Mother, but close enough to drawing poison from a wound that he cannot mind she is not the one hearing it. "Anthony Edward Stark. But it's not mine upon his."
"Impossible," Thor declares, and if only the pain Loki felt was from the beating at the hands of the green beast, because he once thought that too. "There has never been such a thing. It is – your match is in the weave, it is fated – I have never heard of a one-sided bond in the nine realms."
"Because you've never researched it at all," Loki says acidly, stung all over again by the memory of the wrong name on his Anth–
(it's Tony)
Tony's wrist.
"But you have," Thor insists, all bull-headed determination, as if simply saying something can make it true, and because he is Thor he is often right.
"Yes," Loki says. "And yet, here we are. I am again first in all the wrong things."
Thor's brow creases, he opens his mouth to say something and then shakes his head as if understanding his words will not be welcome. Loki commends his mortal lover; she has worked a wonder Loki could not in a thousand years.
"You are sure it is him? That it is not perhaps another Anthony Edward Stark? There are so very many mortals, perhaps -"
"No," Loki says flatly. "He is the one, I am sure."
He doesn't have the words to explain; there is no way to do so easily that does not involve magic in some way and Thor has always been impatient with such explanations, no matter how Loki tried to express them.
"If you knew... if you knew, then why did you bring the battle to his home, brother? How could you be sure –"
"That he would live?" Loki smiles, a bitter thing he would never have let Thor see before his fall.
If Loki had won he could have guaranteed Tony's safety - or something close - but with his loss Tony is safer still, and he is grateful beyond words even amid his pain, enough to tell some portion of the truth.
"He is a warrior, he would not be kept from battle so where else to take it but to him, where I could keep him in my sight and perform my little tricks to keep him from harm? I underestimated the human desire for self-destruction, admittedly."
Thor looks at him and for the first time Loki thinks he sees an understanding in him that Loki is not telling him everything. He will no longer take Loki at his word, and Loki is unsure whether to be disappointed or proud that he has grasped the wisdom of that at last.
Let him continue to think Loki invaded of his own will, then; he will not believe the alternative after all Loki's acting, and if it gives him comfort to believe that Loki's madness is passing, temporary, let him have it. Perhaps Thor thinks the shock of discovering his (one-sided) bond has brought him out of his confused state.
"What is the name upon his wrist, brother?"
A wounded noise is forced from his throat and Thor flinches. Loki gathers strength or bile – they are the same to him in this moment – and spits, "Hveðrungr. I did not recognize the script, but it was nothing I am familiar with of Midgard, Asgard, Vanaheim or Alfheim."
"That narrows it down some," Thor says thoughtfully, as if he really means to go and scour the realms for the writing that marks his crazed brother's soulmate as someone else's, and Loki laughs, as he always has, to keep madness at bay.
(Too late.)
Thor asks, very politely and with great care to assure that he means no impropriety, to see Tony's mark. Tony thinks he might understand for the first time why someone might be reluctant to bare their wrist – all Thor's assurances do is make him aware that there could be something intimate about it.
It's not like it would matter if he actually felt that way or not; just about everybody in the world knows what Tony Stark's mark looks like. They don't even have to go to one of the conspiracy sites dedicated to decoding it, there's a picture on his Wikipedia page, it gets an airing practically every time he ends up in the tabloids, and he's in the tabloids a lot. He shrugs and offers up his wrist, something that makes Thor frown a little, like he can't understand why Tony isn't treating this as the big deal he obviously sees it as.
He holds Tony's wrist very gingerly, carefully turning it this way and that to see the full effect of the pattern, ever vigilant to the possibility of actually touching it, as if the merest brush of a single finger over the wavering lines would be a grave offense.
Tony shakes his head a little, bemused at the thought that even aliens think his mark is something weird enough to gawk at, and wonders if he ought to tell Thor about what happened with Loki.
They think it's private, Jane said. Intimate. Only to be shared between match and mate. Never mind, then.
"Done?" Tony says, and Thor drops his arm as if it burns.
"I thank you for your forbearance," Thor says. "It is not a script with which I am familiar, that is all I meant by asking to see it."
"Script?" Tony says, feeling his expression fall into something blank. "You mean it actually means something?"
"Of course it does!" Thor says, looking horrified on Tony's behalf. "Do you mean to say you have lived your life believing the Norns had no matching thread for you? That it was an accident of the warp and weft?"
Tony blinks, looking at the curling wave-like inscription that used to be nothing more than abstract decoration – still is, really, information too new to have sunk in – and shrugs helplessly. "What's it say then?"
"Ahh," Thor says, prevaricating, and deflates instantly when Tony raises an eyebrow. "Hveðrungr."
"Not Loki?" Tony blurts before he can stop himself, because even though he knows it can't be – remembers vividly the disappointment on Loki's face – it still bugs him a little, the memory of his (well, obviously it has to be some other Anthony Stark, but it's still his) name on Loki's pale skin. "Never mind, forget I said that. What did you say it was again?"
"Hveðrungr," Thor repeats, smiling a little and looking pleased for some weird reason.
"Yeah, no, not even gonna attempt that," Tony says. "So you can understand it because of the All-Speak, but you can't actually read it? Even recognize it? How's that work?"
Thor shrugs easily. "Understanding is one thing, knowing the origin is another. I am not a scholar, and there are many different tongues in the nine realms."
"Huh," Tony says, and ruthlessly crushes that tiny little kernel of hope that somehow managed to spring up upon hearing his mark is actually a name. Likelihood of meeting He – Hved – whoever is still at zero.
Whatever, it's not like he cares. He's had a long time to get used to the idea of never meeting them, nothing has really changed.
"Interesting chat," he tells Thor, claps him on the shoulder and heads back to his waiting suits.
"Perhaps you are overlooking the obvious," Mother's – Frigga's simulacrum says, eyeing the books, papers, plaques and fragments of debris with written words upon them that surrounds Thor, sitting cross-legged before Loki's cell. Thor looks up from his intense study of a broken sword hilt, marked with the rarely seen written tongue of the deep dwarf folk who never leave the mines.
"You shouldn't be here! What if Father catches you?"
"What if your father catches you?" Frigga says archly, leaning closer to a broken slab and frowning at the rather explicit words there. As samples of the Leirjötnar's text go, they could have found better, near extinct or no.
"If he did not want us to be brothers he should not have raised us so," Thor says firmly. "I can't turn my back upon our history just like that."
Loki meets their mother's eyes over Thor's shoulder and smiles grimly. As ever, Thor both grasps the heart of the situation and fails to understand it.
"What did you mean by 'overlooking the obvious'?"
"Well," she says, smoothing her hands down her skirts, eyeing them both carefully, "There is no bond that is one-sided, that is true, so there is something else you must consider."
Loki snorts softly, and avoids her piercing look.
"You are my son," she says firmly, "and I do not say this to wound you, believe me, Loki. It is only – it is obvious, is it not? You are so clever; I cannot believe you do not already have an inkling of your answer."
"Speak plainly, mother," Thor complains, and Loki drops his book and covers his eyes with a sigh.
"You are a Jötunn by birth –"
The words are like a spear deep in the guts.
" – so may it not be that the language is Jötnar in origin? That it is still you, only –"
"Only the name of the monster I was born, instead of the one I have made of myself in this false skin?"
It wounds him to see her flinch, but there is a bitter satisfaction there also. He loves her dearly but she lied for so long, well past the point it could ever be justified – you would never have told me, would you? – and Loki has always attempted to return his pain threefold upon those who inflicted it, regardless of who they were or if he inflicted more upon himself in the process. He is a monster, after all; it is in his nature.
"Loki!"
"Apparently it's Hveðrungr," Loki says snidely, lip curling.
(His poor mortal if it is true, to be burdened with the evidence of Loki's true nature upon his wrist. His poor mortal, to be burdened with Loki by any name.)
Frigga narrows her eyes and Thor shoots him a panicked look, making frantic gestures Loki is well familiar with making himself when Thor used to push her limits unknowingly as a child. "Perhaps this is a good thing," she says tightly. "The Norns do right by you, to help you come to grips with your heritage."
"Perhaps I wouldn't need help," Loki says, dripping poison, "if I had not been told for a thousand years that the species of which I am part is a race of vile, monstrous savages."
"You are not – You are my son. That is all that matters."
"Your son," Loki repeats, and bites at his cheek to keep the bitter words he could say inside him. He is not her son, he never was, but he cannot afford to lose the one person left in Asgard who still wholly and knowingly cares for him, for even Thor must doubt - or he should, if he has gained any wisdom at all. Loki's tongue is too sharp; he cannot trust her mother's love to extend so far, not for the cuckoo of her nest. He could spit such truths at Odin all day long, but Frigga – no.
(didn't i tell you? whispers the memory of the void. you're a monster, but because they raised you, because you wear the shape of the æsir, you're not the same as those other filthy jötnar. you're the exception, isn't that nice? why aren't you comforted by that?)
"Shut up," Loki tells it, and bends his head over his mark so he can pretend not to see Thor and Frigga's worried looks.
Let Frigga be wrong, let Tony have a stranger's name, a stranger who could make him happy – even... even if it is a Jötunn. Loki doesn't deserve a true match, and Tony doesn't deserve being bound to him.
And if he is truly doomed to be Loki's?
There are plenty of beings who find their heart lies apart from their names, who can be perfectly happy without their soulmate – let him be one of those.
Just because Loki cannot be satisfied otherwise doesn't mean Tony has to feel the same. Let him be happy; let him fly as free as the phoenix he once claimed to be.
Some days Tony thinks he loves Pepper because she has never looked at his mark with pity like everybody else, or if she has, she's always had the decency not to let him see her doing it.
He tells her Thor says it means something in the All-Speak, but he can't pronounce it and he's not going to try, and she smiles at him and says she's happy for him.
He tells her he thinks it might actually mean Loki, and her smiles falls.
"What on earth makes you think that?"
He shrugs, taps it his fingers against it nervously and says, "Loki – Loki showed me his wrist during – you know – right before I tried the free-falling thing. It was my name."
"So it said Anthony Stark –"
"Anthony Edward Stark," Tony says, grimacing. "He had the lot."
"- it still doesn't mean it's yours," Pepper says in her reasonable voice that makes him wince a little out of habit. "You know how many claims Legal fends off, even with your mark being well-known as – well."
"Unmatchable?" Tony offers. "Meaningless?"
"Well it's not any more, is it? But you know what I mean, Tony."
"It wasn't – it felt different," he admits.
He sees her taking a breath and carries on quickly, determined to get everything off his chest. "And Thor's been weird about it, I can't even tell you, so weird, and dropping these little hints about Loki being a different species, like, more alien than even an Asgardian, and not knowing until recently, which is just messed up, and Loki might not be the first name he ever had, which would explain why this –" he waves his wrist about, "– doesn't say Loki in whatever weird-ass language it actually is –"
"Stop," Pepper says firmly. "Stop. Calm down. Breathe. Now tell me – do you really think it means Loki?"
"Yes," Tony admits.
"Do you think Loki knows you're –"
"Yes."
"And do you think he knows the name is his?"
Tony hesitates. "He didn't. It's the reason he – but Thor said he and his mother had been doing research and things, about Loki's, uh, birth people, so. I don't know."
Pepper hums softly, and Tony loves watching her work through her thoughts, because she's so quick and sharp about things he barely understands; she leaves him in awe. "Tony. Do you want this?"
"I – " Tony frowns. "He brought an army of aliens into New York."
"No," she says, tight with anger. "Forget that. For the purposes of this discussion, that's irrelevant."
"Really? I'd have thought it was kinda important -"
"And why you've spent so much time going on about bottleneck invasions and studying the legalities regarding coercion, so stop, don't try and distract me; it's not the point of this conversation. Forget everything except the way you feel, just ask yourself: do you want this?"
"I'm no good at feelings."
"Tony."
"I'm pretty sure he's my soulmate," Tony says slowly. "The perfect match we're all taught to want from childhood, except nobody knew my wrist-mark meant anything so they just made fun of how I'd never have one instead."
"And of course that secretly made you want one more," Pepper sighs, and Tony forces a grin.
"Of course," he says. "There's a reason reverse psychology is a thing, come on."
"Back on track, Tony."
"I think," Tony says slowly, "I think I do? You don't – you can't understand what it means, to be told for so long that you don't – that you'll never have – and it's not just that, it's that I'm me. There aren't many people out there who can keep up with me, and even less who can stand me. To have someone who'll be able to do both – he must be able to, right, or he wouldn't be, you know – it's… it's a whole different thing, you see?"
"Alright," Pepper says slowly. There's no judgment in her tone, only honest concern for him. Tony wishes he had any real idea how to go about showing platonic affection, because she needs to know how awesome she is and he doesn't want her to think he might be coming on to her and make things awkward. "You said you don't think he knows it's his name on your wrist. Do you think he'll use that as an excuse to deny the bond?"
Tony stills, caught off guard by something he hadn't even considered. "What do you mean? He wanted a soulmate in New York, I know he did, he was – he was devastated when he thought I wasn't the person he'd been looking for – why would he –?"
Pepper licks her lips cautiously – he's always impressed by the way it doesn't mess up her lipstick in the slightest – and takes his hand in hers. Fuck, that's a terrible sign. "I'm just saying," she says gently. "It's not about you, Tony – not really. It's just that, well, he's an ancient Norse god - alien - being. He might think –"
"I'm not good enough?"
"No! No, stop that line of thought right there, Tony. If he thought that way he wouldn't even be your – your soulmate to begin with. I meant, well, he's obviously older than his tantrum in New York indicates –"
Tony smiles weakly and she smiles back, clearly relieved by the attempt.
" – so it might be that he doesn't want to get hurt. Humans – we don't live long in comparison, clearly. Maybe he doesn't subscribe to the 'better to have loved and lost' philosophy. Maybe he thinks it will be easier to – to not get to know you at all if he'll have so little time with you."
"Okay." Tony says. "Right."
"I said maybe." Pepper stresses. "Maybe he still wants a soulmate as desperately as you say he did and –"
"Thor is sure it's me. That my mark is Loki's, and Loki's mine. He doesn't even pretend to be talking about some hypothetical frost giant any more when he talks about it."
"Frost –"
"That's what language it is. Some kind of frost giant language. He didn't recognize it because the Asgardians and the frost giants were at war for centuries or some shit, so nobody on Asgard would be caught dead bothering to learn how to read the defeated enemy's literature, you know. So if Thor knows, Loki has to. But he's never given any indication…"
"He's in prison, Tony, or he should be –"
"Thor says it's one of the most sacred, most respected bonds between people you can get, and it's considered so just about everywhere. There are special laws and things about allowing prisoners contact with their soulmates. And let's be real here, just going by what we saw on the helicarrier –"
"I don't think I'm supposed to be included in that 'we'."
"Do you really think Loki couldn't escape if he wanted to?"
"I think," Pepper says slowly, "I think it might be convenient for him not to." She keeps her gaze averted while Tony rubs at his itchy eyes.
"Well," he says at last, "This is a kind of low I didn't think I'd get to experience. First I find out I have a soulmate after years of thinking I didn't and then I find out, actually, no, he doesn't want anything to do with me. A possibly insane mass murderer has higher standards than Tony Stark."
"Oh, Tony," Pepper says, and folds him into her arms. He presses his face into her shoulder and promises he'll buy her something as an apology for messing up her suit.
"Oh, Tony," she says again, and strokes his hair.
"Jane tells me that Midgardians consider there to be five stages of grief," Thor tells him while Loki stares blankly at the slim book about Jötnar culture his mother had somehow managed to get her hands on. She apologized in the note she sent with it, not for the book itself, but for the loss of the great volumes that had existed before the Æsir-Jötnar war, back when Jötunheim had been at its height – before Odin had taken the Casket of Ancient Winters and doomed the world to a slow, terrible extinction they could not fight.
He hasn't read it. He won't read it. He refuses to read it. She can have every other book in his cell removed and he still won't open it.
"First is Denial," Thor says, and Loki doesn't have to see his face to know the significant look he's sending him.
"I am not in denial," Loki says.
"What else would you call it? It is the Iron Man's full name on your wrist, and a Jötnar text upon his, and you can't have such a thing as a one-sided bond – there is no way to tie one thread to another without knotting them both."
"It is not denial," Loki repeats flatly. "It is hope."
"He is a fine man, brother. I am sure he will balance – no, perhaps not, I rather think he'd be more likely to spur you on... I am sure he will match you well, given half the chance."
"I didn't mean hope for me," Loki says, unable to keep the incredulous look off his face. "Really, Thor?"
"You are still my brother," Thor says, and looks only a little embarrassed at his misunderstanding.
Loki shakes his head. Here is the reason he cannot help but resent Thor as much as he loves him – how can he not, when at his brilliant and shining best he makes Loki's well-merited reasons for disliking his worst look like nothing more than the petty imaginings of a resentful child? "The other stages?"
"The second is Anger – you are very angry these days, brother."
"Oh really."
"The third is Bargaining, followed by Depression, and finally, Acceptance."
"How… neat," Loki says. "Your point?"
"I asked Jane – I did not mention names, rest easy – why someone might be angry at the discovery of their soulmate. I had to explain a little – only a little – of your… ah, unique circumstances, and she had much to say about – internalized racism? The nature of self-worth? And then she spoke of this 'Kübler-Ross model of the stages of grief' to help me understand how you may be feeling and how I can help you –"
"Thor. I am going to tell you something you should have been told so many times as a child, and not just by me. Stop."
"I just – I want you to be happy again."
monsters do not deserve happiness. monsters deserve to die, one and all.
(when I am king, crows the memory of a young Thor, I'll hunt the monsters down and slay them all! just as you did, father.)
"It doesn't matter!" Loki snaps.
"Your happiness? But –"
"My mind will not be changed by you, just as yours has never changed for me. So save your wisdom; I'll walk this path myself, and all my choices are mine to make. Can you not give me that much respect?"
Thor frowns, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, then sighs, a sound heavier than mountains. "Perhaps you feel you deserve this punishment, and there are many who would agree with you. But must you use the same whip to scourge an innocent?"
"He's my match," Loki can't stop himself from pointing out drily, "he can hardly be innocent."
Thor smiles. "That is the first time since Mother proposed her theory that you have called him your match without some form of caveat. Perhaps you are further along the road to acceptance than I thought."
"Slip of the tongue," Loki lies, and Thor laughs.
"You don't do slips of the tongue."
"Go away, Thor."
In his dream Loki's disappointment is so heavy Tony's shoulders curve beneath it. He can't read his own name upon Loki's skin but he watches it burn a fiery gold and crumble to ash.
"I will not be that," Loki tells him, staring at Tony's mark with such revulsion Tony bristles.
"You're just jealous my mark is so pretty," Tony says. "Sorry the Latin alphabet is so plain."
Loki looks at him as if he can't believe his naivety and laughs scornfully. "It's a monster name, my Stark, no matter what it looks like."
"So?" Tony says. "We're all monsters in this room. Natasha's got her hands soaked in blood but you and me, we'd drown if we couldn't swim. Can you swim?"
(He's suddenly aware that his footprints are red and wet, that Loki's hand closing around his neck is crimson.)
It's weird how easily his window breaks, how the glass doesn't cut him to ribbons the way it should. There are stars falling with him, and there's no armor to catch him, he's not going to fly, he's just going to fall forever and ever while at the edges of everything the void waits –
In his dream Loki weaves the void into a net to catch him, and when he does Tony's mark is a hook in his flesh that Loki tears out while Tony struggles and begs and claws at the web he's trapped in. He watches blankly as Tony hemorrhages to death.
Tony hates his fucking subconscious. He'd almost – almost – prefer nightmares about Afghanistan or the fall back to earth.
He doesn't want to try and sleep again, no matter how much he may need it, and Pepper definitely won't like a four a.m. call, so he spends his time running his fingers over his mark in the pre-dawn light, trying not to lose his place or concentration, never reaching the end the same way twice.
It still doesn't mean anything.
If there is one positive to be taken from Thor's visits it is that they distract Loki from his thoughts. Left alone too long, the black begin to devour the few bright ones, and left with nothing but each other they goad themselves into deeper and darker depths, leave him trapped in a vicious cycle of hatred and madness, the void yawning back open to take him again, so alone it is terrifying –
It is not that he does not want his soulmate. There is nothing in the nine realms he desires more than that connection, and there is nothing wrong with just who it is with – from all Barton managed to tell him and what little he saw with his own eyes, Loki cannot imagine anyone else he would rather have, though of course some of that is simply because he already knows Stark is his match and why should he want any other? He would happily claim Tony Stark before all of Asgard, bend his considerable mind and will to recovering enough of his former station if need be that Tony should feel no shame at being connected to him (or, no more than he ever would, for Loki has never been well-liked in any case).
He is not scorning the Norns or their gift, as some might claim if they knew or cared that he had found his match. He fully believes they have chosen wisely and well and offer a connection to satisfy even his greedy heart.
The fault, as ever, lies in Loki.
He simply cannot accept the name of a monster, not even to know such happiness.
He almost prefers believing his soulmate to be marked by the name of another to knowing it is his. Hveðrungr is the name of a runt so worthless, so abnormal that not even other monsters wanted it, a creature left alone in a temple, never meant to thrive –
your birthright was to die!
How could he ever saddle Tony with such a being – how selfish must he be to even consider –
your birthright
...consider...
birthright
That discarded child... it has a name.
Nobody is born with a name. You don't name a child just to kill it. Someone cared enough to give him a name that he might have a thread the Norns could recognize. Someone thought he would live long enough his soulmate should know it - that he would have a soulmate.
And that runt – that Jötunn child named roarer, he is the mortal Anthony Edward Stark's match. Regardless of the shape he wears now, all the twists and turns of Fate that have brought him here, it's his name upon Tony's wrist, not Loki. If Loki is a monster to his mate it's not because of his name.
He told Thor he deserved his own choices, though he has ruined them all – doesn't Tony deserve the same? Loki's issues are not his; if he doesn't want Loki by any name, he doesn't want Loki, and so be it. But what if he does?
As a child Tony had loved his mark, the elegant curling patterns that tricked the eye into seeing movement, like the slow drifting of glaciers. He'd thought it was beautiful, had been proud of its uniqueness. It had been a promise of infinity circling his wrist, and he'd never quite snuffed out the hope that it represented. He still hasn't.
"I think we need to begin again," Loki says, and Tony's finger stills against his mark. "Can we?"
"No," he says, keeping his eyes down, determinedly starts tracing the waves of his mark again. "The past informs the present and shapes the future. Erasing it solves nothing; it just leaves you making the same mistakes."
"I see," Loki says softly, and Tony hears an echo of his voice talking to the mirror – I hate it when you look at me like that.
"Don't worry," Tony says. "I'm the last man on Earth who can hold someone's past against them. So. I'm Anthony Edward Stark, nice to meet you."
"I am Loki," Loki says, hesitating for a long moment, and Tony can almost feel the weight of his potential decision filling the room, the world – or maybe just his – trembling on the brink of something. "Once called Hveðrungr. I – we are –"
"Soulmates?" Tony offers. "Matched? Two messed up individuals who might be awesome messed up together?"
He can sense the brief flash of Loki's smile at his words, and smiles even more briefly himself.
"I would like to get to know you, if it is well with you."
Tony takes a deep breath and looks up. "I'd like that," he tells his soulmate.