Chapter Text
Loki had lost his memory.
Sometimes, when the sky was blue and the sun was shining bright, bathing Asgard in that beautiful light nobody apart from him seem to realize, there was a brief moment when he thought he could remember.
Not that he had ever had the opportunity to see the sky very often during the last couple of years. He had forgotten its beauty.
He was not completely sure how it had happened. A while ago he had decided that it did not matter. How or for what reason he had been brought to that place where he forgot how to speak, how to laugh, how to love. Well, the reason was pretty obvious. To serve. To please. To follow the rules.
But how. How had it been possible?
He and his brother went on horseback to the Dark Forest. Nothing special since they often came to the forests to hunt beasts or to explore valleys and regions of Asgard nobody had ever been to. They were a good team. His brother, the strong warrior and he, the quiet trickster.
But at that evening everything changed.
The one moment he saw his brother’s long golden hair in front of him, saw a light breeze brushing through the shimmering locks that stuck out of Thor’s helmet and Loki wanted to make a joke about it. To tease him as he always did. It was just a game between brothers.
The next moment it was dark. He felt hands on his body, strong arms wrapped around him. He wanted to scream.
He heard his brother call his name. He wanted to reply, to tell him that he was here, right behind him. But he couldn’t. Not a single tone escaped his lips. As hard as he tried, he could not move nor speak. What was his brother doing to him?
Then he lost his conscious.
He had asked himself so many times why Thor had never tried to find him. He was unworthy. That was the only logic conclusion. It was Thor’s fault. He had brought him there. To the deepest of the Dark Forests and left him. His brother had left him when he needed him the most.
Somewhere deep inside his mind he knew that it was not the truth. But time passed and slowly he lost his memory. How life was like outside these walls. What the sky was like. Who he was. Where he came from. Who the man with the golden hair was.
When he awoke the first time in the prison he would call home for days too long to count it was still dark. But not dark enough. After a while his eyes got used to the darkness. He had been brought to a cell where other men like him were chained and gagged - in the same way he was. Someone had taken his clothes away. He felt that his throat was painfully dry as if he had swallowed sand and all he could taste was the cold metal between his teeth. He wanted to shout, to scream, to beg. But he could not.
All he could do was falling to his knees and whimper while he was waiting for what would happen.
Nothing happened. Just irregularly he found food or water in the cell. Just enough to survive.
Several days had passed until he understood. It was when the first Omega suffered from his heat.
Usually the cell was filled with fearful silence, just a whimper or a gasp could be heard from time to time. Loki awoke from his unstable dreams, a nightmare where he had been taken away from his brother. Where he had been beaten and punished for a reason he did not understand.
A growl came from the creature that was lying on the other side of the cell. Creatures - that was what they were. Reduced to a whimpering pack nobody cared for any longer. The growls and moans did not stop. It was a sound of agony. Of pain. Of longing. Of an unbearable desire that could never be fulfilled.
Now he understood. It was not Thor who had left him. He was an Omega. He had been caught by a Hunter. So simple. Surely he knew that Omegas were hunted. That they were sold. That they were rare. But he had never asked what happened to an Omega who had been caught. Who had been sold. As if it did not affect him. Who could have guessed that this would happen?
He refused to think. He refused to do anything. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall as comfortable as his chains permitted. He tried to suppress the thoughts in his mind, to ignore the moans that came back nearly every day and night. Every time he awoke.
He was scared. He did not want to end up like this.
Pathetic.
Some Omegas relieved each other but as soon as the white stripes covered the floor and their bodies, the heat started anew. It would not go away. Loki knew it and everyone else knew it as well. They had to be filled, knotted, mated.
Some of them were just empty after a couple of days. They could not cope with their heat longer. They collapsed and fell unconscious, completely exhausted. Others were broken. Nothing more than an empty body, their minds mad and their conscious, their intelligence and their pride lost, buried inside an unknown place.
Loki was sure that they could not remember their own names and in an attempt to revolt against his imprisonment he started to repeat his name, his brother’s name, Odin, Frigga, Sif … But with each day and each week he lost another name. His memory was fading away like water he tried to hold in his hands. He did not want to give in completely.
At least he did not go into heat. He was not the most pathetic one in that cell and this thought gave him at least a tiny piece of hope.
Some of the creatures were taken away. Men came and took them and they never came back. Not that Loki had missed them. Fewer creatures meant more silence.
Sometimes the men were laughing and joking when they picked one of them for taking away. But they never talked to one of the creatures. They just grabbed them as if they were objects. Surely they were.
Loki had stopped to count the days but finally the men came again. And they did not take a creature. They took him. He was too weak to disobey. He could not speak. His arms hurt where the cuffs had cut the flesh. He had denied the food he had been given and thus he had lost weight, his frame was smaller than ever.
They punched him to walk faster. He did not look back.
It was dark again.