first entrance

[anotherstolenrelic]

[ Pre-Milliways: Fight, Flight, or Fall ]

The door opens; for a moment, at least, the view outside looks an awful lot like the window show at approximately four in the morning, well before all the explosions start.

The door opens, and the young-looking man(-looking person) who enters does so more at a stumbling fall than a walk; he catches himself quickly enough, yes, and tries very hard to look as if he knows where he is and what he's doing and what's going on around him.

When the door slams shut behind him, just as abruptly as it had slammed open, he jumps anyway, no matter how hard he's trying to look suave, calm, serene, and all of that sort of thing.

Loki will just be skulking off over against the wall, here, until he can figure out how to look like he isn't completely lost and bewildered.

Comments

[asynja]

Sif --




-- thinks, for a second, that she sees a man that looks terribly a lot like her old friend Loki, who she believes to be dead, and her coffee mug might clatter, just ever-so-slightly against the plate due to the shake of her hand.

But it only lasts a second, because she just as quickly looks away.

[anotherstolenrelic]

There's a clatter, but it's only one among so many noises; Loki, blending in with the wall, is the hunted-prey with his heart in his mouth, stock-still and startling with every. single. noise.

So if it takes him a moment to focus in on that clatter, to locate its source, that is, after all, understandable.

If, then, he sees someone who looks altogether too like his old friend Sif, who he has loved for so long and been betrayed by so recently –

Well, no doubt it is for the better that she is looking away, and cannot see the flash of raw pain writ clear across his face, whether or not that expression lasts only for the span between two of those rabbit-fast heartbeats.

[asynja]

Our poor tragic antihero Loki; pity the misunderstanding, there, that everyone involved believes that they have, individually or as a group, been betrayed.

Ask Sif, and she will say that Loki betrayed her. Betrayed their friends. Betrayed Asgard. Ask Sif and she will point out he made more than one attempt on Thor's life, that he had Destroyer harm them all, that he would have destroyed part of Midgard that they had worked so long ago to protect --

-- that she had worked so long ago to protect --

No one is asking Sif.

After all, everyone back home already agrees with her.

Everyone back home, save Odin and Thor, believes Loki died an honorable death.

No one knows the story.

Not yet, if ever.

[anotherstolenrelic]

And who, here, in this room, in this moment, will tell her otherwise, should they even stop to ask her why she looks away from the man beside the door?

It doesn't take Loki so very long, really, to pull himself together, to mask his expression, to hide how very much he feels alone in the universe, rejected by all those he has ever cared for in all his life.

There is an art to being a prince; if Loki has never been the brother who walks into the room carrying all the pride of Asgard across his shoulders and billowing behind him as a cloak, well, he has at least learned to be insouciant and care-free in his carriage and appearance and action, to be the laughing, light-heartedly mocking, carefree playboy Prince of Mischief, and so he leans back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, one foot propped up behind him, and he sets a sardonic smile upon his lips, and he looks about the room as if everyone and everything in it is merely a potential source of amusement.

It is an act, but it is – has long, if not always, been – a familiar one.

[asynja]

No one breathes a word to Sif about it; who would even notice, with how quickly she'd looked? By the magic of Millitime, she's sitting alone, after all --

She's not paying attention to him, but there's an air of discomfort in how she sits, now. As if she's aware of eyes on her, and as if she doesn't like them. Not the sensation, which she just as clearly doesn't like, but the eyes themselves.

If she entertains him merely by sitting and drinking her coffee, so be it.

The game of passive-aggressively not glaring at each other may last even longer than their throne room battle of glances and wits.

[mycursedface]

It's an odd looking tavern in which he's found himself, at least if he looks at the clientèle. Like this woman(-shaped being), small and dark with large wings of bright gold, sitting on a table.

There are green-black snakes tumbled through her blue-black curls, which move and hiss and (some of them) peer at the tall, lean being who is currently skulking.

He has an interesting heat-signature, so Medusa pauses in her reading and - well, she doesn't look up. But she does stop turning the pages.

"Are you new?" she asks at last, voice clear and as human as a desert flute.

[anotherstolenrelic]

New is as new does, is that not so? And new does stare, looking terribly thoughtful. There's something familiar. What is it? Is it the book? The snakes? The sense of being cursed?

Probably it's just the snakes. It definitely isn't the wings.

Careful calculation goes into the measurement of his measured strides, as he paces oh-so-carefully-carelessly over, watching her snakes, watching her book (which is, so far as he can tell, sitting there, being a book)...

"Should I ask, lady, if you are old?" is, in part, courtly and polite – in tone and title, if nothing else, for the content certainly lends more toward the sardonic.

[mycursedface]

"- well, I don't think it's so much 'should' as 'can'," Medusa says, after a slightly startled pause. "I am old, I think. As humans tend to measure, and I suppose gods, too." Given she is older than most of them. "And I've been coming here for a while, which is actually a different question?"

She cocks her head, sharply, as a bird of prey might.

"So, which were you asking?"

[anotherstolenrelic]

"If you are blind, I think," he answers, somewhat more gently.

(It is, in fact, profoundly gentle, for this particular trickster.)

"While I do not know how you should like to measure newness, I cannot call myself young, as humans would measure it, and I am – similar, I suppose, in age to those others I know who have been named gods."

[mycursedface]

"Oh! No, not blind. But as I do not think you'd like being a statue, it's probably best that I don't look at you without wearing...glasses, I think they are called?"

She forgot about Milliways, for a little while, and her memory has never been the best.

"But you are new to here, yes?"

[mogget_cat]

"Not what you were expecting?" asks the very white cat-looking thing on a nearby table, tone light and dry.

"You wouldn't be the first."

[anotherstolenrelic]

Is that a cat?

– No. It isn't. Cats don't talk, at least not quite so – obviously, or cuttingly, or in fact so much the sort of thing that Loki himself would say, should he have been the one comfortable in his surroundings and observing someone else's disquiet.

"Somehow I do not doubt that you speak the truth in this regard," he settles on, after a moment spent staring down the cat-looking thing, then another spent pacing somewhat closer. Close enough for conversation; not, perhaps, close enough for most forms of assault, should it come to that.

[mogget_cat]

The cat is far too comfortable to want to give it up and attack a stranger. Loki may, in fact, be safe. At the moment. The cat yawns, its bright, leaf-green eyes closing momentarily.

"That would be because I do," the not'cat answers, blinking slowly up at him. In this regard. "It wouldn't even be a stretch to say that Milliways comes as a surprise to most of its patrons, the first time they find themselves here. You could say it likes to make an impression."

[anotherstolenrelic]

Loki is not so crass as to make a physical examination of his pockets or person to see if he has anything suitable to bribing a cat, that he might remain in its good graces. If he makes a mental one, well, there is little enough evidence of that, surely.

Not what he expected, a surprise to most of its patrons, finding themselves here... Loki makes the assumption, carefully, that the cat does in fact intend to name the location Milliways, and not, say, itself.

"Were you one such, surprised the first time you came here?" It's a bold question. Loki – well, who said he was wise?

[mogget_cat]

"Indeed," says the cat, mildly amused. "A pleasant surprise, though it was long ago. One does not expect to find a tavern, even one so illustrious as this, when one is exploring the furthest Precincts of Death."

"Nor, I dare say, expect to find a tavern wherever you were, a moment ago," he adds. Wherever that had been, it had looked - and felt - interesting, to say the least.

[knightoflight]

Wing recognizes the flash of dismay on the other's face as he enters. And the desperate attempt to gloss over it, as well. He had been so disoriented himself, when he arrived.

He tries to be subtle. It's a bit hard, considering he's 16' tall, but he does try not to be too obvious as he sidles over.

"I'm getting another round. Can I get you something?"

[anotherstolenrelic]

On the bright side, it's hard to be less subtle than Thor; simply being exceptionally tall – for Loki is not just tiny for a giant, but small for an Asgardian, and not more than the small side of average for a human – is hardly enough to say he can't be subtle, surely?

Instead, Wing gets stared at as a stranger-madman might be stared at, for all that that expression, too, is moderately veiled –

"Do you often make such offers?" is a carefully-guarded response, and far from the first to cross Loki's mind.

[knightoflight]

"Often?" Wing smiles. "Where I am from, yes. It's a friendly gesture. And here...?" He looks around the bar, with a shrug. "It is still a friendly gesture."

[anotherstolenrelic]

"Friendly," Loki repeats, still guarded, but –

Is it such a terrible thing, to offer a drink to a stranger, or to accept one?

Perhaps the answer is that he can use this to his advantage; nothing says he has to actually drink it, surely!

"My thanks," he decides, and asks: "What is available, here?"

It's an admission, but perhaps it won't cost him too much.

[knightoflight]

"Why should one not be friendly? The world is harsh enough, it seems."

"As far as I have discovered...just about anything." He senses some hesitation in the newcomer. It makes him a bit nostalgic: Drift had also been wary, mistrusting.

"Please, it would give me so much pleasure to buy you a drink." It's said sincerely: Wing is nothing but sincere. And doing something good allays the growing loneliness.

[forewarned_is]

If he's looking for an example of suave, calm, serene, and all that sort of thing ...

... well, there's a lady in a red dress seated at a table not too far away, with a glass of red wine in her hand, idly watching the display outside the Observation Window.

The light of countless dying galaxies plays across her face, and seems quite at home there.

[anotherstolenrelic]

Time, of course, passes. (Even if, perhaps, Medusa forgets to count its passing, on occasion.)

Time passes: Loki does not speak to Sif, but he speaks to others, and yet – as time passes – his eye is drawn, from time to time, to a woman in red, who is as calm as he is not, as serene as he pretends to be.

Time passes, the lights die, if not all of them, and then a cold and slender figure stands, in an approximation of serenity, not so very far away.

"Do you not worry, lady, that your wine will grow too warm?"

[forewarned_is]

She's studying the reflections of the light in the surface of the wine when he speaks.

"Not especially," she says, without looking up from her glass.

[anotherstolenrelic]

Silence lasts long enough, for what else should Loki say? That she's wrong?

Instead, in time, he takes a sip of his own drink – due to the courtesy of another, a gift without reason, simply a matter of hospitality, he is possessed of a drink the likes of which he has heretofore only dreamed.

It's easy, to be caught in the studied contemplation of light's fine reflections in liquid, especially when the liquid is a honeyed gold, possessed – perhaps – of its own internal light besides.

Alternatively, it's very distracting when the man next to you is staring intently into his glass while the Mead of Poets sloshes back and forth inside it.

[electro_kinetic]

Noriko sometimes wishes she were the kind of person who can watch someone a while, figure out all the angles and then talk. Fortunately in many respects, she's never managed it. Thus it's with more or less ease that she follow's Loki's progress and, after swiping her bright blue hair out of her face, asks away.

"Hey. You okay over there?" It may take a minute to realize it's directed at him, but that's alright. She figures what with the direct eye contact and voice raised enough to carry over the noise he'll get it. Whether or not he responds is another matter.