Chapter Text
Tony wakes up, the sort of split-second waking up that leaves him disoriented as hell, with his spine feeling like it's practically on fire.
At first, he thinks the latest idiot supervillain of the week is attacking his home—but a moment later he discards that thought, because there's no accompanying chaos to go with his sudden waking. Usually attacks tend to come with the sound of breaking glass and the ground shaking, at the very least, and probably some smoke and heat to indicate a fire going on somewhere; right now, there's none of that. There's nothing, actually. Nada, zilch, not even the sound of someone sneaking around. There's just Tony's quick breathing, and the sound of the ocean breaking against rocks.
“Jarvis?” Tony asks, already swinging his legs out of bed. One of his hands goes, instinctively, to the small of his back, covering the four letters—he hisses at the touch. “Jesus, that hurts,” he says, and stands up. If there's going to be an emergency, better it happen while Tony's fully dressed and awake. He's learned that lesson the hard way.
“Sir?” Jarvis asks, and if Tony isn't mistaken—which, he's Tony Stark, he's never mistaken—there's a note of concern under the professionalism.
“Are your sensors picking up anything abnormal?” Tony asks. “You know, somebody attacking us, earthquake swallowing California, this week's rendition of the apocalypse? Anything?”
“No, sir,” Jarvis responds, “I am detecting nothing out of the ordinary.” Which—shit. Tony knows something is wrong, the sort of knowing that comes from gut knowledge rather than anything his brain is coming up with. He was sort of hoping Jarvis could validate that feeling and back it up with fact. If Jarvis can't—
“Sir,” Jarvis says, derailing Tony's train of thought, “I apologize if this is unwelcome, but might I ask whether you've injured your spine?”
Tony hadn't noticed, until that moment, that he was still clutching at his back like it might break without the support of his fingers. Actually, he hadn't noticed much of anything about it, save that it hurt like hell. But now—well, now Tony takes the time to think about what that means, that those four little letters on his back no longer feel so much like magnets as little pinpricks of flame in his skin.
For the first time in Tony's life, all four letters are pulling in the exact same direction, and it hurts.
Tony sits back down on his bed. “Shit,” he says, because there's every possibility that something he's been waiting for his whole life is about to happen, and what the hell else is he supposed to say to that?
Then, a moment later, the fire fades and the pull stops, and the sudden nothingness in the place of pain is actually worse than the pain itself.
“Shit,” Tony says again, and drops his head into his hands and just sits still, breathing.
…
“Okay, Jarvis,” Tony says, “let's run that through again.”
Come on, this is Tony Stark. Yes, alright, last night sucked, and Tony is going to have words with his soulmate whenever this gets worked out, because, seriously? The appearing-then-disappearing act that went on there was definitely not appreciated.
That said, sitting around feeling sad about it is something other people do. Tony is not other people. Tony won't just let this pass him by unnoticed—he's going to make the most out of this. Now, at least, he's pretty definitively sure that his soulmate exists; and, if the guy won't come to him, Tony will make a way himself. It's what he does.
“Yes, sir,” Jarvis says. “At precisely 1:07 a.m., pacific time, last night, there were one hundred and fifty-three notable events occurring worldwide. Shall I narrow the specifications?”
“Yeah,” Tony says, trying to get his brain to spark off an idea of how to go about this. God, Tony's tired—last night was the first time he even tried sleeping in three days, and, well, it wasn't exactly restful. Coffee pretty much stops cutting it after seventy-two hours mostly sleepless. One day Tony will build himself a caffeine IV drip and be a happier human being for it. “We ran this search once based on parameters of human activity, and unless my soulmate was suddenly lured into revealing himself by a conference on the latest developments in prosthetic biofeedback mechanisms—,” which, admittedly, this is Tony's soulmate they're talking about, so that is a possibility, if a slim one “—we should probably start looking at physical phenomena.” Because why the hell not, right?
“Narrowing search parameters,” Jarvis says, and for a minute there's silence. Tony rolls the stress ball he's been toying with around in his palm, fingers somewhat automatically checking the tensile strength of the ball. At least breaking stress balls feels like doing something. “Sir,” Jarvis says, finally, “my search has yielded twenty-two reports of seismic activity throughout the twelve-hour period of last night, ranging from a 2.0 on the MMS scale to a 3.5. Only one of these reports suggests seismic activity at precisely 1:07 a.m., and the epicenter of this activity was reported to lie along the Denali Fault in Alaska.”
“Right,” Tony says, “so I guess that rules out earthquakes, surprise surprise. Look, Jarvis, let's work on the assumption that normal events like low-grade seismic activity and tidal swells are out of the picture. Narrow your search parameters to include solely atypical events.” Right now Tony is willing to go out on whatever limb he needs to—and, what the hell, if his whole life has been something out of a bad romance book, why can't his solution wander into science fiction?
“One moment,” Jarvis says, and then, not three seconds later, “Sir. An unusual atmospheric phenomena was reported to have occurred in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, at approximately 2:10 a.m. mountain time.” Or, in other words, exactly three minutes after Tony woke up in pain in Malibu—and that's assuming the report's time is accurate, and not just rounded up to the nearest ten minute interval. It's possible that whatever that event was, it happened exactly as Tony woke. Which, admittedly, gives Tony nothing conclusive to work with, but still. “No explanation has been provided to adequately explain this phenomena to date, but the local who witnessed it described the event as 'a tornado of light.' Though it may be of worth, sir, to note that the local in question also maintains a blog called 'Evidence of Encounters with the Third Kind,' and said that he believed an alien descended from the sky in the tornado.”
Tony snorts. Right, so, the odds the guy is a whackjob are kind of high. Still, there's some little fragment of an idea pinging in the back of Tony's head, a memory of some kind—
The memory slips into place, and Tony snaps his fingers. “Wasn't what's-her-name, you know, the brunette astrophysicist with the fascination for Einstein-Rosen bridges who I met at that StarkTech geekfest—”
“Doctor Jane Foster, sir?” Jarvis supplies, helpful as always.
“That's the one,” Tony says. “I've got some memory of her mentioning interest in some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, something to do with auroras. And wasn't her lab based out of New Mexico?” Photographic memory: Tony Stark's got one, in other news. Sometimes, it actually comes in handy, instead of just randomly spitting out the name of King Arthur's nephew into Tony's thought-stream while he's in the shower or something equally meaningless.
“Yes, sir. Jane Foster is currently the tenant of a building in none other than Puente Antiguo, New Mexico.”
Tony grins. Finally, he might be getting somewhere. Albeit with a crazy theory and little to no evidence, but Tony will take that for now and build on it later. “Alright. I think I'm going to shoot an email to Dr. Jane Foster, in that case. Never too late to catch up with acquaintances.”
…
Four days later, that crackpot theory is still the best one Tony has—and, worse, Dr. Foster hasn't gotten back to him yet. Tony isn't very good at waiting for things, and he's especially terrible at waiting for answers. Logically, this shouldn't be that hard; Tony's waited his whole life for this particular set of answers, it would stand to reason a week would feel like nothing. But...it doesn't. It just isn't easy, even if it should be.
Finally, Tony gives up on waiting. It's the work of maybe five minutes to have Jarvis track down Dr. Foster's cell phone number, and Tony puts a call through to that number as soon as Jarvis has it. He leans back in his chair in the lab, listening to the call ring through the lab's speakers, and tries to figure out exactly how he's supposed to start this conversation.
When she finally does pick up, on the fourth ring, Tony just opens his mouth and talks, fuck analyzing the best options. “Hello, Dr. Foster? This is Tony Stark—”
What Tony doesn't expect is to be suddenly cut off by her voice saying, tone relieved, “Oh thank God.” Which, okay, Tony's had people faint in reaction to seeing him before, but thanking their personal deities just because he introduced himself on the phone? That's a new one to Tony. “I'm aware that this is going to sound crazy, Mr. Stark, but I need your help.”
“Call me Tony,” Tony says, on reflex, and then his brain actually catches up with his mouth. “Also. Um. What?”
“I was going to call you four days ago, when he first showed up,” Dr. Foster says, and who is the he in this story, exactly? Tony's sticking with his very intelligent first thought on the subject: What? “Except that his story seemed so far-fetched, and I wasn't sure you'd want to hear about a strange man whose brother has the same name as your soulmate, when that man was also claiming to be a Norse god, you know? So I put off calling you until I could get some facts to back me up—except now government agents have taken all my research and Thor's in their custody and I need your help.”
Tony tries to turn that garble into anything meaningful, and comes up blank. “Can you maybe take that again from the top, at half the speed?” he asks, because he's fairly certain this woman just claimed to know something about his soulmate, in between the crazy talk.
Dr. Foster laughs, nervously. “I'm sorry, I kind of babble when I'm stressed. Okay. Um. Four days ago, I was out observing an atmospheric event, and I hit a man with my car...”
And so the story comes out. Thor, the man who took Foster's car's bumper to the stomach, claims to be a Norse god—and Foster is far from believing him, but she claims that the atmospheric event was actually an Einstein-Rosen bridge, and so Thor is the only person on Earth to have experienced what being inside a wormhole is really like. Throw in SHIELD's very own Agent Coulson confiscating everything in her lab—including, her assistant steals the phone to add, her I-pod—and the fact that Thor broke into a temporary SHIELD facility to get back something he claims is his, and is now in SHIELD custody, and it's just a regular mess all around.
Normally, Tony is the one who causes messes, not the one who fixes them—or, well, causes them and then fixes them in ingenious ways, but that's hardly the point. What Tony means is that, usually? Tony goes out of his way not to take on other people's trouble. He's not a team player, okay, and his sainthood will never be coming in the mail. Tony just doesn't interfere, so long as he isn't directly involved in the mess.
One small problem, though: Thor told Foster that his brother's name was Loki. L-o-k-i. Four little letters.
And yes, Thor is likely a crazy person—and, yes, if Tony's willing to believe this story he also has to buy wormholes through space and Norse gods, and Tony is absolutely never going to be the sort of person who'll just accept those things on faith.
And yet, this is still the only lead Tony has. Foster insists her Einstein-Rosen bridge opened at exactly 2:07 a.m. when Tony asks, and he doesn't even tell her why he's asking, gives no hint that that's the time he's looking for. She gives it anyway.
Tony hears her story out, and, maybe, if Tony was someone else, he would be able to say no. What he actually says is, “Hey, take a deep breath and stop panicking. I've got this covered. All you have to do now is sit back and enjoy the show.” Then he hangs up, drops his head into his hands, and breathes deeply. He's had to do far too much of that lately.
“Sir,” Jarvis asks, after a few moments of silence, “should I take that conversation to mean that I should arrange for your jet to make a trip to New Mexico?”
Tony lifts his head up and says, “I don't even like New Mexico.” As complaints go, that's a petty one, but Tony needs to say something other than 'what exactly am I getting myself into this time?' and complaints about New Mexico will do. Jarvis doesn't respond to that, and Tony blows out a breath and waves his hand through the air. “Yeah, Jarvis, set up the flight.”
Tony Stark's life, ladies and gentlemen. Sometimes it is a strange and terrifying place.