milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

Today when the bar finds Loki, he is slightly more prepared. In that he recognises what he is about to step into, and stops at the threshold. This is a perfect opportunity to fuss with his phone and try to get it to work when he is in the bar.

So an unusually tall young man stands in the threshold, wearing a ridiculous green coat* and golden horns, with one foot on either side of the door. But he doesn't stand idly. He taps at the screen as the phone itself glows green. Or maybe it's his fingers that are glowing.

"Oh, come on, you son of a--" he mutters, trying desperately to get his phone to connect and stay that way once it crosses the threshold. "Ymir's tits. Work, damn you."

It doesn't work, and it is extremely vexing. How is he supposed to scroll through Tumblr if he can't get online?

"ᛟ ᛖᛏᛏᚨᚾᚾ ᛊᛃᚨᛚᚠᚢᚱ!"

He might have to give up pretty soon. This clearly isn't working, and he's just blocking the door for no reason at this point.

*Coat is in significantly better shape than the image suggests. For some reason, his full costume doesn't get drawn very often.

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"Dense?" Loki asks, considering this carefully. "Maybe not. Short-sighted, naïve, stubborn, quick-tempered, and oafish, sure. But he generally doesn't need something explained to him twice. If it comes down to that, he understood you the first time, and just doesn't care."

He loves Thor. Dearly. But the man could occasionally benefit from a brick to the face.

Zenigata nods along. Sounds right, just about. There's plenty to not like about those adjectives.

"Right. So still, a problem. Just another flavor of problem. Heroes -- or gods supposed to be heroes, whatever -- do that all the time," Zenigata says with a wave of his hand. "Road to hell, good intentions, yadda yadda. He just... does it... exponentially bad when he fucks it up. Maybe that's just it. Maybe it's just a matter of scale!"

"Yes, well." Loki shrugs, finishes off his brandy, and orders a new one. He'd like to keep this buzz going as long as possible. "When our brother Balder was on the throne, he decided to move everyone out of Asgard entirely, and into someone else's kingdom, under someone else's rule."

That... might have been Old Loki's fault. Balder is dense as hel, and look where it got them.

"Honestly, I don't think any of us are suited to rule."

They're all terrible. Odin's entire shambling line, just awful people who make terrible kings.

"So figure out democracy. Or will God Ego get in the way of that?" Zenigata asks, though he thinks: "Does this mean you have a society of gods? God of Thunder in charge, but is there a good of small businesses? A god of hospitals? A god of roads? Things that soceity needs to run? Of course the God of Thunder isn't going to be good at -- running things, he's just..."

Well, Loki described him just fine.

"He's that. All of what you said," Zenigata says, waving one hand around as if to encompass all that Loki Said Thor Was.

"We're trying," Loki says. "There's a senate, and members who ostensibly represent the common-folk. But there's also still a throne, and always someone who wants it."

Not Loki. Not this time. Thrones are a cage, and he knows that now.

"All of Asgard is trying to break away from the narrative. Become something new. But we didn't write the stories. We didn't decide the titles. Some storyteller thousands of years ago did, when trying to explain the lightning and rain and wind to their frightened children. That's how gods are born, and it's how they die. Breaking away from that isn't easy."

Edited 2021-03-12 04:57 (UTC)

"So who's telling your story now? If you're still around, and belief powers you-- how do you inspire them to tell new stories?" Zenigata asks.

After all, that means something's still fueling gods, right?

Loki shrugs. "Dunno. I know it shifts and changes. New iterations an interpretations."

Meaning something is absolutely still fuelling them.

"So perhaps if a new story is put into the universe, it can take hold, gain traction, and overtake the current one."

He doesn't know, of course. It's all just mad theory until he's able to test any of it.

"That will take time that only a God will see," Zenigata says, thoughtful. "What things--"

He pauses, finishing his sandwich, letting it and the last bit of liquor fill his belly. There's sluggishness to his movements now, a softness that wasn't there before.

"I have seen amazing things, and terrible things -- things I would never give up and things I would scour my brain to be rid of. I cannot imagine a forever like that. How much you must collect up here--" he taps his temple. "How full of history it must be."

Loki frowns into his brandy, and then takes a drink of it.

"You have no idea," Loki says, something suddenly dark about his voice.

None at all. And there's so much that's missing. So much he can't remember no matter how hard he tries.

"And in the grand scheme of it, I'm not even an Old God. I wasn't there at the beginning. I'm hardly even ancient."

It's truly no wonder Ra's entire pantheon have lost their entire minds.

"Mmm. No idea? I have seen terrible things. Would do anything to clear them away sometimes," Zenigata said, as the feelings take a turn for the maudlin. Loki's darkness and all this talk of terrible things-- of stories unwritten, of people who were heroes and villains...

...it all comes back to another dark-haired young man. Far shorter, slimmer, more feminine. But still...

"You know, I once knew... there was a girl in a castle. Not-- no Cagliostro, not that castle. That's a good story, where there are heroes that win and villains who lose and the only thing that gets stolen are hearts," Zenigata says, and he's getting wound up, flushed and punchy. "No, this is-- this is about the House of Mine Fujiko. A hellscape, all dolls and toys and broken little girls. In it, child who become a broken woman decided that she had to understand why a lowly thief survived torture, became her own person, even when her slate was wiped blank and her mind overwritten with the little girl's pain. So she kept doing it."

Zenigata looks into his cup, getting that dawning horror of having seen things he will never unsee.

"She took other children and wrote her pain all over them, and then cut them lose, waiting for one of them become Mine Fujiko, so she could live vicariously through them. But-- none of them were. They just... went mad. Died. Killed themselves. A handful survived, but nobody knew it until it was too late to save any of them from worse fates."

Loki does not like this story he's being told. Not one bit. He drinks more of his brandy, because of he doesn't, he might grind his teeth together so hard they crack.

"Why are you telling me this?" Loki asks.

It hangs over his shoulders like a storm, dark and dangerous. A secret which would destroy everything if it ever grew voice and breath. His own unforgivable crime. The horrible thing he had to do just to exist.

"Because I look at you, and I listen to you, and I remember Oscar again," Zenigata said, before he pushes against the bar with his palms. "And sometimes I think about-- everything we just talked about, all the things we see and the horrors and how it builds inside us... even though, even though it hurts so much-- I could never let his memory go."

Zenigata lapses into a dark, heavy silence, staring down at his large hands where they press against the bar, fingers flat and knuckles white.

"I'm sorry," Zenigata says, apology heartfelt in the way only drunk ones can be.

"I don't know who Oscar is," Loki says.

Because it's a safe thing to say. It says nothing about himself, or who he is, or what he's done.

But it's all there, right at the surface. Aunt Mildred was fun to talk about; a thought experiment that hurt no one. But this. This is real. And Loki hates it.

"My son," Zenigata says.

Loki doesn't need more than those two words and the weight of grief, does he?

No, he does not. Loki nods, understanding fully.

“What happened?” he asks.

Because something obviously happened. Nobody talks about their child like this, when that child is alive and well and happy.

"He... he was one of the children. I didn't know this until it was too late, but he was one of them," Zenigata explained, still white knuckled with his grip on the bar. "He was trying to -- kill himself, maybe, or simply die for his pride rather then take older ruffians take the single franc. It was-- it was like fate. Zeni, a coin. Gata, shape. The shape of money, a boy who would die for a coin."

He laughs, though it's humorless, all teeth and edges. "I took him in. But I didn't know. Nobody knew. Not even him. Then it was too late. The thing that had-- been left unseen, ignored... I didn't. I should have looked harder. But I didn't. Those owl-headed fuckers came back and they pulled his strings and he..."

He took a deep breath. "Official story? He died in action attempting to stop a bombing on the Port Alexandre III. Unofficially, the servants of that little bitch in the castle had fucked him up even worse than I had, and the last I saw him he was dressed like Mine Fujiko, trying to put a bullet in my head. I was willing to risk it, to reach him."

Fumbling in his coat, Zenigata searches for a pack of cigarettes, needing something to do with his hands now, put in his mouth so he'll stop talking. He's drunk, and it's a slow process.

"He... he got away. I have no idea where he is, or if he's alive, or... anything," he says as he finally fishes out the yellow and brown pack of Shinseis he favors. The lighter is silver, with a single iron mon etched on the side of it: the shape of a coin. "I want to hope he's okay. That he found what he needed to, got out of -- what they did to him. He burned the place to the ground, you see. I just... hope he didn't burn himself with it."

Loki listens to all of this. He still hates this story. He doesn't like conincidence. He's a god; coincidence doesn't exist for him. And yet this story bears a familiar weight. No the same. Barely similar. But familiar. A stolen child, confused and abused and ripped from the world by selfish greed.

It's a story Loki will not give voice to. Cannot give voice to. A grief and guilt he will wear around his neck for the rest of his immortal life if he has to.

"I won't offer you platitudes, because they accomplish nothing, and I'm certain you've heard them all before," Loki says. "But your son wasn't a villain. He was a prop in someone else's story, and sometimes props are damaged and discarded for no reason other than to cause pain for someone else. It's unfair, and cruel, and there's nothing you can do about it."

He'd perhaps be able to get to something closer to comforting if not for his own dark cloud hanging over him right now.

"I know he wasn't. I'm the villain in that one. I saw the signs and I ignored them. Ignored too many things, then," Zenigata said, so dour that the genial man that Loki first met may as well have never existed.

He lights his cigarette, takes a long drag; he holds it a second, letting the burn fill his lungs, before he exhales.

"I-- I've got to get some air," he said, and gets to his feet. He will fall over somewhere, he decides, out by the dojo he's building. It's peaceful out there. Cold as balls, but he's slept outside in worse weather.

Loki nods, and watches him go. He ignores the little boy, crying and scared, despite the brave front. Despite his words of victory.

He knows what it is to be the villain. To do things that cannot be taken back.

So he lets Zenigata go, to face his demons alone and sleep off the hangover that will make him wish he were dead.

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