Chapter Text
Asa entered the soothing darkness of the tunnel, the roar of the crowd dimming instantly behind the thick metal walls.
She let her daggers slip from her fingers, the blades thudding with quiet weight into the loose sand. Her skin was sticky with blood – not hers; never hers – and her mouth tasted like dust and decay. She closed her eyes, the fight she’d just left victorious flashing lightning-quick through her mind.
Grandmaster had her pitted against two Rathtars – big, brainless monsters with flailing tentacles set around gaping mouths full of jagged, gnashing teeth. They were hard to catch and even harder to kill . . . but she’d cut through them in less than five minutes.
“Good show, Asa!” Korg’s cheery voice slipped past the white noise humming through her mind as she walked back into the locker room, daggers once more in hand. “When you were pinned down by that one tentacle, you know, when your knives were in one beastie and the other was jumping for ya, well, Meek and I here though you were a goner. Right, Meek?”
The crustaceous creature at the Kronan’s side clicked its agreement.
“But then, you weren’t! You slipped out and then, chop and chop” – Korg made the appropriate gestures with his blocky hands, miming Asa’s movements in the arena – “they were dead. And you won . . . again. Congratulations, by the way.”
He continued to ramble on in his gratingly pleasant way, and Asa tuned him out as she cleaned her knives and then returned them to her locker, sealing them away until her next fight.
-=-=-=-
Back in her glorified cell, changing her flexible armor for clean clothes – a loose shirt over soft, clingy leggings tucked into her freshly-polished boots – Asa sat on the edge of her bed. She gripped the soft curve of the mattress hard, squeezing it and imagining it was Grandmaster’s throat. She’d wanted to wring that smug bastard’s neck for centuries, but the desire had heightened two years ago when she’d been replaced as his Grand Champion by the green creature of rage from the sky.
“That was quite a show.”
A voice intruded the silence of her revengeful thoughts, the quiet tone seeming much louder because of its unexpectedness. Asa’s fingers twitched instinctively against her thighs for her daggers, but of course they weren’t here. Outside of the arena, she was always unarmed.
She was, however, never helpless.
The stranger stepped forward, a feline grace to his movements. The vivid blue of his gaze studied her intently, like there was no detail that would escape his notice. And though he was dressed similarly to the lazy residents of the Grandmaster’s inner circle, he carried the distinctive, dangerous aura of a fighter.
He’d also appeared out of thin air. Inside her impenetrable room.
“Hello,” the stranger said casually, as if materializing out of nowhere was the most normal thing in the universe.
“Who the hell are you?” Asa snapped, getting to her feet.
“An interested party,” he replied smoothly, bowing faintly from the waist. “I must say, watching you in the arena was . . . impressive.”
“Thank you,” she replied, layering ice over her words. “But whatever you think you might get me from me, you’re wrong.”
The stranger tilted his head, raven-black hair shifting slightly with the movement. There was an odd sort of amusement dancing in his bright gaze, one Asa found herself wary of rather than annoyed. Whoever this being was, he wasn’t the regular sort from Sakaar – she’d dealt with plenty of those in her captivity to tell the difference.
“And what might that be, exactly?”
She narrowed her gaze, adjusting her stance to where she could lash out at a moment’s notice. He flicked a glance at her feet, one side of his mouth turning slightly upwards, matching the sly humor in his eyes.
“Does Grandmaster know you’re here?” Asa asked.
The stranger shrugged faintly, more of an impression than a true action.
“If he doesn’t know,” she continued, hating that she had to rely on the threat of her imprisoner’s anger for defense, “he’ll leave you alive just long enough to regret playing with one of his favorite fighters.”
“I was under the impression that the only fighter Grandmaster cared about was his Grand Champion.” The stranger quirked an eyebrow, adding even more of a humorous expression to his pale features. “And I was also unaware that we were playing a game instead of holding a civil conversation.”
Asa snorted. With that last sentence, it was obvious that this stranger was new to Sakaar. Everything was a game here and the one holding all the strings of all the players was Grandmaster.
“Anyways,” the stranger added, clasping his hands together at the small of his back, “your all-controlling Grandmaster can’t manage every little moment of this place, now can he?”
“Who are you?” Asa asked again, her fingers aching for the reassuring weight of her daggers. If this was a fight, she would have leapt at the stranger already and cut his silver tongue out as a trophy.
“Not important,” the stranger replied with another barely-there shrug. “But what is very, very important is this: who are you?”
-=-=-=-
There was something very familiar about the warrior woman standing defensive in front of him, but Loki just couldn’t place his finger on it. Not yet. Which was why he had projected himself into her cell, his irrepressible curiosity demanding satisfaction.
When he had watched her in the arena, a blur of deadly, flashing blades tearing through the ugly, roaring monsters, she had sparked an ancient memory to life. Maybe it was the way she fought, so like the female warriors on Asgard, or maybe it was how her use of twin daggers reminded him of his own preferred weaponry. Or maybe he was bored and this would all come to nothing, but he couldn’t let the nagging question be.
And so, he was here – well, in reality he was sitting in the Grandmaster’s lounge, sipping at a blue cocktail – verbally sparring with the gladiator that had caught his attention.
She was just a few inches shorter than him, with fierce eyes and dark hair pulled into a loose tail at the base of her neck. Hers wasn’t an unattractive face, but neither was it particularly striking. But there was still something that drew him to her like a magnet, something he wanted to label but no matter how hard he tried, nothing seemed right.
“I’m a gladiator, nothing else,” she replied to his blunt query.
“But you claim special guardianship by Grandmaster, seemingly equal to that of this Grand Champion of his everyone talks about,” Loki countered, his mind singing happily at the thrill of this conversational duel. “And before you fought those monsters, they demolished multiple gladiators much larger and seemingly stronger than you. There’s also this cell” – he glanced around pointedly at the cozy room, much different than the other gladiator cells he’d glanced at in his search for her – “where, if you ignored the security, you’re living in style.”
“If you’re so curious about me, ask Grandmaster.”
Ah, bad blood surrounding guarded secrets. Loki resisted the urge to grin wolfishly at his discovery. He opened his mouth to reply, but then his attention was caught by an unexpected familiar face in his actual surroundings.
He disappeared from the cell, the gladiator’s surprised features shifting into those of his brother’s.
Well, shit, Loki thought, as Thor called his name.