In a shocking change of pace, Loki has found himself a corner of the castle to set up in without bringing a book along to keep himself company. Beneath the glassy stare of more decapitated animals than he particularly likes to think about, he leans over a billiards table, plunking balls about at a leisurely pace. Perhaps the game room is not decorated in quite the fashion he'd usually find comfortable, but on a matter of principle he refuses to hide in libraries and orangeries during the entire trip.
     Besides, there's something to be said for settling in for a few hours near a stocked bar.
     There is, of course, a cup of coffee waiting nearby. The lack of books is somewhat lessened by the warm glow right next to the coffee of his phone, turned on and waiting patiently with a page of Dumas ready for his attention at any moment. For now, Loki is reveling in a moment of historically accurate billiards instead, sleeves rolled up to let him angle the stick around better. The earpiece playing music at him might be slightly anachronistic for the image, but he couldn't detach entire from technology. It would just be weird.

     Normal people use doors and hallways...
     But he never wanted to be like Everybody Else. Mission accomplished, some might say. He is there, suddenly. He doesn't appear from the aether, like some simple apparition. He enters through a sliver of darkness and space, ripping reality like a sheet. It folds up like raven wings behind him.
     He is without shirt, his upper body clothed upon his left side entirely by tattoos. Inky darkness marks him vividly -- who knew that black could have so many tones? -- in shapes of ravens and shadows, and the swirling script of a fragment of verse. A platinum ring pierces his left nipple -- it's as close to a wedding band as he'll ever come. The rest is black leather and shit-kicking boots with decent tread and grip. It wouldn't do to trip over the twelve toed sloths of Chaos.
     Aeron doesn't say anything -- you're plugged in anyway, so you wouldn't hear him. He stands on the opposite side of the table, his blood-red hair loose and tumbled, hanging in a slight veil over his eye. He bends slowly, sending the 8-ball in a triangular pattern around your previous shot to get your attention.
     Aeron leans his weight -- sizable as it is -- against the cue, the cue quickly taking on the semblance of a spear.

     There is a fine line between "strange things happen around here, better pay attention" and "strange things happen no matter what, no point in trying to keep up." Loki is still on the first side of the line, and so his eyes flick up rapidly from the table as the unexpected ball comes rolling through.
     "Hey." As greetings go, it is neither intricate nor warm, but it's not unfriendly. He straightens from his last shot, attention sliding onto you, with the cue stick held loosely in one hand. And because his parents did teach him some manners, he slides the earpiece off to a pocket, silencing the music on the way.

     Aeron's face is, as usual, bland in expression. It is as if few emotions ever take root there. His face is the definition of a crystal ball; one divines in it what one wishes to see, more often than not. To others, it is simply beautiful but cloudy in intent.
     "Hi," he says, an odd vernacular, made all the more surreal by the fact that he actually seems interested. "Enjoying the country life, Percival?" he wonders, and he actually wonders. Aeron rests his chin upon his hands, his hands around the cue. His heart-shaped face is quite rook like in his gaze.
     "I haven't even been spying on you. Who has time with all of the family dinners.."

     "I've had worse vacations," Loki says, which is both entirely true and largely uninformative. He spins the cue around between his fingers, watching you right back. Normal rules about it being rude to stare don't quite seem to apply with some people. "Some interesting conversations. Some reading. Some practice in shoving emotions around to see how that works. You know how trips go, when there's no set itinerary."

     His mouth makes a devil of a smile. It is slight -- it barely exists -- but in its twisting it is the very ivy around the horns of Pan. It is a staring contest. He stares back, his black-green eyes both an oasis and an abyss. "Have you seen much of your King? So many here all in one place. It is a wonder the roof can fit over so many crowned heads..."
     Aeron straightens and paces along the table, rounding a corner of it slowly, as if he were making his way around the table just to you. His path is slow, however, meandering. "And in the midst of all of this, where do you and how do you find yourself, Loki?" It is an honest question. While the sound of his voice is always an insinuation, it is not a personal attack.
     "Lost? Found? Somewhere in between? What have you learned in your three moons in the house of the three kings? Soon to be four..."

     Loki blinks first, deliberately enough to be a discreet comment about throwing the contest. Or just refusing to play that game. "I saw him once in passing, which is about what I ought to expect."
     He turns away to put the cue back on the rack. It is not entirely incidental that it takes him out of your path around the table. "I've learned a few new ways to look at the things I don't understand, which might or might not help with figuring them out. And that your family makes it a downright habit to hook up with people who don't know anything about the supernatural, and then drop it on their heads."
     He looks back over his shoulder without any smile. "I suppose I find myself somewhere in between. Not worried enough to be lost, and not certain enough to be found. It's slightly better than I would have expected. Also, wouldn't three moons be three months? Or am I drawing too much from the jargon of ancient Wild West movies?"

     "You're trying too hard," Aeron quietly counters. "Literalism will be the death of you yet." His voice is coiled upon the tease of a comment, like the serpent around the apple. "So...you are in the middle, in between. Where do you want to be? What is it you yet wish to know that you haven't managed to piece together?"
     There is a chuckle about family as he leans against the table. He places the cue on the grass, the equivalent of Truce, and then folds his arms against his chest. He is muscle and skin and shadow, flesh and blood and mirage. "You think it is deliberate. That we peered through a glass and picked on you like ants." The corona of emerald around the black of his eyes shimmers. "You have perhaps confused us with the all-knowing, all-seeing deities of America. We are not gods, Loki, vengeful or otherwise. We have been given gifts at a great personal cost and responsibility. And so now have you."

     "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them," Loki says, dry as cold wind. He shrugs, dropping down into a chair with his legs spread out in front of him. "I don't think it particularly matters if you selected people after careful study or threw darts at a map while blindfolded. 'Why' seems much less important, being about the past, than details like 'what do I do next' or 'what the hell is going on'. With great power comes great responsibility, check. I've heard the line before."
     He picks up his coffee to drink, blue eyes meeting yours over the rim of the cup. "What do you want?" The emphasis is, ever so slightly, on the third word and not the fourth.

     "I want for nothing," Aeron counters. Hands rest upon the heavy, carved wood and he leans his weight against something more formidable. He looks at you again. "The question is, Loki, what do you want?"
     He pushes off the table, he rounds behind the bar, picking up a bottle of whisky, and he circles your chair, a blood-red eyebrow cocked skyward -- a red raven circling the roost of a point. "What do you want? Has it occurred to you, yet, to inquire? And here I am..." Waiting.
     Your hesitation becomes the carcass that the raven now circles. He takes a perch upon the chair beside you. "Do you want love? Do you want knowledge? Do you want understanding? Answers? Presents? What..."

     "I want things I can't have, so why bother focusing on that?" Loki collects his phone, turning the glowing screen black before it disappears into his pocket. "It'd be more useful to think about what I need. I need to get better at using what I was given, so that it's second nature and first on the list as a response when the situation's appropriate. I need to figure out what appropriate situations for use are, beyond the blatantly obvious."
     Between all those staring animals heads and your circling, Loki's begun to pull inward, if only in the body language of hunched shoulders and feet pulled back to his chair. "I keep asking what I should be doing, but the answers I get, while increasingly specific, usually boil down to me needing to figure that out myself, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time asking that question anymore."

     "If you do not ask, you will never get. If you never inquire, you will never learn," Aeron says quietly, evenly, simply. One would never say he is gentle. He does not lecture. It is stated as the plain fact that it is. "There is no should in this vernacular, Loki. Should does not exist. That is why you have no answer to it. So... what do you want? What is it that you think you cannot have?"
     Aeron cocks his head, examining you with all of the corbin intensity that he would any shiny thing of interest. You are his jewel, his pebble, his piece of sparkling foil. "You retreat. But there is no need. Am I not sitting here, asking about you? Do you think I would do this out of," he grins, "...politeness?" Aeron tips back his head with an amused expression. No, politeness is not something he's often confused with having.
     "Your fear keeps you from moving, keeps you from having what you want. If you go for what you want, what you wish, you will find that your needs.... align themselves accordingly."

     "I want mutually exclusive things," Loki says, and now he sounds a little weary about it. Less closed in on himself. "I want to keep following this stupid career choice I've made, and I want my father to be happy with me. I can't have both, so I've picked one, and it's a waste of time for me to keep wanting to have both when I can't."
     "If I want things from people they're not going to give me, I'm the fool for not getting over it. 'Want' covers one person. Me. 'Should' can affect a lot more." The look he gives you is nearly bewildered. "I can't even understand where you're coming from, on this one. If I go for what I want, I lose other things I want. I don't see how it affects what needs to be done at all."

     "If it is a stupid career choice, then why do you stick with it? If it isn't stupid, then why do you belittle it?" He is an oracle. He does not so much answer as ask.
     Aeron uncorks the bottle of whisky, taking a pull from it. "Your needs will realign, once you determine what is actually important to you." That is the only explanation he gives. "Until then, they are phantoms, obstacles, and nothing more."
     His cupidic mouth quirks. Daddy issues. Aeron settles in the chair next to you, leathered legs long and stretched, relaxed. "Have you considered... one... that your father may be wrong and... two... that if you believed in your course of action, truly believed and trusted in it, that he might begin to see the value it has? Of course," his mouth quirks, "...you could simply ....encourage him to be open-minded. You do have the technology..."

     "I'm a drummer, Aeron. Even other musicians mock that career path. That I take it seriously doesn't mean anyone else ever will, and I wouldn't be sticking to that choice anyway if I weren't willing to deal with that."
     Loki shifts a little, in the war between proper seating habits and the urge to curl his knees up to his chest. Propriety wins this round, with the help of an intent stare into his coffee cup. "I couldn't change my dad's mind once he's set it if I made a million dollars in this career and tried to hammer warm fuzzies into his head in person." He does not present this as opinion, but fact. "He's never approved of anything else I've done in life. Magic tricks and a show of confidence are not going to change this. The solution is to stop caring what he thinks."

     Aeron says nothing. He looks at you. "Then why do anything at all?" He rises with a quiet laugh, a shake of his head. He sets the whisky on the table beside you. You need it more than he does. "You are too fatalistic for me. And that should frighten you, Loki."
     With his hand, he peels back the curtain of this reality, showing you the gaping maw of black holes and chaos theory, the Scylla and Charybdis. "Without faith and hope, you are of no use to yourself, let alone anyone else. Do you want to be a priest, Loki? Do you want anything, really? Or do you just want to construct a city of obstacles through which you cannot pass, in order to save yourself the commitment and trouble of doing so?"
     Aeron quirks his head, quirks an eyebrow to hear your answer, the ravens etched on his skin in motion, the shadows live on and in him.

     "You think that because I don't believe I can have the world by wishing for it, I don't believe in anything?" It's bemused and amused, distracted as Loki stares at what you've shown him, and looks away to drink his coffee. It's nothing he can understand, or expects to understand. "Fuck, I've spent the last twenty years trying to get what I wanted, and that never ended well. I figure I'm old enough now to act like an adult and start paying attention to what I should do."
     He turns a narrow gaze back on you, unable to entirely look away. Not for long. "Of course I don't want to be a priest, but since when has that mattered? It apparently needs doing. Someone told me to do it. I'll work from there. You want hope? I'm hoping I won't screw it up. Is that enough to qualify, or do I have to pretend to mysticism to handle the job?"

     "No." The easy answers are always the most disconcerting. Aeron toys with shadows idly, spinning darkness between his fingers like a yo-yo trick. "We are not talking about the world. We are just talking about you. I asked you what you wanted. You gave me what you could not have. I ...am not interested in what you cannot have. I am not interested in your obstacles."
     He drops the curtain, the shadows hidden again and he takes a position on the corner of the billiard table. "You are not a slave, Loki. If you do not want to be a priest, then don't be. It is that simple."

     "That would have been a more convincing suggestion," Loki says, "before your family started running off with all my friends." He watches hidden things become hidden again, instead of looking at you. "You know what I want? To figure out how to cram some artificial happiness into my own head so that I stop being bothered by what other people get that I can't have."
     He drains his cup of coffee, and continues without that strain of bitterness. "But at the moment, I'd settle for a way to contact Gwi without it being some fucking emergency. Or a spare friend, if you have any of those just lying around. Someone with a phone number and email address, who lives in this world. I'm sort of running out of those."

     "I think your friends started running off with my family," Aeron counters blandly. "Your chocolate is in my peanut butter. Your peanut butter is in my chocolate," he drolls. "I do not profess to know much about happiness. I would concentrate on believing in yourself and your choices. Confidence will trump the thoughts and comparisons to others. I would start there. And...I believe Gwilym gave you the ability... as did I... to reach us whenever you wished. You ... simply need to remember and use what you already have, Loki, rather than concentrating on what you do not have."
     Aeron looks around and then back to you before pushing off the table once more. "Funny, that's what I thought I was doing. Or do you truly believe I would spend this much time with you for my benefit." He looks at the balls on the green. Molecules and atoms, planets and suns. He twirls the seven, spinning it on its axis. "You can always choose to quit, Loki. If you do not wish to be a priest, then you will be doing my king no good with your service. You will tax his energy, and your own. And you will both be less for it. Be honest," Aeron murmurs as he takes the 8-ball and rolls it down the length of the table, sinking it into the left corner pocket. "That is all he would ever ask of you. He cares about you, or he would not have made the offer. He would not have stood up for you when I doubted you. I would not have worked past my doubt to put my trust in you if we did not believe that you were worthy of it. But if you don't believe it, then none of it matters."

     Loki concedes the chocolate-and-peanut-butter point with a lift of his empty coffee mug. "I almost believe this would be easier in French," he says, "as it sounds like we're having vocabulary issues. But, yes, I had assumed that you'd stopped by for some benefit to yourself. Friendship seems to imply wanting to be around someone, and I didn't really think you wanted to be near me except as required by the job."
     He flicks a sharp, brief smile at your back. "You know. Should. If I was wrong on that assumption, I apologize for being such a twit about it."
     He gives in to one small desire, and curls a knee up to his chest, loosely so that he isn't committing the sin of putting his shoes on the furniture. "I want to get the job done properly. The job title gives me the creeps. If I could get it done without the weird religious aspects, I would, but they seem to be obligatory."'

     "I don't really speak Francais," he notes quietly. "And I don't have friends. I never have. You are correct: I didn't want to like you, but I have tried for my king's sake, because you are important to him, and serving him is important to me. I ...offered myself to you when I saw you last. I offered assistance and guidance. I even gave you homework. If that is not an expression of caring, then I fail to understand how I can be more clear, Loki."
     Aeron turns his head, looking to you over a tattooed shoulder. He raises an eyebrow. "You wish to get the job done properly, but you do not wish the job. Shall we start at the beginning? For we are in the middle of the trees. Do you want to serve Gwilym? However he wishes you to serve... in or out of his bed... whatever it means. Are you willing to learn, to push past what is comfortable to...whatever possibilities might be waiting on the other side of your discomfort? That is the only question you really need to answer."
     He laughs. Though quiet, there is a kind of raven's cackle to it. "Religion? What does religion have to do with anything?"

     "Your kind of caring isn't like any other kind I know," Loki says quietly, with small shrug that conveys the unsaid But this doesn't really surprise me. "I'll try to take it as you mean it."
     "If there's a non-religious definition to go with 'priest' I haven't heard it yet, but as I said. Vocabulary issues. I've never much held with gods or worship or service or--anything I'd call religious." He lets out a breath that's not quite a laugh. "And then Gwilym showed up and fucked that all up. Fuck it all, I'd do nearly anything for him, and that bothers me as much as anything he could ask me to do. I'm not the kind of person who--acts like that. Except apparently I am."

     "Don't get lost in semantics. The world is just too big," Aeron notes. He sinks each ball in the pocket, one after another, listening to the porcelain clink. It is a musical note, always in the key of F. "You will never find your way in such a tangled wood."
     Aeron tilts his head as the field is cleared. "You do not like priest, then do not use the term. I think it is far closer to the truth that you are his instrument. Maybe, drummer, you are his drum. Maybe.... all you need to do is play," he postulates. "Perhaps you mark the rhythm of his steps on the earth. You play, so that others may know him, may know the energy that moves him. He has never asked you to be anyone or anything other than who you are. You are the only one who can say who and what you are. He cannot do that. I cannot do that. It is for you to determine."
     He looks up and over at you. "If you love him, then love him. Who among us could not use love? What's wrong with that? Wait," he grins, holding up his hands, "...don't answer that..."

     That surprises a laugh out of Loki, if a reluctant one. "Maybe you had a point about literalism. I seem to get a lot more use out of metaphors lately than anything else."
     There's a question waiting to be asked, and he puts it aside for later. Typical. "Love, or whatever it's called. It is what it is, and I'm not doing well on vocabulary tonight. For what it's worth, thank you." He leaves the precise nature of the thanks vague. It's probably better that way.

Posted by rowan at July 02, 2009 01:59 PM