Chapter Text
Ravenhill, Connecticut. November 14, 2001.
That day began like any other. It was only later that Loki found it unfair—that there had been no warning, no sign to set the morning of November fourteenth apart from the thirteenth or the twelfth. It was identical. A history essay submitted two days ahead of schedule, because unfinished business was something Loki tolerated about as well as untied shoelaces—which is to say, not at all. Latin during the long break in the empty library, which smelled of old paper and someone’s forgotten sandwich. A missed lunch that he only remembered just after two.
An ordinary day. The most ordinary day.
Except that at four, he was supposed to be in Ashgrove—a small town park behind the Catholic church, featuring a pond that grew thick with slime in the summer and turned lead-grey in autumn, matching the Connecticut sky. Hardness ever drew anyone there after school. For the most part, it was just mothers with strollers in the mornings, old men with newspapers on weekends, and teenagers who needed a place to sit for hours pretending they had arrived by accident.
The bench by the water had a broken slat on the left side.
Tony had complained about it the very first time they sat there—back in September, when the trees were doing their best to stay green and you could hang around outside without any justification. “Someone ought to fix that,” he had declared with the confidence of a person who possessed an opinion on everything and an intention to do absolutely nothing. Yet he had sat precisely on the broken edge, stretching his legs out as proprietarily as if the entire park belonged to him. Loki had not been surprised. At seventeen, Tony Stark already owned that rare and rather insufferable talent for feeling like the master of any space he entered—a classroom, a street, a stranger’s living room, this bench.
Loki had taken the right side then. Then the right side again. Then, at some point, he caught himself feeling that sitting anywhere else would be bizarre. When exactly that shift occurred, he could not say. That it had already happened, he could.
He was sitting on the right side now.
The park was quiet: a woman with a dog on the far path, a fountain that the city shut off every November frozen silently in the grey twilight. The leaves had almost entirely fallen. Only a few clung to the branches with the stubbornness of things that had not yet been told it was all over—rust-colored and orange against a sky that had been threatening rain since morning but still could not quite commit to it.
He watched the path where Tony was supposed to appear, convincing himself with a certain obstinacy that he was not watching at all.
Naturally, he was. But lying to oneself was not a matter of shame—it was more of a habit. Old and worn, like a doorknob. He had discovered it in himself at ten or eleven, when he realized that observing things was far safer than participating in them. To stand slightly apart, to watch, to file everything away—who gets what, who acts why, how much anyone is paid for this emotional lease. To most, this seemed peculiar. Well, that is just how he was born, they would say. Loki did not know if he was born that way or if he had simply realized early on that things have a tendency to end, while you—you remain.
Right now, that habit offered little comfort.
He noticed his fingers had locked together over his knees—so tightly that the knuckles showed white. He relaxed them. A minute later, they clenched again without his consent. The body did not know how to lie to itself; the body merely waited.
Lately, something had shifted.
Loki did not want to use the words “grown worse.” Firstly, because he disliked rushing to conclusions—a premature judgment says more about you than the situation. And secondly, because saying “grown worse” would mean acknowledging he had a benchmark for comparison. To compare meant to depend. And to depend—well, you get the idea.
Everything had simply become different.
Last week, Tony took two hours to reply to a text. He used to respond instantly—sometimes faster than Loki could pocket his phone. The day before yesterday, they agreed to meet after class, and Tony showed up, but his mind was entirely elsewhere: he looked in the right direction, spoke at the correct moments, and yet there was this persistent sensation that he had already mentally packed up and left, just without finalizing the action. Loki had not asked what was wrong. He did not know how to inquire about such things—about matters that lacked a definite shape but still felt too distinct to ignore.
That was precisely why he suggested meeting today.
He had not used those words—he did not say “it feels like something is wrong,” he said nothing of what he actually thought. Because at sixteen, you do not yet know how to say what you mean without feeling like a complete idiot who hands someone a knife and says, “here, just be careful, it’s sharp.”
He simply wrote: “on the bench at four.”
Tony replied: “of course.” Not “I’ll be there,” not “great,” not that ridiculous emoji he used to send when he wanted to make Loki smile. A plain “of course.”
Loki re-read that message a dozen times before putting his phone away, spending the whole morning convincing himself that he was acting irrationally—even though the morning, in essence, looked exactly as it always did.
He was still telling himself this at four-forty, when the sky finally made up its mind.
The rain arrived stealthily. At first, the air just grew heavier, as if someone had turned an invisible humidifier to maximum capacity. Then the cold crept under his jacket—that part was hard to miss. Then Loki raised his eyes and realized it had been drizzling for at least a quarter of an hour. He had not brought an umbrella. The morning forecast had promised “possible showers,” which Loki had translated for himself as “wear a jacket,” not “bring an umbrella, you fool.” Looking back—and he would look back, more than once—this was that rare occasion when he had allowed himself optimism. Usually, he was smarter.
Loki wrapped his coat tighter. It did not help. The rain found every unfastened button, every gap between his hood and his neck. He thought that from the outside, he probably resembled a wet crow—hunched, pathetic, with feathers sticking out in all directions. It was a good thing no one was watching. A good thing Tony could not see.
He remained on the bench anyway.
Tony had been late before. Five minutes, fifteen minutes. Once—by half an hour, and back then Loki had managed to invent seven different scenarios of what had gone wrong before Tony materialized around the corner with two cups of coffee and an expression that suggested he truly felt guilty.
Loki was accustomed to waiting. Accustomed to the fact that Tony arrives—in the end, he always arrives.
And here, perhaps, was where one should pause and ask a question: how had a person who knew since the age of ten that wanting nothing was the only way to lose nothing managed to let Tony Stark into his life?
Loki lacked an answer. And that, perhaps, was the most alarming symptom of all.
Because his habit worked flawlessly right up until Tony appeared nearby. Around Tony, it glitched. Around Tony, he caught himself staring at the path and counting the minutes. Around Tony, he suddenly found himself inside his own life rather than at a safe distance from it. He did not know when it happened. He had not noticed it at all until it was far too late. And now he sat on a wet bench under the gathering rain, waiting for a person who might not even be thinking about the fact that he was being awaited.
And yet, and this was almost comical if it were not happening right now, Tony always came. Before—always.
Today’s hour was just longer than usual. That was all.
Loki told himself: until five. At five—another ten minutes. At ten past five—until twenty past. At five-thirty, he pulled out his phone, stared at the screen, and pocketed it again. There were no texts. Of course there were none. If there had been, he would have already re-read them twenty times. He sat and stared at the empty path. And inside, deep down beneath all the defense mechanisms, a single dull, infinite, utterly useless thought pulsed: come, come, please just come.
He did not even comprehend whether the words had been spoken—aloud or otherwise. There was a voice, but whether there was a sound remained uncertain. In any case, no one heard. The rain drowned out everything.
At five-forty, he stood up.
His legs had gone numb. Only when he attempted to take a step did he feel the needles pins-and-needles run from his soles to his knees—and instantly realized he had been sitting in a single position for over an hour. Foolish. All of it was foolish. He stood in the middle of a deserted park, drenched, freezing, and was about to walk to the house of a person who was not expecting him.
The walk to the Starks’ took about fifteen minutes if he walked briskly, and twenty-five if he took his time. Loki did not hurry. Not because he lacked the desire—he wanted to, of course he wanted to—but because his legs slowed their pace on their own as he passed through the park gates. It was as if his body recognized what his mind refused to accept: the faster you walk, the sooner you learn that everything is over. If you go slowly, you can linger a little longer in that interval where there is no answer and you can pretend it could be anything.
He walked down the deserted street. The streetlamps flickered on one by one, automatic and indifferent; they did not care who walked beneath them or whether he was shivering from the cold or from something else. In one of the houses, a light was on the ground floor—a television, someone’s silhouette, a drawn curtain. Life. An ordinary life where people have dinner, watch the news, and do not know that somewhere on the street walks a boy who has no idea if he will have the same address in his phone tomorrow.
Loki realized he was counting his paces. One hundred and three, one hundred and fourteen, one hundred and twenty-two—senseless, mechanical, just to occupy his mind. His mind did not want to think. His mind wanted to switch off and switch back on only there, at the gates, when everything became clear. But for now, it was here, between the park and the Stark residence, on an empty street with no cars, no people, just the rain and him.
The air smelled of wet asphalt and leaves—that autumn scent Loki had always loved, but which today, for some reason, brought a wave of nausea.
He did not know which he feared more—that the gates would open or that they would remain shut.
At the end of the private road, they were already visible—black, iron, with a keypad on the right. Loki had known that code for eight months.
His fingers were numb from the dampness and now obeyed him poorly. When he touched the first button, his hand gave a noticeable shudder—a tiny, irritating tremor he could not suppress no matter how hard he tried. He entered the combination.
The gates did not budge.
Loki froze, staring at the steady row of numbers as if they might change their minds. He already perceived what this meant, but he forced himself to press the buttons again—slowly, burying each pad of his finger into the keys with force, as if the issue lay in a poor contact or his own haste. As if, should he apply more physical effort, reality would bend and return to how it was.
Nothing.
The intercom was on the left. He pressed the button and waited, looking through the iron bars at the house at the end of the driveway: the upstairs windows glowed with a warm amber light, and Tony’s car stood by the porch—exactly where it always did.
The pause before the reply was brief.
“Mr. Loki.”
He had asked to be called simply Loki. Not because it was a matter of principle, but because names are simpler when they are not weighed down by formalities. The butler, however, pronounced that “Mr.” every single time with the same calm precision, as if it were a matter of punctuation rather than status. And over time, Loki had stopped correcting him.
Edwin Jarvis was around thirty-five. There was something about him that recalled old furniture—reliable, pleasant to the touch, standing in its place for so many years that the house without it would feel foreign. He had worked for the Starks since before Tony learned to tie his shoes. He knew where everything was kept, who would arrive when, whom to pour tea for, and whom to offer something stronger. In his kitchen, there was always a tin of biscuits—dark chocolate at the bottom. Loki had never mentioned that he preferred those specifically. Jarvis had simply set it on the table one day, and it had remained there ever since.
And once, when a thunderstorm caught them in the garden, he had lent Loki a jacket—“please, I insist”—and Loki had returned it washed and folded, because he did not know how else to say thank you for being treated like someone who belonged here.
Right now, there was nothing of that “belonging” in Jarvis’s voice.
“I am afraid Mr. Stark is not at home today.”
Loki did not avert his gaze from the camera lens, though he understood perfectly well that he saw only his own distorted, pale reflection in the wet glass, his dark hair plastered to his forehead. He shifted his eyes to the driveway.
“His car is here.” Surprisingly, his voice did not waver. Loki had been certain he would stutter, swallow his words, betray himself completely—but no. “I can see it right from here, Edwin. It’s wet. Which means it hasn’t been driven anywhere.”
The speaker responded only with the low hum of an empty channel and the rustle of rain striking the metal casing of the intercom. This silence stretched far too long to be an accidental connection glitch. Loki felt cold water trickling down his collar, but he did not stir.
“Edwin,” he uttered the name slowly, forcing the speaker on the other side to acknowledge his presence. “Did he personally ask you to say that?”
The new pause was different—heavy, laden with the awkwardness of an adult forced to participate in someone else’s cruelty. Loki could almost hear Jarvis in the warm hallway, choosing words that would not be a lie but would not betray his employer either.
“I am so very sorry, Mr. Loki,” finally came from the speaker. There was so much genuine sympathy in that “so very sorry” that for a split second, Loki wanted to strike the bars of the gates. Sympathy was the worst part. Because it meant it was over. That the decision had been finalized. That someone—the one sitting behind those warm windows right now—had placed this guilt into Jarvis’s hands, and Jarvis was carrying it because he had no choice.
“He is home,” Loki repeated.
Jarvis did not dispute it.
“I cannot let you in. The code has been changed, Mr. Loki.” A touch of almost fatherly anxiety suddenly broke through his tone. “But you are absolutely drenched. Please… it is freezing rain out there. Allow me to call a car for you. It will be here in five minutes and take you straight to your door. You mustn’t stay out there like that.”
He considered agreeing. He was freezing, and Jarvis was offering this from a pure heart—out of that helplessness of a person who cannot fix a massive tragedy and tries to patch at least a tiny one. There was kindness in it. Loki saw it clearly.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice dropping slightly quieter for a second. “There’s no need.”
“Mr. Loki…”
“Thank you, Edwin. Good night.”
He pressed the end button, cutting off the hiss of the speaker.
Loki remained standing at the gates, gazing at the glowing windows. From the outside, it always seemed that a light in a house meant something good—that there was comfort within, that everything was correct, that you could walk in and exhale. But now he looked at that light and knew what he had not asked to know: Tony was there. Tony had personally changed the code. Tony had dictated the words to Jarvis. Tony was probably sitting in an armchair right now, or pacing the room, or pretending to watch television—just twenty meters of gravel driveway away, and the distance between them was not measured in meters. It lay in how Tony had stopped answering texts. In how he had looked through him, not at him. In how his “of course” no longer sounded like “of course I’ll come,” but like “of course you’re annoying me.”
These things had been accumulating for weeks—in hesitations, in accidental inflections, in the way he stopped using that silly emoji. And Loki had watched the shadows deepen, refusing to call them by their names because doing so meant losing. And he did not know how to lose. Or rather, he did, but he never admitted it to himself.
He stood there until standing lost all meaning. Until hope, or what he mistook for it out of inexperience, froze out completely. Only then did he turn around and head back toward the road.
By seven, he was home. Wet jacket on the radiator. Textbook open on the desk—unread.
His room was ordered to such an extent that it seemed nothing ever occurred there. The books stood straight, alphabetically, the desk had been cleared since evening—no traces of life, no “I’ll finish writing tomorrow.” Loki did not consider this pedantry. It was just that if everything outside was tumbling upside down, there had to be at least one corner inside where order reigned. On the shelf above the window sat his only photograph: a shoreline, dark cliffs, grey waves. He had chosen it because it depicted no one. No faces, no “remember when we did that.” Just the sea in a foul mood.
Now he looked at that photo and failed to grasp why he had ever needed it in the first place.
Eight-fourteen.
The screen illuminated. Loki had time to think “now”—and the phone confirmed: yes, now.
This isn’t working out. I think we need to end this
Ten words. No period at the end—Tony always forgot them when he was worked up or trying to appear cooler than he actually was. Loki stared at the text, feeling everything inside him grind to a halt, turning into a hollow, freezing void. He expected the screen to go dark, but the phone vibrated again. And once more.
I’ve packed up your books. The Latin ones, and that hoodie you left last time. Found your headphones under the bed too
I’ll have Jarvis drop everything off in the next few days. You don’t need to come over
Loki re-read it twice. First the part about “ending this,” then about the hoodie. This was even worse than the initial sentence. While Loki had been sitting in the rain on their bench, believing it was all some mistake, Tony had been walking around his room collecting his belongings. Tossing textbooks into a box, pulling headphones from under the bed, checking if he had missed anything else, ensuring Loki would have absolutely no excuse to call or drop by.
Tony was tidying up his life. Purging it of everything that recalled Loki. And the fact that he was asking Jarvis to deliver it “in the next few days” put a finality to it heavier than any punctuation mark. You are no longer welcome here. Don't even come for your things.
Loki set the phone on the desk, screen facing up. He did not reply.
He merely sat very quietly, thinking of the Tony who had called him at two in the morning once—without a reason, as he often did. He had said then, laughing slightly as if he didn’t quite understand why it mattered himself: “When I talk to you, it’s like the world goes quiet.”
He had said it the way people say things that have unexpectedly turned out to be true. And he himself had seemed surprised by his own words.
Loki hadn’t really replied anything specific back then. Or he had murmured something insignificant—what usually occurred in such moments. It hadn't felt like something that needed to be memorized. Just another conversation, another strange night with Tony where he was slightly more candid than he should have been.
And now this exact same Tony was presumably just packing his things into a box.
As if there were no connection between these two versions.
Loki attempted to connect them in his mind—the person who says such things and the person who neatly puts away someone else’s books and hoodie. But they would not connect. They fell apart every time he tried to hold them together.
They just wouldn’t connect. That was all.
Outside, the rain kept falling just the same—the identical rain, unhurried and indifferent, dropping onto the street, the park, and the bench with the broken slat. Now both its sides were vacant. Both the broken part and the whole part—equally wet, equally dark, belonging to no one. Tony had complained about it every single time and every single time he had sat on it anyway—as if the complaint were merely a ritual before choosing to stay. As if the broken part didn’t alter the fact that this was a place worth returning to.
Now it no longer mattered. Now no one would fix it.