Steve knew a thing or two about being beaten up. At the end of the third day, by the time he couldn't move his fingers, or summon the resilience to shove himself out of the puddle of his own puke, he had to give these guys a reluctant nine and a half out of ten. They dropped the half point for leaving it there, while he was still conscious, and for, curiously, leaving his face untouched.

There was something very demoralizing about a good old fashioned punch to the nose, and a working over didn't seem entirely thorough without it.

For another five days, they fed him water, and nothing else, through a tube in the wall, while he waited with increasing despair for the Avengers to find him. Any moment now, he thought, every waking moment of that hellish week, any moment now the walls will burst and tumble like sugar cubes as Mjolnir smacks effortlessly through them. Any moment, he'd hear the whine and boom of Tony's propulsors, Barton's wisecracks, or the all but silent carnage wreaked by the Widow on a rampage.

But for five days nothing happened. It was so silent in the cells that he began to fear the cadre had fled, had left him here to starve alone in a six foot square white tiled box that was slowly filling up with his own stink. It was something of a relief when the need to excrete shut down altogether and he could crawl over to the tube and leave his necessary corner to mind itself.

A day after that there was an odd taste to the water, and the next thing he knew he was waking up, scrubbed clean to the point of soreness, with his jaw aching and his wide open mouth gagged with an apple. Intense, intense apple taste overloaded his senses, and it was a while before he registered the more worrying fact that his arms and legs were strapped down to some kind of gurney. A stainless steel gurney, with gutters down each side.

There were chandeliers above him, and all his senses, sharpened by deprivation, reeled at the scents of roast meat and pastry, fruit and port, perfume and sweat, the glitter of candles set deep on a long mahogany table, its red surface reflecting gold everywhere – gold plates, gold punchbowl, golden goblets brimming with red wine.

Four of the masked and faceless minions of this league of shadows lifted up the steel tray on which he lay and slid it onto the polished surface of that long table. He managed to get a look down – every villain he could think of surrounded him, watching. A glitter of eyes stirred behind masks, and he could see himself reflected there. He was dressed in a short, white Grecian tunic. Leaves nodded in the corners of his eyes, the pressure of the wreath a small irritation as it curled around his forehead.

Steve wasn't a stupid man, but sometimes he was too innocent to put two and two together. Sometimes he didn't want to know what evil lurked in the hearts of men. Sometimes it took Harry Osborne, with a chafing dish sizzling gently in front of him, sharpening his carving knife dramatically on a steel that dripped sparks with every stroke, to make him realize he lay on a platter, trussed up with an apple in his mouth like a suckling pig. The main course.

"Mr. Fear, what will you have? I believe the inner thigh was considered a delicacy, in Aztec times."

He dropped an over-familiar hand on Steve's bare leg, angling it. Light ran off the curved blade in his grip, and Steve let out an incoherent noise and thrashed against his restraints.

Laughter, every shade of mad, and some disturbingly sane.

Osborn lifted the knife, trailed it up Steve's body, across his throat, and poised it above his right eye. "Though of course in some cultures the eyes are the cut of honour. The question in my mind is, do we want him to watch, as we carve him, or do we want him not to know where the next cut will fall?"

Down the end of the table something grey stirred in a fog of black. "Balls," it said, in a voice like ash. "The balls go first."

More laughter, and Steve tried very hard to be calm, rationing his breathing as they'd taught him in the army, trying to keep his pulse steady. But then Osborn was wiping the tears of mirth from his eyes and sliding his fingers up, and there was only so much that Steve could take without screaming beneath his gag and pulling and pulling at his restraints, hands numb, wrists bleeding, and his gaze locked horrified on the bitter point of the knife as it descended.

And then something altered in the air around him, and the knife stopped, hanging like a baleful star above him. Osborn's eyes had gone wide and furious. They tracked something approaching behind Steve, but they were the only part of him that still moved. Even the candle flames hung stationary, and did not tremble or bow as Loki strolled quietly into view, propped his hip against the table and examined his green-lacquered fingernails.

"Tch," he said, softly, reaching out to prise the carving knife from Osborn's clenched fingers. The popping of knuckles sounded like bursting bubble-wrap in the unnatural hush. "A great feast, and no one invited Loki? Can it be that no one remembers what a very bad idea that was last time?"

Slowly, deliberately, he lowered Osborn's hands to the table top, one on top of the other, and slowly and deliberately he pushed the knife through both of them, deep into the wood. Then he turned to look at Steve.

There was a light of laughter in his eyes, as though he found Steve's predicament hilarious, but he had stopped the dismemberment before it started, so Steve felt inclined to let that go. "What shall we do with them, then?"

He watched Steve struggle to get his dislocated jaw to bite down, so he could free his mouth and speak. Then he reached out and wrenched the apple free – pain whiting out the corners of Steve's vision, thundering through his starved belly and weakened limbs. With the smuggest of little smirks, Loki bit where Steve's mouth had been, and then tucked the fruit into Steve's bound hand.

"No, don't tell me. We should arrest them all and take them to the authorities blah blah blah... What kind of fun is that?"

A tiny gesture of his left ring finger, and though everything else in the room maintained its strange and frozen calm, the flames of the candles leaped up, licked down the wax and sunk themselves greedily into the table, into the curtains, into the carpet and into the clothes of the men in the seats. "Care to place your bets now on who will get out and who won't?"

He leaned down, bringing his mouth close enough almost to touch Steve's ear. It was getting very warm already, the room filling with a fierce amber glow, but Loki's breath was cold as silver and moonlight on his face. "I have the utmost faith in you, of course."

And he disappeared, leaving Steve bound, starved and tenderized, in the middle of a burning table in the middle of a burning room, surrounded by angry villains.

"Loki!" Steve yelled, gulping in a lungful of smoke, while expected betrayal and surprising disappointment warred with the terror in his throat. "Loki, please! I can't..."

The smoke smothered him and everything went dark.

A clean death, Steve thought, swimming up from unconsciousness to find he was no longer in pain. Smoke still surrounded him, billowing in grey coils just beyond his face, but he could no longer feel its searing choke in his lungs, and he felt clear, as though he had just woken up from a long, refreshing sleep. So that's what he meant.

There was plenty of time to be grateful as he waited for the expected tunnel and bright light. A quick and painless death by smoke inhalation was indeed far preferable to what the other villains had planned for him. He breathed out a long sigh of relief. It was nice to think that everything was over now, all the struggles and the strangeness of this new world overcome, and only peace ahead.

But the moments stretched on, and the smoke remained, curling and twisting above him. His stomach rumbled, and a spot beneath his right shoulderblade twitched, where there had once been a numb patch from one too many bullets being dug free. No celestial light came, and after a while he reached out – his arms unbound now – and touched the smoke. It was a solid thing, like clouded glass, though the shades and tendrils of it swirled around his fingers, and when he pushed it opened like a coffin lid and let him sit up, blinking, in the everyday light of a large, bare room.

He still staggered as he climbed out, weak from starvation, but all his lacerations and broken bones were healed, and even the bruises sponged away.

Light poured from a skylight into the centre of the room and made the casket from which he had climbed shine like opal, catching in the sinuous carvings of its sides. Steve stood in the sunshine as if it were a shower – he was altogether bare, the humiliating tunic and wreath nowhere to be seen - and gathered his wits. He recognized Asgardian technology when he saw it, and as no Thor had rushed into the room to envelop him in the crushing hug that, these days, made him cringe, the obvious conclusion was (as Stark would put it) obvious.

The door to the room was open, and by it stood a very mundane padded chair with a set of SHIELD scrubs neatly folded on top of it. Steve picked them up and stood for a moment with them in his hands. Washed and smoothed as they were, they were still clearly the same ones he had given to Loki on that day, and did that make them some kind of message? A reminder of what had happened to the villain in Steve's custody, on Steve's watch? A warning, or a rebuke?

He laughed at himself and put them on. Whatever they meant, they were clothes, and alone in a super-villain's lair as he was it was better to be clothed than not.

Barefoot, he came cautiously out into a short corridor of stone, into which a wintery light shone from an open door at the end. He padded up it, noticing the silence. The temperature was just a little chill and the air fairly seemed to ring with silence like a crystal and light like liquid gold.

That impression only strengthened when he came out into the huge room at the end of the passage. Here, a table, a few scattered chairs and piles and piles of books and scrolls utterly failed to fill the emptiness created by a wall of windows, through which Steve could see swells of pine forest and distant mountains, aflame with snow.

Loki stood there quite alone, looking out at a circling eagle. His back was to Steve, so there was a moment when Steve could look at him without being looked at in return.

The god seemed a piece with the solitude and the serenity, watching and thinking. He was much taller than Steve remembered – a great deal taller than Steve himself – and he was broader too across the shoulders, less fragile than Steve's mental picture of him. Some of the disparity came from his elegance; one didn't expect so big a man to be so neatly, so carefully put together. Some came from his litheness – all angles, sinew and sharp bones. But most of it, Steve realized, came simply because he wasn't standing next to Thor and suffering from the comparison.

Steve was struck again by a twist of painful fellow-feeling. He'd loved Bucky, honest he had, and he'd give anything to have him back. But sometimes, before the serum, dragged out by Bucky as a double date to some disappointed woman, he'd felt like that one fat girl brought out by the cheerleaders to point up their own beauty. He knew what it felt like to be judged against someone else's charms and found lacking, asked along because he was someone's friend, not because he was himself. I guess both of us had something to prove. I guess too that both of us have proved it by now.

Steve coughed politely to show he was there. Loki turned and smiled. He had a trick of moving that did not disturb the silence, only the chain-mail in his armour swinging with a quiet rustling, like a snake through dry grass. The expression gave Steve pause too. Except for that day, he'd never seen Loki without a sneer, and he still wasn't sure whether, on that day, Loki had just been playing him for sympathy.

But this was an oddly simple smile, the cool light filling up those clear green eyes, making them look guileless, even kind. "Captain," he made a gesture of invitation towards the table, where a place had been set, and a shallow bowl steamed beside a small cup and a single stem of grapes. "You should eat. Little at first, but more later when you become accustomed to it."

"I could eat a horse," Steve said, sitting down and finding porridge, five mouthfuls and gone.

Loki's smile tipped up at the edges into amusement. "Believe me, I have some experience of this. Gorging after will burst your stomach and kill you, and I would not have that happen after I went to such trouble to save your life."

Companionably, he sat at the opposite end of the table and poured himself wine from a silver jug. His presence was as soothing and as mellow as the light in which the room bathed, and Steve thought, with a feeling of revelation, that maybe this – this gentle, thoughtful young man, quiet and wise - was the brother Thor so loved. The Avengers had put Thor's continued affection for his evil brother down to his big heart; a nature that could love the unlovable. But now it seemed odd that it hadn't occurred to them that perhaps there was, or once had been, something in Loki that was worthy of love.

"About that," he said, putting the third grape down after a pang of cramp. "Why did you save me? We're not exactly friends."

"Nor are we exactly enemies, you and I." Loki propped his feet on the table and rocked on the back legs of his chair, to the distress of a succession of schoolmistresses in Steve's head. "Despite what you may have been told, I am not an evil man, and I would not see a fine thing destroyed without reason."

"You've got reason. I've foiled plenty of your plans."

A breath of laughter as Loki buried his answer in his cup, and Steve was driven to carry on, to have all his crimes taken into consideration.

"I didn't get there in time. That day. I didn't get there in time to stop Thor."

Loki put the cup down, tilted his head like a raven regarding a daring worm. "No one could have stopped him," he said. "But that situation has been resolved. Have you not noticed the difference?"

A dark suspicion made Steve put down his half-cup of coffee with a shiver. Yes, there had been a difference in Thor, since he came back from his sessions of forced re-education at SHIELD headquarters. He'd been just that little bit less sure of himself, just that little bit softer. But they'd put it down to the acquisition of a guilty conscience, the realization that he had made a truly appalling mistake. Now Loki's veiled threat came back to him. It had taken him a fortnight to figure out that by "rectifying this inequality and saving our brotherhood" Loki had meant he would pay back rape with rape. But even when Steve had worked it out he'd thought it was empty defiance. As if anyone could do that to Thor.

"What did you do? You didn't...?"

Loki grinned like a scythe. "Oh please, force is Thor's thing. Persuasion is mine. I did something much worse. I made him beg for it before I gave it to him."

Alright, scratch that bit about gentle.

Steve locked his hands around his cup and looked at the ripples on his coffee for council. "I hope you don't mind me saying this," he said at last, "but it seems to me that your relationship with your brother is not exactly healthy for either of you."

This time Loki's laughter sounded as if it was forced out under pressure – as if he would burst if he tried to hold it in. Not a happy sound. "And that pales beside my 'relationship' with my 'father'. Why do you think I threw myself into outer space to get away from them both? It is not my doing that they won't ever leave me alone to heal, but must keep coming back and having another go."

Twisting the stem of grapes between his fingers, Steve checked out the exits. One the way he'd come, one opposite that opened onto a flight of steps. It was habit by now, but he didn't feel he would need to run. He felt paradoxically safe, cozy even, with his strength returning and the knots in his stomach uncoiling and turning back into hunger.

He thought of pointing out the contradiction between what Loki had just said and his claim, that day, that he had thought there would always be love between himself and Thor. But really, you only had to listen to Stark on one of his alcoholic rambles on the subject of his dad to know that it was precisely because love was an inescapable chain that family could hurt you worst of all. So maybe neither part was a lie.

"Well," he said instead, reaching for the bowl of fruit that was the centerpiece of the table, taking a plum. No more apples, not for a long time. "Maybe some of that is to do with the super-villain thing. They feel like they need to stop you, since they're pretty much the only ones who can. You should try being a hero for a bit. See if that helps."

"When I was a very young child," Loki said, his eyes once more on the mountains, but his gaze a thousand years ago or more, "my father said to me 'a wise king does not seek out war.' Thor brought war to our doorstep. I thought to please my father by finding a way to destroy our enemies that did not involve war, or the slaughter of our own people."

He frowned, the look of bemusement making his face briefly resemble his brother's. "And that somehow made me a monster. I have still not quite grasped why. I do not think I understand the difference between heroism and villainy. I seem to achieve my greatest acts of evil by trying hard to do good."

"I reckon saving me comes down on the hero side."

That head-tilt again, birdlike and curious. "Because you are a good man, and saving you increases the amount of goodness in the world?"

"Not really. Saving anyone – anyone at all – qualifies as heroic in my book. And that brings me back to my question. Why get me out of there, when you've nothing to gain and plenty of goodwill to lose from your allies?"

"It troubles you, this 'why'?"

"Yes. Yes, frankly it does. I wish I knew what you wanted from me. I'd give it, if I could. I mean, if it wasn't against my principles. I'd like to do something to say thank you, if I could."

"Perhaps I intend to use you for one of my cruel schemes?"

Steve laughed, though it was likely enough. "Don't give me a perhaps," he said. "Give me the truth."

"The truth?" Loki arched a winged black brow at him, amused.

"A truth, then, if the whole of it is too complicated."

"Oh, good answer. Very well then. This truth is that when you burst in, that day, I expected violence, or pity, contempt, or fear. But you gave me none of those things. You gave me understanding, and that I had never encountered before. I liked it. I would have more, if you have it to offer."

"You want to be friends?" Steve asked, incredulous and disturbed, not sure if he'd followed Loki's meaning, but also worryingly flattered if he had.

"You could put it that way."

Definitely flattered. Being Captain America had brought a set of problems he would never have imagined when he was just praying for the strength to make the bullying stop. It hadn't occurred to him, then, that he might have followers, fans, sycophants and yet find it hard to gain honest friends. So many people were lured by the glamour, who didn't really want to know the man. "We're kind of on opposite sides."

"Would that matter?"

Of course it would matter, Steve thought at first. There would be the issue of trying to kill each other, for a start. Though he supposed that if Loki could decide not to take attempted murder personally, it wasn't beyond him to reciprocate. This little talk had been strange but not unpleasant, and there was still the possibility that once Loki had been allowed to work through some of his problems, he could be persuaded into a more productive use of his talents as a trickster; such as stealing tech from the gods to distribute among mankind, cheating demons out of their victims, shaking up the stagnant, breaking down society's restrictive boxes, encouraging the weirdoes, and giving marvelous gifts.

Maybe Loki was right, at that – he might not be cut out to be a white knight. But he could be Loki in a way that was a hell of a lot better for the world, if someone would just show him how. Why shouldn't that someone be Steve? Steve had never been the kind of guy to back down from a challenge or a responsibility, not even one as superhuman as this.

"I guess it wouldn't have to, if I didn't let it," he agreed. "Alright then, big guy, it's a deal. Let's shake on it."

Later, when Steve was back in the Avengers' mansion, being mercilessly grilled by Coulson on how he had managed to be in twelve different cities at once, caught on film robbing a different bank in each one, he recalled that another thing trickster gods were known for was a slightly dubious sense of humor.

SHIELD rounded up the Steve-clones quickly enough. Afflicted by identical guilty consciences, they'd turned themselves in within hours of his return. But it gave him a qualm for a day or two, until he put it down to 'waste not, want not,' on Loki's part and reluctantly had to laugh. (A) because the truth that Loki really had wanted him for one of his cruel schemes didn't necessarily mean that the offer of friendship wasn't also true. And (b) because, frankly, what did he expect?

Buddy, you're really not hero material at all, are you? I should have guessed.