A World I Never Made

"How am I to face the odds/ Of man's bedevilment and Gods/ I a stranger and afraid/ In a world I never made" – A.E Housman

1.

The barman at The Lokasenna has seen a lot of shit since the club first opened; good shit, boring shit, bad shit – so much bad shit now that a lot of it has passed into the realm of boring shit. He has seen more than he will ever tell you, and tell you but a fraction of all that he has seen. Seasons come and seasons go, and so with the people like the push and pull of the tides. He has seen them all before, these waifs and strays that wash up on this shore – a shore of bar stools and sticky table tops, coughed up by the sputtering sea of the highway, that rolling constant thing eternal beyond the grimy windows and the sickly neon lights.

For all anyone knows The Lokasenna is just as eternal. Nobody remembers a time when the club was not there, nobody, not even the oldest of the locals can remember it being built. It just appeared, it seemed, out of the rain-washed concrete on the crappy side of town, resplendent and awful in its slick shine of fading pink and green light. Locals may work there but they never frequent it.

No, the clientele are all the scattered debris of the sea, falling in here, never as though they quite meant to. They come in and shake off their stories in patterns that cycle over and over without cease, lifetime after lifetime that would have worn away the patience of any other poor bastard behind the bar. But Heimdall never tires, he knows the patterns and the cycles, he knows these lives and he never tires of hearing them recounted, for there are inflections in every story, in every life that make it new, that make it beautiful and strange and in hearing them he lives them. In seeing them pass by he partakes of their lives - from that place behind the bar, the place where you will always find him.

One thing Heimdall has never seen is the amount of drink this man can put away, and believe him when he tells you he has seen a lot of men put away a lot of drink. He is standing ready with the refill before the man has even finished crying for "Another!" and slammed his third triple Jack down on the bar top.

"What say you just save yourself some work and give me the whole damn bottle?" the man grins with a smile more charming than his words.

"With all due respect sir, that I shall not do. Though you are welcome to make your way through it in such manner as you have already begun".

The man grumbles good-naturedly enough and knocks back a good half of the drink, watching the dark liquid swirl in the glass and frowning as though listening musingly to the chink of the ice.

And this, Heimdall considers, is why he has not seen this man before, nor a reflection of him in any passer-by yet come this way. For though these men - men who seem precarious perched upon a bar stool, with the highway in their leathers and the wind in their hair and eyes – are not uncommon, rarely do they listen so tenderly to the chink of the ice at the bottom of a whiskey glass. This one looks at the ice in the empties, glimmering under the lights as though it could tell him a story he half knows but cannot quite remember. And it could, Heimdall knows it, it could tell him many a tale. This one has been coming in every other night for a week now, roaring his bike upside of the window and coming back for it in the morning, groaning that he could have driven home that night, he really could. Heimdall knows, because he always knows, that home right now is the motel off Junction 19 but he does not point this out any more than to correct the other inaccuracy- just hands the man his bike keys and says he'll see him again. Because he will. He knows this too. When a person's time here is spent, and when there is still more story here to tell.

He has heard this man's story in snatches over the last few days, though he did not need to hear it to know it. The story of a poor family from nowhere, of a father he hated, of a mother who was the only thing keeping him there, of how she died some three years ago and how he got on his bike the day after the funeral and never stopped riding. And there are the parts he does not tell that Heimdall knows all the same because he always knows, of the brother he lost when he was twelve, given up for adoption in spite of all of his own and his mother's tears, of the hole this leaves in him that he feels is surely greater than it should be and of which he never speaks. A common enough story, if an uncommon man. A story with so many chapters left to go. Heimdall wonders if he drinks to forget his past or remember his way into a future. Sometimes they blur all together. He has an idea about this man's future, an idea that it begins here tonight, in The Lokasenna , that its coming is foretold in the clicks and bangs of amps and microphones being set up on the stage behind them, of the curtain backdrop falling into place, of the stage lights coming on.

Thor ignores all this, he always does. He does not come here for anyone else's show but his own. For his life is more his own now than it has ever been and he has little interest other than in the drink he needs to fill the hole in his heart. He does not even know quite how it got there or what he really seeks, only that no fleeting connection he has made along the road has connected to his blood that shrieks for something else. Indeed he has confessed more of himself to this unknown, almost silent barman than he has to anyone these past three years. He adds the fourth glass to his growing collection with a grunt and is just starting on preparing a fifth for that collection when he hears the click of the microphone and the rustling sound that is a precursor to speech. His heart sinks a little in preparation, hating this cheesy lounge singer shit that interferes with his perfect plan to get quietly, benignly slaughtered, and that voice cuts into his dull drifting complacency like a knife to the head and kills it forever –

"Good evening Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're all enjoying tonight's dulcet path towards tomorrow's raging hangover. Here's one for all you gents in the audience."

The voice is low and growling as a faraway storm cloud with an edge to it like gleaming ice; dipped with that faint touch of sarcasm that both abuses the listener and demands that they love it. Something in that voice speaks to something low down in Thor, causing ripples that brush pleasantly with the river of whiskey in the belly. Just because they provide no long term cure for his undiagnosed heart does not mean he does not still have an eye for the ladies.

"Who is she?" he mutters aloud, turning round to look against his better judgement. He has no sooner glanced at the stage than he spins back round, choking on his drink and banging a fist into the bar – "Dear fuck!"

He glares up to meet Heimdall's faint, possibly – sympathetic smile and his nodding face –

"She is a he," he affirms, as though Thor had not worked that out already and this is the cause for his cursing.

"Fuck." Thor re-iterates, for lack of a better expression.

"You're not the first," Heimdall shrugs, though it is possible he is referring to more than Thor realises.

Unable to help himself Thor looks back. The singer is butchering a song he has heard grinding its sordid way out of so many bars, a song he has always loved for its filthy beat, foul rhythm and sensually violent words. This version has the same perky bouncy beat of every lounge-singer-song he has ever heard, and he would like to take the singer by the throat for it. He looks for longer than he intended; the man dazzles with green sequins, spins and twists across the stage with top hat and cane and a sinuous grace that he grudgingly admits to himself surpasses any other act this crappy. Yet there is something to the face beneath that hat that makes him feel distinctly uncomfortable, something in the arch of those sardonic eyebrows and the twist of the smirking lips that bring a filthiness back to the words that the beat did not intend. Even from this distance he can see the deep flash of green in the young man's darkly lined eyes, a green that is only half the reflection of sequin and spangle. He can see the curl of those slender pale fingers around the top of the cane and the slick swish of the dark hair against that pale throat that make him think all the more about taking that throat and squeezing –

He turns away fast, cursing again under his breath, for his thoughts are beginning to take a highly unwanted turn. This is strange and alien to him and really not what he wants; he has no interest in men, he never has, so why in the hell? He growls out the request for another with a greater urgency than Heimdall has yet heard from him. He is ready with another other when Thor drains the first in an instant.

"Do you want to rephrase?" Heimdall asks, Thor scowls, trying to remember what question he had asked, so long ago now it was - three drinks away. He nods remembering, no he is not sure he does not want to know anymore, he is not sure he should not just leave and never come back before this all goes weird. But he won't back out like that much of a coward, he motions his forefingers in a circular gesture yes I shall continue –

"Who is he?" he rephrases. Heimdall cannot resist a slight so glad you asked expression –

"Name's Loki –" and he adds with just a touch of inevitability – "He's in again on Monday."

Thor nods and makes his first mental note to not be here on Monday, but he foolishly meets Heimdall's eye and they share a look that suggests they both know that he will be.

_x_

I don't know what's happened to me! I hate AU's! I especially hate modern day Thorki AU's! Okay here's what happened, I was listening to Richard Cheese, not wholly on perpose and got this image of Loki as a cheesy lounge singer singing his covers, this developed in the course of a conversation with the very much to blame but lovely Zedrobber into the creation of a whole AU with biker!Thor/ Loungesinger!Loki. Zed started doing illustrations for this, I said "I know I'll write some ficlets for these pictres". Ficlets my arse. Now this is happening and I've kinda fallen for it hook, line and sinker. It may grow into another of my beasts. (Though fear not I have not forgotten my other beastly babies, I still have plans for "All the stars fell" and the "Colours of Asgard" series!)

For those that were wondering Loki was singing the Richard Cheese version of "Closer" the original of course being that infinite gift offered to slashfic writers by Nine Inch Nails.

The next chapter, to balance out this one, will be Loki – centric.