Titans Bearing Gifts
Chapter 2: The Spirit of Gift-Giving
The screaming resumed the next day, or something similar to "the next day." There was no real day here, only starlit night. He'd managed to sleep for an undetermined period of time; therefore it was "the next day."
He did not return to that room. Others may think themselves heroes. Loki was no hero. He'd tried, he'd wanted to be a hero, the greatest hero Asgard had ever known, a hero to be immortalized in verse that proclaimed his glory for all time. Mother now thought him…well. He didn't know what she thought. It wasn't her who'd stood atop the bifrost staring down at him. It wasn't her whose words had rejected him. But her heart was as soft and gentle as her smile, and in retrospect she might not look favorably on the fate he'd meted out to Jotunheim. And Father… Not Father. Odin. Odin thought him a pitiful excuse for a son, a creature to be kept on a porous rock shelf, taken down to rule Jotunheim someday, perhaps. A monster returned home to his fellow monsters, the only place he was truly fit to exist.
The Frost Giants, at least, were dead now, he hoped, and neither Odin nor anyone else would be sending him there, whether to rule or be ruled. He laughed, then again more loudly when he could still hear the screams over his own laughter. He was supposed to have joined them, once he realized his efforts had been futile – he was supposed to have joined them in death. Appropriate, it should have been. An irony so delicious that few would ever properly appreciate it. Returned to that from which he'd come.
In quiet moments here and there, he still wished that the fall had resulted in what he'd expected. What he'd opened up his arms and reached out to embrace. In most moments, though, he wanted to kill. He wanted to kill the lackey. He wanted to kill the unseen master. He wanted to kill Odin. He wanted to kill Thor. He wanted to kill everyone on Asgard save, some days, his mother. He wanted to kill any last Frost Giant that somehow still clung to a crumb of the rubble of his realm.
He wanted to kill that blasted woman who would not stop screaming.
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If each prolonged round of screaming marked a day – and there wasn't any particular reason to think that it was, actually – then it was on the ninth day when the screams became less pronounced. Less continuous.
On the fourteenth day, he heard not a single scream, and his still-ringing head gave thanks. On the fifteenth day – so determined because he'd risen and slept without hearing anything in between – he crept closer toward the room, close enough to hear that grunts and moans and groans still came from it. But there were no screams.
He walked away. There was nothing he could do for that woman, even if he wanted to.
Something here prevented him from using magic. At first he'd thought it was his weakness after being trapped in the void for who-knew-how-long without food or water or even air, which he'd really thought ought to have killed him. But when his physical muscles began to regain some strength, his other "muscles" did not. He could feel the energy crackling around him when he put all his effort into it, but every attempt to harness it failed. He'd never mentioned it to his savior-turned-captor, but the creature had known all the same, plucking everything Loki knew of magic, every ability, every inability, along with every other strength and weakness, directly from his mind.
Magic would have done him little good here, anyway. He'd not seen portals or ships or any other form of long-distance travel on this forsaken collection of floating rocks; he had no way to leave. After a few days of quiet, though, he realized there was something to be learned from the presence of the woman on the table. She'd gotten here somehow, and surely not like he had.
A few days later – without the screaming he lost his only means of even loosely marking time; for all he knew he was sleeping every six hours or every thirty – food and water were finally brought to him again. He could live for a long time, perhaps indefinitely, without it, but he knew from experience that his body would eventually weaken and virtually shut down. He forced himself to eat slowly and calmly – he knew also from experience that anything else would quickly rob his body of what he'd consumed – and he couldn't even bring himself to care that he was eating with his fingers and using the bit of oddly spongy bread to sop up every last drop of the brown sauce that had covered the unidentifiable meat.
He fell asleep with a pleasantly full belly.
He woke to pressure on his ribs.
"How pleasant to see you again," Loki said, then jerked away from the boot pushing into his side and in a fluid movement got to his feet. "It's been a while. But then, I suppose you've been too busy to be a proper host. If I've outstayed my welcome, I'll be happy to be on my way if you'll just provide me with the means."
"You talk too much, Asgardian," the hooded bloody-toothed creature said.
"Really? It wasn't that long ago that you were quite insistent that I wasn't talking enough. Perhaps you lack certain higher brain functions, along with a name?"
"You have asked about our master. Would you like to know more of him?" the lackey asked, taking a series of slow steps in a semi-circle around Loki, who stood still and watched him carefully, body tense and ready to react.
"Knowledge isn't a bad thing, Loki."
"I would know his name, if he actually has one," he answered carefully, each sound deliberately and tightly crafted.
"Thank your father for this gift."
"His name is Thanos. And he wishes to see you," the nameless one said, grinning and baring his red-stained teeth.
Thanos. Thanos. Thanos. The first name he'd heard for anyone here at all, other than his own. It should have rung bells – loud, heaving ones that made the ground shake with each peal – but it meant nothing to him. Two random syllables strung together.
The Other began to walk away, oddly slowly though Loki knew him capable of much faster movement; Loki took a deep breath and followed. They took a path through boulders and jagged rock, and twice along the way Loki glimpsed what appeared to be the vastness of space in gaps in the rock. The few landmarks all looked largely alike – a boulder here, a rock jutting out a bit higher than normal there – but Loki had trained for navigation in unfavorable conditions, and he was learning his way around. The smooth-surfaced steps of stone and metal that floated up into a staircase that twisted up behind a ledge had not been there before.
Thanos's grotesque servant – it was so good to have at least one name around here – paused before those mysterious stairs. "Go. He has a gift for you."
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Notes
This one's going up especially because of the delay in the next chapter of Beneath while I rework a few scenes... :-)