Chapter Text
Footsteps
and
muttering.
It takes him a while to connect the sensations to memory. The Grandmaster’s footsteps, pacing back and forth. The Grandmaster’s voice… the words are too hard to grasp, but there’s something… different… about the cadence. Loki can’t make it out.
When he tries to sit up, though, the Grandmaster is suddenly there, a hand on his chest, pinning him down. Loki goes still, blinking back tears against the too-bright lights.
“Shhh, relax,” the man murmurs, brushing fingers gently down Loki’s cheek. “Don’t get up. It’s, uh, it’s pretty hectic out there, but you’re safe in here. With me. It’s the one place they can’t reach.”
Hectic?
Oh, Norns, the revolution.
Loki hadn’t expected it to get very far, not against the Grandmaster’s guards; it had merely been a convenient distraction. But if the Grandmaster’s been thrust out of power…
That’s what’s different. In the muttering. When the Grandmaster isn’t annoyed or raging, he’s only got one setting: amused self-assurance. As the leader of the planet, he’s got all the power; his whim is law. But now…
“You’re so tense,” the Grandmaster says reprovingly—though with a hint of unexpected fondness to his tone. “Even with a little liquid relaxation. That’s not, um, it’s not good for you, getting all keyed up like that. Especially now.”
The amusement’s… not gone. Different. Same with the confidence, like it’s quieter, and strangely off-key. Accepting. The Grandmaster doesn’t accept things; when anything displeases him, he turns coldly lethal—or worse. Dealing with a slave revolt and the escape of his favorite pets? Execution might be a mercy.
Then again, Loki’s never seen the man without his usual authority. Is he coming to terms with no longer being in charge—or quietly scheming for how to reclaim his station?
Loki’s best efforts had failed to dig up much of Sakaar’s history, and nothing that spoke of a time before the Grandmaster’s reign; it’s a planet without a history, aside from the Grandmaster’s sweeping claims about the Contest of Champions. And without knowing how the man got to power in the first place, it would be impossible to predict how easily he might regain it.
Which means that, even now, Loki can’t risk rousing his ire.
And it might already be too late to avoid that.
“Grandmaster—” he croaks out, but the Grandmaster taps his lips again.
“You know, you’d think—after all I’ve done for you, all I’m about to do for you—you’d think you’d have learned to trust me.” He frowns. “I’m gonna need your trust, Lolo. We’ve got a whole new, uh, a whole new world to set up.”
Glancing out toward something Loki can’t see, the Grandmaster sighs again, wistfully this time. “I didn’t expect it so, uh, so soon,” he says. “Usually takes a few centuries to fall, uh, to fall apart like this. Don’t get me wrong, I live for variety, it’s just… I’m gonna miss this setup. It was going pretty good.” Looking back at Loki, he smiles almost painfully. “All things must come to an end, I suppose.
“All things but me.”
A shiver runs down Loki’s spine at the odd weariness in the man’s eyes, the hunger. As so many times before, he wants to get away from the man, to run off somewhere safe and comfortable, to hide.
As so many times before, he stays put, forcing back the terror, relaxing into a situation he abhors, and concealing his true feelings behind the social masks he’s always been so good at. In other circumstances, he might have fled across the branches of Yggdrasil, found his way to better surroundings, but he is stuck here, so far removed from the Nine Realms and the well of energy that used to fuel his seidr. On Sakaar, he must get by on his natural energy, conserving his powers—and he dares not let the Grandmaster learn about them. The man is far too fond of new toys.
But staying here, in the Grandmaster’s power, would mean laying himself open to whatever fate the man sees fit to give him, and it’s likely not a pleasant one. So his options are to accept that, or to wait for a chance to slip away. Or, perhaps, to physically overpower the man… but as satisfying as it sounds in his head, that would mean burning any bridges he has left—a dangerous gambit if he’s forced to remain on the planet.
The Grandmaster hums, and there’s a glass in his hand again, hovering near Loki’s mouth. “You’ll need to, uh, relax for this next part,” the man says with an unnerving grin, and Loki knows from long experience that it’s dangerous to flat-out refuse. And if he can’t talk his way out, fight his way out, or slip out unnoticed, what choice does he really have? He opens his mouth.
The liquid is bright and shivery on his tongue, poured in a little at a time so he can swallow it without choking. It’s citrus-like, but otherwise it doesn’t taste or feel like anything he’s had before. The effect, though, is nearly instantaneous, and he finds himself relaxing back into the cushions, his resistance draining away.
“There we go,” the Grandmaster drawls, and pats his cheek. “You worry too much, Lolo. I know you, uh, you like to predict things. Always aware of the threats, even if you can’t do, uh, you can’t do anything about them. You would have done great in the arena; Asgardians are fun that way.”
A sliver of dread pushes through the drink haze. It takes Loki a moment to realize that the Grandmaster has dropped his mocking butchery of ‘Asgard’, and is even correctly using the gentilic to talk about the people. So he’s encountered others from Asgard, and surely more than just the Valkyrie who’d been trying to deny her homeland.
“Still, you live long enough, you learn to value a little change now and then. A little, uh, a little unpredictability. Time to try on a new role for a while… see what it’s like in different shoes. And for that…”
The Grandmaster gracefully sinks down by Loki, settling in and placing one hand on his chest again, immovable as Mjolnir. The other hand brushes back Loki’s hair before resting on his forehead.
“For that, it’s time to get inside your head.”
Before Loki’s brain catches up to the threat, there’s a quick, unbearable pressure, and something slipping inside him—not physical, but just as visceral a feeling, his entire being filling up with thick slime. With sudden panic, he stares up at the Grandmaster, no longer seeing the room or the outward shell but the true nature of the being who holds his life in its hands, immense and harrowing and distorted beyond all recognition, not just as the Grandmaster but as anything alive and real.
Frozen in sheer atavistic terror, he can’t even struggle as the bits of his psyche get teased apart, and then there’s something reaching in, grasping at his core, pulling forth a piece of his essence like a string and twisting it around a piece of the Grandmaster that glows like moonlight flickering through a tornado.
The instant the connection is made, Loki—
— f e e l s —
Even this closely, he can only make out a fraction of the reality, but the being is old beyond measure, as aged and ageless as the universe itself and just as unkillable, its psyche cracked and reformed as it has found ways to adapt itself to the pitiless weight of piled-up millennia. Just a taste of that enormity has Loki pressed down into the cushions, gasping against the knowledge he can’t cope with. For all that he thinks of himself as a god, the distance between the Grandmaster and him is unfathomably greater than any superficial distance between him and the mortals around them.
The awareness is too immense; he can’t bear it, and gathers up his seidr to flee, but the impulse is smothered before he can even attempt it, the Grandmaster’s hands reaching deep inside him again, the violation unendurable, and he—
There, the voice echoes through his entire being, awareness more than words. I see you.