"No way!" Clint exclaimed, with his eyes wide in astonished disbelief. On the screen, Romanoff was hurriedly leaving the cell upon hearing the name, which was apparently some kind of revelation to some.

Not to Tony. He quickly googled it, but other than some military guys in white camouflage and someone's Reddit handle he found nothing. "Care to explain?"

"That guy's a legend!"

"Mhm," Tony said. He was never big on those. His father was called a legend by many. He himself might have been, too, in some of the sappy TV reels that had been made after his disappearance in the Afghan desert, when some stations wanted to get their brownie points for calling his death first. He watched them all, out of morbid curiosity, and found out that the media respect for a person got a serious boost after one's presumed demise. Truthfulness – not so much. "Any details?"

"A Soviet shadow operative and hitman, with more than fifty kills credited to his name. And that's what we know of. The most prevalent theory was that it was not one single man, but a pseudonym for a series of highly trained operatives, for they were active from the early fifties till the nineties. Now, I'm not so sure."

"Great," Bruce said with absolutely no enthusiasm.

"Right? First a homicidal alien, now a Soviet assassin. What's next? A giant sentient octopus?"

"Tony!" Pepper scolded.

"That was a joke!" he jeered, and was about to follow it up with another, equally witty one, when his eyes fell on Loki and the utter look of dismay on his face and bit his tongue. "Hey, am I not allowed to make jokes anymore? That's like my trademark move!"

Loki nodded, slowly, but it didn't wipe the kicked puppy expression from his face. Really? That was the level of…

"I know my presence here inconveniences everyone. But I have nowhere else to go," Loki said, staring down at his hands. Fuck, Pepper was going to kill him for that, there was no other way. And if he somehow lived through that, Romanoff's knife would find him in the night.

"You know jack squat, apparently," he said, trying for an aura of unhurried nonchalance. "I thought you were a reasonable adult who could take a hint."

Loki set his jaw and stared back at him and there might be a hint of outrage in his red eyes now, which was kind of an improvement, really. "I would know a joke for one if I knew the rules of what was and what was not expected of me here first," he said, calmly, but there was a bit of belligerence in his tone, maybe.

"Rules?" Tony asked, quirking an eyebrow. This was getting interesting.

"You broke me from a prison and brought me here, but no one bothered to tell me what's asked of me in return."

Tony stared at him for a moment, taken aback. "In return?" he echoed.

Loki gritted his teeth and placed his hands flat on the table to keep them from fiddling. "No one breaks a defeated enemy from prison without seeing an interest in it, Stark."

"Either I'm missing something, or… No, I must be missing something."

Loki frowned, a weird mix of emotions painting on his face, and only now did Tony realize how thinly his illusion of self-control had been spread and how close that veneer was to cracking.

"I thought we're long past that, but I guess not," Tony sighed. "I don't consider you my enemy. I did, for a short while, you know, when you were terrorizing that crowd in Germany and we came to kick your ass? But then we sat down and talked things through like civil people and now we're good. I thought that should be clear by now."

"I attacked your world."

"Were you lying about the mind control then?"

Loki narrowed his eyes. "No."

Tony felt like tearing hair from his skull. Or screaming. Preferably both. If this was how explaining things to stubborn children worked, he didn't want any children, ever, because with his and Pepper's genes combined there was a solid probability they would turn out stubborn as fuck.

"Then explain to me where the problem is, please, because I don't get it. Is it some sort of language issue? Would a switch to writing help? Drawing pictures? Smoke signals?"

Loki slowly shook his head.

"Tony…" Bruce started.

"Not now," Tony cut him off. "We need to settle this, once and for all, and we're doing it right now." He turned back to Loki. "Tell me what it is. Really, I'm dying to know, what is it that we do that makes you distrust us so much and question everything we say?"

Loki held his gaze for a couple of seconds before looking away. "You're kind to me," he said.

Clint chuckled nervously.

"And that's a bad thing somehow?!"

"No one was ever kind to me without a reason."

Tony stared at the god for a couple of seconds longer, chortled, and pressed his fingers to his eyelids. "This is ridiculous, you know that, right?" No answer came, so he carried on. "We knew you were feeling out of order when you first came here. That you found it hard to trust us because of the shit you've been through. Because, yeah, that I can get. Been there, done that and I know it sucks ass. So, we figured out that giving you space to come around on your own would be the best for you. Then you fell sick and we had to deal with that. And then the whole Pierce thing happened and I'm guessing that wasn't fun either. Are you saying that it would be better if we kicked you out when you were sick and could barely drag yourself out of bed because of injuries and stress? That we should have let Pierce's men keep you?"

"Yes," Loki said, quietly.

Tony's eyes flew open and trained on Loki. He was looking at Tony, his face blank, only the slight quiver of his lower lip betraying any sort of emotions going on behind that mask.

"Yes," he repeated, a bit louder. "It would make more sense."

The desire to scream that Tony had just fought down was back with more force. "Mhm," he murmured instead. "So, you're saying that – according to your logic – disregarding a fellow man in need and abandoning them to endless torture makes more sense than helping out. That you would turn around and happily ignore if the same thing happened to any of us?"

"No," he said, and he sounded… offended? Yes, that was about right.

"Okay, you lost me. Actually, you lost me like a dozen sentences ago, but now I can't even see the trail you left behind anymore. What's the difference here?"

"I came here as your enemy…"

Tony grunted and hit the table with his forehead. It hurt, but it helped, too.

"…and you've defeated me, captured me, and spared my life. Since then, it's yours, free to do as you please with it."

Tony's head snapped up. "What?!"

Loki twitched, like he was about to jump back and away from Tony.

"Is this some Asgardian rule?"

"Yes?" Loki said carefully, the surety gone from his voice all of sudden.

"No voiding clauses for mind-control or other extenuating circumstances?"

"No."

Tony chuckled, and it sounded like something between a nervous laugh and a whine. "No wonder you didn't want to go back there. Well, news flash, Gandalf, we're not doing the whole slavery thing here anymore."

"I understand that, yes. But you don't need to own my body for me to owe my life to you. Or Director Fury's organization, before, but you won that right by stealing me away."

The way Loki spoke the words, bluntly and crudely, as if he were discussing getting rid of an old car, made Tony's stomach churn in disgust.

"Okay, I feel singled out as a slave driver here. How come it's me and not any of the others?"

"I was about to ask the same thing," Clint said and Pepper sent him a murderous glare.

"It's… all of you, I suppose. Any of you can decide my fate."

"And you would just do whatever we tell you to do?"

Loki didn't answer, just looked away, and Tony stifled a sigh of relief. The god might be trying to play by the rules – an imaginary set of them, sick and twisted, straight from space-hell – but he wasn't ready to fully give in yet.

"In such case, you will be overjoyed to learn that's not how we do things on Earth. In fact, you might want to google Geneva Conventions and what they do. Crash course? No owning people. Or their lives. And then there's the whole humanitarian treatment thing which we've been apparently failing at, since nobody has even told you about it yet."

"I've been told that, Stark. Repeatedly, in fact. But it doesn't change the reality. I'm here. I'm entirely dependent on your mercy. I can't leave the Realm, I can't even step out of your estate without facing imprisonment and cruel experimentations designed to break my mind, I have to rely on you for a place to sleep, the food I eat, the clothes I wear. And yes, whatever you told me to do, I'd have to do it, because the alternative is tenfold worse. You own me in all aspects but the name."

Once laid out like that, the notion didn't seem all that ridiculous, and it was even more sickening.

"I see," Tony said, thinly.

Before he could figure out what else to say to not make it worse – better late than never, Tony – the elevator door opened and Romanoff and Rogers stepped out. Cap looked like he had just witnessed his childhood pet being flattened by a road roller. Romanoff looked mostly pissed off.

"We're not done with this conversation yet," Tony said, pointing a finger at Loki, who let out a dejected huff. "I mean it!"

Romanoff stopped a few steps away from the table and scanned the gathering with a suspicious glare, her hands on her hips. "Okay, what did I miss?"

At that point, there was only one thing Tony could do and it was hiding his face in his hands and groaning in frustration.