Author's note: Well, I guess one good thing about Tony being an idiot is that Loki gets to save the day for once. ;)

He half expects the guard to change his mind and call them back as Loki pushes him out through the exit, but he doesn't. Only silence follows them.

Once they've made it out safe and sound, Loki carefully slides the gates behind them shut, the creaking of the hinges ear-deafening in the stillness.

And Tony can barely look at Loki as the god puts his shirt back on again, smoothing it out with a brush of his hand down the front. Despite having been locked into a tight embrace with him mere moments ago, Loki's bare skin pressing against him, it hadn't been arousing in the slightest. Not under the circumstances, not when Loki had pretended that they – that he had been about to-

And the lecherous, pleased grin on the face of that guard as he drew the obvious conclusions – it makes bile rise in his throat and his hair stand on end. He doesn't know what to say, what to do, how to salvage the situation.

"Why did you do that?" he finally blurts out for lack of something more eloquent to say. "You didn't have to… pretend anything like… that."

Loki shrugs, a surprisingly unperturbed look on his face. "If I hadn't, that guard would have sent you straight to the dungeons for trespassing." A short pause. "And believe me, not even for an honoured guest are the dungeons a pleasant place by any stretch of the imagination. The guards down there are not nice people, and are not expected to be. Hence, it was better this way," he says, as if that settles it. As if there is nothing else to it.

But there is, and a lot at that. He clenches a fist, feeling his nails dig into his palm. Despite the vastness of the corridor they're standing in, the air around them suddenly feels stuffy and difficult to breathe.

"And now that guard is going to think that we're… that I'm… " He can barely bring himself to say it, but pushes over the threshold nevertheless "That I'm – using you in that way."

Loki looks down on the floor for a while as if contemplating what to say next, and then looks up at Tony again. "It makes no difference," he finally answers. "That's only what people here already believe anyway."

And Tony's throat constricts to the point of pain at those words; yeah, sure, he definitely got some unwelcome hints about the state of things just yesterday, but he had thought it was just the assumptions of some, not that the general view of him here would be that he was a rapist. Even if no one would actually call it that, but instead think he was merely exercising rights fully belonging to him.

As if Loki can tell what Tony's thinking, he continues. "You heard Arnulf's words yesterday – they were not merely a mean-spirited insult, but what he took to be the truth – and you were later asked by Geir to let him use me for the night, weren't you?" Loki asks with a gaze boring into Tony like needles.

And Tony finds himself gaping like a fish flushed onto dry land at those words; he'd never imagined that Loki actually knew what that freak had wanted.

"How – how did you find out about Geir?" he manages, feeling his cheeks heat up with embarrassment and emotional turmoil. It had certainly been bad enough being asked, but to have Loki know about it too…

"It was not difficult to figure out," Loki says softly. "Considering the expectations, what else would he have asked you?"

Yeah, so maybe he should have seen that coming. But still…

"And just what makes everyone so fucking sure?" he half-yells, hands grasping his own upper arms in a tight hold. Perhaps it's a make-shift shield he's trying to put up to distance himself from the unpleasant truth staring him into the face. "I haven't done anything to give them those ideas," he insists, voice oddly shrill in his ears. "Why would they believe that?"

Loki eyes him for a few heartbeats before slowly answering. "Because of many things – such as your lenient and indulgent treatment of me, the absence of bruises, how you haven't had my hair shaved off, among other things. These would all be signs pointing towards a slave gaining his master's favour by serving him well in bed."

Goddammit. How is he even going to be able to look people in the eye here if they think that of him? Even if they don't see anything wrong with it.

And there's another thing that baffles him as well.

"Doesn't that bother you?" he asks, waving his hands in exasperation at Loki's seemingly indifferent attitude in the face of such an appalling matter. "That people here believe that kind of shit? That they think you're…"

Loki shrugs and lets a soft sigh escape his lips. "It makes little difference," he says. "People here already consider me to be argr anyway; this hardly changes anything."

And there's that word again – argr – that had made Loki flip his shit at Fjalar despite knowing the consequences that would follow.

"What does that even mean?" he asks, feeling he has to know. "This… argr?"

Loki looks away at that, ostensibly studying an inscription on the wall, a finger nail travelling over the withered stone. "It is a word that has many connotations, all of them highly negative," he says, gaze still nailed to the indented writing. "And if you were to call a free man by that word, he would be expected to either retaliate on the spot or demand holmgång, or his honour would be forfeit. There is really no worse insult than that."

"But what does it mean?" Tony presses on, not willing to let the topic go just yet. Given that he was merely inches away from having to whip Loki into pieces because of that word, he should at least be entitled to know the meaning of it.

"It means that you call the manhood and honour of that person into question, that you consider him a coward. That you do not believe him to be a real man. And there are certain things that would automatically make you argr in the eyes of most people," Loki says, glancing at Tony out of the corner of an eye.

"Such as?"

"Such as practicing magic – or letting other men take you as if you were a woman," Loki answers, voice even, but with an undercurrent of something darker beneath the smooth surface.

Shit.

"And Fjalar called you argr then because he believes that we – that I…" Oh fuck.

But Loki slowly shakes his head. "No," he says, "that's not the main reason. I was already thought to be argr before being sent to Midgard, due to my… proclivities. Only difference is that back then no one would have dared calling me that to my face when I still was a free man and a prince and had my magic powers. But that has changed now, of course."

And Tony can hear the bitterness lacing those words; even if Loki is trying to keep it out of his voice, the resentment is still seeping through. And he can't help but wonder what Loki means by 'proclivities'. Was he only referring to his use of magic, or to… other things as well?

But there's no way Tony is going to ask him, it's none of this business and it's not like it matters anyway. He'd never pry into Loki's personal business like that no matter what.

Discomfort and awkwardness washing over him once more, he decides to put the subject behind them, and the quicker, the better. After he's said what he still needs to be said, of course.

"Well, then," he manages to mumble, wincing. "I'm really sorry for… pushing you into that situation back there, regardless of whether it will affect what people think or not. It really wasn't my intention to be a dumbass like that." And he can't help but feel that he would actually deserve getting thrown into the dungeons after this. It had been idiotic of him, of course, and in the end it had been Loki who had ended up paying the price for Tony's recklessness.

"It's alright," Loki says. "It was a small thing considering what you did for me yesterday."

"You know, next time, you should just let them drag me off to the dungeons instead and have me suffer the consequences of my own idiocy. But… thanks for helping me out," he says, still feeling like a moron.

And he wonders what the dungeons in Asgard are really like if Loki thought demeaning himself like that in the eyes of that guard was worth paying Tony back for saving him yesterday. He's not even sure he wants to know.

The food brought by the servants has been eaten, and the leftovers cleared away. Loki is haphazardly flipping through a book and Tony doesn't seem like he's up to doing a whole lot, instead settling for lounging on the couch in their room, playing around with the crystal ball that had been resting undisturbed and peacefully on a bookshelf before it had grabbed the man's attention. Its vibrant colours are shifting continuously as he angles the item against the light, glittering in a way that is not entirely unlike the Bifrost. He remembers amusing himself with such items when he was a child, never ceasing to be mesmerized by the varying patterns of colours and light, ever-shifting and never displaying the same appearance twice.

And judging by the way Tony is peeking and poking at the thing, it's obvious they don't have fire crystal back on Midgard.

Seeing Tony fiddling with the colourful ball reminds him of all the times the man has been holding that equally colourful, but now relinquished, cube in his hands instead, and it makes his thoughts once more trail off to what transpired yesterday and then back to the incident in the weapons vault. Perhaps he should have been angered by Tony's thoughtlessness, but after everything that's transpired, Loki can't find it within himself to be mad at him.

Of course, he hadn't been surprised in the slightest when Tony had insisted on seeing the vault from the inside. It wouldn't be like him to pass up on something like that, despite knowing full well that he should just leave well enough alone.

It had been a stroke of bad luck that there had been a guard present just then; normally they would be patrolling other parts of the Halls not protected by such strong wards as the armoury, just occasionally making their rounds in that direction to make sure everything was in order. It wasn't as if it was possible to steal anything from there regardless.

And yet, they had entered at an ill-chosen time, had been taken by surprise by one of guards who had decided to pay the vault a dutiful visit. And of course, he knew in that instant as he heard the guard's voice booming behind them that Tony, honoured guest or not, was about to be dragged off to the dungeons for trespassing, and there was no way Loki would let that happen if he could stop it.

Yes, it had been a demeaning display to put up, pretending as if Tony was about to ravish him right as they were interrupted, but if he knew the guards right, they would be sufficiently pleased with encountering such a sight that they would let the trespassing offence slide. They'd let Tony off, rather than locking him up in the dungeons until Thor came back and could vouch for him.

Of course, it would only have been for a few hours. But even so, he's too well acquainted with the dungeons after his own long stay in them and he knows exactly what they're like. It's like a world of its own down there – a very, very unpleasant world, with rules of its own. The cells would be dark and cold and dank, and the guards rough and vicious and crude. In fact, he can think of very few places more objectionable than the Asgardian dungeons.

And the last man he would want to have to spend time down there would be Tony.

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