Chapter Text
If he were honest, Tony was more than a little wary of this trip.
He always tried to be appropriately cautious and responsible going into any unknown situation now that he was at the head of an entire planet, of course. Sometimes he couldn’t believe how responsible he’d become.
Well, it wasn’t as though the change had happened overnight. Rhodey told him that’s how it should be, that his old self would have made a terrible king—he absolutely agreed—but he’d slowly changed into someone who could handle that job, and it had started before they’d left Earth.
Sometimes he thought, with a mix of bitterness and odd satisfaction, that the hell he’d gone through with the Avengers was good for him. It made him into a stronger person, able to deal with the kinds of difficulties he’d face in this sort of leadership position. It certainly taught him to be able to hold his tongue and tamp down the sarcasm around assholes that he secretly hated but had to pretend to respect. A habit he’d almost have felt guilty for as King, except that Amilie had confessed that she did the same thing all the time.
He’d never thought of himself as cowardly; in the old days, he was brave to the point of reckless, usually throwing himself into danger without a second thought. Now, he was more cautious, but still willing to face difficult situations and explore new, potentially dangerous territory.
Still, this mission was making him feel… something not too great. He’d call it nerves, but it was more like a bad feeling in his gut, the kind that didn’t make sense but should usually be trusted. He could hardly call it off, however, tell Amilie that he’d abandoned this important opportunity, because of a gut feeling.
Maybe it was the prospect of being the head of these negotiations. Not that he hadn’t made plenty of business deals in his past, and been damn good at it, and he’d had the entirety of his company to worry about at the time. That wasn’t too different from having a planet depending on him.
Still, so far most of his important actions and deals as King had been made with the Queen present and working with him. As she’d been elected several years before him, she both took the lead in most actions and was generally viewed as the first in charge, at least until he was well-established enough in his role to earn his title.
But they couldn’t both be present for everything, particularly when it was off-planet. Amilie was busy with the tail end of a project she’d been overseeing for the last two months, and so when the Dekunt reached out and offered to meet, it fell to Tony to make the trip.
He wasn’t traveling alone, of course. It might be construed as rude to not have representatives of both leaders of the planet at this important first meeting, and so one of Amilie’s advisors, skilled in trade and negotiation, accompanied Tony in her stead. An advisor with some basic knowledge of the planet they were traveling to, as well as the keen skills to handle any trouble they might encounter.
Tony didn’t have a problem with Loki, really. He’d long since accepted their explanation of his… circumstances of duress during the New York invasion. Tony himself had gotten a new start on Tolsar and tried his best to give both Thor and Loki the same chance when the Asgardians showed up. Besides, their home had been destroyed and more than half of their people slaughtered. According to Thor—and all the rest of them—Loki had come back to help them even when he had no real obligation to them. That seemed pretty significant to Tony. He sure as hell understood constantly feeling like you were subverting negative expectations, trying to make up for past mistakes, ones that had cost people their lives.
But that didn’t mean it wasn’t a little awkward to be traveling alone with Loki. Most of their interactions since the Asgardians’ arrival on Tolsar had had the buffer of others between them, usually Amilie or Thor. And while Tony could joke and snark with Loki in relative privacy back on Tolsar, he wasn’t quite sure how they would fit into their roles here as King and Advisor to the Queen.
He couldn’t deny that sometimes he felt a little ridiculous being the leader of two near-immortal beings. Thor and Loki both seemed to have great respect for Tolsar and therefore for Tony’s earned position, but it didn’t stop Tony from sometimes feeling like they were just humoring him. They were both ages older than him, with powers he couldn’t come close to matching. Even with his ability to resonate with Amilie and share a tiny portion of her abilities, he knew both Loki and Thor could wipe the floor with him if they really wanted to when it came to magic and superhuman abilities.
Thor, of course, was generally busy with his own people. Having taken over the warriors of Asgard as a military force contracted to Tolsar, he essentially had free reign over most of them—appropriate, since he was eventually going to take his place as their own King when they found and settled a new planet—only reporting to and dealing with Amilie and Tony occasionally. Their interactions were amicable, but mostly businesslike. Thor had been present during Tony’s dramatic exit from Earth and seemed to understand Tony’s desire not to mention the Avengers or much of their shared history. On Tolsar, Thor stuck to current issues and was too busy dealing with his warriors to reminisce about terrible times past, anyway.
Loki, on the other hand, had refused to join the army of Asgardians, and instead integrated into regular Tolsaran society. Some of the other non-warrior Asgardians had wanted him to lead them, Tony knew, but Loki had declined. He confessed to Tony and Amilie once, in a rare and somewhat surprising moment of vulnerability, that he didn’t quite feel that the others trusted him yet, and sometimes still struggled with feeling like an outsider among his people. While he’d come back to fight for them and now considered himself Asgardian once again, he still wanted a bit of distance.
Tony thought it was admirable that he was willing to maintain ties with them, moreso the more he learned about Loki’s upbringing and childhood in general. Loki becoming an advisor to Amilie, in large part because of his skill with and knowledge of magic—for which he was bullied and ostracized for much of his life on Asgard—seemed to Tony to be righting a wrong in the universe.
All in all, what it meant was that Tony’s relationship with Loki was complicated. They’d gone from random enemies to awkward acquaintances living on the same planet to official roles intertwined with each other in a matter of a few meetings and interactions. Tony felt like they both knew a slightly uncomfortable level of personal detail about the other, considering how little they actually knew each other. He hadn’t spent nearly enough time around Loki to work through any of that yet. And it wasn’t that Tony didn’t trust Loki to do his job, but on a mission this uncertain, he would have preferred to be with someone he was more used to working with.
But the Dekunt were a flighty, secretive people, hiding out on their home planet of Dentrun and only venturing out for the occasional odd trade. They were supposedly collectors of a vast array of strange artifacts from around the galaxy, and were fascinated by magical objects and beings, seeking knowledge and understanding of them despite having no innate magical abilities of their own. Tony and his partner would need their wits about them for this visit, and having a powerful magic user as that accompaniment couldn’t hurt.
Visitors to the planet of Dentrun were exceedingly rare, usually only invited when the Dekunt were negotiating a particularly important trade. That, or trading away something they already owned, which was so rare as to not have been done within several human lifetimes, as far as anyone in the galaxy knew. Visitors were restricted to only a small area of the planet and were never allowed to see the place where the Dekunt stored their hoarded treasures—anything for trade was brought out and shown individually.
The Asgardians had traded with the Dekunt a few times in the past, according to both Thor and Loki, though neither brother had ever been present for any of the trades. They knew very little about the Dekunt, but still more than Amilie or Tony, hence why Loki was now accompanying Tony here.
Tony wasn’t sure how worried to be about this. Loki had warned that the Dekunt were strange and shifty, likely to be sly and try to find ways to trick Tony into agreeing to things he wouldn’t want, or worse deals on his part. He was used to that from years of business, however.
What he wasn’t sure about was how wary to be of the planet itself and its inhabitants. Loki seemed genuinely scared of the prospect of going to Dentrun when it was first suggested. After some prompting, he told Amilie and Tony about the stories Asgardians passed down regarding the planet.
The Dekunt, supposedly, lived above the surface of the planet, in structures suspended in the air with the help of the natural landscape. The rumors Loki had heard spoke of gigantic creatures on the surface of the planet, the Kuntun, that were the sort of horror story told to scare children at bedtime. The Kuntun were intelligent beasts, according to legend, that roamed the surface and pounced on anything—or anyone—unlucky enough to fall from the cities above, tormenting whatever they captured before tearing it apart barbarically. What seemed to scare Loki the most about these things were the rumors that the Kuntun were immune to the effects of magic, and that anyone who upset the Dekunt would be thrown from the dwellings to be devoured below.
Since the Dekunt weren’t the type to share details of their planet, no one really knew how much of this was true. Rumors tended to be exaggerated the more they were spread around, so Tony took all of this with a grain of salt. Still, Loki’s genuine worry seemed to be that the residents of the planet were in fact resistant to the effects of magic and therefore most of his own talents would not be of use if something were to go wrong.
Tony stood at the front of the ship—though the ship was mostly piloting itself—thinking about all this and watching as they slowly approached Dentrun, when a voice spoke up behind him.
“Anthony.”
Tony turned, raising an eyebrow expectantly. He didn’t bother telling Loki yet again that he could call him Tony; he’d given up on that a while ago. While most of the Tolsarans called him Anthony because he had been crowned using his full name, those who knew him well—particularly those who’d known him before on Earth, namely Rhodey, Amilie, and Thor—still called him Tony. Loki, however, seemed to like his full name for whatever reason, be it formality, a desire to be contrary, or just some kind of aesthetic preference, so Tony let him use it. It didn’t bother him. If anything, it might become something of a thing between them, Loki as the only one of Tony’s friends who called him by his full name, which was a thought that made Tony smile inwardly. He wouldn’t mind being friends with Loki, he thought.
For now, they remained allies and colleagues, for lack of a better word. And they were on a potentially dangerous trip, which was why Tony tore his gaze away from the muddy brown surface of Dentrun easily when Loki spoke his name, and straightened his posture when he saw the serious look on Loki’s face. “Something wrong?”
Loki hesitated a moment, looking like he wasn’t sure whether he should say something. After gazing out at the approaching planet for a moment himself, however, he turned back to Tony. “I should tell you, it is also uncertain whether the natural materials of the Dekunt’s planet may be harmful to beings from other worlds.”
Tony frowned at that. “You mean like air we can’t breathe?”
“No, we’ve been assured their air is breathable for us, and on the few occasions they’ve visited other worlds such as Asgard, they have had no problems with our atmosphere. What I am concerned about is physical touch.”
“You think something there might be, what, poisonous for us to touch?”
Loki looked contemplative. “Likely not anything mundane, the paths we will walk or any sort of furniture we touch, but anything unusual… It’s better if you avoid touching anything unless I do so first. The same with eating or drinking anything they offer.”
“Are you giving me an order?” Tony said, letting a smirk play over his face. While he indeed thought of Loki as much more of an equal than a subordinate in any manner, and valued his input, he couldn’t resist teasing him.
Loki didn’t smile back, but the look in his eyes told Tony he understood the sentence was just in jest. He did continue seriously, “Asgardians are more resistant to most things that would affect your… fragile mortal body, after all.”
Tony chuckled. “Well, if you’re willing to touch and lick all the weird stuff first so I don’t have to, who am I to argue?” Loki made a face at Tony’s choice of words.
“By the way, don’t think I won’t make you pay for that ‘fragile’ comment later,” Tony added, finally getting a smile out of Loki.
“Twenty minutes to landing,” Loki said, turning his attention to the displays at the helm. “Best to get ready.”
Tony nodded. “Yep. Time to get ready to rock and roll.” He turned, hiding his smile as he could practically hear Loki frowning, puzzling over that one. It was going to be an interesting day.