30 Days - Futures

 “Everything depends on this.”

 

“There’s no choice.”

 

“They gave us no choice, if they had only…”

 

Tony watches the laulja circle the control panel of the central server, fingertips brushing over panels that have so little writing on them they might as well be blank. He looks so young, and isn’t that something? To be confronted with the youth of some of those very people he’s harmed.

 

He wonders how much his father was right, that there was no choice, that the future depended on going to war and subjugating an entire people.

 

The laulja–Loki, he reminds himself, and if only that name meant something, but it’s a dime a dozen for lauljad, celebration and tribute to their long-missing prince no matter what the Council has tried to enforce–pauses to look at him, green eyes narrowing but face otherwise blank.

 

Tony doesn’t say anything. He keeps his arms crossed and waits for Loki to speak first. The laulja looks wane, slight tremble to his limbs and dark circles beneath his eyes, and Tony remembers he’s not yet bothered to give him any supressant.

 

“I will need time,” Loki says, and if he looks like he might collapse, his voice betrays nothing. “I have never worked with a central… the central server before.”

 

“Figures, but some progress is better than none. You’re people aren’t exactly found of leaving written instructions anywhere.”

 

That gets him a sharp smile, vicious, wolf-like, a bladed thing dipped in poison. It’s a point of pride for him that Tony can’t crack this alone; no surprise. Tony would certainly take joy in stymieing people if their roles were reverse and doesn’t begrudge Loki it.

 

He’s more curious what it is Loki is hiding, why he’s lying about working with a central server before.

 

“Get some rest. You’ll have your own rooms. Get cleaned up too,” he adds. 

 

 

Loki snorts, casts one last glance back at the still and quiet consoles, then leaves.

 

“Keep an eye on him JARVIS,” Tony says after Loki is gone, examining the console where Loki had been. Still nothing, no surprise there.

 

He wonders, vaguely, what it would be like if things had gone differently, if there had been peace instead of war, collaboration instead of subjugation. What marvels would result from the union of his tech with their own–theirs that seems near magic, aural instead of visual.

 

Certainly something different than this.