Chapter Text
I shouldn’t have dared.
It was the worst idea ever.
What was I thinking, believing I could outwit a god?
I’m sitting on the floor in a dark, draughty corridor, trying to understand the shouting happening on the other side of the massive door just in front of me; trying to ignore the blue-green eyes glaring at me from that corner on the left; trying to make sense out of this whole situation; and above all trying to keep the giggling under control, because it will certainly not help. But seriously, of all the supernatural places men bright and dumb have invented, why did I have to arrive in the tackiest one ever? I breathe deeply to quiet the totally out-of-place hilarity I can feel growing in my chest.
“Are you feeling nervous?”
Can I really answer him that I actually need to remember how dangerous my situation is so I don’t laugh? “Not exactly nervous,” I say.
“Then you are nothing but an idiot.”
That’s it. These are the only two sentences he spoke over the past half-hour and I already want to punch him in the face. “Well,” I answer without looking at him, “when you’ve been greeted to a supposed paradise by a pile of corpses instead of slowly drifting into death as you had planned, it takes a lot more than shouting to make you nervous.” That should keep him quiet for a while; he hates it when I remind him that I was going to die anyway. It means I don’t care about surviving, right now, making me uncontrollable. And it actually helps me put everything that has happened to me over the past days into perspective. Because showy décor or not, I did get a second chance. And of all people, maybe I’m not the one who deserves it most.
The decision to die didn’t come as the conclusion of a lengthy depressive state; to be honest, I’ve always been a sort of drama queen, threatening to hurt myself every other time someone upset me, prone to soar very high on the wings of euphoria only to crash down harder a few days later. The only difference this time was that I didn’t warn anyone about how hard the crash had been. And as by some sort of miracle I can’t explain, I’ve always resisted drug addiction despite the people I worked with, I didn’t have the chemical help some of my… friends, for lack of better word, regularly used. I need to keep it in mind: I wasn’t a junkie.
Until very recently, I wrote books. All sorts of books, fiction, essays, short stories, a novel or two. But to pay the bills, and because my only other alternative was teaching – a prospect I found ghastly, – I mostly wrote biographies. The official ones. I wasn’t a ghost, writing autobiographies for others who didn’t have the time or the skill, the book had my name on the cover, but I didn’t do any investigation, didn’t publish any controversial account of my discoveries. First of all because it wasn’t what my readers were interested in, and second because being discreet and reliable propelled me into the company of powerful people so much more easily than all the righteous reporters I’ve ever met. These disregarded journalists used to say that I was morally impaired, hearing about all these dirty secrets and never using the opportunity to denounce my clients’ wrongdoings, but the fact was that I knew and they didn’t. And my status didn’t require me to be objective, or even detached from the subject, quite the contrary, so it allowed me to get closer to many, many influential politicians. And yes, I mean very close. In that sense. Not that I’m particularly attractive or anything, but it was the context. I was there, I knew how to strike up a conversation, and I spent weeks listening to their confessions without a sound, without being judgmental, without trying to fix any of these men’s – and women’s – anomalies. At first I was surprised at how easily they overlooked any pain they could cause to their families, but soon I learnt to create the perfect balance between being a threat and a challenge. I realized that if I stayed in the background, I could make it, and make it big.
Until I got involved in a long-term affair with the wrong person. Stuart. Young, handsome, promising MP. We could have been great together, but his wife found out, and she wasn’t of the forgetting type. I lost the contract; I lost my reputation; I lost my agent. I also lost most of my money, because she had connections with the mob – meaning that half her family was involved in traffics of all sorts – and I had to move back into my old life, my life before power. I couldn’t manage it. I had known more; I needed the thrill.
So I swallowed twenty sleeping pills, washed them down with a bottle of Teacher’s whisky – oh, the irony – and left the worst suicide note ever, along with a hard drive full of all the notes I had taken, including the ones that couldn’t go in the books. I know, it was a twisted idea; but I wanted to make them pay. I still don’t know if it caused the mayhem I intended, but at least I tried.
Yet it must be nothing compared to the confusion I’ve created since I arrived here.
In Asgard.
That’s it, I’m laughing now. I hear an irritated sigh and the sound of someone walking away, but I don’t care. He thinks I’m half mad anyway, and I’m not even trying to change his mind about that, since listening to someone like me is beneath him. By someone like me, he means an inferior being. A human.
Because you know how they say you have to reach the bottom to be able to stand up again? I’d hit rock bottom, and the sleeping pills gave me an uncanny kick, strong enough to send me higher than any mortal has been – as far as I know, anyway. The gods picked me up.
Well, not exactly picked me, I wasn’t chosen. And not just some god. Loki, Norse god of what I have come to call ambivalence. Or deceit, lies, mischief, as you wish, all are equally suitable. Technically, he’s an alien, and he was responsible for the attack on New York not so long ago, but was simply designated as a terrorist, because how would people have reacted if they’d learnt a megalomaniac extra-terrestrial had attacked them? And just because he could try, he decided to transfer some mortals into his own realm of Asgard, since he was forbidden to ever set foot on Earth again.
I swear it; it was whisky and sleeping pills. I got my hits from testing the limits of my power over people, not from mushrooms.
I remember thinking I should probably turn the telly off before the pills kicked in, and then nothing. But instead of dying, I woke up in some sort of cold, dark place, and I heard an equally cold voice mutter words I couldn’t quite make out, something like “why did it only work on a dead one? So much reparation to do.” I tried to scream I didn’t want to be repaired, but I couldn’t move and drifted back off to sleep. When I opened my eyes again, my head was throbbing, my stomach burning, but I could stand, I could walk, and I could scream. Which I did, because there was a dozen corpses piled up in a corner of the vault I had been transported to. I jumped to my feet, struggling with dizziness, listing up who among the people I had most likely pissed off with my goodbye package could be screwed enough to save me and imprison me, and looked everywhere for something I could use as a weapon. Not that it would have really helped, since I couldn’t fight even if my life depended on it, but maybe the psychopath keeping me here didn’t know that. I tried screaming again, hoping it would frighten whoever had kidnapped me. As if. Still howling at nothing in particular, I tried to open the door; but it turned out that it wasn’t the door, since I heard somebody walk in from the other end of the cave. “Will you stop shouting? I had forgotten you were so loud.”
That quieted me. It had to be someone who knew me well enough to know that I – wait a minute. I didn’t recognize the voice. And I always recognize voices. I turned around and kept my back to the wall. “Who are you? What happened to me? Why am I not dead? And what is this place?”
A tall figure slowly walked out of the shadows, and that’s when I first suspected I had gone mad, so I laughed. Because the first thing I recognized from the footage I’d seen was that crazy-ass pale guy who dressed in a green cloak and had probably lost a truth or dare bet condemning him to wear the most ridiculous item in the fancy costumes store. On the other hand, his clothes would have scored big on How To Look Good Naked. Or dressed, for that matter.
“How dare you laugh at me? I am Loki, of Asgard, and you should worship me as your god!”
As far as I could remember from the secret files I’d managed to see, that man standing there calling himself a god came from outer space. Did that mean I was –? Ok; so I was mad as a hatter anyway, what did I risk? “I’m an atheist; I don’t believe in any sort of god. And anyway, I once showered the Prime Minister in champagne, so –”
“Silence!” I obeyed. He had a sharp… something in his hand, and I didn’t have anything. And if this was death or madness, I could tell from the loud pumping in my head I could still feel pain, and I didn’t like pain. “I brought you here for a specific purpose, and I won’t hurt you if you do exactly as I say.”
That’s a sort of sentence I had learnt not to challenge directly. It happens more than one would think. “And what is it you want me to do?”
“That is none of your concern for now. I have to make sure your weakling’s body will not fail you before I let you out of here.”
“Is that what happened to the others?” I pointed at the corpses.
“No; they were already dead when they arrived here. They didn’t survive the transfer.” He shrugged.
Oh, I thought. So you’re psycho. Ok. He pointed at the table and I sat back on it, knowing better than to resist. I shivered. “Then why am I not dead? I heard someone… you perhaps, saying I was damaged.”
“You were. I took care of that.”
I felt anger flaring inside me. “Why on Earth would you do such a thing? You wanted to prevent me from killing myself?”
“Prevent you from killing yourself? No; but you had survived the transfer, I wasn’t going to let chemicals ruin my work. You have no idea how important this is.”
That’s when I started thinking I had some sort of advantage over him. I always know when I have the advantage. Well, almost always. “And what are you going to do with me?” He didn’t answer and proceeded to handle strange devices that glowed blue and red and gold. “Hey, I’m talking to you! What transfer are you talking about?”
“I have successfully transported you from your world to mine by a process I will not even try to explain, as your intellect can’t possibly comprehend it.”
Well, thank you, asshole. “And to what avail, may I ask?” I could feel RP kicking in automatically as he spoke.
“You don’t want to make me repeat an answer I have already given.”
I arched an eyebrow. “If you say so.” I looked about the vault. “Why me?”
“I didn’t choose you,” he snickered.
“Oh. And will you send me back once you’re finished?”
“I never intended to allow you back.” He fumbled around with more strange objects and started leaving without another word.
“Hey, what am I to do now?”
“Your body still needs to get stronger. You will sleep, woman.”
Woman? Is this for real? He was almost gone when I reacted. “Hey,” I hesitated. I wasn’t going to call him by a Norse god’s name! “Er… beetle-god! My name’s Eileen.”
“I don’t care. And if you don’t want to use my name, you can address me as my lord.”
My eyelids were already feeling heavier. “I will most certainly not do that,” I muttered before everything went black again.