More than Monsters//Closed
It had thus far been an ordinary day in Loki’s most recent existence. Well, as ordinary as one could reasonably expect under the circumstances. After all, how many fugitive gods lived as private citizens in the city that never slept? He had woken far too early, with a start, causing the book he had been reading as he passed out to fall, and lose his place. It could have been worse: more than one of his books were singed where he had woken more violently.
His dreams were never pleasant, not any more. He dreamt too often of unnaturally blue eyes in grey skin and purple, gnarled fingers and the sting of pain, and often too of black fur under slender chains, of the deep blackness of the Infinite Sea and the pale mists of Niflheimr. Of red hair, and of blonde, and of falling out of thought and time and back to those terrible, terrible eyes, and the torture that had accompanied them.
He tried to keep an even keel; drinking tea, stretching each morning in the apartment he had purchased for himself with the proceeds from fencing Asgardian gold to unscrupulous jewellers, going down into the city with no intent but to wander. He had walked every street in Manhattan now, and was working on the outer boroughs, finding small delights in Jewish bakeries and hidden bookstores, and thanking the dregs of his luck that his face had not been widely broadcast as the true perpetrator of the Battle of New York. The media had rightly focused on the aliens dropping out of the sky, and apart from a few dozen Stuttgarters who had seen him helmless he remained mostly anonymous. He used a dozen different names, from Lifgjarn through to Locke depending on who was asking, and though he kept a knife strapped to his forearm and one in his boot he found he had little use for them.
It was difficult to pinpoint the exact moment he realised he was being observed. His paranoia was always there, rumbling away like distant thunder in the back of his mind, but as he made his way down a quieter shopping street in Brooklyn he became aware of somebody’s eyes watching. It was the lie; the attempt at concealment that seemed to ping in the back of his skull, not quite a sixth sense but a tug in the fabric of reality, as the hider tried to convince the world that they were unseeable.
Glancing around, he wasted no time in quickening the pace, lengthening his stride to a mile-devouring march down one street and another, doubling back to the main route to try and loose his tail, heading for the river, the bridges.
