#And then there’s always gonna be like three people clinging to Lorna and to them I say shine on you crazy diamonds

[allieinarden]

The generation that grows up with Over the Garden Wall will never understand how funny it was watching like 70% of the base flip from Team Beatrice to Team Sara when they watched it a second time.

[terresdebrumestories]

Chapter 12/24: Out

✗ TECHNICAL DETAILS

FANDOM: Marvel’s MCU SERIES: SEADLA Verse, version 2.0 RATING: Mature WORDCOUNT: 4 626 PAIRING(S): - CHARACTER(S): Tony Stark, Nick Fury, Clint Barton. GENRE: Jail time sucks. TRIGGER WARNING(S): This chapter contains brief and non graphic suicidal thoughts (it’s really small, but it’s there) as well as iffy matters of consent regarding telepathy that aren’t really discussed. (Check the AO3 listing for a glimpse of what’s to come). SUMMARY: In which there is a rescue team.

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

SEADLA ON TUMBLR: [Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6] [Chapter 7] [Chapter 8] [Chapter 9] [Chapter 10] [Chapter 11]

Tony stares into the abrupt darkness with his heart hammering against his ribs until a green and gold flame, no bigger than a thumb, whispers to life. The light flickers over Loki’s face, makes his features handsome, childish and fearsome in turn, a thousand faces birthed and killed by a thousand tricks of lights.

It makes Tony’s head swim.

Loki, apparently unbothered, sends the flame hovering a little above his head and lights another one, then another and another, until several dozens of small fires float in the air around them, casting their light over Loki and deepening the pitch blackness around him.

“You look like the Boogeyman,” Tony blurts out through the wild rhythm of his breathing, twisting his fingers into his sheets, just to make sure the bed is still there.

The whole scene looks and feels a little like the Big Bang did, except there’s neither scientific wonder nor any sense of emotional closeness to keep Tony calm, and sweat starts prickling at his brow long before Loki shrugs and deadpans:

“Well I did do a bit of interim for him.”

Tony gapes, unable to tell whether this is supposed to be a joke or not, until his eyes catch on to a slightly-less-dark rectangle in the blackness behind Loki. He twists around a little, careful to keep his movements limited to the approximate area of the bed, until he catches sight of something moving in the rectangle, like black heavy fog trying to hide paler silhouettes. Tony thinks they look like trees, but they’re too pale to be real.

“Where are we?” He asks at last, struggling to tear his attention off the door and onto Loki.

“I suppose you could say we’re technically both in you cell. This is your mind. Well, a possible manifestation of it, at least.”

“A physical manifestation of—wait, I’m dreaming?”

“In technical terms,” Loki corrects with impossibly precise enunciation, “you are being Visited.”

“Oh right,” Tony retorts, switching from surprise to sarcasm almost before he has time to decide on it, “and you couldn’t ‘visit me’ before because…?”

“You didn’t pick up the knife.”

Tony’s face flushes red in less time than it takes to blink. What does the fucking knife even have to do with anything? And what the fuck does Loki mean, Tony didn’t pick it up? He spent literal days cutting into his arm with that stupid fucking thing, and Loki has the gall to blame him for not picking it up?

Worse, still! The bastard looks sad! Hurt, even! Like he’s the one who suffered instead of Tony! Oh, what a fucking joke, what a bastard—a week! A full week, at least, in custody, all but tortured into drinking, not knowing when he’d come out and that’s what—oh, what a fucking moron Tony was.

“Oh, forgive me your highness,” he hisses, trying not to choke on his fury, “I guess I’m not smart enough for princely mind games, after all!”

“That’s not what I said,” Loki replies in a neutral tone, one eyebrow raising with so much elegance Tony wants to punch it open, “I’m simply saying—”

“You’re saying bull, is what you’re doing. I picked your damn knife up! For nothing! I’ve been calling you for help—”

“I’m actually fairly certain you were punishing yourself,” Loki replies, drawing his head back like an offended bird.”

“You told me there was a spell in it—that you’d know if I tried to use it on myself—why d’you think I went back to cutting? The aesthetics?”

“Contrary to what you seem to believe, I didn’t actually get inside your head about a minute ago. I knew you were cutting, not why.”

“Oh, right, because that makes everything so much better!”

Tony is all but kneeling on the bed by now, body tense and boiling with the urge to start throwing punches. He’s not even picky about where: face, chest, legs, anywhere it’ll take so long as it gets Loki begging for forgiveness and the ugly mess of Tony’s memories out of his brain forever.

Loki doesn’t seem to care, if he even notices at all.

“It doesn’t,” he says with a slight shrug, “you had to call for me. I planted the knife as because I knew you were too stubborn to—”

“What? Too stubborn to die like you planned?”

Technically, there’s no wall to stop him here, no ground to slam into, which is probably the only reason why flying off and landing in an undignified heap doesn’t physically hurt. The gesture still reels him though, pulls his thoughts into a sharp sideway twist.

Fuck, he wishes it’d hurt though. Wishes it’d bleed like a proper wound so he could just stitch it up and be done with it instead of having to watch himself fester down into nothing. It’d be a bitch to go through but it’d be clean. Straightforward.

Simple.

God, he misses simple.

But it doesn’t hurt.

Loki’s face though, that gets something out of Tony, because he looks hurt. He looks like he’s hurt and betrayed, like Tony should commiserate with the poor widdle god of trickery and lies regret at sending a so-called friend flying. Like Tony should be craddling his cheek and say ‘it’s alright, you’re not really an asshole for trying to throw me into concrete, or whatever you thought would stop me mid-flight’.

Fuck that game. Tony’s most definitely not playing it.

“If I’d meant for you to die,” Loki hisses after a long, shivering pause, “All I had to do was leave you here. I could have killed you a dozen times as Lorna. Better still, I could have ignored your letter and let you do the bloody job for me, you pathetic coward!”

The lights around them burn brighter with each word, swelling with Loki’s venom and turning his hair from black to a bright copper, draws lines of runes onto his face. Tony watches the change proceed with sick fascination, blood humming in his veins as Loki’s ordinary black leather shifts into thick winter gear, his chin colors with a thick copper beard where the runes come and go like words on the wind.

It fills something primal in Tony, like he’s witnessing something he shouldn’t have access to, and there’s the beginning of a punch building up in his fist when Loki strides up to him, seizes him by the collar and hisses into his face:

“You’re a lucky coward, though, I do not intend to let you die. Be ready for an escape tomorrow. You will know when the time comes.”

Tony does punch then, as hard and fast as he can manage, satisfaction blooming into his chest when he hears Loki’s nose crack and spots blood dripping onto the elegant mustache. Fuck him. Fuck him and his mysticism, his arrogance, his every fucking thing! If he wants to think he’s above everyone, fine! But if he thinks Tony’s gonna lie down and take it in silence, he’s got another fucking thing coming.

His thing with Lorna might have worked wonder, but Tony is sure as hell not about to take another one of his lies, fuck him very much.

“Lorna was a lie, that much is true,” Loki says while he dabs elegant fingers under his nose, “but it wasn’t mine.”

He’s out of the door before Tony can try to punch him again.

{ooo}

Tony wakes up to a major kink in his neck and the taste of a hangover gone stale on his tongue. He lies on the bed like a a stringless puppet, crusty-eyed and sweaty, desperatly trying to ignore the headache forming behind his eyeballs. At the edge of his memory, shouting and pain mix with green flames in the dark, and it’s all he can do to push them back in favor of Loki’s words.

Be ready for an escape tomorrow. You’ll know the moment when it comes.

Of course he had to be a fucking cryptic with that, too. What an asshole.

Tony still hopes, though. He thinks about the not-quite-dream all day long as he lies down, unable not to wish Loki said the truth. Unable not to feel like time has turned into especially thick syrup as he keeps his hands under the pillow, clutching Loki’s open knife just in case.

Somewhere around what’s probably the beginning of the afternoon, Clint comes back with more food. He doesn’t make a show of roughing tony up this time, which is definitely progress, but he does mouth ‘be ready’ when he leaves the tray. If nothing else, it probably means Clint is on Tonys side.

In times like these, it’s a thought worth clinging to.

{ooo}

As far as Tony can tell, it’s about four when the guards start screaming. Muffled shouts and the slap of flesh on flesh fill the air for a hot second, and then there’s a pregnant silence and the hiss of Tony’s cell door sliding open. Tony, who at this point is little more than a random collection of ill-kept hair and bloodshot eyes in hospital pajamas, watches a skinny silhouette in red and blue spandex stride into the room with confident step, pause into a full-bodied show of surprise, and exclaims:

“Dude, you look like crap!”

The boy sounds something like seventeen, maybe eighteen. Barely college age, at any rate. It doesn’t stop Tony from saying he’s been worse.

It’s both true and false. Afghanistan hurt more, physically speaking. He doesn’t remember feeling that empty while he was there, though, too busy trying to figure out how to get Yinsen and himself out to feel sorry about his life.

He wouldn’t go back there just to stop being depressed though, thank you very much.

“How did you know where to find me?” He asks, following the kid out into empty corridors with Loki’s swiss knife in hand, “Clint managed to get blueprint out?”

“Yeah, and then a little spider talked to me in a dream.”

A pause, and then:

“I mean, it was really more like the biggest tarantula the world has ever seen, but it’s not as funny an image.”

Tony’s too busy trying to walk in a straight line to care much, either way, but whatever rocks the kid’s world, really. How or why on Earth Anansi got involved, he has no idea. Same goes for Spiderman, actually, but neither of these questions feel pressing enough to distract him from the very real, very urgent need to get away from this place.

So he runs.

They reach a doorway that probably leads outside about fifteen minutes into Tony’s escape, four S.H.I.E.L.D agents standing in their way with old Nazi weapons at the ready, and Tony’s heart sinks.

No way he’ll get past them.

“Okay,” Spiderman says, twisting his head until the bones in his neck crack, “no offense but I think we’ll be better off if I handle that one on my own. You’re in no shape to fight, pop.”

Tony would quip back and say the kid is being a little generous about his suit-less abilities, but he doesn’t have the time. He’s barely started opening his mouth, and one guard is down already, dragged to the ground with a clever use of silky—and sticky—rope. Spiderman runs toward the next one, yells ‘crotch!’ and hit the man with exactly that part of his anatomy, catching one of the two women in the jaw with his foot as he twists the male guard around.

The second woman manages to get a grip on him and twist his arm behind his back, but before Tony gets to helping him, he’s jumped and twisted in such a way that he broke the woman’s nose with his knee and wriggled free of her headlock.

“Phew,” he says, voice rough from the chokehold, “thank heaven for super flexibility, right?”

Tony doesn’t have time to answer before someone grabs his arm and forces him to start running. He barely realizes it’s Clint in time to avoid punching at him—and then it stops to matter, because he’s finally outside.

He was never a very outdoorsy person before but hell, he’s ready to get into full time camping right now, relishing the wind on his face more than he could have thought possible, so happy to be let out of that damned cave of a jail cell that he barely manages to hold himself upright.

“Stark!” Clint yells in his ear with the tone of someone who’s been trying to get his attention for a bit, “they’re trying to torture Banner into hulking, we gotta move out fast!”

“He’s not gonna do it!” Tony protests even as he picks up his pace to keep up with Clint, “Bruce—”

“I’m not wondering if he wants to hold it in,” Clint replies, guiding Tony away from where a gaggle of agents are fighting a man on a horse car, “I’m wondering if he’ll be able to! He’s never had to resist torture before, we don’t know how it’ll affect him!”

Tony, still half-drunk from sudden freedom, wishes he could protest. Bruce saved his life multiple times already—sometimes as Hulk, even!—but Clint as a point. This is brand new territory, and they’re probably better off getting to safety before they start pondering the nature of Bruce’s doppelganger and how it’s gonna react to pain.

Around them, the air screams with explosions and too many voices, multiple fights breaking on the ground and across the sky as Tony lets Clint and Spiderman drag him out into what may or may not be the desert of New Mexico. He thinks he makes out a voice that sounds like thunder in the chaos but, really, there’s no way to be entirely sure.

“We gotta come back for Bruce,” he manages between two steps, dodging Clint’s elbow when he shoots at an agent.

“We gotta get you to safety,” Clint says, eyes roaming the landscape around them for something, “if Banner’s smart he’ll let the other guy come out and get him out of Fury’s hands.”

“But he’s—”

“I don’t see out back up!” Spiderman yells, “Where’s she?”

“Hell if I know! You seen a cat recently?”

Tony stumbles on the uneven ground, legs of cotton and shot vision combining to mess up with his balance, but he’s still got enough brain to despair at Clint’s words. A cat? they’re hanging their survival on a damn cat? God, they’re so lost—he’s just gonna die here and get this kid who asked for nothing down with him and then—

“Oh fuck!”

Tony twists on himself to follow Clint’s line of sight, trusting the guy to take them through a manageable path...and immediately regrets his decision.

Behind them, mounted onto some kind of vaguely horse-like mechanical monstrosity, the scarred man who visited Tony is flinging people out of his way like they’re annoying flies and not full grown adults. He’s yelling something Tony doesn’t understand but, more importantly, he’s catching up to them. Fast.

“Damn it all!” Clint shouts, “Bastet! Where the fuck are you!”

There’s a flash of grayish-pink flesh by Tony’s feet, a shape running toward the artificial horse as the scarred man prepares to shoot, and then he’s flung to the ground under the weight of a hairless lion with a snarl of hatred that shakes the air around Tony.

“The portal’s behind the rock,” the lion—lioness, judging by the voice—yells over the scarred man’s struggling body, “go!”

Tony is scrambling to turn around before Spiderman even manages to grab him—there’s a sharp pain in his guts as he runs, the exhaustion finally settling in, but he doesn’t let it stop him and keep going, passing a giant boulder at breakneck speed.

He doesn’t notice the hole until he’s already falling.

{ooo}

“Finally,” a deep, cheerful voice exclaims when Tony climbs back to consciousness, “I was beginning to think you’d never wake up!”

Trying to ignore the voice, Tony keeps his eyes closed and tries to list his injuries—there should be some, considering the day he’s had...whenever he got knocked out.

He doesn’t find anything.

Nothing hurts.

There’s no fire in his veins, no throbbing in his head, no itching and pulling around the reactor, no dull ache where he thought he’d pulled a muscle running, nothing at all.

He’s not sure what it says about him that the absence of pain is what makes him open his eyes and panic.

“Alright, alright, try to calm down,” the voice says when Tony bolts upright, “it took a while to patch you up, and probably even longer to negotiate your return with Hades, let’s not go and ruin all that good work.”

Tony turns, and stares at the woman he finds there. She’s about as tall as Thor, though her shoulders and hips are slightly narrower. Long, bleached-blond hair tumbles into a thick braid over her right shoulder, and when she walks closer to examine Tony it’s easy to spot the freckles on her golden cheeks.

“What the hell?” Tony exclaims when she inspects his wrists and there’s no trace of scarring there, “Where the fuck am I?”

“The exact answer is a little complicated,” the woman says with an apologetic smile, “so for the sake of simplicity we’ll just say it’s my infirmary, for now.”

“Right. And how long have I been in ‘your infirmary’?” Tony asks with his heart in his throat.

“A little under three days. You were awake for some of it, actually, but you kept trying to tear your glowing gadget out and re-open your wrists, so I sedated you. You should be able to get out tomorrow, depending on your state of mind...i the meantime, you can visit Anansi in the next room but going further would be a bad idea.”

Tony blinks, and takes his first proper look around the room.

White stone walls, too smooth to be natural but not enough to be a modern building, curve in as if to cover whatever is inside them. Blue light, rippling over the room like it had to get through water, mixing with the light of several candles to paint the atmosphere a golden kind of turquoise. It’s unusual and somewhere halfway between magical and spooky, but it’s also oddly soothing.

Secure, more than stifling. It’s a nice change of pace.

As for the furnitures, aside from the way they curve in to accommodate the walls, they look fairly infirmary-like. A spartan bedside table for each of the three narrow cots, a roll up tray with instruments waiting to be used, and a basket filled with whatever it is an infirmary needs to throw away. To the left, a closed door. To the right, a door left ajar, the low hum of conversation filtering through it—probably Anansi’s room, then. Tony should probably go and visit.

He doesn’t have it in him to do it, though.

He didn’t expect to wake up. didn’t even really want to, either. What does he have to come back to, these days? An empty house without Jarvis? A bunch of broken dreams? More problems than he can even begin to count? And that’s taking Loki out of the equation. Loki who, unless he’s even more of a jerk than he already showed, might come walking though that door at any moment.

Wonderful.

Honestly, tony wishes he could stop thinking about him. He’s going to have to, at some point, whether he likes it or not. Might even be a good idea to do so, in the long run. Right now though, nothing in his body hurts—not even the reactor—and his mind is just numb enough to keep him from a fall in complete despair.

It’s not ideal, but compared to the past few days it’s progress, and Tony is not going to ruin it with undue concern, thank you very much.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about Anansi’s health?”

It take tremendous effort to look at the woman again. Here eyes, almond shaped with a distinct fold at the corners, are so dark they’re almost black, but they’re warm too, and comforting. Well, there’s also a hint of reproach in there, but Tony doesn’t really have the energy to care about that.

“I assume he’ll be alright. He’s a God.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t try and be a proper friend to him. Or, you know, a polite person.”

Tony tries to snort, but it comes our more like a huff of breath. Either way, it’s not the answer the woman was angling fro, because she crosses her arms over her chest with a more obviously disapproving stare. She’s wearing an apron over a purple wool tunic, more prepared for viking ships than the imperial court of China, but what does Tony know about mythology, after all? Just ‘cause nobody talks about godly emigration doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

“Just because you’re out of it doesn’t mean you get to be an ass, Tony Stark.”

“And just ‘cause you know my name doesn’t mean you get to use it like you’re my mom,” Tony replies without much heat, “I don’t even know who you are.”

“Only because you didn’t ask.”

The woman’s voice deepens with every sentence, like her annoyance at Tony can be measured in how many octaves she can drop. She still reaches for a bowl and holds it out to Tony, with a firm ‘eat something’ when he takes it in hand.

It’s something like gruel, bland-looking on the whole, though when Tony tries it he finds nuts, honey and dried fruits as well. He doesn’t have the capacity to enjoy it in full, that’s true, but at least it tastes of something.

There are worse thing to unenthusiastically munch on.

“My name’s Sigyn, by the way.”

The name sounds vaguely familiar, but Tony doesn’t quite get why until Sigyn adds:

“You might know me as Loki’s wife.”