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“Three hundred thousand, have I got three hundred?”
Loki stood perfectly still at the front of the hall, just as he had been told. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, nearly drowning out the words. He was barefoot and naked to the waist, hands bound behind his back. The Grandmaster had taken away the blue leather trousers that belonged to the set he’d had made for Loki all those weeks ago and replaced them with a pair of black ones, thinner and simpler in style. They were trimmed with green, and faint touches of gold to match the band around Loki’s throat.
“To bring out your – lovely features,” the Grandmaster had said as he traced a fingertip along the tender skin under Loki’s eye.
The Grandmaster slipped it on, reaching around the back of Loki’s neck to clasp it shut. “Now,” he said, running a soothing hand over Loki’s flank as though he were calming a spooked horse. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Loki couldn’t answer from where he was pinned to the wall by the force of the ancient magic the Grandmaster wielded so effortlessly. His mouth felt like it had been sealed shut. He made himself shake his head, as much as he could.
“I don’t, uh, understand why you’re making such a big fuss about this, honey, I really don’t. You’re the one who tried to leave me, remember? There are worse things I could do, I’m sure you – um, realize that. Huh?”
Loki nodded automatically, knowing the response the Grandmaster required, while he reached desperately for his own magic. It would not answer. He could feel it churning inside of him, but it seemed to have forgotten how to break the surface.
The Grandmaster chuckled as if he knew full well what Loki was attempting to do, and ran a finger over the snug golden band. “Uh-uh-uh…sorry, sweetheart, I truly – truly am. But it just had to be done. You’re too much of a wild card, you know, you’ve proven that.” He stepped back and sighed fondly. “Now, you’re not gonna try to fight me again, are you?”
Ice pumped through Loki’s veins, and his mind sped off in a thousand different directions, examining every angle of his unfortunate situation, searching for some way – any way – out of it. Very slowly, he shook his head.
The force holding Loki against the wall disappeared. He straightened up cautiously, eyes trained on the Grandmaster.
“Good. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way – time for you to meet dear brother mine.”
Loki did not so much as allow himself to twitch as the auctioneer – a species he thought he recognized from the second quadrant of Muspelheim’s galaxy – slammed his giant fist on the metal podium. The young Xandarian woman who had just sold for half-a-million units was led, shaking, from the dais and taken through a side door. One of the Grandmaster's colorfully dressed guards poked Loki viciously in the back, and he stepped forward. He dug his nails into his palms behind his back, keeping his face utterly blank. He forced himself not to look in the direction of the Grandmaster, or his brother.
Carefully, so as to project profound disinterest instead of panic, Loki let his eyes roam over the room, instinctively looking for any possible escape route. There were none. He could try to run. But without his seiðr to help him, bound and surrounded by guards and a roomful of interested patrons as he was, it was a great deal more than hopeless. He would never make it to a door, and if he did he would certainly never make it off the ship.
Loki caught the Grandmaster making a gesture out of the corner of his eye, and the auctioneer spread his arms wide. He rattled off the Grandmaster’s pre-approved description of the – item for sale, Loki thought, his jaw clamping down savagely – and Loki tuned it out, only vaguely aware of increased murmuring at words like prince and shifter. And Jötunheim.
“Esteemed guests, we start the bidding at twenty million.”
The door opened, and Loki could not stop himself falling back a step.
“Lo-Lo, I’d like you to meet my brother – Taneleer Tivan.”
Loki knew very well who he was.
The Collector. The creature who stocked his display cases with rare objects and living beings alike. Loki stood rooted to the spot, and this time he did not need the Grandmaster’s power to make him stay. He might have been made out of solid marble for all his body wanted to obey his mind’s screams to flee.
Tivan hummed in a breathy sort of way. He took another step forward into Loki’s space and put a single finger to his jaw, turning his head this way and that. “Mmm, he is…pretty,” he began disinterestedly, “but I have no need of an – Asgardian.”
The Grandmaster blinked long and slow, grinning. “Oh, there’s much more to this one than meets the eye. Right, sweetheart?”
Loki swallowed. He commanded himself to throw off the Collector’s touch. To look around the quarters for a knife, for anything sharp enough to sever a couple of jugulars. He didn’t move.
“Loki here was, uh, adopted,” the Grandmaster went on. “He might smell like an Asgardian, but um – go ahead and jump a few species over.”
Tivan’s expression remained deceptively bored and his finger dropped away from Loki’s jaw, but his eyebrows rose towards his hairline.
The Grandmaster placed his palm flush to Loki’s neck. Loki knew what was going to happen, what he was going to do, and no longer knew if it was his own terror or an outside force keeping him nailed to the floor. He could feel the change spread across his skin – the air around him seemed to warm. He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the room’s mirrors, a stain of blue, a flash of red, and he slammed his eyes shut.
It took everything in him to wrench them back open, knowing even that small tell of discomfort was valuable information in the wrong hands.
The Grandmaster put a hand on his brother’s shoulder and leaned in close to his ear, lowering his voice to a stage whisper. “Fffrost giant.” His tongue tapped out the ‘t’s with extra emphasis.
Loki felt like he was going to vomit.
“A natural-born shapeshifter,” the Grandmaster explained with a lopsided leer. “Quite a talented one…”
Tivan’s shoulders shook in an approximation of a shudder. His dull eyes ranged over Loki again, from his toes to the top of his head.
The Grandmaster’s voice grew even quieter, hardly a whisper. “Not to mention a, um, powerful – ah – magic user.”
Tivan let out another one of those breathy hums. “Forty million units.”
The Grandmaster scoffed and clucked his tongue. “Tan. Tan, Tan, Tan, I’m just givin’ you the – the sneak peek! A little family perk.” He removed his hand from Loki’s neck, and Loki felt his skin shift back to pale white. Despite his terror, a grateful lump rose in the back of his throat. “But I know – I know! – you’ve got a lot more than that, you’ll have to duke it out with the rest of ‘em. Can’t let my sweet little Lo-Lo go for forty million.” He gave Loki a conspiratorial wink. “Even if you did help your brother and my champion escape and start a revolution.” Loki bit down on his tongue, though he burned to explain again that he hadn’t actually meant for any of that to happen. The Grandmaster wagged a finger at him, half-turning to his brother. “He’s the reason we’re on this ship, you know – well,” he broke off, flapping his hands. “He knows what he did, he knows what he did.”
Loki did know.
Loki knew, too, that he should have slain the Grandmaster in his sleep when he had the chance.
“Seventy-eight million, I have seventy-eight, do I hear eighty? Eighty million in the back, do we have eighty-five?”
The hulking being who raised his hand at eighty-five million had a brutal set to his face, and Loki felt perversely thankful when his selling price was driven higher in a different direction. The number climbed steadily. Loki tried for what seemed like the hundredth time to stretch out and grab hold of his seiðr, but it continued to elude him. It was a twisted sort of relief that his wrists were bound and he could not reach up and claw at the band around his throat. He did not know if he would have been able to stop himself otherwise. It only would have ended in punishment. The despair he had been choking down began to climb up through his chest, dragging the air out of his lungs.
Against his will, Loki’s eyes flicked over to the Collector sat not twenty feet away in the front row at the Grandmaster’s right side. As if this had been some sort of cue, the Collector raised a lazy hand into the air.
“Five hundred.”
The auctioneer paused, uncertain. “Five hundred…million?” he clarified.
The Collector gave a slow blink and inclined his chin. Beside him, the Grandmaster crossed his arms and legs and leaned back in his chair with a wide grin on his face, tongue between his teeth.
“We have five hundred million!”
The despair swelled and crashed over Loki in a great black flood as he realized there had never been any other possible outcome to this charade. It had simply been a game the Grandmaster had wanted to play, only another amusing way to torture Loki for costing him his champion, his games, his planet—
There was not a single soul who knew where Loki had ended up (or where he was going to end up) let alone any who would care in the least to come looking for him. His – elder sister – had certainly obliterated Thor and his company of rebel misfits by now. Who else, what else was left to him? There was no one coming to save him. There would be no rescue. Tivan sat up a bit straighter in his seat, the ghost of a smile brightening his perpetually bored expression, and Loki saw the fate that was carved into stone and laid before him as sharp and clear as a vision. Put on display in a glass cage, chained and stripped of his magic, reduced to a thing, a curiosity. A slave.
Loki would have gladly taken the dungeons of Asgard, or the Grandmaster’s bed, in place of the sentence he now faced.
The Collector’s lips twitched in satisfaction in the silence that followed his bid, and one final moment of clarity brought that black wave surging up to suffocate Loki at last, sealing him inside his ruin.
Taneleer Tivan, he recalled with the dying of his last ember of hope, presided over more than an eclectic assortment of the universe’s oddities. He had been entrusted, too, with the keeping of the Aether – and it would sing as a siren to the Mad Titan who listened closely to its call.
The hand came down, striking the metal podium with a clang that echoed around the hall. The sound of an axe Loki had expected long ago finally falling.
“Sold!”