Chapter Text
Loki stared, unseeing, at the heap of broken men in his master’s living room. They squirmed, and howled, and occasionally begged for mercy through their tears. Loki didn’t really understand what was so terrible about their position. He wasn’t doing anything to them, nothing at all.
He was pretty sure one of them was dead, however. The red-head. There was a whiff of human decay that reached him every once in a while. The man who had been holding the gun was right below the corpse, wailing the loudest. It’s always those ones, isn’t it? The ones who bark the most are usually weakest.
Except for Thor. And Anthony.
Loki approached, expressionless, and nudged the body off the man with a dainty foot. “Better?” he asked, but only heard incoherent pleas thrown at him. He sighed, exhausted, and sat on the floor. He put a hand to the man’s mouth and nose, watching as his eyes grew desperate. “Sh, sh, please. I really need you to quiet down.” He paused, gaze unfocusing. “I don’t feel too good.”
He pulled away his hand. The man started wailing again, which was making Loki’s headache so much worse than it needed to be. He slumped back onto the floor, staring at the ceiling. “Jarvis, where is my master?”
“He is out, Loki,” Jarvis replied. He had been terribly unhelpful since Anthony left.
Loki turned onto his side, knees to his chest. He really felt unwell. “Will he come back?”
Silence. Then, “I have no reason to assume the contrary. However, my programming is not advanced enough for me to understand the complete nuance of human emotion, and its consequences.” He almost sounded sorry. “I’m afraid I cannot give you a definitive answer.”
“You already said that before,” Loki mumbled.
“Perhaps, Loki,” the AI started, gently, “It may help if you drank some water and rested. Would you like to head to the bedroom? There are fresh blankets in the cabinet.”
“Do you think he’ll take the ring away?” Loki observed the claret band upon his finger. “Do you think he’ll go back on his promise?”
After a while, Jarvis just dimmed the windows till the room was half-dark.
“Maybe if he kills me it would be better,” Loki mused, watching blurry specks of dust flying in the stale, decaying air of his master’s living room. “I wish he would at least hit me,” he admitted. “I wish he were here.”
Loki had been awake for much longer than thirty hours. His master had been gone for about fifteen. I can’t do this right now, Anthony had said, exhausted, livid, wearing revulsion on his face. He then just… left. There had been no screaming, no hitting or strangling, no demands. His master hadn’t even forced him into violent sexual acts. Loki didn’t really know what to make of that.
He had already gone through the worst of his grief, or at least he thought he had. He didn’t quite understand why, but after he knocked his own head against the wall hard enough to see stars, his brain stopped attacking him brutally. All the terrible thoughts lost their edge and lulled down into an amorphous blob of general discomfort. And nausea. Loki really wished he could be held in warm arms.
The words I can’t do this right now had played in his head over and over long enough that they had lost all meaning. He almost thought they sounded like sing-song by now, a lullaby. He supposed any lullaby was a sort of good-bye. Perhaps Anthony would be back if he went to sleep? Perhaps Loki could awaken to a familiar hand suffocating him, or a fist pulling his hair, or maybe even a rough fuck. He’d do anything for one of those just about now. Anything to be rid of this cruel silence his master had forced upon him.
Well, almost silence. There was still the wailing man.
Had he magic, he could just make the man sleep. Had he magic, he could remove that putrid scent of decaying flesh from the air. And, for that matter, if Loki had magic, he could just go find his lover wherever he may be.
You wouldn’t.
You wouldn’t, because you wouldn’t want to anger him.
Even anger would be good.
In any case, Loki didn’t have magic, hadn’t had it for a century now. This wasn’t news, it wasn’t some sort of sudden revelation brought to light by his unlikely visitor. It wasn’t an unfamiliar grief, but it was oddly devastating all of a sudden. A nightmare upon a nightmare.
If only Anthony were here.
“Jarvis, where is my master?” he asked again. How many hours had passed now? He did not hear Jarvis’ response. He didn’t need to.
There were strange shadows in his vision, like haunting beasts darting too quick for him to catch. They seemed to smile, blinding white teeth shining in the corners, laughing, always laughing at him. Loki supposed there must be something funny about all this. The wails of the man on the floor eventually turned to soft sobs, or maybe it was Loki that was sobbing, because at some point he had placed his hand over the man’s mouth once more and he stopped moving. Perhaps he had gone to sleep.
There was also this constant thumping going on, thump-a-thump, like a soft mallet tenderising hard meat. Maybe it had something to do with Loki’s fist hitting his own thigh over and over, mindlessly, hoping for some relief. Afterwards, he stood and walked over to the windows to watch the city move ahead — as if the world hadn’t ceased spinning —, and he thought it strange when he heard Jarvis lock the glass doors to the balcony.
“I would never leave my master,” Loki reassured, heartfelt. “Besides, there’s nowhere to go from here.” He waved a vague hand towards the 91 floors beneath.
“Indeed,” Jarvis simply replied, hiding again in his inhuman silence.
Eventually one of the broken men on the floor seemed to perk up, shuffling in his restraints, looking around. Loki found it very polite that he did not start screaming or wailing or begging for his life, so he sat across from him and stared.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Loki asked. The man seemed awfully tired.
“I hope not,” the other breathed out, and there was an ugly, wet wheezing in his lungs.
Loki did not think this was a very nice answer, so he scoffed and turned his back, lying on the ground, once again watching specks of dust. He ran a hand through his hair, feeling the bump there where he had been hit the prior night. Or was it the night before that? He started pulling at the strands, one by one, then bunch by bunch, letting them fall and creating a generous pile. By the time the wheezing man started coughing up blood, Loki had an irritated, irregular bald spot somewhere in his scalp.
Loki saw him die and it seemed peaceful. Ugly, but peaceful. He stared long enough into that face that it started to morph. First, it was Thor, and Loki watched in morbid fascination as he was brought back in time — sapphire skin in garish contrast with gilded walls, the haunting shadows in his peripheral vision taunting him with deep-set eyes the colour of blood. Or rubies. Nine of them were staring at him, in fact, as he twirled and twirled again the claret band in his hand.
Would his master ever come back?
Loki laid on his stomach, staring into the dead man’s face, seeking answers. He seemed to doze off a couple of times, awakening abruptly when his head drooped down, confronted yet again by the cruel corpse before his eyes. He started seeing a different face come through, one which had never held an ounce of kindness for his fate. It was Byleistr.
Loki smiled. This Byleistr here was nothing to fear. He was dead, was he not? Pale and dead and no threat at all. So he gripped his dead half-brother’s hair, pulled it back, and spat into that face. Yes, that felt nice. That felt right, Loki thought, so he did it again. And again. And then it wasn’t enough. He rolled him over and straddled him and punched him square in the jaw. It was unsatisfying when no sound came out, so he tried once more, but nothing changed.
It made no sense, he realised. It was futile. “There is no comfort in a dead man,” he declared, and laid down on top of his half-brother’s chest. It was lukewarm, and Loki really longed for any kind of warmth. Then, after some time, he asked, “Jarvis, where is my master?”
“He is out, Loki,” Jarvis replied.
“Okay,” Loki whispered. “Will you tell him I love him?” he requested, and it was the first time in long hours that his heart seemed to throb and hurt and poison his chest. He was grateful for it. He deserved the pain.
“I will, Loki,” Jarvis reassured, and Loki finally succumbed to darkness and fatigue.