Chapter Text
Introduction: Everything’s the same here, just a little worse
Death isn’t nearly as exciting as Loki had expected.
In life, when he’d thought to imagine Hel, he’ll admit to picturing something grandiose. A vast underground hall, palatial and maze-like. Fire and brimstone. The unending screams of the damned. That sort of thing.
The reality is much different.
After Loki dies, he gets a job with the accounting firm of Nelson & Franklin. It wouldn’t have been his first choice in life, either, but here his options had been limited. The eternally-present ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the window of the Kamikaze Pizza had appealed to him even less, and besides, the guy who’d helped get him the job in the first place needed a roommate.
The office is bland and grey, and the apartment even moreso — with the added bonuses of things that skitter in the walls and a persistent smell from the pipes that it takes all of a week for him to become desensitized to. The job is miserable and Casey, his new roommate, is… Well. He’s overly friendly and constantly seems like a fish out of water, but he’s also mostly unobtrusive, keeps a religiously regular schedule, and doesn’t ask much of Loki other than that he keep the apartment’s common areas relatively clean.
Slipping into a routine is easy, easier than he would have expected. He wakes up, goes to work, and then, because there’s nothing else to do in this godforsaken town, he goes to the bar.
There are two in town, only two and a half blocks from each other. One, he’s only visited once, but the other — Annie’s — has gotten well acquainted with him. It’s a dingy joint, small and windowless with an almost obnoxious amount of string lights hung from the ceiling to make up for it. It would sail past the border of too much if nearly every third bulb wasn’t burnt out. It’s more of a dive than any bar or pub he’d ever been to in life. But there’s alcohol – even if the only available beer is lite, and everything else is watered down, the vodka is fine – and places to sit – even if every stool and chair either wobbles or creaks. And Annie’s is by far the better bar.
The familiar, by now almost comforting, scent of stale tobacco smoke and damp wood hits the moment Loki opens the front door. It’s as busy as it always is, dripping with the sluggish air of plenty of booze and lazy conversation. There’s a backbeat of clacking cue balls from one of the pool tables in the slightly more secluded far corner of the room. The hum of voices is steady but easily tuned out, helped by the loud buzz of the fan overhead.
He grabs a whiskey from the owner, who isn’t an Annie at all, but a Catalina. He’s never once seen her on this side of the counter, even though he knows there are other bartenders. This was the first place he’d tried to get a job. Catalina had taken one look at him and said ‘No’ before he’d gotten halfway through the sentence.
The not entirely clean glass is set down silently in front of him, and he takes it back to his usual seat towards the middle of the room near the front door. Like everything else he’s tried, the drink isn’t good. But the slight tang of metal that lingers on his tongue after each sip has grown on him since he’s been here.
He gets all of five minutes to himself, half-listening to the drone of the song playing faintly over the speakers. The singer’s voice is low and rough, and he might have been able to place them if it wasn’t for the pair of women sitting at the bar.
Correction. One of them is still sitting but, as he looks over, the other stands, metal scraping against tile as she leaves her stool. She tucks a strand of her straight, platinum bob behind an ear lined with silver hoops and studs and tosses back the rest of her glass before setting it back down on the counter. And then she mutters something quickly into her companion’s ear with a low giggle before marching across the floor. Straight to his table.
The last two times he’d noticed her glancing in his direction, she’d been more subtle about it. Now, she meets his gaze with determination as she sits down in the chair across from him.
“Can I help you?” he asks with a questioning eyebrow and a not-quite smile.
“Yes, actually,” the woman says, glancing back to her companion. “My friend Tanya and I, we have this— It’s sort of a game we play. See, we try to guess, well—” She pauses. Bites at her lower lip. Waves an errant hand. “We try to guess how people, y’know. Ended up here.”
Ah.
“You mean how they died,” Loki deadpans.
Blondie squeezes one hand around the edge of the table, but she sounds entirely unapologetic when she says, “Well. Yeah.”
Loki deliberates, studying her while his fingertips drum across the table. And then he throws back the rest of his coppery whiskey.
“Alright, then.” He sits up straight and his chair screeches loudly as it inches closer to the table, lilting to one side. “But fair’s fair. You first.”
“Deal.” Blondie’s lips press together in a smug expression. She sets her forearm, palm up, on top of the table between them and tugs up the sleeve of her knitted pull-over.
The scars are impossible to miss. Twin gashes that run roughly parallel to one another start at the creases just beneath her palms and reach towards her inner elbows. They’re not long, but they’re thick. The skin is more than well-healed, but there’s still a red tint to it. Like it’s irritated.
“I see,” Loki says. He wishes he had another drink. His expression doesn’t change.
“Ironic, right? Trying so hard to escape one shitty life just to end up here.” She waves a hand to encompass the room. “But it’s not all bad.”
A glance towards the other woman she left at the bar has her lighting up in a way that gives Loki pause. The expression is familiar in a distant way, and yet so foreign that he’d almost forgotten entirely what it looks like. Even more surprising is the way the second woman’s face mirrors it when their eyes meet. Her freckled nose wrinkles as she pushes her wide, square glasses up. It’s different, but the same.
“So, what about you?”
Loki turns back to Blondie and blinks. What about him? It takes him a second to remember the conversation that the question relates back to.
“Oh,” he says, running a finger through the cool condensation that’s quickly melting off the side of his empty glass. He shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Seriously?” Blondie’s mouth thins. Now that’s a look that Loki’s more familiar with. “Dude.”
“It’s the truth.” Loki crosses his arms over his chest, expression going tight. “I have absolutely no memory of how I died.”
“Bullshit.” Blondie scoffs, but she sounds more disappointed than truly upset. “Come on, man.”
She shoves her chair back as she stands with a huff, not bothering to push it back in again.
“Go on, then. Stomp away. You know, it’s not like I asked you to join me.” Loki waves a hand in Blondie’s direction as she returns to Glasses at the bar and wraps a hand around hers, pulling her up out of her stool.
“Come on, we’re leaving,” she says, muttering something that he doesn’t catch except for, “jackass.”
They leave together, Blondie pushing her way loudly out the door first with a final huff as they pass him.
Loki raises his hand to signal Catalina for another drink.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me the first dozen times,” Loki snaps, tipping over the edge of impatience and into open anger. “I had nothing to do with this. I just happened to be passing by—”
“Uh-huh.” The officer huffs, making another scribble on the notepad in her hand.
Loki can’t entirely fault her suspicion, he supposes. Maybe he’s never been the most truthful of people, but at least in this he’s not lying. He’d picked the can up off the ground to avoid kicking it, in case it was going to explode on him or something. He’d only noticed the sign after the fact. What had once, innocuously, read “Keep Right” with an arrow pointing in the same direction had been altered, and rather clumsily. The word “right” had been covered over with a jarringly bright lime green so it could be written over again in uneven black letters to instead read “Keep Going.”
He’d stopped only for a moment to wonder at it, and its purpose — not the vandalism itself, but the message behind it. And that’s when he’d heard the quick burst of a siren pulling up next to the sidewalk.
“Listen, this is all a big misunderstanding,” he says. “And I’m sure we can get it sorted out—”
“Sir, if you could just come with me—”
“—but I’m going to be late for work and—”
“Please get in the car—”
“Hey there!” The third voice is entirely unfamiliar. It comes out of nowhere, breaking into the middle of the conversation. Loki turns towards the source to find a man he’s never seen before standing just a few feet away. He’s wearing a button down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows that’s tucked into a pair of shorts sporting an only mildly offensive tropical pattern. His stance is casual, hands resting loosely on his hips. “Yeah, hi. Sorry to interrupt.”
“Sir, this matter doesn’t concern you,” the officer says sternly.
The man raises both hands in a gesture of conceit, inclining his head. “No, no of course not,” he says, the tight-lipped almost smile on his face unchanged. Instead of leaving, however, he inches forward a step as he lets his hands fall again. “But I just have to wonder. You really think he’s capable of this?”
The man gestures between Loki and the graffitied sign. As soon as the officer turns her attention away, he winks. Loki splutters, biting his tongue against the indignation that bubbles up in his chest. While such an act of petty vandalism is certainly beneath him, he is by no means in capable of it.
The officer turns back and the man who has approached them raises his eyebrows in her direction, shrugging one shoulder. “Come on.” He jerks his head towards Loki. “Look at this guy; he’s like an overgrown kitten. Harmless.”
The officer looks over him, as if she’s actually considering the absurd notion. Him. A kitten. A moment of silence, and then.
“Fine.” She huffs. “I’ll turn the other way this once. But know I’m keeping an eye on you. And if you ever—”
“Yes, thank you very much. I hope you have a great day.” The man grins, and Loki starts when he feels a hand come to rest against the center of his back. His voice lowers to a mutter that only Loki can hear as he turns them both around. “Come on, then. Before she changes her mind.”
It isn’t until there’s at least a block between them and the police car that Loki stops. The man with him, who Loki has been following mindlessly despite the fact that his hand had fallen away almost immediately, takes a few more steps before realizing he’s alone and stopping as well.
“What was that back there? Why did you help me?” Loki demands, stopping the man in his tracks before he can do more than begin to open his mouth.
The lazy shrug he gets in return is more infuriating than anything else, and an acidic reply immediately burns on his tongue. Before he gets a chance to speak it into existence, however, the man continues.
“You looked like you needed it,” he says. “Besides, I know who the real culprit is. There’s this kid. Teenager. Who’s constantly making my existence a living— well.” He chuckles dryly, lifting his arms and twisting at the waist to encompass the space around them in a vague gesture. “The name’s Mobius, by the way.”
“Loki.” He reaches out to take the hand that the man — that Mobius — offers and gives it a single shake before pulling back. His palm tingles with the contact.
Mobius looks up from where he’s flexing the fingers of his right hand, a curious expression on his face.
“Have we met before?”
“No,” Loki answers instantly, shaking his head. He focuses intently on twisting the frayed leather band of his watch.
“Are you sure? Because I could swear—”
“Quite certain, yes.” Loki huffs out a breath. “Now, I really am late for work. So.”
He nods once and walks past Mobius, careful not to brush against him as he passes. He doesn’t turn around, not even when he hears Mobius call after him, “Ok, then. I’ll see you later!”
He sincerely doubts it.
Casey’s yogurt goes missing. Despite swearing up and down that he had absolutely nothing to do with it — No, Casey, that empty package was there before I left. Yes, really. I don’t know; maybe someone broke in. — Loki is still forced to make an impromptu grocery run in order to replace it. It’s eight o’clock and the sun is starting to set when he leaves the apartment.
The grocery store is only a couple blocks down, on the corner. It’s small and dingy and at least one of the buzzing fluorescents overhead is always flickering. Honestly, it can barely be considered a grocery store. The selection of products leaves something to be desired and tends towards cans and freezer burned boxes. There is very little on the shelves that can’t be prepared in a microwave. But the essentials are covered: there’s a basic assortment of slightly over-ripe produce, cigarettes and, of course, alcohol. There’s a bigger, more sterile superstore on the other side of town that allegedly has a larger selection and products that have yet to pass their best by date, but Loki has never been. The length of the trip — too far for him to reasonably walk while carrying more than a single grocery bag — outweighs any other advantages.
When he pushes open the door of the corner store, he’s greeted by the familiar sound of a dissonant electronic bell. There’s a stack of baskets just inside and he grabs one from the top, checking the structural integrity of the handle before he walks off with it. He doesn’t need a repeat of that time his third apple hit the bottom of the basket he’d been holding and sent all the rest of his groceries spilling across the floor with it.
He makes his way towards the back of the store, grabbing a few other things as he sees them, because while he’s here he might as well. He’s peering into the fogged over glass doors of the refrigerated section, trying to remember which one holds Casey’s preferred yogurt, when he’s interrupted by a too-cheery, “Hey!”
He doesn’t look up at first, assuming the greeting isn’t meant for him. It’s only when someone steps up next to him that he raises his head to find that there’s no one else it could have been for. The only person in sight besides himself is—
“Loki, right?” The voice holds a familiar hint of amusement that makes him hard-pressed to avoid rolling his eyes. “I don’t know if you remember; I’m—”
“Mobius,” Loki says, surprised himself at how quickly he recalls the man’s name. He usually tries his best not to keep tabs on people here. It’s been over a month, and he still can’t remember whether his neighbor in the cubicle across the way at Nelson & Franklin goes by Alice or Amelia.
“Right.” Mobius’s eyes widen slightly, but the corners of his mouth twitch up. He jerks a thumb towards the coolers next to them. “So. Late night ice cream run? Somebody break your heart?”
“My roommate needed more yogurt,” Loki huffs, rolling his eyes. He turns his attention pointedly back to his grocery shopping. Mobius keeps step with him.
“Ah. The snack replacement walk of shame,” he hums, nodding sagely.
“I didn’t eat the damn yogurt,” Loki snaps. “Why is that so hard to understand.”
“I never said you did.” Mobius grins. Loki resists the urge to punch him in the face. “Where did you say you were living?”
“I didn’t.”
Scowling, Loki stops in front of a cooler and yanks the door open. As he scans the shelves with more focus than strictly necessary, he quickly realizes what he’s looking for isn’t here. Casey’s preferred brand of yogurt must be in the next cooler over. Still, never one to be caught on the wrong foot, Loki grabs a different container of yogurt at random, shoving it into his basket like that’s what he’d meant to do the entire time.
Beside him, Mobius hums. “Right, right. Maybe you mentioned your job then?”
Loki moves to the next cooler. “Not that, either.”
“Huh, really? Because I could have sworn—”
“I’m an accountant, alright?” He does data entry, which can hardly be considered actual accounting, but it’s close enough. Yanking the door open, he grabs two containers of Casey’s yogurt with one hand and tosses them into the basket. “There. Are you happy now?”
Mobius seems overwhelmingly unperturbed by his outburst. His thoughtful expression has yet to falter.
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever swung by the local pool?”
“No. Have I passed my interrogation yet?” A pause. “And what does the pool have to do with anything?”
“Oh, I’m so glad you asked. You’re currently speaking to the head lifeguard of the Wolfe Aquatic Center.”
Loki looks him up and down. He’s currently wearing brown shorts and an off-white shirt patterned with green palm trees and blue waves. It’s surprisingly easy to imagine him in crimson swim trunks.
“Sorry for the interrogation,” Mobius continues, hands forming lazy air quotes around the word. “I just had the weirdest feeling that I’ve seen you somewhere before, but for the life of me I can’t put my finger on it.”
Loki scoffs. “Please. Like you’d be able to forget this face.”
“Fair point,” Mobius says, and Loki preens a little at the compliment, no matter how indirect. “Ah, well. C’est la vie.”
That’s life. Ironic, considering.
“How long have you been here?” Loki finds himself asking the question without much input from the rational side of his brain. It’s not an uncommon pleasantry, but he finds, to his own surprise, that this time he genuinely wants to know.
“Hm. It’s hard to say — a couple months, at least.” Mobius’s face crinkles. He lowers his voice. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but time is a little weird here.”
“Er, no. I can’t say I have,” Loki says.
“Really? Huh.” Mobius frowns, briefly. And then he shrugs, the lax expression returning. “What about you?”
“Not long.” He doesn’t elaborate.
“Well, not to brag, but I like to think I know my way around by now,” Mobius says. “So, if you need anything or, hell, if you just want to grab a drink, you should look me up.”
Mobius winks, and Loki isn’t entirely sure how he’s meant to read that. So he does one of the things he does best instead. He ignores it.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says. “I’m sure you have your own shopping to do yet. So.”
Mobius raises his hands in surrender. “Alright. I can take a hint.” He gestures to the basket in Loki’s hand. “Better get your roommate their yogurt.”
Loki blinks down at the contents of the basket. He’d almost forgotten the reason he was even here in the first place. His frown sours. Right. Casey. There’s still that to deal with.
Suppressing a sigh, Loki turns to head for the checkout.
The yogurt — Not Casey’s. The other one. The one that Loki grabbed when he was looking for Casey’s yogurt and accidentally opened the wrong cooler. The accidental yogurt — is light raspberry. It’s more sour than sweet, and he doesn’t even like raspberries to begin with. Not that it would be much better if it was another flavor.
He still eats it all, because he bought it and he’ll be damned if he lets anyone, especially Casey, know it was an accident.
As he struggles through his shitty yogurt at the tiny corner table in the kitchen, he tunes out Casey’s inane breakfast chatter. His roommate never has needed a second participant to carry on a conversation. Instead he thinks of Mobius.
He keeps thinking of Mobius when he sits down at his desk, a filmy raspberry aftertaste lingering on his tongue. That day, he learns that his cubicle neighbor is actually named Audrey, and he along with everyone else in the immediate area gets an earful from her about the sanctity of clearly-marked containers in the break room refrigerator. This time, Loki is genuinely not responsible, although fortunately she doesn’t glare at him particularly harder than she glares at everyone else.
After work, he d0es something he rarely does. He heads in the opposite direction of Annie’s.
For how small this dead-end town is, Loki doesn’t know his way around it perfectly. He doesn’t often venture beyond his usual haunts, and while he has a vague sense of where things are, that hardly prevents him from getting lost. In other words, he doesn’t know where he’s going. The flat, blocky apartments, and squat, dingy houses in their various shades of beige and tan blur together quickly and by the third time he’s passed the same block — at least he thinks it’s the same — he’s about ready to give up and stumble his way home.
Which is when he turns the corner, quietly cursing this terrible idea, and finds himself face to face with just the place he’d been looking for.
The public pool.
Even from the sidewalk, he can hear the obnoxious din of voices floating through the chain link fence. Most sound young, younger than him — teenagers and the like — which is something he doesn’t let himself think about for too long.
The green slats covering the fence don’t allow him to see through it from this angle, so he doesn’t bother trying. He instead looks to the stout, browning red brick building that marks the entrance. He can read the words Wolfe Aquatic Center over the wide, arched doorway more in the discolored outline where the letters once were than the chipped black paint they’re supposed to be written in.
There’s only one other person in the building. They’re sitting behind a counter to the left of a trio of turnstiles that block the way through, leaning back in the chair with their feet up and a yellowed, coverless paperback in their hands. Beside them is a sign, clearly handmade with black marker, listing the price of entry at seven dollars.
Loki looks from the turnstiles to the sign and back again. Without giving it any more thought than that, he braces his hands against either side of the spinny door part and leaps over.
The employee shouts at the action and looks up from their book to give him a rude gesture but doesn’t otherwise make any move to stop him.
He slips through the empty shower room and comes back out the other side, raising a hand against the sudden brightness as the sun reflects off the water and straight into his eyes.
As soon as he blinks away his temporary blindness, he sets his shoulders and starts to scan the poolside, but there’s not much to it and he doesn’t have to look far.
Mobius is wearing red swim trunks and a bright yellow shirt with red sleeves that’s made out of the same material. He stands out like a bruise against the faded blue tile and cracked concrete of the poolside. He’s sitting atop not a towering lifeguard chair, but an aluminum folding lawn chair with visibly frayed green and white webbing across the back that appears to be leaning slightly to the left.
As Loki beelines for the chair, studiously ignoring everything else around him, he hears a bout of splashing from somewhere in the pool followed by a shout. Mobius rolls his eyes and stands, grabbing for the whistle hanging on a cord around his neck. Before he can raise it, his eyes stray in Loki’s direction. He does a double take, eyes widening.
Loki doesn’t stop until he’s standing just in front of Mobius beside the chair. Suddenly hyperaware of where he is and what he’s doing, he stuffs his hands into the pockets of the brown slacks he’s still wearing from work. The way Mobius looks him up and down only makes him raise his chin.
“You’re a little overdressed for the pool.”
Loki rolls his eyes. “Do I look like I’m here to swim?”
Mobius’s eyes crinkle around the edges in a way that Loki refuses to think of as familiar.
“Well most people—”
“Do you still want to grab that drink or not?”
Loki bites his lip. That’s not the way he’d planned to approach this. The man in front of him just seems to have a way of getting under his skin that he has yet to figure out how to manage. Still, he doesn’t back down, and he doesn’t retract his offer.
Mobius snorts and for a moment, Loki considers the best way to remove himself from this situation while retaining some shred of dignity. But all Mobius says is, “Yeah. I do.”