open.

[mistruths]

CHARACTERS: loki (MCU) & u
DATE: post-rescue mission, pre-next mission??
WARNINGS: n/a
SUMMARY: a new and exciting(???) arrival is exploring Oska...


Arrival in Oska, following the short (but definitely anything but boring) time in the unknown forest, is very welcome. It's warm and dry, and Loki is quick to claim a room of his own. In the cavernous castle, he roams the halls, taking note of rooms of interest (CYOA). You might find him popping his head into the training room, kitchen, or just wandering curiously through the halls. Or, perhaps, you might encounter him in one of the following places:

i. viewing room
Though he hadn't intended to stay in any one of the rooms he found (exploration first, in-depth investigation later), this place catches and holds his attention. Loki steps inside, chin lifted as his gaze sweeping slowly over the shifting frames. He walks along one wall, then the next, eyes inevitably drawn back to a section of mirrors he'd already looked over when movement shows that they've changed. It's overwhelming, dizzying, and he could stay here for hours on end if he allowed himself to.

Not yet, though, not now, not when he knows next to nothing of Oska and the other people here. Perhaps later, perhaps another day. Though, another few minutes will be of no harm...


ii. mists
How could he resist? The mists hover there, a clear line from a distance that fades the closer one approaches. Loki paces the edges of the thick mist, half-shrouded. The castle is just barely visible, and if he takes but a few more steps into the clouds, he has no doubt it'll be entirely too easy to lose one's way. Another day, perhaps, to better prepare. For now, though, he walks the boundary of reality.


iii. library
Eventually, as he knew would happen, Loki ends up in the library, prowling the stacks and flipping through books that catch his interest. The sheer wealth of knowledge available here easily rivals the library in Asgard's palace, where they were content with what they knew and had experienced. Asgard is the Realm Eternal, unchanging, stagnant; for all the Loki idealizes it, he's well aware of the rot beneath the gold.

Comments

iii.

[dailydouble]

[ While Ahad was a fairly frequent visitor to the library, the stack of books he's brought with him to return is quite different from what he can usually be found reading. Anyone who glances over might catch a glimpse of covers plastered with women leaning provocatively against half-dressed men, with both muscles and flowing hair prevailing. The titles are often short and to the point; there's no mystery about the contents of novels such as these.

Ahad makes his way to the returns desk, more than ready to abandon the books there. He'll leave them with the librarian behind the desk, only pausing long enough to say: ] You know who to blame, if these are late.

Re: iii.

[mistruths]

Would it not be yourself? Or is it you find yourself...

[ It really isn't his place to speak up, but he's never seen books quite like this before, and Loki finds himself picking one up curiously. His eyebrow arches as he takes in the details of the cover, and travels even higher as he reads the back. His voice, for that matter, trails of incredulously. ]

...ashamed of such, ah, interests...?

[dailydouble]

[ The book that Loki takes from the top of the stack features a particularly colorful cover. There's flowing red locks (on both heads), more muscles than seems possible, and that's certainly a kilt.

Ahad raises an eyebrow right back at Loki. There's a part of him that's amused at the question, considering who and what he is. ]

To be ashamed of such interests would be rather difficult.

[mistruths]

Would it? I would think it'd be rather simple.

[ This is, perhaps, what one might call morbid curiosity. He flips through the book, eyes catching phrases as he does, and finds a startling amount of "heaving bosom"-s and "clutched at her torn bodice"-es. ]

This is meant to be literature?

[dailydouble]

Perhaps, if one were young or prim enough to find sex a topic to avoid.

[ It's not the purpose that he objects to. Ahad doesn't necessarily indulge in such literature himself, but he's very much aware that they are read quite voraciously by others. ]

A terrible example of the form, perhaps. I do not object to the idea so much as the presentation.

[mistruths]

[ He hums, a faint sound of thought as he shuts the book and sets it back atop the pile. ]

It is surprisingly, ah...soft. Literally. For a tome. Rather charming, really, and I imagine that it would make such things much more easily carried about for a spot of entertainment.

[ Asgard could use some silly things like this, he thinks to himself. They do take themselves far too seriously. ]

[dailydouble]

[ Ahad's expression is rather nonplussed for a moment, but he quickly replaces that with something more neutral. While Ahad was the one carrying the novels, he intends to still blame Loki for this. ]

I believe that is the intent of them. To be read and disposed of just as easily.

[mistruths]

I see...

[ Somewhat. Disposing of books so easily sits oddly, but it's true that these don't seem to hold any particular value. ]

Would you recommend a few, then? I find myself dreadfully curious.

[dailydouble]

I don't read them. [ Normally, he would recommend that Loki speak with Loki...

However, that seems like a poor idea. There's a certain familiar feeling, and one that he can't shake. ]

...what do you value higher, amusement or quality of prose?

i.

[selfimage]

Perhaps it was the temporal insects and their unwanted consequence that made him bolder (than he already was, of course), or maybe it was that nothing, in comparison to what had already happened, could have torn open any wounds deeper than they already had been. Another arrow to the face was little in comparison to the scar left on his soul. While he can't exactly feel him, he can't deny that he knows that presence, and despite everything pushes on in reckless curiosity.

There were Lokis far worse out there than this one (he assumes), though he can't say he he knows how far that he's fallen. All Lokis fall sometime, all of them fail, all of them are evil at some point or another. Chaotic, angry, bitter: Loki was all of those things. Facing himself meant exactly that, but there was some assurance in the knowledge that whoever he faced would hate him just as much as he hated himself.

For the last few days he had chosen a less conspicuous attire, not clad in his tacky jacky and horned diadem, he's in a green hoodie and a black pair of pants. The only odd accessory seems to be his boots. (He needed some wiggle room, after all.

"Tell me," he starts. "Which one are you?" His gaze lingers where Loki's is, as if he was gaining insight from it.

Re: i.

[mistruths]

Loki hears him come in, had felt him approach, but stays silent in his vigil until spoken to. "Which one," he echoes lightly, his gaze sliding sideways to take in his--other. "I'm afraid I do not know how I ought to answer that."

He himself is clad in what he arrived in, leather and linen and golden armor all. The uniform offered, after all, is neither his colors nor of a cut he's accustomed to. And perhaps he could have strove to fit in better, twisted the impression of his clothing to that which appears more Midgardian--but such attire doesn't seem to quite fit in with Oska's castle either.

"How might you answer such a question? Which one are you?"

[selfimage]

"The better looking one," there's an easy, pointed tone of voice. It was the same tone he used with Thor when he wanted to illicit some reaction from him.

It's an easy jape, one with some weight behind it, as if he were brandishing a little knife. It wasn't enough to draw blood, but enough for him to gauge the reaction and predictability. He had a millennia to draw from, and he could only hope that this Loki wasn't able to draw from the same resources.

He remains perched casually by the door, uncaringly resting a foot against the wall. There was arrogance, but no maliciousness, ease tainted by recklessness, sacrificing safety for whatever whims that he may be following.

[mistruths]

He lets out a sharp bark of laughter, tilting his head as he turns to properly face the other Loki. "You're but a boy," he says scornfully, eyes flicking up and down Loki's clothes, soft and casual. "Though..." And his eyes narrow, his attention caught. "Though you are not."

The view of worlds forgotten, he steps forward, slow and steady as he closes the distance between them until they're standing but a few feet apart. "How have you come to be this way? This is no mere illusion, no simple fooling of the eyes."

Though Loki would be honestly surprised if his question is answered.

[selfimage]

"Ah, ah, ah—" Is he a boy, or is he not? Sometimes he felt like he was both young and old at once, more young than old, something written with new ink. Yet he wasn't beyond old temptations and deep grudges held by countless lifetimes of failure. "You don't get to ask another question if you haven't even answered mine."

The breech in ground doesn't seem to bother him, in fact, it gives him some room to tactlessly eye the man in front of him—another Loki, another self.

"That's not how this game goes. So ..." he twists his dark nailed fingers out in a lackadaisical gesture, uncaring. "Which one are you?"

[mistruths]

Game, he says, and a game it might be. A test, at least, and Loki raises an eyebrow. "The newer one," he offers with a wry twist of his lips, eyes glinting. That, at least, he's reasonably sure of.

Something about Loki puts him on edge; unsurprisingly so. He knows no one so well as he knows himself (though Frigga once claimed otherwise, and he shoves that thought aside, buried quick and deep), and no Loki should be easily trusted. Underestimated.

[selfimage]

Those were the first words that he had ever said to himself: I am Loki, who you should not trust. They still rang true, in that situation, and in others. He had learned to be something more than a point of wickedness and distrust, fumbling on the line between them and whatever good he could make of it.

There were many Lokis, and he had been a few of them.

"Goodie, that's exactly what ALASTAIR needs—another Loki. You think that they'd have their hands full with one, but they just don't learn."

[mistruths]

"Then," he says mildly, "perhaps my answer to your query ought to have been I am the Loki who can do that which you cannot, since we are, the both of us, here. You were not sent away upon my arrival, so it is not as though I am simply better, nor were you left here alone, so it cannot be that you were enough."

i, sorry for how late this is; i'm the worst.

[expatriates]

When she first entered the viewing room to follow him in, she thought for sure that it was the Loki she already knew to be present, and that she'd finally gotten him on his own on the heels of the temporal distortion to address the fact that his presence around the castle had been in short supply, often an object of fleeting necessity and not his usual paradoxically ephemeral lingering.

But when her feet carried her into the room, stopping in the entryway, she realized the mistake and brought her boots together in a full halt.

It had been years and still the mere intimidating outline of his back seemed to gouge reality, filling her with a cold sense of wrongness that called to mind the crippling terror of fleeing Banner on the helicarrier. She had seen worse since then—her own nightmares, Ultron, the true defeat of the Avengers at their own hands that made her wonder how much of a hand she had in starting it when she betrayed Banner—yet there was no ignoring the visceral reaction she felt to this ghost.

So. Loki Prime—and she segued seamlessly into the distinction, not for a minute considering them within the same lens, the same stroke of a brush of one another—was right. He had survived. She wondered what Thor would say. Would he feel regret? Betrayal? Shame at his own frustration that it had not ended as easily as he'd thought? She felt an almost sadistic curiosity, schadenfreude of sorts, in her wondering, and quickly slotted it away as unproductive. If Loki was alive, and in Oska, it was not her job to wonder, but to act.

She walked forward with slow measured steps, now to deliberately announce herself while she measured her options for exit.

Re: i, noooo

[mistruths]

The heels of her boots aren't terribly loud, but he still hears it as she steps inside. It's the sudden stop that cues him to who it might be, really; that sort of reaction only comes from someone who recognizes him.

And those who might know him so well as to recognize him from behind are few.

He's on edge as he turns, a brow lifting slightly as he stands his ground. "Agent Romanoff," he greets her, voice silky as he offers a slight smile. "It has been... quite some time."

<333!!

[expatriates]

She wished it had been longer, and in that moment, listening to the smooth tumble of his voice for the first time in years, she knew that she didn't have to say so. He already knew. The terrible truth of her business was the way it helped people like her understand people like him—and in a way, the opposite was true. More than anything, her time with ALASTAIR had shown her that, for eventually, someone very like him had become someone very like her in the Loki she'd come to know.

She would need a way to distinguish between them, and she realized it in that moment, but somehow, brainstorming nicknames was far from her mind.

"If you were hoping to reminisce, you're about a week too late." Her tone held the same open candor she'd used with him the first time, the implication of honesty without the depth of it, or at least with care paid to the selection of what depths to show. "The past can be so exhausting."

\o/

[mistruths]

"A week too late?" he echoes, curious. "Does it matter?"

What a very specific mention, one that hints at information he does not have and a situation he is unfamiliar with.

"Though," he then says without honestly waiting for an answer, "I will admit I did not come to reminisce at all. You'll notice I was not the one to seek you out; in fact, I'd no idea you were here at all until you approached."

[expatriates]

Though she wasn't blind to his curiosity, she didn't offer more than that. It spoke for itself—or rather, she hoped it did. It was hard to believe she really had the measure of what could be considered authentic with him, but for the moment, it seemed he wasn't aware of the temporal distortions.

That put him less than a week in Oska. Good.

For the first time since she got it, Natasha felt grateful for the magitek; telepathic communication could be handy when you didn't want to pull out a phone to send out an APB. She sent a missive to Tony then and there without so much as twitching a finger. SHIELD would have killed for technology like that; they had before.

"If I said I had a hard time believing you, would you blame me?" There was a sweetness in her tone, falsely mannered and deliberately see-through.

[mistruths]

"How could I?" he returns, just as saccharin sweet. "Though I don't suppose there's anything I could do or say that would give you cause to trust my word, so why ought I bother?"

Remarkable. For a single meeting, one where he'd barely done anything to her at all, she certainly carries a grudge. There is, admittedly, what he did to Barton and SHIELD and, perhaps, the small issue of his attempt to destroy her city--though it was but a few hours, little more than a few scant days. So many have done more.

She herself had done more unforgivable if, perhaps, on a lesser scale. But scale is relevant, when one deals with gods.

[expatriates]

"I didn't take you for a quitter." Her answer came quickly, but it seemed to hitch at the end, as though she'd swallowed something particularly unpleasant and choked on it. There was, unfortunately, one important drawback to magitek devices in the inability to filter out messages as they came in once you were anticipating them. Telepathy was only useful if it was timely, and Tony's reply certainly wasn't. Tension flickered through her jaw, though, and she regained her composure. "But in this case, I wouldn't blame you for laying down arms and going quietly."

[mistruths]

"I am not a quitter," he says smoothly, "I am a realist. Though I really don't see where you expect me to go. And--" Here, he spreads his arms, raising an eyebrow to demonstrate how very unarmed he currently is. "Surely you don't find me a threat right now."