"It's complicated," he starts, trying to decide where to begin. Does he tell her about Loki and the Tesseract first? The fact that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been watching him for years before finally approaching him? Something else? It takes him a second or two to pick a place, and he tries to make in clear in those moments that he's not deflecting, just trying to come up with a starting point.

"There's this group called S.H.I.E.L.D.," he continues when he works it out. "They're kind of a government thing, and they'd been keeping tabs on me since my first run in with the Other Guy. Running damage control, I guess. Keeping people off my back, since they didn't think what happened last time I was in New York was really my fault."

Or maybe they did and they'd wanted to be there to put him down, if and when they needed to. He didn't know what S.H.I.E.L.D. knew or didn't know for sure, nor did he fully understand why they'd kept Ross from finding him when he'd obviously been looking, but he owed them for that much, at least. That and giving him a chance in the first place -- or a second chance, if they were counting the fact that he'd all but destroyed their helicarrier against him.

"They came to me in Calcutta because they needed my help. There was this thing -- this artifact that one of the bad guys decided he needed to get his hands on, and they needed to find it and him. They figured I was their best chance, since the artifact was giving off gamma radiation and I'm still sort of the go-to guy for that." He shrugged. "I said yes and they brought me back here.

"It was supposed to be a temporary thing."