The Cat and the Canary [Loki Series]
"The cat that swallowed the canary" - idiom; to look extremely well-pleased, smug or self-satisfied often because one has secretly achieved something or has gotten away with a great act of mischief.
Summary: Having Tony Stark as your father brings up a host of unique challenges. One of said challenges is 6' 2", black-haired and had previously tried to take over the planet.
Trope: Enemies-to-lovers.
Notes: This is what, I guess you'd call, a Tower fic. Just a little ways beyond the events of Avengers.
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It was seven o’clock in the borough of Manhattan. Nearly two hours overdue, you traded your lab coat from the comfy black parka on the coat rack and started your journey home. That would have been more troublesome for you if ‘home’ had been the house where you'd grown up - the Stark Mansion in Malibu - but it luckily wasn’t. Here and now, ‘home’ meant an apartment on the twelfth floor in the same building in which you worked every day. You punched the codes on the security panels before you left, waiting just long enough for the screens to scan your features, and then you were walking down the hallway. Beside you, a view of a city gleaming in shades of copper, silver and gold was framed in the floor-to-ceiling windows. You didn’t stop to gawk.
The extra time at work didn’t really bother you much. As a young engineer, you had been pouring over some of your dad’s old designs for the Mark 6 Prototype of his suit and you'd been using his blueprints on a project of your own. It was the C60 Arc Generator that still captured your attention. You were sure that you were close to a break-through on how to improve its design even more: how to prevent the excess overheating that your father often complained about after his missions. If you could figure out why it was overheating or, better yet, think of a solution to stop it, you'd win offspring of the year. And perhaps a Nobel Prize.
That’s what led to the lie.
To make sure that your dad was properly surprised (read: not interfering), you had to make sure that he didn’t know what you were working on in the engineering labs. You'd bribed the workers to move to your lab temporarily, which was located directly opposite your father and his nosiness, and you'd been moving around carefully for weeks to make sure that he didn’t wise up and realise that his child was up to something. Working late like this without talking about what you were working on was also a cause for suspicion, so you'd had to do the only thing you knew how: use the narrow, cramped elevator in the service hall to sneak up to your room without him finding out. Total cake-walk.
You felt the impact of your footsteps in the reverberation on the linoleum floor. You gritted your teeth. It must’ve been the heaviness of the heel of your boots or the way that you were striding, longer and faster than usual, to reach the elevator. You had about thirty minutes to sneak up to your room, get changed and not be missed at dinner. Hissing a breath of embarrassment, you tried to distract yourself from the racket you were making by thinking about the vibranium core arc reactor in your father’s suit. It didn’t really work.
Paneled lights illuminated the empty corridor when you reached the elevator. No sounds came from either of the other hallways - which didn’t surprise you an awful lot as you knew that most of the other scientists, engineers and operatives had already left hours ago - but you did hear the shrill beeping of the elevator as it was recalled. You waited there patiently, hands in the pockets of your parka, and you spent your time staring suspiciously at the potted fern. The thin, reedy pot plant was a strange green colour but you couldn’t decide if it hadn’t been watered for a while or if it was a plastic plant.
“Hmm. That’s weird,” You hummed to yourself.
You weren't talking about the pot plant. Apart from the churning sound of the elevator as it rose level-by-level, you started to notice another sound. Ears pricking, you realised that she could actually hear the sound of footsteps coming towards you. When it finally reached your level, the elevator made an impatient noise and demanded your security code. Once the sound of feet reached near to you, you turned your head and called out to the other person who’d come.
“By the way, the elevator next to the executive boardroom works way better,” You started, focusing on pressing the buttons on the lift, “Normally, I wouldn’t even bother with this one but desperate times calls for desperate -”
The words died on your lips.
It was him. While your first glance had brought back only the brief flashes of male and tall, the second brought a jolt to your heart so violent that the force alone could’ve kick-started a military assault vehicle. It was impossible to look away from him as he continued his purposeful, loping stride towards you. The stride of a predator that cared not about the prey that skittered at its feet.
And that’s what you were to him. Prey. There was a sudden electricity to your blood that made you certain that you were being hunted: by the way that his stare, vacant and calculated in a way that betrayed no thought and showed no emotion, tracked onto your movements. Recognising that you were now like a gazelle facing up against a lion, a snippet of a wildlife documentary flared in your ears louder than your heartbeat in your eardrums: Remember not to run from a predator, the presenter’s voice droned, because it provokes the animal and prematurely forces it into attack mode. You clung onto that knowledge even as the adrenaline surged through your veins and your pulse screamed: Get me out! Get me out! Get me out!
The man continued his approach. Pale and striking, his face was faintly hawkish: all angles and contours, sharpness and severity. His eyes were mesmerising: shining and slick like the surface of a snake’s eyes, unblinking and with a putrescent intensity that you didn’t understand. As if he were no longer alive. Not a living thing.
But he was. The god of mischief was a being who had lived for hundreds of years.
And he was standing right in front of you.
Loki didn’t speak at first. When he came to a stop and glared down at you, he was so much taller that you felt as if he were towering over you: a great colossus standing over you and regarding you as if you were no bigger than a homunculus. You couldn’t bring yourself to look away, even though your heart was thumping so fitfully that you felt it thrashing at the base of your throat. His eyes were pure blue - blue like permafrost - and you could feel yourself freezing over the longer you met his gaze.
“What - what was I saying?” You muttered weakly, trying to catch your breath.
When he spoke, his voice seemed to tremble down your spine.
“Something about desperate, I believe.”
That’s when he smiled. A wicked, beautiful smile.
It was just then that the elevator arrived. The sound itself startled you, causing you to flinch as the doors slid open and a rectangle of that pale, greyish light fell into the dark room, but you reacted quickly. Turning your back on him, you stepped into the elevator and pressed the number for the floor where you needed to be. Your hands were sweaty as you punched in the passcode, wiping them on your jeans. Hurry up, you pleaded. I knew that we needed a higher processing speed on this damn thing, but no one ever listens to . . .
“It is most unwise to turn your back on an enemy.”
You froze. He was behind you. More than that, he was so closely pressed behind you that you could feel the solidness of his chest pressing against your back and the whisper of his cold words falling on the back of your neck. His steady breathing pushed the locks of your hair to the side.
“You’re,” You swallowed, “You’re not an enemy. You - you wouldn’t be here if you were an enemy. You’d be down in the cells or in one of the interrogation rooms.”
Loki leaned down until he could decisively speak into your ear. The words he breathed were so silent that you almost didn’t hear them over the blood rushing to your head, but the warmth of his breath on your jaw was something else entirely. It seemed to sting you.
“I’ve been there before.”
It was true. You remembered the first time that your father had been called away to join the Avengers - you remembered hunching over a stack of textbooks, drowning in a sea of sticky notes and trying to rub away the sharpie staining your fingertips when you heard the news. The lo-fi beats on your YouTube playlist had been replaced by a startling message that a terrorist had invaded Stuttgart and had severely injured nearly eighty people. You remembered how your heart had squeezed, seeing your father’s face among a league of other superheroes.
You turned to face him. He was standing so close to you that your chest brushed against his, keeping you in place. That wicked smile had all but disappeared now, replaced by a more stalwart expression that burned with a fierceness in his eyes. But when you tried to form words, trembling on your lips until you could do nothing but passively meet those blue eyes, you saw it shape on his face: a smirk.
“Why are you smirking like the cat that ate the canary?”
It was all that you could muster. He was terrifying - but you had to keep reminding yourself that he wasn’t an enemy. It had been two years now since he had joined the Avengers - whether willingly or not - and he was under orders not to harm anyone living in the tower. He couldn’t hurt you. . . You swallowed. Theoretically.
“Because,” Loki’s voice was so smooth and soft, it was almost a purr, “I’ve just spotted a particularly delicious canary.”
Delicious. It must have been only a sign of weakening mental stability that the word pulled goosebumps from your arms, having your breath leave in a single, shattering exhalation. He’d winded you with only a few silly words, but that was his entire act. He was the god of mischief - and eloquence. You'd seen some of the interrogation tapes where Natasha had brilliantly gotten him to reveal his plan; where he’d tried to hypnotise your father and control his mind before being beaten brutally by the Hulk; watched in heartbreak as he used his staff to kill Phil Coulson before he -
“You’re so full of shit,” You remarked coldly, “that I’m quite surprised you can breathe without gasping.”
Loki’s eyes narrowed so quickly that you mightn’t have seen the surprise in them. The doors closed behind him, trapping you both in this confined space, dimly-lit except by the soft white fluorescents overhead. The highly-polished mirrored surfaces showed you together: the dark-haired god that pressed forwards even more - impossibly more - that your short, gasping breaths brushed against his chest. In a move that you didn’t see coming, his hand caught your chin and angled your face up. Ever in control.
“Do you think that you can get away with speaking to me like that?”
“I can speak to you however I want,” You challenged.
Loki growled, “And just what gives you that right, mortal?”
There almost wasn’t an answer. What could you possibly say that could get him to leave you alone and to step away, with just enough space that you wouldn’t be able to feel every muscle in his arms or every curve of his ribs, except for the burning knowledge that you had to say something? It was revenge for him. To get back at the man that had defeated him all those years ago and now constantly mocked him as Reindeer Games - if Loki could get Stark’s child to fear him, then there would be a sweet vengeance. A consolation prize.
But you were a Stark. And Starks don’t get intimidated.
“Because my name is on the side of this building.”
Loki’s face contorted into an expression of absolute loathing. For just a moment, the grip he had on your chin tightened and his fingerprints carved into you deeper as if he was trying to chip your skin away - and then he stopped. The god stepped back so suddenly that you almost slid to the floor.
While you tried to catch your breath - knowing from your reflection in the mirror that you were in shambles, with your hair mussed and your clothes jumbled and erratic - you couldn’t help but glance at him. It confused you that he had given up so easily, seeing as your confidence was mostly a bluff, but there was some triumph that warmed you to see him defeated. Standing in the corner with his arms folded over his chest, glowering at his feet as there would be no other surface that didn’t show them both in it.
You smirked, “Well, well. Looks like the cat’s no match for the canary, after all.”
“The canary would do well to remember that it's just as meagre, feeble and breakable as any other creature on this dreaded planet,” Loki remarked. “And that I, while confined to this living Helheim, might be under the Allfather’s thumb - that even I have bad days.”
Those inky eyes pierced into your chest. Your heart almost stopped beating.
“Bravado,” Loki continued, “I see that it comes far more easily to your father than you. It’s quite unbecoming on you - not so easily believed. I suppose that’s only natural, considering that - for all the rot that he is worth - you are even more meaningless, trivial and unimportant. He is a hero, you are not.”
There was silence for three beats.
Loki had returned to his original posturing: tall, dark and imposing. Even in the dim light of the room, seeming to leave no shadow but embody his own. The tight expression on his face was cruel and victorious. You licked your lips, knowing deep down that there was some truth in his words. Then your lips pursed.
“Wow. . . You. . . really like synonyms, don’t you?”
When the doors dinged open, you strode out of them without a moment to lose. But there was something noticeable in the way that you didn’t skitter or lunge or lurch, but walked with that typical bounce that characterised a curious mind and a young body that wanted to work out all of those ideas. When you glanced back at him before you rounded the corner, you saw that he was still standing there.
You'd lost the predator, after all.
One point for the canary.
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