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There's a boy down here.
Perhaps a man, but he certainly looked like a boy. His cloak was too large for his shoulders, and the kid’s helmet tilted haphazardly over the span of his forehead, licks of black hair spilling beneath the leather. Every time he moved his head the helmet jerked to the side. It would be comical if Loki wasn't so baffled by the whole thing. The snake-like mass of silver steel chains that single-handedly trapped Loki to the ground whistled in the freezing wind. The kid gaped at him, before his head tilted perceptively and his mouth curled into a thousand-watt smile. A stranger, then.
“Name yourself,” Loki bellowed, nothing if not intrigued by this bold, stupid boy. It can get quite boring down here; his stomach curls with hunger more often than not, and there are little to no visitors down here. A lost and wandering teenager could be at least somewhat useful if only to provide amusement.
The boy's eyes glittered, maybe a little mischievous. “My name’s Luffy,” His grin stretched. “I’m gonna’ be king of the pirates.”
A pirate?
A king?
There is no room for kings, not here, not now. The royal hall is spilt with the blood of Loki’s father. But it is wholly incorrect to assume this teenager has taken it upon himself to acquire the throne of Elbaf - he does not seem to be the kind bled from royal cloth. Not with that lopsided smile, the claim of being a lowly pirate. Although, in fairness, neither does Loki.
The boy inquires where he is, and who Loki is. So Loki tells him, with only a little dramatic flair. This is Elbaf, the land that breathes war and spits out blood. It is too poisoned with peace nowadays, Loki knows this from the six long years he’s spent holed up in the Underworld. Children have gone pliant without warfare, it is unlikely the newly Elbaf-bred giants above can even brandish a blade. Mighty weapons are flimsy and useless in their large, sticky fingers. Loki does not use the word weak: giants aren't weak. They refuse to be weak, their bones do not know weakness. It is their duty to be the strongest. He tells the human that he is the sun god, that his name is Loki.
Luffy does not blink, which proves that Loki’s initial evaluation was correct: this is a stranger, a newcomer. He has not even been on Elbaf’s soil long enough to know Loki’s name. In fact, what he does instead surprises Loki more.
“Oh yeah? That so?” Luffy laughs. “Nice.” Pure joy lights up the boy’s face. He pumps his fists in the air and does a little victory hop in place, whooping and hollering loud enough for Loki’s ears to ring. Then he squats down to gather momentum and jumps with the flexibility of a coiled spring, landing himself on Loki’s knee. He puts a hand on his chin and starts to mumble excitedly.
Interesting how comfortable Luffy is. Lowering his guard, maybe? Or a naive fool. Or both. The corners of Loki’s mouth twitch. Luffy could be the very key to his freedom.
“Hey!” Loki snarls. Luffy jolts in surprise and cuts off his useless ramblings. “I have not told you that you can speak, boy. Do my words mean nothing to you?”
It was mostly rhetorical, but Luffy shrugs one shoulder. He reclines on the slope of Loki’s knee and pillows his head with his folded arms. “Wasn't really thinking about it.”
“Insulting,” Loki spits. Luffy peers at him, infuriatingly unperturbed. “Answer me this, then. What do you make of the situation?”
“The situation..?” Luffy frowns. He looks Loki up and down. “You’re chained up.”
Observant of him. Efficiently summarized, if anything, but it's not what Loki wants. He eyes the pirate for some sort of tell, some sort of tick. Luffy’s round eyes give away no secrets. What is he here for? What is he seeking? What is he doing on Elbaf in the first place? At the moment, it seems like the boy has simply awkwardly stumbled his way down to the prison yard of this island just from his stupidity alone. This pirate is only a child - it is unlikely he’s any sort of threat. He wonders if Luffy understands what he’s trying to do, if he’ll be intimidated by the large beasts that surround him. By Loki’s luck, he’s not.
And he isn’t. Luffy looks up at them in awe, not in fear. Loki tries to play a few more of his cards, then something flashes over Luffy’s face. He tames the Beasts while he’s at it, petting at the wolf’s wet nose. He’s slack-jawed, bug-eyed, looking at Loki, waiting for an answer.
“Red-Haired Shanks,” Loki tells him. He lies to catch his attention. “A coward of a pirate, you mean, passed by here a while back—”
There’s a blur, then unbelievable pain blooms in Loki’s jaw as the kid packs an absolute bitch of a punch. Loki cringes, but it hurts his mouth.
But this is what piques Loki’s interest:
“Don’t say that about Shanks,” Luffy glowers. The boy’s perfectly calm expression morphed into one of furious rage in a matter of seconds. His body had changed too, skin covered with weird tattoo-like markings and steaming smoke with the effort, blown up as large as a young giant. “Not even as a joke!”
“Right, right, I didn’t mean it,” Loki fumbles to say. He’s confident in his own capabilities, but another one of those angry fists to the face is not going to feel good. “Hey, I’m chained up here. A defenseless target!”
The boy does seem to have some sense of honor, and his body reverts to his original puny yet muscular form. Despite his frustrating qualities, Luffy is fascinating to some extent. It is not often that Loki runs into any sort of lifeform in the Underworld, and especially not one that looks up at him so curiously. Ah, Loki thinks, testily, as the boy slingshots himself up on top of Loki’s horns. He wraps himself around the span of it with his oddly stretchy limbs and hangs from it like a chain. He’s still a nuisance.
“You’ve got a Devil Fruit,” Loki says, but does not mention: I do, too. There was no need to reveal his own power. He inhales through his nose. Luffy is approximately the perfect size for Loki to reach up a hand and flick him off his horns with a single finger, if he had any available hands to utilize. As Luffy crawls down his horn and lands in his hair, Loki questions, aching for information, “What power does it grant?”
“Ah,” Luffy says. He yanks an arm back before he throws it forward, the span of his forearm stretching impossibly far. “I’m made of rubber. See?” He demonstrates with a jarring stretch of his neck, bringing his head down far enough for Loki to stare at him beneath his bandages.
Loki almost scoffs. Rubber was likely one of the most inane Fruits Loki has heard of. It was hard to imagine all that much a rubber body could do for a man, but if that smoky, tattooed form was the result of it, he must be underestimating it. It likely required a level of creativity this child had the mind for, and Loki did not. It did not represent the power of Nika, who was certainly far too strong for someone like this kid. “An idiotic power.”
“No?” Luffy’s head tilts. What a brat. “I punched the hell out of you with it.”
Loki grunts. “Hardly. I’m tied up, fool! It’s not something to praise yourself for!”
Luffy hums. His neck jerks back into place with an obnoxious snap. Then he maneuvers himself around Loki’s horn and elongates his torso far enough that Loki could look him in the forehead at eyelevel. “Where are your eyes?”
Loki gawks. He’d kill most for such an insensitive question, but Luffy seemed to sound like he genuinely thought Loki lacked any vision. It wasn’t even that the blindfold was meant to obscure his eyesight, but–it was about his eyes themselves. He could see perfectly fine through the blockage, even as a child he had the Haki for it, but nobody wanted to look at them. Loki’s curse of a birth mother always believed Loki had wrought all of Elbaf’s woes; anything that had ever gone wrong was Loki’s fault, the bastard, the demon. At birth, Estrid had looked down upon her baby and her first accursed thought was to toss him down to the Underworld. Affection from others was so far beyond his reach that even his infant-self knew it was a lost cause. Even when his father had held him in his arms, it was hard to feel any warmth. If he was dumb enough, he might have yearned for Ida’s affection when she was long dead. She was the only mother Loki would ever have.
What a dull idiot. “I can see, you know,” Loki snaps. “The bandaging over my eyes does not prevent me from proper vision.”
Luffy frowns. “Why cover them?”
Loki brushes his tongue over his teeth. His jaw ticks. “Not many enjoy the sight.”
The pirate scowls. “What a wimp. You’re a huge giant! What do you care if someone doesn’t like your eyes? It’s not like you picked ‘em.”
Loki grits his teeth. It’s not like he hadn’t thought that before, but.. Loki’s been covering his face for years. There hasn’t been a time where he wasn’t hiding the sight of his eyes. The second that he was born he was aware of how they were. How they looked. How he had seemed like a bastard devil. There wasn’t much he could ever do about it except cover them up.
“You understand nothing, boy,” he mutters. Luffy doesn't understand this kingdom, or how the giants operate at all. He wasn't here for the rule of Harald, and he wasn’t here for the death of it. Just a human, at the wrong place at the wrong time. Loki felt like he was watching his freedom sink away from him, water down a drain. “Don’t ask questions you won’t understand the answer to.”
Above all else, Luffy just seems frustrated by this response. His eyebrows knit together, and a childish pudge formed with the purse of his lips.
“I don’t get it,” he complains. Loki was getting irritated with all of his useless shifting, Luffy wiggling around once more and jumping off of his horns, landing on his drawn-up knee.
“You’re too big to care,” Luffy says, finally.
Maybe that was true, but Loki didn't particularly want to concede to this irritant of a boy. He was already treating his body like one of the big trees in the upper levels of Elbaf, something to climb and swing on. He was a childish pain in his ass, but Loki didn't want him to leave just yet.
So, they strike a deal. Luffy is far too trusting considering his strength. He ensures Loki that he will free him and that he will find the key to his chains, when he doesn't even seem to understand that he himself is Loki’s key. Capitalizing on Luffy’s curiosity, sure, and Loki has no real plans to share the knowledge of Red-Haired’s whereabouts in return - not that Loki even really knows where the guy is. Sure, he helped defeat Pop’s possessed form, but that didn't mean Loki kept any serious tabs on him.
Luffy looks up at him from his perch on Loki’s knee.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Loki grins.
“Hey,” Luffy says. Loki turns his attention away from his fool of an older brother to stare Luffy down. “Loki.”
Loki grunts. Tilted his chin towards him, looking down his nose like you would the barrel of a gun.
“Join my crew,” the pirate says. “And then we’ll let you go.”
Loki tries not to gape, but he does. The first thing he feels is justified fury. The blonde and the swordsman squawk out meaningless refusals and pleading denials to Luffy’s offer, their voices joining together as one to convince the kid otherwise. But from what Loki has seen so far, the pirate captain is not a man susceptible to the opinions of others; when his mind is set on something, it is difficult to stop him. Luffy places his hands on his hips and says that he’ll kick someone’s ass if they complain. It’s weirdly kind. Luffy has not even seen his eyes. Arguing so fiercely for a man he does not know is the work of a fool. For a demon he does not know of, no less.
“As if I’d be a henchman for you,” Loki scoffs. “Take it to someone else, pipsqueak. I don’t even know you.”
“But I like you,” Luffy fusses, crossing his arms, as if that is at all a reasonable explanation.
“What do I care!” Loki almost leans forwards in his shackles. The steel groans with the effort. “That is not my issue. You think I wish to join your puny little crew just because you’ve suddenly found me interesting?”
The look on the boy’s face made it clear he was not only being serious, but the answer was an obvious yes. “Yeah, so?”
It was like.. the boy was offering friendship. When he knew the truth behind Loki’s eyes, and he was now aware of the havoc Loki the public believes him to have wreaked above—when his father’s death was his own wish. But he was a scapegoat, a perfect fit, because nobody would blink twice if the unruly demon-bastard son of the king with eyes gifted to him by the Devil himself were to murder their precious, peace-seeking ruler. Peace at the death of evil, it was so perfect it seemed planned. Loki had shoes to fill, so he did, because nobody would want him any other way.
“Why do you persist?” Loki sneers.
Luffy shrugs. “I don’t think you're evil.”
“Don’t be fooled!” Hajrudin insists, waving his arms. Luffy didn’t turn his stare away even as Hajrudin turned to him to plead his case. “Loki has his tricks, and has always been trouble. He murdered my father.”
“Our father!” Loki snaps. He does not bother bringing up the fact that Harald had requested it, but that horse was long dead.
“Some family,” the blonde drawls.
“Release me from my chains, child,” Loki levels his glowering expression down to Luffy - he has a permanent glare etched into his face, but there is nothing to be done about it.
He will not keep his word. He is unsure how great a judge of character Luffy is, but so far, he has seemed unbelievably naive. But, to mention, he seemed weak, too, but Loki now knows that he is not. It appeared that this pirate had a lot to hide. Loki has a good poker face, so when he grins broadly, he is positive the boy buys it. “I will join you.”
Amidst the crew’s loud, blustering complaints, the boy’s eyes glint. He smiles like he had foreseen Loki’s decision.