Title: we're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart
Author: open_summer/emptysummer
Pairing. Gennish. Hints of Tony/Pepper
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: PTSD
Spoilers: Everything in Avengers, Iron Man
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not even the title. That's from a Richard Siken poem.
Summary: "You have heart." Loki said to Clint. As if it mattered. Tony wonders what that says about him.
Notes: Just a little thing to drain my brain for a while. Unbetaed so all mistakes are mine.

Tony does his homework. Pepper had to offer a bribe to get him to do it, just like college, but he did it. The readings, the dossiers, the video of Loki taking apart a secret SHIELD base like nothing could harm him.

Tony wishes he felt like that.

Ever.

oOo

The cameras are Stark made, like most things these days, so he runs them again and again from every angle in the hopes of finding something. Anything, they can use.

"You have heart." Loki says to Barton, blown up to life size on the screen. As if it matters. As if there is a secret there. Feeling the thrum of the arc reactor through his chest, Tony wonders what Loki would say about him.

He who cut his heart out in a cave and built a new one with his hands.

In a cave, in the cave, because Tony will only ever allow there to be one, Tony would wake panicked because he couldn't feel the beat of his heart over the ever present thrum of his new heart. Yinsen would be there hands on his chest, gentle voice and steady hands. A good doctor needs those.

Don't waste your life, he said, then died.

oOo

What do you mean? Tony's fine.

He's been fine since he was six and burning his hands on tools designed for someone much older then him, because he needed his father to look at him. Just this once.

He just gets better.

oOo

He thought maybe Pepper would see right through him. She does that sometimes, looks at him and sees him. Why do you think she's managed to stick around long enough to take control of his company?

It's not because he's in love with her.

She doesn't look, because he sits up there, cracking jokes, and munching on a hamburger, like he hasn't been tortured in a cave for the past three months.

Tony can be defined by his armor, and it is rarely painted red and gold.

oOo

That cave was supposed to be his tomb.

Sometimes he thinks it is.

He walked away, with a metal heart, his old heart in ashes on the floor.

oOo

Loki has fever-bright eyes. Tony looks at him and recognizes something of himself.

oOo

Banner, who is quickly becoming Bruce, talks about exposure. Like a nerve he says. Tony resists the urge to tap his chest where the glow of his heart is visible through his t-shirt, and ask what Bruce thinks this is.

oOo

On the helicarrier, Steve tells him, that the only thing he fights for is himself, that he's just a man in a metal suit.

Tony, ever the crowd pleaser, smiles wide and bright and argues like Steve wants him to.

He does not tell possibly the only genuinely good man he has ever met of a cave where his blood soaked into the sand, or of a man who died to save him.

He does not say I would have died for a doctor.

oOo

The scepter clinks against his heart. And Loki's eyes widen as he says "This usually works."

The joke is so obvious that he has to bite it back.

For the first time in his life Tony does not do what his audience expects him to.

Instead he smiles, not the false shit eating grin he wears for every occasion. This smile is jagged edges, and shards of glass, and the dark of the cave. "They killed my heart. So I built myself a stronger one."

Loki laughs. It isn't the reaction Tony expected.

"In the correct era you would have been one of mine." He says.

Back when the Asgardians were gods. Tony gets that. He was a god once. But the times changed and so did he, the direct result of a cave, and his worshipers fell away and now he's something else entirely. An idea, or an ideal if he's flattering himself.

Loki the Liesmith, and lies are unlikely to ever go out of fashion so he has nothing to fear.

Redemption however, is more questionable.

He still gets tossed out the window a moment later as Loki realizes the ploy for what is.

oOo

This, in the great void of space directing a nuke, is him, not wasting his life.

oOo