"Pure Insanity" 9/?
Title: "Pure Insanity" 9/?
Author: Lena
Fandom: Marvel
Warnings: Foul language, some violence, and I don't know what else. I'll update this as the story spews forth.
Rating: R (The version of Tony Stark in this story is RIDICULOUSLY foul mouthed.)
Disclaimer: Marvel is god, I'm just a lowly worshiper, blah, blah, blah.
Summary: A man insists that he's Loki of Asgard, and ends up in a mental institution. Was he really sent here as punishment for his misdeeds in New York as he insists, or is he just a sadly deranged soul? Your guess is as good as mine.
Beta'd By: Just me tonight, kids. Feel free to correct anything you see. My grammar sucks balls.
When Romanoff had woken up, she had made similar threats that Barton had made, and Tony had barely paid attention to the back and forth sniping between her and Loki. He knew he should likely listen more, but he was working on the little presents that he knew should be waiting on the rest of his former teammates when they would likely arrive to free their comrades in arms and then try to collect them as well. He had to admit that he was kind of looking forward to it.
He wondered if Thor was around. Tony knew that it was at least somewhat likely, as Loki had initially escaped Asgardian jails even to be here in the first place, but he also knew that getting in contact with the thunder god was a huge pain in the ass. Cell phones didn't work on other planets, as far as Tony knew of, although he was pretty sure that he could put one together that would, although he didn't want to imagine the bill that he'd get for the roaming charges.
Someone bitching in the cage dragged Tony from his musing about interplanetary cell phones. He had to look up to see who it even was. Romanoff, it turned out. The one that he was personally pissed at for his own reasons. She had infiltrated his company, lulled him into trusting her, and then he was forced to keep her around and not blow her 'cover.' She was lucky he didn't find a way to stab her then.
"I need to go to the bathroom," Romanoff said to him. Tony looked around, and realized that he was alone in the room with them. Where the hell had Loki gone? Had he gotten so wrapped up he missed the god leaving?
"Use the corner," Tony said simply, already wanting to go back to the project that he was currently working on. It seemed like someone was always interrupting him when he was working. It had been that way before everything happened, and it seemed to continue to be the case.
"Not exactly in line with how you keep prisoners, Tony," Romanoff said in a soft, soothing tone. "You can't walk me to the bathroom?"
"During which you'll attack me in some way and escape?" Tony asked her with a snort. "Come on, Romanoff. I'm Tony fucking Stark, not a Bond villain. Either hold it or piss in the corner. I can't smell it from here, so I don't really care which one you do." He really had absolutely no care which one she did. However, there was NO way he was willingly letting her out of that cage.
"Can I at least get some privacy?" she asked him in that same tone that was already starting to grate on his nerves. He just had the feeling that she was trying to get him to do something. He just had to figure out what it was. Or gas the both of them.
"Trust me, the LAST thing I want to do is watch you go to the bathroom. Now, I'm trying to work. Will you please shut the hell up and let me do so?" he snapped, attention already turning away from her.
Before she could protest, an alarm went off. "Might want to hold your wee then," Tony said, smirking at her before shutting his laptop, pushing his chair over to the monitors that he had set up that showed all of the security cameras. He could see that Thor and Rogers had gotten onto the first floor of the building. "Looks like the cavalry is here."
OoOoOoOo
There were days that Tony felt like he was selling his soul for information about the Tesseract technology. He knew that what he was doing was wrong, but the more that he learned about the one gun that Loki had decided to allow him to have working (which seemed to only work in only Tony's presence, annoyingly enough), the less he cared about something as intangible as a 'soul.' The technology itself was incredible. It was a gun that never needed to be reloaded or recharged. What was there to hate about that? If he could replicate the energy, then he would be in business.
It was one late night in the lab that he was working on just that when he felt that oh so familiar chill in the air that signified his benefactor's presence. Tony turned around, all full of snark, only to feel any words die on his lips as soon as he saw Loki and the mess that he was.
"I'm calling in that favor now, Stark," Loki rasped to him, crumpled up on the floor. His long black hair was matted and tangled with what looked like blood, and his armor had numerous tears through it, showing wounds underneath.
"Wow, who'd you piss off this week?" Tony asked, still bending down and putting his arm around Loki's waist, helping him up from the floor. He had a small bed in the room that he sometimes crashed on, so he helped Loki over to it, gingerly laying him down on it.
"I am sure that you do not want to know," Loki replied curtly. "I am here because I have nowhere else to go, not for your witty banter."
"You love our repartee and you know it," Tony replied, grabbing his giant first aid kit anyway, figuring he'd start work on Loki's face and go from there. It looked like something had dragged his face across some jagged concrete from all the scrapes on it. "And I mainly want to know to make sure that whatever did this isn't going to follow you here and do a similar job on me."
Loki hissed when Tony started to apply antiseptic to his scratches, but didn't pull away, thankfully. "Nothing will be following me here. I think it would be the last place anyone would look for me."
Tony supposed that he had a point there. NO ONE would look for him here. "No wonder you popped over here then, along with the 'no place to go' part. I didn't miss that. Makes being the bad guy suck more, huh?"
"It only 'sucks,' as you say, because it was one of your good guys who did this to me." Loki had said that so softly that Tony wouldn't have caught it if he weren't already so close.
Tony felt his hand freeze in place when he realized what Loki meant by that. "Wait, are you saying that Thor did this to you?" He had to admit that it was something that he REALLY couldn’t believe.
"Yes, hard to believe that the golden child would beat me within an inch of my life," Loki groused. Even during what was a serious moment, Tony realized that Loki had an amazing grasp of slang that Thor didn't seem to get no matter how many times he was around anyone. "You'd be amazed at just what Thor is capable of."
Tony didn't answer right away, instead, when he finished cleaning up Loki's face, went to start unbuckling the leather armor from Loki's chest and slowly removing it, stopping for a second every time that Loki winced until the god snapped that he was not made of glass and to just get it over with. When he finally did, Tony could see that Loki's injuries were much more extensive than he initially realized. He looked just as bad as when the Hulk slung him around like a rag doll during a child's temper tantrum. "Sweet zombie Jesus, man. He really did do a number on you." One of the things that Tony could see was what looked like a giant hammer print on Loki's chest. Not many people running around with a giant hammer. Sure, this could be some trick of Loki's, but it seemed out of place. Why would the god let him see him vulnerable like this?
Loki just sighed, body slowly relaxing and sinking into the bed. It seemed to have chilled him out that Tony was seemingly believing him, or at least willing to. "So, why'd he do it?" Tony had to know. He knew that he'd likely be turned into a toad just for asking, but he HAD to know.
Loki grimaced. "He found me, on Midgard. It seemed he was not pleased that I had escaped. I believe his talk of us still being brothers is finally done. For that I'm relieved," he started to try and sit up, "but I could do without the beating with a hammer again. Quite annoying."
"Only you would call a hammer forged in a dying star annoying," Tony said with a roll of his eyes, gently pushing against Loki's shoulders and making him lay back down. "I know you heal super quickly, but you CAN'T move around right now. You're just going to fuck something up worse."
Loki looked like he was going to protest, but apparently something painful twinged and he groaned, lying back onto the mattress again. "No one's here tonight. Just you and me," Tony reassured him. "Well, and JARVIS, but he doesn't tell anyone anything I don't want him to. So, chill the fuck out and get some rest."
"You sound like you actually care," Loki said with a rueful smile.
Tony sighed. Damn, it really did. "It's like you said, paying back that debt," he said quickly. "Speaking of that, I think I've got it figured out just how to power those damn weapons on my own without your little beads or whatever the hell you gave me last time."
"Is that so?" Loki almost looked relieved to have something else to talk about. "Does it have to do with that thing in your chest?"
Tony hated anyone speaking about his arc reactor. Everyone on the planet knew the very basics about it, but very few knew how it actually worked, and that was how he liked it. "Something like that," he said evasively. "That and the giant one that you borrowed that one time. Clean energy and all that." He had been reading his father's old notes on the Tesseract as well, and those were helping him out more than he wanted to admit.
Tony was actually starting to think that his father had done a lot more studying of the Tesseract than he would have others wanting to know. Tony was starting to think something quite worrisome about that 'element' that his father had left notes behind that he had used, but it was something that he didn't want to admit, not even in his own head just yet, and he was usually was honest with himself.
"I've been quite curious about that since it interfered with my spear," Loki admitted to him. "I still haven't quite figured out how you were able to avoid being taken over by it."
"Good thing you didn't think to aim a little toward the left," Tony joked. When Loki looked at him confused, he went on, pointing to where his heart was. "The human heart is on the left, not the middle." He wondered if he should have admitted that, but it was a very easy thing for him to learn about, wasn't it?
"I believe your device still would have interfered," Loki pointed out. "It has to do with your heart, even if it doesn't sit directly over it." Loki shrugged, and then cringed when he realized just what a bad idea that was to do with his injuries. "I suppose that we'll never know."
"Well, I'm happy about that. Not really thrilled with the idea of being anyone's mind slave," Tony remarked. "I enjoy having free will and all that jazz."
"The idea that we have control over our destinies is the greatest lie humanity ever made up," Loki said softly. "It's something that you may not like to hear, but I've been around long enough to realize that no matter what you do, it's impossible to fight fate."
Tony snorted. "So you were destined to try and take over Earth and wind up failing pretty miserably. You didn't even get part of one city."
"I think it is my destiny to fail," Loki remarked simply.
"Now that's bullshit. I don't know why I'm encouraging you, because that'll likely to lead to bad things, but it's no one's destiny to fail constantly. Maybe you're just trying to do things the wrong way. Or maybe you should stop trying to kill people so often." That was a handy little idea.
That managed to elicit a chuckle from Loki. "I'm still amused that you sound like you care about me."
"Yeah, freaky huh? I think we got a thing going on now. You teach me how to blow things up with weapons from another world, and I give you inspirational talk while patching up your boo-boos. We're a regular pair," Tony remarked. He really needed not to think on this for long. "Now come on. I can't handle letting you sleep this off in my lab. Makes me feel weird."
It took a few tries to make sure that he wasn't going to hurt him, but Tony managed to get Loki off what was basically a shitty cot and get him up to one of his guest rooms. He was quite grateful that Bruce was off at a conference and Steve was gone to SHIELD for some mission that they wanted him on. He did NOT want to explain this to anyone.
He managed to get Loki in the bed and, after directing him to where the bathroom was, leaving him to his privacy.
OoOoOoOo
While Tony was distracted, Loki had decided to do a walk around the building, trying to figure out if there were any easy ways for someone to get into the place. He was having to remind himself that he could talk to Tony's 'helper' JARVIS while he was doing so. It would do nothing but help, after all.
"How many entrances are there to the building, JARVIS?" Loki asked as he walked down the stairwell. He knew that Tony had lived in the upper floors, but other floors had served other functions as well.
"There is a front and side entrance to the building, Mr. Loki," JARVIS explained. "Plus there is access through the roof that Mr. Barton and Ms. Romanoff tried to get into earlier, but you would have to scale the building to get to it."
"So, technically three entrances then," Loki mused. "Are they all locked?"
"Locked and alarms set if anyone manages to get inside," JARVIS replied.
"Seems that Tony thought of everything," Loki muttered to himself.
"Mr. Stark has had certain protocols in all of his homes since his trip to Afghanistan," JARVIS explained. "He did up all of the security here specifically after you first started spending time here, though. It seemed that he didn't want anyone to find out about his association with you."
Loki understood that the AI had basically the ability to think for itself, but it was actually quite clever at times. It was easy to forget that the thing was a machine. "And I wonder why that would be," Loki said sarcastically. That just meant that Tony had been as smart as everyone claimed that he was.
"Mr. Loki, there appears to be a break in going on the first floor of the building," JARVIS said, interrupting Loki's thoughts. "I've alerted Mr. Stark as well, also that it appears to be Mr. Banner and Mr. Rogers."
"Is it Banner or the monster that he becomes?" Loki asked.
"It is currently Mr. Banner, but I will add that he does not look pleased," JARVIS said. It did seem that the AI had absorbed some of Tony's personality as well. "Mr. Stark is currently suiting up in one of his 'hidden' suits."
"Tony has hidden suits?" Loki asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Ones that he worked on before he was taken away," JARVIS explained.
"Then I think it's time to greet our guests," Loki said, grinning. He was looking forward to this. He managed to teleport downstairs just as Banner and Rogers were coming through the front door. "I wasn't aware that we had sent out an invitation," he said, smiling as the two of them jumped and turned back toward him. Loki had chosen to lean against one of the walls, looking relaxed and like he didn't have a care in the world.
Rogers narrowed his eyes at him. Loki couldn't help but realize just how 'All American' the man really looked. It was just about ridiculous. "There really shouldn't be a 'we' in that statement," he growled at Loki.
"Well, there is, so you're just going to have to adjust to it at some point," Loki said, looking positively bored by the entire conversation when it had barely just begun. He wondered how much longer he was going to have to deal with this. He would much rather be fighting with one of these plebeians rather than trying to converse with them.
Banner had been more silent, simply staring at Loki, but it seemed that he was finally ready to talk. "It doesn't have to be this way, Loki. We don't have to go through all this. Why are you making this so hard?"
"You tend to get pissed off when someone erases your memories and sticks you in the booby hatch with a fake life shoved in your head." Somehow, even in the suit, Tony had managed to get into the room without anyone noticing. Loki personally wasn't sure how he had been able to creep in. Maybe it had something to do with the new suit? "Was that Fury's idea? It sounds like something that sick fucker would come up with."
"I'm sure you can figure out whose idea it was," Banner said simply, looking over at Tony but not meeting his eyes, even though he had his face plate up at the moment. "That's not the point, though. You were both acting insane. Don't you remember now, since you're here?"
"Oh trust me, I think we both know plenty now," Loki replied with a bitter smile. "Doesn't begin to excuse what you did to us." He couldn't think of something that he could do that was truly worth taking his memories away from him, or Tony's, either. "I think the time for talking is at an end. Now...is the battle."
Author: Lena
Fandom: Marvel
Warnings: Foul language, some violence, and I don't know what else. I'll update this as the story spews forth.
Rating: R (The version of Tony Stark in this story is RIDICULOUSLY foul mouthed.)
Disclaimer: Marvel is god, I'm just a lowly worshiper, blah, blah, blah.
Summary: A man insists that he's Loki of Asgard, and ends up in a mental institution. Was he really sent here as punishment for his misdeeds in New York as he insists, or is he just a sadly deranged soul? Your guess is as good as mine.
Beta'd By: Just me tonight, kids. Feel free to correct anything you see. My grammar sucks balls.
When Romanoff had woken up, she had made similar threats that Barton had made, and Tony had barely paid attention to the back and forth sniping between her and Loki. He knew he should likely listen more, but he was working on the little presents that he knew should be waiting on the rest of his former teammates when they would likely arrive to free their comrades in arms and then try to collect them as well. He had to admit that he was kind of looking forward to it.
He wondered if Thor was around. Tony knew that it was at least somewhat likely, as Loki had initially escaped Asgardian jails even to be here in the first place, but he also knew that getting in contact with the thunder god was a huge pain in the ass. Cell phones didn't work on other planets, as far as Tony knew of, although he was pretty sure that he could put one together that would, although he didn't want to imagine the bill that he'd get for the roaming charges.
Someone bitching in the cage dragged Tony from his musing about interplanetary cell phones. He had to look up to see who it even was. Romanoff, it turned out. The one that he was personally pissed at for his own reasons. She had infiltrated his company, lulled him into trusting her, and then he was forced to keep her around and not blow her 'cover.' She was lucky he didn't find a way to stab her then.
"I need to go to the bathroom," Romanoff said to him. Tony looked around, and realized that he was alone in the room with them. Where the hell had Loki gone? Had he gotten so wrapped up he missed the god leaving?
"Use the corner," Tony said simply, already wanting to go back to the project that he was currently working on. It seemed like someone was always interrupting him when he was working. It had been that way before everything happened, and it seemed to continue to be the case.
"Not exactly in line with how you keep prisoners, Tony," Romanoff said in a soft, soothing tone. "You can't walk me to the bathroom?"
"During which you'll attack me in some way and escape?" Tony asked her with a snort. "Come on, Romanoff. I'm Tony fucking Stark, not a Bond villain. Either hold it or piss in the corner. I can't smell it from here, so I don't really care which one you do." He really had absolutely no care which one she did. However, there was NO way he was willingly letting her out of that cage.
"Can I at least get some privacy?" she asked him in that same tone that was already starting to grate on his nerves. He just had the feeling that she was trying to get him to do something. He just had to figure out what it was. Or gas the both of them.
"Trust me, the LAST thing I want to do is watch you go to the bathroom. Now, I'm trying to work. Will you please shut the hell up and let me do so?" he snapped, attention already turning away from her.
Before she could protest, an alarm went off. "Might want to hold your wee then," Tony said, smirking at her before shutting his laptop, pushing his chair over to the monitors that he had set up that showed all of the security cameras. He could see that Thor and Rogers had gotten onto the first floor of the building. "Looks like the cavalry is here."
OoOoOoOo
There were days that Tony felt like he was selling his soul for information about the Tesseract technology. He knew that what he was doing was wrong, but the more that he learned about the one gun that Loki had decided to allow him to have working (which seemed to only work in only Tony's presence, annoyingly enough), the less he cared about something as intangible as a 'soul.' The technology itself was incredible. It was a gun that never needed to be reloaded or recharged. What was there to hate about that? If he could replicate the energy, then he would be in business.
It was one late night in the lab that he was working on just that when he felt that oh so familiar chill in the air that signified his benefactor's presence. Tony turned around, all full of snark, only to feel any words die on his lips as soon as he saw Loki and the mess that he was.
"I'm calling in that favor now, Stark," Loki rasped to him, crumpled up on the floor. His long black hair was matted and tangled with what looked like blood, and his armor had numerous tears through it, showing wounds underneath.
"Wow, who'd you piss off this week?" Tony asked, still bending down and putting his arm around Loki's waist, helping him up from the floor. He had a small bed in the room that he sometimes crashed on, so he helped Loki over to it, gingerly laying him down on it.
"I am sure that you do not want to know," Loki replied curtly. "I am here because I have nowhere else to go, not for your witty banter."
"You love our repartee and you know it," Tony replied, grabbing his giant first aid kit anyway, figuring he'd start work on Loki's face and go from there. It looked like something had dragged his face across some jagged concrete from all the scrapes on it. "And I mainly want to know to make sure that whatever did this isn't going to follow you here and do a similar job on me."
Loki hissed when Tony started to apply antiseptic to his scratches, but didn't pull away, thankfully. "Nothing will be following me here. I think it would be the last place anyone would look for me."
Tony supposed that he had a point there. NO ONE would look for him here. "No wonder you popped over here then, along with the 'no place to go' part. I didn't miss that. Makes being the bad guy suck more, huh?"
"It only 'sucks,' as you say, because it was one of your good guys who did this to me." Loki had said that so softly that Tony wouldn't have caught it if he weren't already so close.
Tony felt his hand freeze in place when he realized what Loki meant by that. "Wait, are you saying that Thor did this to you?" He had to admit that it was something that he REALLY couldn’t believe.
"Yes, hard to believe that the golden child would beat me within an inch of my life," Loki groused. Even during what was a serious moment, Tony realized that Loki had an amazing grasp of slang that Thor didn't seem to get no matter how many times he was around anyone. "You'd be amazed at just what Thor is capable of."
Tony didn't answer right away, instead, when he finished cleaning up Loki's face, went to start unbuckling the leather armor from Loki's chest and slowly removing it, stopping for a second every time that Loki winced until the god snapped that he was not made of glass and to just get it over with. When he finally did, Tony could see that Loki's injuries were much more extensive than he initially realized. He looked just as bad as when the Hulk slung him around like a rag doll during a child's temper tantrum. "Sweet zombie Jesus, man. He really did do a number on you." One of the things that Tony could see was what looked like a giant hammer print on Loki's chest. Not many people running around with a giant hammer. Sure, this could be some trick of Loki's, but it seemed out of place. Why would the god let him see him vulnerable like this?
Loki just sighed, body slowly relaxing and sinking into the bed. It seemed to have chilled him out that Tony was seemingly believing him, or at least willing to. "So, why'd he do it?" Tony had to know. He knew that he'd likely be turned into a toad just for asking, but he HAD to know.
Loki grimaced. "He found me, on Midgard. It seemed he was not pleased that I had escaped. I believe his talk of us still being brothers is finally done. For that I'm relieved," he started to try and sit up, "but I could do without the beating with a hammer again. Quite annoying."
"Only you would call a hammer forged in a dying star annoying," Tony said with a roll of his eyes, gently pushing against Loki's shoulders and making him lay back down. "I know you heal super quickly, but you CAN'T move around right now. You're just going to fuck something up worse."
Loki looked like he was going to protest, but apparently something painful twinged and he groaned, lying back onto the mattress again. "No one's here tonight. Just you and me," Tony reassured him. "Well, and JARVIS, but he doesn't tell anyone anything I don't want him to. So, chill the fuck out and get some rest."
"You sound like you actually care," Loki said with a rueful smile.
Tony sighed. Damn, it really did. "It's like you said, paying back that debt," he said quickly. "Speaking of that, I think I've got it figured out just how to power those damn weapons on my own without your little beads or whatever the hell you gave me last time."
"Is that so?" Loki almost looked relieved to have something else to talk about. "Does it have to do with that thing in your chest?"
Tony hated anyone speaking about his arc reactor. Everyone on the planet knew the very basics about it, but very few knew how it actually worked, and that was how he liked it. "Something like that," he said evasively. "That and the giant one that you borrowed that one time. Clean energy and all that." He had been reading his father's old notes on the Tesseract as well, and those were helping him out more than he wanted to admit.
Tony was actually starting to think that his father had done a lot more studying of the Tesseract than he would have others wanting to know. Tony was starting to think something quite worrisome about that 'element' that his father had left notes behind that he had used, but it was something that he didn't want to admit, not even in his own head just yet, and he was usually was honest with himself.
"I've been quite curious about that since it interfered with my spear," Loki admitted to him. "I still haven't quite figured out how you were able to avoid being taken over by it."
"Good thing you didn't think to aim a little toward the left," Tony joked. When Loki looked at him confused, he went on, pointing to where his heart was. "The human heart is on the left, not the middle." He wondered if he should have admitted that, but it was a very easy thing for him to learn about, wasn't it?
"I believe your device still would have interfered," Loki pointed out. "It has to do with your heart, even if it doesn't sit directly over it." Loki shrugged, and then cringed when he realized just what a bad idea that was to do with his injuries. "I suppose that we'll never know."
"Well, I'm happy about that. Not really thrilled with the idea of being anyone's mind slave," Tony remarked. "I enjoy having free will and all that jazz."
"The idea that we have control over our destinies is the greatest lie humanity ever made up," Loki said softly. "It's something that you may not like to hear, but I've been around long enough to realize that no matter what you do, it's impossible to fight fate."
Tony snorted. "So you were destined to try and take over Earth and wind up failing pretty miserably. You didn't even get part of one city."
"I think it is my destiny to fail," Loki remarked simply.
"Now that's bullshit. I don't know why I'm encouraging you, because that'll likely to lead to bad things, but it's no one's destiny to fail constantly. Maybe you're just trying to do things the wrong way. Or maybe you should stop trying to kill people so often." That was a handy little idea.
That managed to elicit a chuckle from Loki. "I'm still amused that you sound like you care about me."
"Yeah, freaky huh? I think we got a thing going on now. You teach me how to blow things up with weapons from another world, and I give you inspirational talk while patching up your boo-boos. We're a regular pair," Tony remarked. He really needed not to think on this for long. "Now come on. I can't handle letting you sleep this off in my lab. Makes me feel weird."
It took a few tries to make sure that he wasn't going to hurt him, but Tony managed to get Loki off what was basically a shitty cot and get him up to one of his guest rooms. He was quite grateful that Bruce was off at a conference and Steve was gone to SHIELD for some mission that they wanted him on. He did NOT want to explain this to anyone.
He managed to get Loki in the bed and, after directing him to where the bathroom was, leaving him to his privacy.
OoOoOoOo
While Tony was distracted, Loki had decided to do a walk around the building, trying to figure out if there were any easy ways for someone to get into the place. He was having to remind himself that he could talk to Tony's 'helper' JARVIS while he was doing so. It would do nothing but help, after all.
"How many entrances are there to the building, JARVIS?" Loki asked as he walked down the stairwell. He knew that Tony had lived in the upper floors, but other floors had served other functions as well.
"There is a front and side entrance to the building, Mr. Loki," JARVIS explained. "Plus there is access through the roof that Mr. Barton and Ms. Romanoff tried to get into earlier, but you would have to scale the building to get to it."
"So, technically three entrances then," Loki mused. "Are they all locked?"
"Locked and alarms set if anyone manages to get inside," JARVIS replied.
"Seems that Tony thought of everything," Loki muttered to himself.
"Mr. Stark has had certain protocols in all of his homes since his trip to Afghanistan," JARVIS explained. "He did up all of the security here specifically after you first started spending time here, though. It seemed that he didn't want anyone to find out about his association with you."
Loki understood that the AI had basically the ability to think for itself, but it was actually quite clever at times. It was easy to forget that the thing was a machine. "And I wonder why that would be," Loki said sarcastically. That just meant that Tony had been as smart as everyone claimed that he was.
"Mr. Loki, there appears to be a break in going on the first floor of the building," JARVIS said, interrupting Loki's thoughts. "I've alerted Mr. Stark as well, also that it appears to be Mr. Banner and Mr. Rogers."
"Is it Banner or the monster that he becomes?" Loki asked.
"It is currently Mr. Banner, but I will add that he does not look pleased," JARVIS said. It did seem that the AI had absorbed some of Tony's personality as well. "Mr. Stark is currently suiting up in one of his 'hidden' suits."
"Tony has hidden suits?" Loki asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Ones that he worked on before he was taken away," JARVIS explained.
"Then I think it's time to greet our guests," Loki said, grinning. He was looking forward to this. He managed to teleport downstairs just as Banner and Rogers were coming through the front door. "I wasn't aware that we had sent out an invitation," he said, smiling as the two of them jumped and turned back toward him. Loki had chosen to lean against one of the walls, looking relaxed and like he didn't have a care in the world.
Rogers narrowed his eyes at him. Loki couldn't help but realize just how 'All American' the man really looked. It was just about ridiculous. "There really shouldn't be a 'we' in that statement," he growled at Loki.
"Well, there is, so you're just going to have to adjust to it at some point," Loki said, looking positively bored by the entire conversation when it had barely just begun. He wondered how much longer he was going to have to deal with this. He would much rather be fighting with one of these plebeians rather than trying to converse with them.
Banner had been more silent, simply staring at Loki, but it seemed that he was finally ready to talk. "It doesn't have to be this way, Loki. We don't have to go through all this. Why are you making this so hard?"
"You tend to get pissed off when someone erases your memories and sticks you in the booby hatch with a fake life shoved in your head." Somehow, even in the suit, Tony had managed to get into the room without anyone noticing. Loki personally wasn't sure how he had been able to creep in. Maybe it had something to do with the new suit? "Was that Fury's idea? It sounds like something that sick fucker would come up with."
"I'm sure you can figure out whose idea it was," Banner said simply, looking over at Tony but not meeting his eyes, even though he had his face plate up at the moment. "That's not the point, though. You were both acting insane. Don't you remember now, since you're here?"
"Oh trust me, I think we both know plenty now," Loki replied with a bitter smile. "Doesn't begin to excuse what you did to us." He couldn't think of something that he could do that was truly worth taking his memories away from him, or Tony's, either. "I think the time for talking is at an end. Now...is the battle."