He wakes slowly - groggy, like he's fighting his way up from the bottom of a very deep well. It's difficult to open his eyes at first, and Tony doesn't fight it. With every growing awareness of his body he's less and less enthused to return to the land of the living just yet. This is either the mother of all hangovers, he thinks dimly - and even the thought hurts - or he got hit by a truck. Possibly more than once.

When the dark opens up to swallow him once more, he doesn't fight it.

-

He's jolted awake by a sharp jab to the ribs, a hissed "Get up." Tony jack-knifes up, blinking quickly at the light stabbing him in the eyeballs. It's not a great idea. His head spins, and nausea overtakes him almost instantly.

"Ugh," He groans, raising a hand to his head in an attempt to stop the spinning. There's someone standing over him - he must have passed out on a floor somewhere; time to fucking quit drinking - but Tony ignores them for the moment. He's Tony fucking Stark. Whoever it is can wait until he gets his head on a little straighter.

"You have been unconscious already for-" The voice starts and it sounds vaguely familiar, but then whatever was in Tony's stomach is forcing its way up and Tony turns his head just in time to vomit all over the floor beside him. Dimly, he hears the voice sneer at him, something that sounds an awful lot like "disgusting."

He feels a lot better for it instantly though, the world - his memories - coming in a bit more clearly. Tony glances around. He's in some sort of cell, but it's much too... sterile looking, he decides, to be in any prison he knows of. It's unremarkable, but then - there's the question of his cell mate.

Tony looks up finally, and regrets it instantly. It's Loki - Thor's brother, the homicidal maniac he'd faced off against less than a year ago - that stares down at him with nothing less than contempt written across his face. "Fuck me," He groans, wracking his brains as to how he possibly could have ended up here.

"While I appreciate the sentiment," Loki sneers, "I'd rather not." He steps back, and Tony takes advantage of that fact to slump back against the floor. He hadn't been drinking - he knows it. He hasn't had a drink in... in weeks now, Tony's sure of it. And Loki's supposed to be imprisoned...

"How'd you get me?" He asks, breathing coming heavy. The drugs (or was it a spell?) are wearing off, but his body's not taking to it gracefully. "I thought-"

"I," Loki interrupts, "did nothing of the sort. It seems we have both been brought here at the behest of another."

That takes a moment to sink in. "You were abducted? Loki of Asgard, batshit supervillain extraordinaire - abducted?" He chuckles and it's clearly the wrong thing to say, but Tony can't help but find that the slightest bit funny.

And then the world's gone topsy turvy, and the next thing he knows is that his back is to the bars of the cell, Loki's hand around his throat and wearing an expression that suggests death might be too kind a thing to ask for at the moment. "You insignificant cunt," He rages, and Tony does his best to gasp for air around the demi-god's iron grip, "I was chained, imprisoned, stripped of my powers - tell me, what was left of me to resist?"

He can't breathe, and the force of Loki's grip has Tony seriously worried about the structural integrity of his windpipe. Things are going fuzzy again, darkness and pain overtaking him again. "Please," He gasps, "Stop,"

He's back on the floor a moment later, gasping for air like a fish out of water. There's some sort of kerfuffle going on in the rest of the cell, but he can't seem to lift his head just yet. "Unhand me," He can hear Loki command, sounds of a struggle.

There are guards there. Their shoes - heavy work boots - are the first things Tony sees, but he quickly takes in the rest. They're real bruisers, mean and tough looking, and Tony doubts they've got much in the way of brains - mooks never really seem to - but they subdue Loki with a frightening amount of ease. "You're not to harm him," One of them orders, and with that, they're retreating, locking the cell behind them once more. Quick, efficient, understated. They're professionals - the thought has Tony's chest seizing up, making it almost impossible to catch his breath. This is bad news. Really bad news.

Loki sulks. His lips are puffy, a black eye forming, and a trickle of blood from his nose slowly drying on his face – and he's holding his head carefully so that it doesn't drip, but he doesn't wipe it away either. At Tony's gaze he snaps, "I should hope that satisfied your curiosity."

"Not particularly." Tony drags himself back up to a sitting position, leaning back against the bars so that he's directly across from Loki. At the raised eyebrow that earns him, he clarifies, "Not for your sake, princess. After New York, all those people, I think you deserve a lot worse."

Loki's eyes narrow, but he scoffs. "I have no more blood on my hands than you do, Anthony Stark."

"That's the difference between you and me," He decides, putting as much ice in his tone as he can muster, "When I saw what I was being used for, I did something about it." Loki has no right to compare them as if the blame was Tony's alone, as if his hands had done the deed like Loki's had. He's fuming, but he does his best not to let Loki see it. Better not to give him any ammunition.

"Ahh, yes, because the world is simply a play-thing to you. But what about your mind? Tell me Stark, do you know what it's like to be unmade, from the inside out? To be crafted into a new sort of monster from the fragments that remain?" His tone is colder than anything Tony has ever heard, eyes glimmering with some kind of dark hypnotic suggestion – Tony finds himself shivering, shaking, looking away in desperation.

Loki laughs then, and it's brutal, breaking glass. "I thought not." There's something that's so wrong about it, so twisted, so...

"You are a special kind of sick puppy." Tony tells him, but he can't quite bring himself to look back over at Loki again either.

He's terrified of what he might find if he does.