by C. Gockel
“You don’t know that!” says Beatrice, fingering the cross hanging around her neck.
Loki looks up at her and glares. And then he stands from the table and walks out the door. Beatrice and Amy watch him walk into the garage. Amy looks around the kitchen. Nothing is on fire. For some reason that makes her sad.
Sitting with her laptop and checkbook on the kitchen table, Amy’s looking at her bank accounts trying not to feel depressed. It’s the evening after Loki’s return. She had a temp job in the afternoon, and now she’s obsessively reconciling her checkbook, calculating how much she has earned and how much she’ll need to earn to have enough money to pay the school fees her scholarship doesn’t cover, and to make a down payment on a new place to live in the fall.
Hearing a knock at the door, Amy looks up. Through the window she sees Loki wearing the same clothes he had on earlier.
Grateful for the distraction and relieved that he looks sober and shaven, Amy walks over and opens the door. Face almost expressionless, Loki says, “Miss Lewis, it seems I will be a guest of your world for awhile. I was wondering if...” He looks away. “If you might help me get acclimated to your world’s current magic...technologies.”
Amy’s stares at him. That seems so healthy and proactive. “Wow. Good for you,” she says, too shocked to move from the doorway.
Shrugging, he says in a flat voice, “If I’m going to see Odin kneel before me while I hold his testicles in my hands as all of Asgard burns, I have to start somewhere.”
Amy’s mouth drops.
Straightening, Loki says, “I will make it worth your while somehow, I give you my — ”
Amy waves a hand. “No, no, no. It’s okay...of course I’ll help you if I can; you don’t owe me anything.” She’ll just take that Odin’s testicle thing and Asgard burning thing as a slight bit of hyperbole brought on by grief.
Loki tilts his head and his expression softens just a bit.
Her brow furrows. “Is there any place you’d like to start?”
Loki’s eyes go over to her laptop on the kitchen table. “Computers and the internets. The last time I was here I had some access to ENIAC — but things have come so far since then.”
Amy blinks at him. ENIAC? Shaking her head she steps aside and motions for him to come in. “Have a seat. I’ll get us something to drink.”
“Thank you,” says Loki, walking over and sitting in front of her computer. As she turns to the refrigerator, he’s staring at the blank screen of power save mode.
Taking out a pitcher of freshly made peach tea, she pours two glasses and turns around. Loki has one finger hovering above the keyboard and he’s staring at her bank account information.
“Whoa,” says Amy, going to the table and closing that tab.
Loki looks at her, brows slightly raised.
Wincing, Amy says, “You probably shouldn’t have seen that.”
Loki holds up two hands. “I just touched it and — ”
“No, no, no...It’s okay.” She grabs her checkbook and then brings the two glasses of tea over to the table. Handing him one, she takes a sip of her own. It’s not as cold as she expected. “Drats, I’ll have to get some ice,” she says.
Holding out a hand to her, Loki says, “Sit down and allow me.”
She hands him the glasses. He gives her a twisted half smile and frost climbs up the outside of both. “Here,” he says, handing one back.
Amy finds herself smiling...more than she should. Is she being flirty? She shouldn’t be flirty. He just lost his family and his best friends and that would be inappropriate. She schools her face to neutral. Is it her imagination or is her pulse a little quick? Just knowing about his family...he doesn’t seem so much like an obnoxious flirt anymore. He has children, he’s —
Loki clinks his glass with hers which snaps her back to the moment. She takes a sip. “It’s perfect,” she says, staring over her glass at him.
Loki raises an eyebrow. “Where should we start?”
Realizing she’s staring, she spins back to her computer. “Well, I guess, first...this is a mouse.” She toggles the wireless mouse she has next to her iMac. Remembering his confusion over Car, she says, “It’s just what it’s called...it’s not actually alive.”
Loki holds out a hand and she hands it to him. Eying the mouse he murmurs, “Hoenir would have fun with this.” Expression hardening, he says, “How does it work?”
Amy has some experience teaching techie neophytes. She expects hours of back and forth, and obvious questions that make her want to tear her hair out. That doesn’t happen.
Loki grasps the point and click concept immediately. They move quickly from mice to the internet, and he begins asking questions that are too technical. He accidentally calls up the browser’s options and gets a menu she has never seen. He clicks on something, and when the page of gobbledygook comes up, he recognizes it immediately as the code for the page.
That’s when she looks down and sees it. “Um...” she says. “Loki, your fingertips are blue...” It’s that lovely, robin’s egg shade she had seen before, and it almost seems to be alight from within.
He looks down and his brow furrows. He takes a breath and the color fades away, like a wave draining from sand. Turning to her, his expression sharp, he says, “It is just an illusion.”
Amy can’t help it; she puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay.”
Turning back to the computer he says dryly, “I blame you for putting the damned idea in my head.”
Removing her hand and taking a deep uncomfortable breath, Amy says, “Okay, maybe we should go next to Google. It’s an internet site that can tell you just about everything....”
Once Loki has access to Google, it quickly becomes apparent that Amy isn’t so much helping as holding Loki back. She gets up and lets him explore ‘How the Internet Works’ and ‘Static Versus Dynamic Web Pages’ by himself.
Beatrice comes in, they all eat dinner together, and then Loki is at the computer again. When Amy goes to bed, Loki is still there, the screen flashing from one page to another. His eyes look very dark, and she swears his skin has a blue cast but decides not to say anything.
The next day when Beatrice goes to fetch Loki for breakfast, Amy clicks on the browser’s history — just out of curiosity. She’s not sure what she expected to find, but she doesn’t expect to find a whole bunch of entries on something called Schrödinger’s cat, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, quantum computing, random number generators and something on financial derivatives. She backs slowly away.
At breakfast when she asks him what he was browsing the night before, he just smirks and says, “Magic.”
With the help of Google, Loki fixes the ceiling fan in her grandmother’s room — turns out the problem was actually in the fuse box. During his first week with them, among other acts of computer wizardry, Loki cleans up the hard drive on Beatrice’s PC — something Amy would have thought impossible since her grandmother seems to open every attachment and click on every link she’s ever gotten in an email. And he also manages to get a nasty virus off of nosy-neighbor Harry’s computer — Harry’s on Beatrice’s email list. Sometime that first week he also hooks up the television, the DVD player and the stereo so that all share one remote, something Amy never managed to do. After that Amy finds herself regularly watching TV with Loki late into the night. He lies on the couch, feet propped up on one end. She sits on the EZ-boy chair — she starts sleeping better there than anywhere else.
Overall, Beatrice and Amy are both really impressed by the way Loki immerses himself in modern technology and modern life. But there are some incidents.
Amy comes home just after lunchtime during Loki’s second week with them. She had a job as a hostess at a local restaurant that morning. Beatrice meets her in the backyard, water pot in hand. “He’s in the kitchen,” Beatrice says. “I think you need to talk to him. We just don’t do that!”
Puzzled, Amy heads into the kitchen. Loki is wearing her gra
ndmother’s apron...which is a little odd considering it is pink and far too small...but that isn’t what really grabs her attention.
“Why is there a dead pig on our kitchen table?” She’s been around enough dead animals in vet school to recognize it without most of its skin and to not be disgusted — even if she is mostly vegetarian.
Loki looks up from where he is leaning over said pig with a very big cleaver. His brows furrow. “It has come to my attention that I am, in Beatrice’s words, ‘Eating you out of house and home.’ I am trying to do my ‘fair share’.”
“By butchering a pig...”
“It is a free-range pig, much higher quality than you would get in the the grocery store. Also, it is freshly slaughtered. It will be delicious...even you will want to eat this bacon.” He smacks the pig’s hindquarters and smiles.
Tilting his chin and rubbing the back of his cheek with a bloody hand, he says, “Though tonight I think we should eat the head. I make a delicious sweetbread.” He looks at her, holding up the cleaver in a way that is kind of psycho-esque. “What?”
“You cook?” she says. That is probably the least important question in her mind, but somehow it pops up first.
He rolls his eyes. “Odin was always sending me out to babysit Thor when he went adventuring. Thor was a prince; a bastard, but a prince... I got to cook.”
Amy looks at the dead animal stretched out and filling the whole kitchen table. “Where did you get the pig?”
He blinks at her and then leans down and starts sliding the knife under the pig’s skin. “From a butcher on Fulton. I read about it on the internet and went this morning.”
“You don’t drive...did you take this thing on the bus?” She had taught him how to use the bus and left a pass out for him. The one time Amy tried to teach Loki how to drive, he turned the Subaru into a load bearing part of the garage wall. Amy doesn’t know how he can build her a personal website on ‘server space’ she didn’t know she had and hook it up to ‘RSS feeds’ on veterinary medicine but can’t manage to put a car in reverse. It probably relates somehow to him setting the toaster on fire, though.
He looks up at her. “You know they wouldn’t let me?” He shakes his head as though amazed. “I carried it back. I got a lot of stares. You’d think people never had seen a hog before.”
Amy can hear the neighborhood gossip mill grinding in her head. Trying not to think about it she says, “How did you pay for it?”
He blinks again.
Oh, no. “Did you steal this pig?”
“I have no money. Of course I stole the pig,” he says.
“We don’t do that!” says Amy.
He stares at her. Then frowning and crossing his arms, cleaver still in hand, he says, “Do you want me to return it?”
Amy looks at the partially butchered animal and rubs her eyes. “No, just tell me where you stole it from and give me your oath that you won’t do it again.” She tells herself she’ll send the butcher compensation. Somehow. Anonymously.
“Fine...you have my oath, while I reside at your house, I will not steal another pig — ”
“Anything,” says Amy.
He glowers at her.
She glowers right back even though she feels a pang of fear. “It could attract attention and the police.”
Narrowing his eyes, he uncrosses his arms and rolls his eyes. “Fine, you have my oath I will not steal while I reside under your roof.”
Amy decides that is the best she is going to do. Later that night, despite her better judgment, she tries some pig cheek — it just smells so good. It is delicious.
It is near the end of the second week when the second incident occurs. Amy is just coming home late from her hostessing job. There is a light in the living room. She follows it and finds Loki kneeling in front of the TV cabinet fiddling with the remote.
Without thinking, she puts her hostessing apron with the $66.73 she got in tips from takeaway orders on the coffee table next to her laptop. It was a long day, she made hardly any money, and she has no idea how she’s going to pay all her expenses at this rate. Settling into the EZ boy, she just sighs.
Without looking at her, Loki flops down on the couch. “I’ve hooked the television up to your computer. We can watch YouTube, Netflix, Hulu...”
“Whatever,” Amy says.
Without looking at her, Loki points the remote at the TV and some strange menu with cute icons comes up. He selects some talk on YouTube about Higgs Boson particles. Physics really isn’t Amy’s thing, but it is interesting — until it isn’t. Amy finds herself drifting off into sleep, Loki talking in the background...Something about, “Humans can’t see magic, but you’ve found all these ways to look at it indirectly. I really can see why Hoenir is so fond of you...”
She jerks awake when the program ends. The strange menu comes up and Loki flips to Netflix and Star Trek TOS reruns.
Spock’s making eyes at some incredibly elegant woman, and Amy’s just drifting off to sleep again when Loki says, “She’s scrawny.”
“Mmmm...” says Amy.
And then out of the blue Loki says, “You know, Amy, you really are just my type, but I don’t even feel like having sex right now.”
Amy bolts upright. Loki isn’t even looking at her. He’s just lying on the couch, head turned to the television screen. Her heart rate goes from racing back to normal. For a moment she’d felt like her sanctuary was going to collapse on her.
Staring at the flickering light without even seeing it, Amy feels exhausted again. “Sex is overrated,” she says. Sex is a tease. Your body convinces you you want it, and then during it you hardly feel like you’re even there, your mind wanders, the sensations become muted. Once it’s over you’re left feeling incomplete, and empty, wondering why you’d bothered in the first place. And then your partner describes it as awesome. She huffs at a recent memory and stares at her fingernails on the arm of the chair.
“Ordinarily I’d take that as a challenge,” Loki says, not moving.
Amy’s cheeks flush. “Glad I can be here during your time of personal growth.”
“This isn’t growth,” says Loki, his voice flat.
He isn’t looking at her; he hasn’t even moved. And then she remembers him laughing about getting his lips sewn shut, and flirting with her in Alfheim. Where did the Loki that could laugh about his own torture go? She’s been enjoying his company these last few weeks; he’s been mellower. There have been no horrible pick-up lines; she feels so safe she falls asleep with him in her living room. But the reason he’s been so mellow, the reason she feels so comfortable — it’s because he’s depressed, isn’t it?
She swallows. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s lost everything.
The images on the screen stop. “I’m bored with this show,” says Loki. He flips back to the cute icon-y menu.
Suddenly anxious to draw him out, Amy says, “Did you hook my computer up to the DVD player somehow?” Talking about technology is about the only thing that seems to perk his interest lately.
Loki actually laughs. “Oh, your DVD player isn’t involved in the slightest. I’m utilizing a device called an Apple TV. It’s a little box that connects your TV to your computer and the internet. The hard part was getting a username and then a password to initialize it.” He shakes his head and sighs. “Actually, it wasn’t that hard. You know, if you humans used more pass phrases instead of passwords the internet would be so much more secure. And think of it — ‘the pink hadrosaur jumps over thirteen purple griffins in the icebox,’ you’d never forget it, and it would be nearly impossible to hack.”
He actually sounds happy, and that’s good, but he talks so fast it takes Amy a moment to decipher all of it. And then she flushes. “Did you steal an Apple TV?”
He waves a hand at her and puffs. “No, I borrowed an Apple TV. I have every intention of returning it.”
“You can’t do that!”
Loki looks at a point on the wall. “No, I really can. I make myself invis
ible, walk into the Apple Store and — ”
“That’s stealing!”
He glares at her. “I do not break my oaths!”
What follows is an argument that she thinks she technically wins, but he refuses to acknowledge her victory. In the end she extracts an oath that he will return the Apple TV the next day and that he won’t borrow again without a merchant’s express consent...as long as he resides on their property.
That night she goes to sleep in her own bed, leaving him taking the Apple TV box thingy out of the TV cabinet.
Later, she comes down the stairs to let Fenrir out. Loki is stretched out asleep on the couch. A box she supposes is the Apple TV is on the coffee table beside him.
His face is drawn, his fingers are blue and twitching, and he’s mumbling something in another language, sounding strained. Her change apron is still on the coffee table, too. She decides not to move it. It’s so close to his face, it will jingle and Loki obviously needs his sleep, pained as it may be.
She has his oath not to steal in her house; and she’s seen that the man takes his oaths very seriously.
It isn’t until she’s settled back in bed and closing her eyes that she realizes the true significance of her argument with Loki earlier in the evening.
Her eyes bolt open.
...forget borrowing things without asking. What’s really scary is that he’s been here two weeks and he’s already hacking into computers.
Stumbling out of the rain into Hoenir’s hut, Anganboða, Mimir, Loki and the nearly unconscious Hoenir find themselves in a sitting room. Panting, Loki drops Hoenir on the small sofa. Hoenir mumbles something in his sleep, and Loki crumples to the floor.
“That’s going to hurt in the morning,” says Mimir with a tsk, tsk.
“His head or my back?” Loki grumbles.
“Both,” says Mimir. His eyes slide over to Anganboða. “Would you please lean me against that wall?” He waggles his eyebrows in the direction of a wall just to the side of an unlit fireplace.
