Tony was shocked; he was horrified, but most of all, he was hurt. As he lay there, broken and battered in his destroyed suit, the thing that hurt most was his heart.
"Was everything a lie?" he whispered as Loki stood over him, infamous scepter in hand. "Befriending us, living with us, fighting with us… was any of it real?"
The god above him smiled cruelly. "To rule you, I had to infiltrate you, and to do that, I had to become one of you," he explained coldly. "I convinced Steve to love me, I convinced Fury to trust me, and I even convinced you to befriend me." He sneered. "It must kill you to know that you were right all along. If only you'd stuck to your guns, Stark. You might have avoided all this death and destruction if you weren't so easily swayed by friendship."
"It's not a shortcoming," Tony spat. "It's a privilege, but you'll never see that. You're too blinded by your own ambition to ever understand something that great."
"I had friends once." Loki's gaze grew distant for a moment as he thought back to his life on Asgard, before Thor had launched his attack on Jotunheim and his world had fallen to pieces. "I had friends, and they betrayed me." His eyes focused on Tony once more and his lips pulled back in a snarl. "They left me to flounder in favor of my brother. It was then that I learned the true value of friendship." He made the word a curse, and Tony couldn't help but flinch.
"I pity you," the man in the iron suit finally said, turning to spit the blood from his mouth. "You're capable of so much but you understand so little."
"I need only understand war, and its cleansing fire shall elevate me in all the nine realms."
"No," Tony shook his head. "I promise you, Loki, that as long as I breathe, you'll never rule a damned thing."
The God of Lies smiled and raised his scepter. "Then it is a good thing that you shall not breathe long." With that, he plunged the weapon down.