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Somewhere along the way the swathes of green in Loki’s wake lost their meaning, like too many things, so he stretches achingly and leans against the glass of a stolen ship and thinks of something to tell the Valkyrie. She has spent centuries immersed in the gladiatorial colors of Sakaar, so she, like Thor, flourishes them with that casual gusto; violence is more palatable when it is at least a little bit beautiful. Loki speculates that a lot of things are like that. He could have explained the gold to her, easily. Even a little bit honestly. A King’s right, something which catches the eye, which only a madman wears into battle. Something blindingly Asgardian.
But she had to ask about the green, damn her, and he has no quip on hand.
“Take your time,” she says from behind him, a drink for the wait immediately on her hand. “I’m sure it’s got something to do with the dichotomy between good and evil.”
It was my mother, Loki says, but he doesn’t say that, and not because it isn’t true. Frigga's memory is a breath on a mirror. Invoking it involves getting dangerously close, close enough to see his own illusion flicker. Or, It was envy, but he certainly doesn’t say that, he winces at such startling awareness. Oh, it was Thor, and the available color schemes. I recalled the spectrum of light and simply found the one completely opposite his beloved red.
Ironic, really. My brother prefers blunt weapons. He does not have to contend with the still-beating reality of red.
But he doesn’t say any of this. Empty words. He stares wryly and unblinkingly through his reflection on the glass and out into the long void of immortal night, where not a single star nor flare of light is his green.
“There was a time when I had all manner of plants growing in my room,” Loki says. “On Asgard. An alphabetized jungle in its own right. Everyone thought they were poisonous.”
“I bet it was weed,” Valkyrie says. “Or magical healing herbs. Or both.” When Loki doesn’t answer, she sets down her bottle with a triumphant echo.
“It was flowers mostly,” he says, the corners of his lips twitching. “Or vines. Harmless. I don’t quite know why I doted on them.”
With that morbid air of a man who knows he is marching ever closer to the stepping-off point, Loki dares tread the terrible edge of sentiment. It had been because green things were the same as his magic; the shade of life, of things which cannot be caged, the quietly and remarkably growing constants of Asgard. In between the gold and steel and up from the stones. Tripping the unwary, making the gentle smile.
One day, however, he had been stung by that enduring significance that all of his proudly tended life grew with abandon only in the shade of something else.
Looking a bit put out by a relatively benign explanation, the shieldmaiden reaches for the bottle again, absently. Brunnhilde. She wears white now, silver, blue. He sort of thinks Valkyrie colors insufferable. Difficult to keep clean.
“So when did you stop treating life gently, Your Highness?”
“I grew up,” he says, his smile waning, for this woman knows full well that selfsame survival instinct. “Life stops being gentle.”
He loses a little patience with their drunken philosophizing. Someone mistakenly taught mortals that all gods are merciful, and now the gods themselves have begun to believe it as well. Even the wayward ones.
Perhaps his natural state is falling, and there is solid ground and sky under and above him only in passing. Weeks earlier, a lifetime earlier, Hela and Thor and all hopes of reaching whatever fate lies with Asgard vanish above him. Space warps and—he finds breath enough to swear between screams, if all of this leads but back to Thanos—
He lands in a wasteland of broken things. The nexus of broken and discarded things. Loki does not find this amusing.
But he holds onto his wits.
When the scavengers come for him, he waits for the weakest of them to make itself known by a mishandled weapon, a clumsy misstep. He kills that one first, and then they find that he is not there at all, he is neither here nor there, did you honestly think you could subdue a god? Who do you answer to? Would you be so kind as to give me audience with him? The god of lies so loves to stand alone against the blazing guns of people who will not see him coming. It is, actually, perhaps the only thing he loves about standing alone.
But alone he talks his way into the deeps of the city, and learns that Sakaar is the roost of what seems to be an Elder of the Universe, by his guess. He talks his way up to the heights as well, and learns that the Grandmaster appreciates a sharp wit, almost as much as he does siccing a collection of found halfwits and traitors on each other. For the enjoyment of the world. So Loki finds himself a niche of limited helpfulness from which to stay alive.
He is surrounded by the sheer noise of a familiar but dangerous state of chaos. Drowning in bright color. The quick-tongued man of the court—his mother would be proud.
“But you don’t strike me as the type, you know, the warrior type, eh?” the Grandmaster looks appraisingly at him, keeping his boots a safe distance from the misshapen puddle that was once a guard. The very guard who had picked a surly fight with the newcomer and had met an abrupt end at the soft flash of steel that was Loki, or more aptly his dagger. All at once, briefly, Loki finds himself on the gladiatorial chopping block. His proud heart is a little too fast for his liking. When champions are looked for, he has ever been narrowly passed over.
Loki folds his hands. "Type is a matter of taste, Grandmaster. I’ve never had much of one for warriors.”
Silence. The metal staff which indifferently boils the skin off of living beings is again offered with a single gesture to the Grandmaster, and Loki stands on the point of running.
The Grandmaster waves it away.
“Ooh, layered statement, that,” the madman says, grinning like a child. “I like it. Backstory, troubled adolescence—hey, hey, try not stab anyone else, okay? Because then I have to intervene. Very messy. Makes a mess.”
“Of course,” says Loki, with a wide smile of his own. “It won’t happen again. Though I would not have you think it was wholly avoidable."
With a confiding air, the Grandmaster sidles closer. The secret king, if one can ever be in such a place, stands his ground, stands rooted to the spot. “So what is it? Lone wolf? Dove? Furnish me a metaphor, I’ve gotta classify you as something.”
“A runaway,” Loki says immediately.
“Even better! The plot thickens! You hear that? This kid is on his gap year.”
And so Loki survives, looking down at the puddle of human at his feet, seeing his indigo and golden yellow shift in it. This is no place for clear magic, or other vestiges of living things. Green wilts here. He breathes a sigh of relief, for this he can live with, in the same way he lives with himself; poetically, he thinks maybe it is easier to lose oneself in a place for lost things, but Loki is never one for self-annihilation. He is reliably inconsistent, many shades of one constant. In a world of bared teeth and theatrics, it is comfortably hard to determine who—if anyone—that is.
It is not until his brother arrives that he remembers.