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Chapter 5: Clean Slate

He reads the letters several times over the next two days, folds them open and shut so much that the parchment starts to rip in the creases.

It’s stupid, obsessing over the words of someone he can’t stand to be around. But the letters don’t feel like that person. They connect him to a shred of the Loki he held on the space shuttle.

So he keeps the locket tucked under his shirt at all times and focuses his attention on blasting every known element at the Tesseract. Nothing so much as chips the surface, not even the as-of-yet unnamed element in his arc reactors. It doesn’t even flicker when he takes it to the Arizona base and sends it on a light speed trip around the particle accelerator.

The cube baffles him, but that’s what makes science fun. 'There’s always tomorrow' is his new motto, because, seriously, there is. He had Jarvis run the math, and even at half an Asgardian lifespan, Tony is going to see nine hundred thousand more sunsets in his life. At least. God knows how much medical technology will advance by then.

There are some jumbled attempts at a response to Loki’s letter, but he can’t seem to force the right words into a meaningful order. It’s funny, people are always calling out his charisma when they want to get him riled. Always a witty comeback huh Stark, I wonder what happens when the laughter stops?  Yet when he tries to put that talent down on paper it just seems insufficient.

The phrases sound forced, or too insensitive without a certain tone to give them context, too harsh without a wink and a smirk to make them funny or diffusing like he intends. So in the end he takes the out Loki left him and doesn’t write a direct response.

Instead of eloquent words he sends news. The sticky notes live by the egg now, with a nice juicy Sharpie and a photo printer.

He sends photos every day, anything interesting or cute that the sprouts do around the house. Fenrir holding a tablet where he wrote his name for the first time. Hela buzzing Jori’s hair. He tries really hard to come up with commentary worth the paper, but it’s usually just lame high school locker crap like “Fen’s horns grew an inch!” or “Hela, the Indomitable Laundry Girl”.

One day he’s feeling especially impotent and draws a lopsided heart. He’s literally never drawn a heart in his life so it comes out looking like a kidney with diarrhea. He burns that one with a blowtorch and sends a smiley face instead, as if that’s any better.

The penis shaped sailboat almost makes the cut, but he chickens out. Maybe Loki hates these dumb notes and something like that would just put them back at rock bottom. He puts that one in the lab though, because it’s the pinnacle of his artistic achievement.

Loki doesn’t respond once for the rest of the week, so Tony isn’t sure if he’s helping or hurting. There’s nothing else he can offer him, so he keeps sending his silly tokens. As the week turns into two he keeps sending them, more and more each day when the kids find out and demand he show Loki this and that.

Tony’s not sure when exactly he signed up to be a family man, but here he is. The bits need an adult and their dad is a bag of dicks, so Tony puts his life on pause and does his damnedest not to be Howard Stark.

It all starts to seem normal until Loki materializes in the living room on Friday night while Walt and Jesse plan to build another meth lab on TV. At first he’s annoyed because, hello, Mike can’t afford to bribe the snitches in prison anymore, what a fucking plot twist. Then Loki collapses and turns the crack in the coffee table into a pile of glass shards with his face, and Tony grows the fuck up.