Beneath
Chapter Seventy-Seven – Broadening
Loki felt awkward working beside Jane the next day, for it was difficult to look at her without picturing her on that table staring up at him with one good eye. He would sit at his computer, start a new task, then lose track of what he was supposed to be working on and stare blankly at the screen. The dream had left him far more disturbed than simply seeing violent images of Jane really should have. Jane was fine, after all; she was sitting a few feet away from him, happily typing away at her keyboard and tracing graph data with her fingertip.
But she might not have been fine. If it was Jane who'd had the iridium Selvig said he needed, or if he'd happened to need something else, one of the pieces of equipment only Jane had because she'd built it herself, she wouldn't have been fine. He would have taken what he needed from her no differently than from Heinrich Schäfer. She would have been a numbered name in a stack of papers. He would never have known her at all.
Of course, that was assuming he didn't know who she was, that she was that woman of Thor's. But he did know who she was then already, thanks to what he'd seen through the Destroyer, and even more so thanks to Erik Selvig. Knowing it was her then…considering it from a strictly practical – and honest – standpoint…he would have done only one thing differently. He would have used the scepter. He would have made her submit willingly to the eye scan, and then in the chaos of the moment he would have had her escape the area to be extracted by those working for him, because she could prove immensely useful later. In controlling Thor, and in inflicting on him the deepest wounds possible. He pictured the moment atop Stark Tower when Thor had asked him to help him put a stop to what he'd started, when Thor had still naively thought they could just join hands and put this all behind them as though it had never happened, as though nothing had changed. "We can do it together." How differently that moment would have gone, had he done such a thing to Jane. He wondered if he would've even survived it. Thor was considerably stronger than him, and Loki's extensive experience fighting alongside and against him told him Thor had been holding back when they fought on that tower.
Loki stole another quick glance at her, immersed in her work. Had it been Jane instead, had she been in that other scientist's place, he would never have known her. Not the real her. The image of her with clouded-over blue eyes anticipating his every need, perhaps working alongside Erik, perhaps taunting Thor, unable to argue with him and not even wanting to argue with him…it was unsettling. It wasn't Jane. He thought about what he would have missed, had he never known her. That bizarre and mostly funny version of what happened when Mjolnir was stolen. A story of a young girl's first crush in the mountains of Guatemala. Piñatas and Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Pathfinder and space-time and learning more about Yggdrasil in a few months than he had in a thousand years. Someone whose intelligence and intellectual curiosity and drive to succeed impressed him and challenged him. Someone who listened, even when he lashed out or insulted, even when he had nothing at all to say. He would have never known what she had to offer to those all those around her. The scientist in Stuttgart…could he possibly have had any such things to offer, beyond the use of his eye? A wife, children, grandchildren. Charitable donations. He'd been a kind man, then, perhaps.
He blew out a frustrated sigh through his nose. He'd never thought about such things before. Never. The thoughts were unwelcome. I didn't mean for him to die, Loki thought, though he knew how disingenuous it was. He hadn't meant for it to happen, but he'd hardly concerned himself over it, either. Life and death among these mortals had meant nothing to him. If a few died here and there…well, the planet was hardly underpopulated. So he'd never thought about it before…and now suddenly he was. It was exactly what he'd worried about. Her acid. Weakening him, and his resolve. Making him question himself. But it was too late for that. No amount of time travel would undo what he was at his core.
"What is this?" Selby said in an irritated voice, interrupting the train of thought that had already interrupted Loki from his work. He had just arrived for the morning, and was holding up a white coffee mug with the shape of Antarctica outlined on it, and a carved wooden cup stuffed with pens.
Loki stared at him with a raised eyebrow. It appears to be a coffee mug and a cup full of pens, he wanted to say, but he only antagonized the man in secret – on the surface he was friendly but professional and somewhat reserved with him. He glanced over at Jane, who was doing her best to look very busy over her computer.
"Seriously, what is this stuff doing on my desk?"
"Oh, sorry, I must have moved it there when we were playing paper football yesterday," Wright said, looking up from a printout he'd been studying.
"You can't move this crap onto your own desk? You had to stick it on mine?"
"Selby, relax, dude, you're going to give yourself an ulcer. Here, I'll take it," Wright said, standing up and taking the two or three steps over to Selby's desk, where he took the two items out of Selby's hands.
"Look, I know it's just a little thing, all right? But I'm so sick of all these little things. There's no respect for someone's space or belongings here. Someone is always taking my food from the leftovers fridge."
"Still?" Wright asked.
"Well, not since I started putting my stuff in the Game Room refrigerator."
The rest of the exchange was lost on Loki, who smiled only on the inside. So that's why I haven't found anything labeled "Selby" for a while. He would wait a few days, of course. Acting on this new information too soon would unnecessarily narrow Selby's pool of suspects.
/
/
"Ready for lunch?" Jane asked quietly a few hours later, hoping to avoid the potential awkwardness of someone asking to join them.
Loki nodded. "One moment," he said, inserting a digital mark in the data he was working through to flag the burst of energy one of Jane's devices had monitored. "All right."
They walked down the corridor toward the galley together in silence, prepared plates, and took their trays, at Jane's suggestion, to one of the empty offices in the suite next to the Science Lab. There they should have both privacy and the space they needed, she said.
"What's going on with Selby?" Loki asked as they reached one of the offices and set down their trays. He closed the door behind them.
"I don't know. He's been acting kind of strange for a while. Standoffish, I guess? But really just with me. This is the first time I've seen him snap at anyone."
"You should stay away from him. I don't think he's entirely stable."
Jane paused, a forkful of mashed potatoes halfway to her mouth. She regarded Loki for a moment, considering and then rejecting making a comment.
"All right, so tell me: what kind of a game is poker?"
"Well, it's a card game. And there's pretty much always some kind of betting involved."
Loki's eyebrows went up. Card games he knew. Card games he was good at. At least, if she was speaking of the same sort of thing he had in mind. "What sort of card game? What sort of cards?"
"We really only have one kind of cards. And I guess…well, there's Uno and Skip-Bo and those kinds of boxed card games…but for the most part it's just one kind of cards, and we use them for all sorts of different games. Here, I brought a deck from the Game Room." She fished around in her backpack for the cards she'd grabbed earlier this morning, and handed them over to Loki once she found them.
Loki opened up the flimsy paper carton the cards were in and pulled them out. On one side they all had identical pictures of a palm tree on a beach, and on the other side were mostly numbers and four distinct symbols. He pulled out the ones that didn't have numbers. "K for king, Q for queen…interesting. You play with rulers you don't even have."
Jane nodded and swallowed a bite before responding. "I guess it all goes back to England. We have…I mean the United States has a lot of ties to England because of our history. They have kings and queens. But a parliament, too. But sorry, I guess that's not what you're interested in."
"No, I am interested, but I already knew that, actually. I made cursory studies of a great many of your realm's nations before…well, before New York."
"Really?" Jane asked in a sort of morbid fascination. From her perspective it kind of seemed like he'd just shown up and started destroying. She wanted to ask more about it, but she wasn't sure exactly what yet, she wasn't sure she wanted to hear the answers, and she felt now was probably not the best time anyway.
"Of course," Loki said, and, sensing that Jane had questions, quickly continued. He wasn't sure if he could deal with personal questions from her today, with that dream so fresh in his mind. "What are the J and A for?"
"J is for Jack and A is for Ace. They're ranked. The Jack is above the ten. It's the lowest of the face cards, then the Queen, then the King, and the Ace is worth the most, it's the highest card in the deck."
"What is a 'jack?'"
"It's the lowest-"
"I understand that, Jane, I heard you the first time. But what is it? Another word for a prince?"
"Well, it's a…ummm…" Jane looked down and to the right, knitting her brow, before giving a little laugh. "I have no idea. I never thought about it. I'll have to look it up later. But it's not like you'll need to know in order to play. It's just the name of the card. You just have to know how much it's worth. Who asked you to play?"
"Our neighbor, Ronny."
"Did he say what game, exactly?"
"He only said 'poker.'"
"Okay. There are lots of variations on poker, but I guess Five Card Draw is the most common. So I'll teach you that one, and the basics of the terminology, and if they play a variation on it, just ask for a reminder of the rules. The concepts are pretty simple, really. The complicated part is more about trying to figure out how good the other person's cards are, and whether they're bluffing, and also not giving away how good or bad your own cards are."
Loki nodded. "I've played such games many times. I'm very good at them."
Jane gave a rueful smile. "Why am I not surprised?"
"I'm sure I don't know," Loki answered with an overly innocent face.
"Anyway, it all depends on how seriously the players take that part of it. When I played in college it was just a bunch of friends goofing around, and there were usually Jello shots involved. I played a few times in grad school but those guys were all about winning and faking everybody out, and some of them were even counting cards, and it wasn't fun for me anymore."
"You don't like the manipulative aspects of the game."
"No, I don't."
Why am I not surprised? Loki wondered, but aloud asked only, "What are Jello shots?"
Jane laughed and told him, then got on with explaining flushes and straights and full houses, and calling and raising and folding.
Loki indeed caught on easily; the game was a good deal less complicated than most of the other ones he was familiar with, since these cards didn't even change value during the game. The full house concept was an apt one, he thought bitterly. If a Jack was truly a prince, then one prince indeed made a full house.
Jane offered to play a real practice hand with him – they'd just played one with cards face-up – but Loki declined; it wasn't necessary. Jane then taught him Seven Card Stud and Texas Hold 'Em as other common poker variants.
"That should cover it," she said when Loki nodded that he understood how Texas Hold 'Em worked. "It's all guys, right?"
"As far as I know."
"Pretty much no possibility of strip poker then," Jane said with a laugh. Loki playing strip poker was a pretty bizarre idea anyway, and impossible to picture – no, no, no, don't picture it – but if the company were mixed, she wouldn't be surprised if at least a comment about it would come up.
"What- ah." Loki pictured it. A man can't be convicted for his thoughts, he said to himself while very carefully not visibly reacting, recalling his earlier words. "That would never happen on Asgard."
"Really?"
"Well…possibly behind closed doors, if the individuals involved were young and severely inebriated."
"So what you're saying is…it would happen on Asgard, and probably does."
Loki shot her a look of annoyance. But he had no desire to discuss Asgard, much less defend it from her aspersions.
"All set then?" she asked a moment later, after collecting and shuffling the cards again.
"I'll take their last dollars. You've prepared me well."
"Comforting thought. And as my Uncle Van used to say, betting your bottom dollar may make for a nice song lyric, but in real life it's usually a pretty dumb bet. He did some tournament play, so he'd know. But, hey, I guess you could just make more. Don't do that, by the way. Please."
"Don't worry. I guarantee it won't come to that. Not on my part. You had an uncle named Van?"
"Still do. He lives in Colorado." Jane set the cards aside.
"I had two uncles named Villi and Ve."
"My aunt's name was Vivian," Jane said with a smile. She was surprised he had volunteered this of his own accord.
Loki echoed the smile. "My aunts' names did not begin with 'v.'"
"So why haven't you mentioned your uncles before?"
"Why haven't you mentioned yours?"
"I haven't seen Uncle Van in years. We're not all that close. Just life circumstance, really. I should probably make more of an effort."
"Uncle Villi married a woman from Vanaheim and they moved there before I was born, so I didn't see him very often, and he died…I suppose around two hundred years ago now. Uncle Ve's wife and two children died in a fire almost a thousand years ago, and he became…well, the word most often used was 'eccentric,' after that. He died two or three hundred years ago." It was easier, somehow, to still think of them as uncles, their wives as aunts, their children as cousins – except for Gilla, who still lived on Vanaheim – as family, because they were gone, and untouched by Odin's revelation. But they weren't family, of course. For all he knew, Villi and Ve had known exactly where their brother Odin had obtained his second son from.
"Were you close to them?" Jane asked, trying to fathom what such a loss would feel like after a few hundred years had passed. Loki, at least, didn't seem upset when speaking of his uncles the way he was with Thor or his father.
"I suppose, somewhat. Going to Uncle Villi's was like an adventure when I was child. The first time I traveled by bifrost was to see him. I was just three years old but I still remember it. It's probably my oldest memory. I was closer to Uncle Ve, though. But that's enough about them. You're always asking me about my family, Jane. Why don't you tell me about yours?"
Jane glanced at the cards she'd set aside next to her lunch tray. She was surprised that Loki was asking, and they were now pushing well past the definition of "long lunch," but if he was back to being willing to talk to her, then she was willing to talk to him again, too. "There's not a whole lot to tell. I mean, I told you about my parents. My mom was an only child, and her parents both died when I was a kid. On my dad's side my grandfather had a disease called Huntington's. He had a lot of physical limitations, but, you know, his mind was pretty sharp until near the end. He used to tell me funny stories, and he'd come out to the garage with me and my dad and have us tinker with one of his old cars and then point out everything we were doing wrong. He died eight years ago, and then my grandmother followed him three years later. I know it sounds kind of trite but she'd put so much of herself into taking care of him that I think she kind of didn't know what to do with herself anymore once he was gone. Her cancer came back, she'd been in remission, and she refused the chemo…that's a treatment for cancer that's really harsh on the body. Losing them was really hard… Anyway, Aunt Vivian, she had the same disease, Huntington's, it's hereditary. She got pneumonia and passed away the year after my grandmother. And when you put it all together like that…wow, yeah. I really need to try harder to stay in touch with Uncle Van and my cousins."
Although it would be unheard of on Asgard to lose so many members of one's extended family in such a short time – Jane was speaking of a time span of perhaps fifteen or twenty years, he figured – it wasn't such a stretch for Loki to imagine it. He'd lost his entire family in one ill-fated trip to Jotunheim, both those still living and those long dead. Before his thoughts could lead him far down that path, though, something else Jane had said came to mind. "This hereditary disease your grandfather and your aunt had…does that mean you could have it, too?"
Jane gave a half-smile. This wasn't something she particularly enjoyed talking about. Or thinking about. But it was there, and it didn't bother her enough to back away from it. "I do have it. I mean I have the genetic markers for it. I have thirty-six repeated glutamines in…sorry, there's no need for you to learn human genetics on top of astrophysics. The short version is I have a risk of developing the disease, but it's a relatively low risk, less than Grandpa and Aunt Vivian had, and if I get the initial symptoms at all it probably won't be until I'm really old. By the Midgardian definition, of course," she added, trying to lighten the conversation that had turned as heavy as a house's worth of bricks, at least in her mind.
Loki looked closely at her, every bit of her visible above the desk that was between them, lingering on her two brown eyes. Nothing about her spoke of illness, or of anything wrong with her genes or her glutamines or anything else. She and every other mortal here were just some fifty or seventy years from death, though, each of them with illness and frailty ever present in some form or other. Did Schäfer have a weak heart? He forcefully shifted his focus back to Jane. She looked healthy, but her body could already be wracked by half a dozen different illnesses, including this Huntington's. It was unfortunate, really. If Jane had an Aesir's lifetime, who knew what she could accomplish? And what have I accomplished in the last millennium? Nothing of import. Except stuffing my pockets with fruit from six months ago. And setting a record for the shortest kingship in the history of Asgard. "Is there no treatment for this disease?" he finally managed to ask.
"No, not yet. Research is being done, but right now there's just treatment for some of the symptoms. But it's just…it's just something that's out there, that might be part of my life later on, either for me, or when it comes to having kids. It's not like I sit around worrying about it."
"You could pass it to your children as well?" Loki asked, then frowned at himself for having done so. She'd already said it was hereditary. But while heredity was a familiar concept to him, hereditary illness was not.
"There's a fifty percent chance."
"It's strange to think of you having children," Loki said, the first thing that came to mind – other than what was really on his mind – because the topic of conversation was making him uncomfortable.
"Gee, thanks," Jane said, pursing her lips and widening her eyes for a moment to let him know what she thought of his input on that particular issue, then looking off to the side. The truth was, she didn't think she'd be such great mother material either. Kids were messy and disorganized and she had a hard enough time keeping her own stuff from taking over wherever she happened to be living. They needed to be fed and she sometimes forgot to feed herself.
"That's not what I meant. It's just…you're very young."
"Oh. Yeah, it's all a matter of perspective. Sometimes it seems like I'm about the only one of my high school class not to have kids yet."
"On Asgard thirty-one is…well, it's technically adulthood, but no one really treats you that way. And no one would think of marriage or children at that age. It would be frowned on."
"Oh, really? When do you start thinking of it?"
"Odin was well over two thousand when he led the Aesir against the Jotuns, and when Thor was born."
"Two thousand?" Erik's sister occasionally liked to ask her when she planned to settle down and start a family. Don't worry, Lise, I've got a good one thousand nine hundred and seventy years before I need to start thinking about that. "You must have such a different perspective on life when you live that long."
"I think we mostly squander it," Loki answered.
"How do you mean?"
"There's no sense of urgency. There's no…there's no need to do something today. You can just as well do it tomorrow. Or next year. Or next century." Loki paused, thought about the others that had been around him all his life – the servants and Einherjar and merchants and engineers and craftsmen. He had little idea what their lives were really like; he'd never much thought about it. "Or perhaps that's only for those who were raised as princes," he added.
"I bet it's changed now. Because of the war, I mean."
"Yes," he said with a nod. "I'm sure you're right."
"Loki…don't you wish you could be there?"
"On Asgard? Why would I want that? They're in the middle of a war, as you've just pointed out." Here we go again. Can't she ever just let this go?
"But it…it sounds like it's pretty bad, with everyone ganging up on Asgard, and…whatever happened between you and Thor, or you and Odin, it's still your realm."
"Is it?" he asked with a dry smile.
"Of course it is. You once told me you were the king of Asgard," she said, remembering it only now. He'd said it in the midst of so many other unexpected things in such an angry, volatile moment, and somewhere along the way she'd forgotten. "Was that true? How could you be Asgard's king and then not care about it now?"
Loki sat back and inhaled and exhaled deeply before responding. "Yes, Jane, it's true. And I never said I didn't care. I don't wish to see Asgard fall. But they betrayed me, so you'll forgive me if I have no desire to take up my knives alongside them. And, lest you forget, I couldn't even if I wanted to. I barely avoided being killed the last time I tried to go to Asgard."
"I know you can't. I'm just saying…if I were in your shoes, I'd be going crazy to not be able to be there."
"Then it's a good thing you aren't, isn't it?" Loki snapped. "You couldn't walk two steps in my shoes without tripping."
"And you couldn't walk one step in mine without whining like a two-year-old. Your point is?" Jane asked calmly if sharply.
Loki held the gaze that she fixed steadily on him. Jane was stubborn, but he could be as well. His point though…she would never understand it. She would never understand the complexity of his attitude toward Asgard – he didn't even fully understand it himself. And he wasn't going to help her try. "My point is that your feet are just as tiny as the rest of you."
"Okay," Jane said after a moment, uncertain how to respond. Isn't it usually me that gives in when we argue? Not that we argued, precisely. More like he insulted me and I insulted him right back. Jane frowned, then, as she got it. It was as she'd suspected before – he insulted to end a conversation that was going in a direction he didn't like. "If you don't want to talk about something you could just say so, you know."
He tilted his head a bit and raised his eyebrows.
Jane looked away and laughed. "Is it too late to take that back?"
"Yes. In fact, I'd like you to say it again when I'm able to make a recording of it."
"If I push sometimes-"
"If?"
Jane shook her head, smiling. "When I push sometimes, it's just that…I know you're…for all of the…stuff you've done…you hold in a lot of things, too, and it helps to talk about it. Don't look at me that way, it does. You need to talk about it, and I need to…well, I want to understand. More than I do, anyway. But…okay, I'm sorry I brought up all that stuff about my family and the Huntington's and everything. I'll start over and tell you some nicer things, okay?"
"Don't apologize. I'm glad you told me," he said, and he was. Though it was strange to think of her sitting there right across from him looking perfectly healthy, but with some tiny part of her body rebelling against itself, breaking her apart inside in some way that seemed slow to her but shockingly fast to him. "And you've already told me nicer things about your family. You told me about your mother's rose garden and her attempts at home maintenance and her work in anthropology, your father's work in physics and him tutoring you in your constellations and you staying up with him when you went camping. And a moment ago you told me about repairing old cars with your father and grandfather."
"You weren't listening very well," Jane said with a laugh, though in truth she was surprised at how much he remembered.
"Oh?" Loki asked, masking his annoyance. He listened to everything she said. Even when he didn't want to.
"I said we tinkered. I never said anything about repairing. None of those cars ever actually ran again. From Grandpa I learned how to just dive in and get my hands dirty and try stuff and see what happens."
"'Try stuff and see what happens.' I like your grandfather's philosophy," Loki said. Tomorrow he would try more stuff and see what happened.
"Um, yeah, well, I was talking about tinkering with cars and basic engineering, you know, not…" Not pandemonium. But there was no sense in making reference to that again.
"Of course. That's what I meant as well. Cars and basic engineering. Speaking of which, we should return to the fruits of your basic engineering now, should we not?"
"I guess so," she said with a nod, though she'd hoped to ask him about his mother, or maybe more about his uncles. Another time, she thought, gathering up the cards and her lunch tray. There was a lot of winter left; there was plenty of time.
/
/
"Okay, I've got one. My wife's brother? He shaves his chest and he gets his back waxed," Austin said.
Loki's look of confusion lasted less than a second before melting seamlessly into the laughter of the rest of the group. Such a thing would be ridiculed mercilessly on Asgard, and he couldn't fathom why anyone would willingly do it. But then he remembered the woman with the ring through her nose that he'd seen at the six-months-ago Pole – that certainly wasn't done, either. Plenty of things were done on Midgard that wouldn't be done on Asgard. Behind the laughter he wondered why it was that he still tended to view Asgard as the pinnacle of perfection, the standard against which all the other realms were measured and found lacking. He'd thought himself a part of that realm and its elite people even though he himself was often found lacking by them. I really should have known it was a lie, he thought as he let his laughter die along with the others.
"Was it growing as long as the hair on his head?" Loki asked with false laughter still in his voice, partly to remain a part of the conversation, but partly because he was genuinely curious why someone would do such a thing.
"His ex-wife thought so."
"She divorced him because of his hairy chest? I thought women liked hairy chests," Ronny said. "Like it's a sign of…virility or something."
"Oh, then I am so virile," Zeke said.
"Rita said his ex was always on him about his hairy back. So when they split, he got it waxed, and I guess he liked it so much he did his chest, too."
"I like women with hairy chests," Paul said, drawing big laughs and a few pieces of popcorn.
"Carlo, I bet you used to shave or wax or whatever," Austin put in.
"Too virile for the local chics?" Ronny asked with a laugh.
"What can I say? It was self-defense," he answered with a nod. "No, I used to do competitive swimming. I even went to the European Junior Championships when I was eighteen. Shaving reduces drag and makes your skin more sensitive to the water. I shaved my arms and legs and feet, too."
Ronny whistled and the others followed; Loki was a little too late to join in on this odd reaction and merely laughed. It was hard enough to do that when he really wanted to twist his face into some horrid expression to match how utterly bizarre this sounded. He remembered then, Jane had said something about swimming in competitions in school, and he filed it away to ask her about later.
Austin started leaning down over the table and Carlo shot him a look at the same time as his body made a small jerky movement, and Austin sat back up. "Mmmm, silky smooth," Austin said with a look of bliss on his face and this time Loki laughed of his own accord.
Carlo shook his head. "I haven't shaved in over a decade."
"Except for your face," Zeke said. Carlo and Loki were the only two men at the table – and among the few at the Station – who hadn't grown a beard.
"It itches," Carlo said, running a hand over his bare jaw. "I don't like it. I grew it out once. I hated it and my girlfriend said it tickled."
"What about you, Lucas?" Zeke asked. "Not joining the beard club?"
Loki glanced from Zeke to Carlo. "I look ridiculous with a beard. I prefer my face smooth." It was even true, he thought. Certainly the experience of wearing Fandral's face just yesterday had shown him that he no longer wished to grow one. He thought, perhaps, though, that it would still be nice to be able to grow one, to have a choice in the matter.
"I'm not such a fan of mine either," Ronny said – and Loki noted again that there was an odd bare batch in it just off center on the left side of his chin – "but shaving was killing me here. Too dry."
"Let's get on with it. Deal the next hand," Paul said.
Austin got up to bring over another round of drinks, and when he returned, Zeke dealt. They were out in the Vehicle Maintenance Facility, where Loki had thrown horseshoes with some of these same men; he wished they would simply choose a location inside the elevated station, so that going outside wasn't required. Loki was doing well, but not too well. They were betting in twenty-five-cent increments, and he'd won $8.25. It was true what Jane had said; success in this game, Five Card Draw as it turned out, depended largely on accurately assessing the other player's hands, and only Carlo seemed to be putting true effort into concealing his reactions to his cards. The game itself was just as simple as he'd thought once Jane explained it.
At the end of the next round of three hands, during which Loki allowed himself to more fully capitalize on what he'd observed during the first two rounds, he'd earned $19.75. It put him in second place behind Paul, who'd simply had a stroke of luck in the cards he'd been dealt in the last hand, and just a dollar ahead of Carlo. If he'd wanted to, though, he could have left them all in his dust in this round.
"Another liquid round!" Paul called and Zeke, now in last place, left the table and returned with more drinks. Loki accepted a second can of Coke, and the others took bottled beer. The pattern for the game had been three hands, followed by a break filled with pointless talking, the real reason for which appeared to be to give everyone a chance to drink and relax without worrying about the actual game. During the breaks Loki alternated between feeling terribly out of place – both far, far above these mortals and at the same time oddly resentful of them – and actually feeling a part of this group of men, who themselves had little in common with each other on the surface, other than the South Pole. Of course, he didn't actually want to feel a part of this group, so the discomfort never left him entirely.
A belch came from Ronny at the end of a random story about fishing in Alaska, and Zeke called out, "Five!"
"Five what?" Ronny asked, while Loki grimaced. Such noises were of course made on Asgard, too, but Loki had once done it at the High Table in his youth and was forbidden from taking his meals with anyone but himself for two weeks. Thor had forgotten the lesson learned at Loki's expense after a hundred or so years and was banished from the Feasting Hall and their parents' dining room for a month after a similar incident.
"Five points," Zeke answered. "It's the Three D's. Something my brothers and I used to do. Still do, when we get together. Allow me to demonstrate." He took a drink and swallowed it down quickly, began squirming about in his chair as though some creature were gnawing away inside his body, and then pressed his chin down to his chest and let out a long rumbling belch.
Austin bore a look of disgust mixed with laughter; Loki could relate at least to the disgust.
"You don't really get to rate yourself, but for the teaching moment, you understand, I'd give that one a six. Three for depth – that's the most you can get – two for duration, and one for disgustingness. The Three D's."
Paul started laughing loudly and Ronny slapped the table and shouted, "Game on!"
"You are all disgusting," Carlo said, echoing Loki's thoughts, though he held back his nod of agreement, not having decided how to play this yet.
"Ah-ah-ah," Austin said. "I see you when it's just the two of us out there at the Ice Cube Lab. You use your sleeve for a napkin, you scratch your crotch, and yes, you belch. So…I think we have our first player, do we not, gentlemen?"
"Apparently there is no 'what happens in the ICL stays in the ICL rule.' I'll keep that in mind, Austin. All right, if I'm going to play, I want to know what I get when I win."
Loki laughed with the others and at the comments that followed, while giving an internal sigh of resignation. A few months ago he'd been on his way to ruling this realm. Now – unless he feigned illness – it appeared he was going to be compelled to participate in a burping contest with those he would have ruled.
"How about a case of beer?" Paul suggested.
"Lucas doesn't drink. Not a fair prize," Austin said, and Loki nodded at him. As if he cared about their prizes, anyway.
"How about this?" Zeke asked. "Winner and partner get a week off of house mouse and dishpit, and everyone else picks up the slack."
Loki's ears perked up.
"Carlo's my house mouse partner, double chance of winning, basically. I like that," Austin said.
"Okay, but then you two can't score each other," Ronny said. "You'd give each other straight threes."
"Good point," Zeke said, and Loki found himself nodding and voicing his agreement, while Austin put on a false look of grave offense. "And no lowballing everybody else. Your honest assessment. Everybody gives their scores out loud."
"We should be allowed two attempts," Loki said. When no one immediately responded, he added, "A man should have the opportunity to improve his technique."
The others laughed and indicated their agreement.
Jane did say that I can't resist a challenge, Loki thought, keeping his smirk at a reasonable level. Game on, indeed.
/
I was surprised and delighted at how many of you mentioned enjoying the dream scene at the end of the last chapter. As I mentioned to a few of you, I was initially very unhappy with the scene and planned to come back to it later and try scrapping it and starting it over and seeing if I liked the second version better. But as sometimes happens I thought it wasn't so awful when I went back to it later, and I just made a few edits and I started liking it a bit better. For me the key sentence in that dream - and really you could say in many ways it's the theme of the entire story, because it's about a particular moment but also about so much more - is "A war raged inside him, a war over his eyelids and whether he would keep them shut forever or open them and see just what he'd done." And, well, that sentence wasn't in the original version of the scene. ;-)
Speaking of which, I have a small number of "deleted" or "alternate" scenes or snippets here and there that when this thing is done I'll try to make available in case anyone's interested.
On to some previews for Ch. 78: Jane invites Loki to an activity but Loki's already got plans; Jane reads about Thor's highly efficient goats and rereads a passage about Loki now that she knows more about him; and ninepen shudders with excitement (actually just writes really fast) at bringing something full circle that's been in the making for well over a year.
And the excerpt:
Loki felt sunshine warming his face – real, afternoon sunshine – and it felt glorious. The journey was over before he'd even realized it had begun, just like the last one. He supposed it was because the distance covered was much less – into Yggdrasil and right back out again. He made a careful circle where he stood, but he'd chosen his arrival point well, and no one had seen him or, he hoped, the flash. He was precisely where he was supposed to be. The side of a building was at his back, and broad leafy trees before him concealed him from the busy road. From here it was just a question of waiting, and keeping an eye on the building across the street. If he was precisely when he was supposed to be, he knew he wouldn't have long to wait.