Liesmith

by Alis Franklin

  And that? That left Sigmund with a moral dilemma. Because Lain being the Designated Villain, despite seeming sort of an okay guy most of the time in person, implied the existence of a kind of predestined, absolutist morality that Sigmund wasn’t totally down with. Not to mention that Sigmund didn’t see himself as being a card-carrying member of Team Evil. Would he still be okay with joining up just because that seemed to be where his friends were hanging out? And did that make him, like, the Misguided Love Interest in this story? Was Baldr going to come swooping through his window one night and try to have him join the Forces of Good through the power of persuasive argument and/or seduction? ’Cause Sigmund? Totally wasn’t into Baldr in that way. He was just too…blond. He looked like he should be carrying a surfboard and saying dude a lot.

  Did relating a cosmic battle of good and evil to his love life make Sigmund shallow?

  There were an awful lot of rhetorical questions there.

  And finally, Point the Fifth: Sigmund didn’t want to die. Gods were cool in theory (or video games), but in actuality they seemed to be accompanied by a lot of screaming and violence. Sigmund had read the account of Loki and Sigyn’s imprisonment and had just sort of stared at the wall for a while afterward. He wasn’t sure if time worked the same way for gods as it did for mortals, but Lain had said he’d escaped during World War II. The actual age of the Vikings had been around 800 to 1100 CE. So that made, what? A thousand years imprisoned in writhing agony, chained by the entrails of his son, held beneath the dripping poison of a snake’s fangs? Sigmund couldn’t imagine a thousand years of anything, let alone unspeakable suffering. It was astounding Lain was, well…Lain, and not some seething mass of hate and resentment, raging violently against the universe.

  Maybe that’s why Sigyn had done it. Or was that too trite?

  Point being, Sigmund was gaining a newfound appreciation for his boring, normal life. With his boring, normal (if extremely nerdy) hobbies and his boring, normal job and his…okay, Em and Wayne were neither boring nor normal but they weren’t marauding gods of supposed evil, either.

  Just, apparently, former valkyries. Sigmund tried to imagine Em in a horned helmet and bustier, serving mead to dead Vikings, and not only failed miserably but received an extensive mental lecture on the objectification of women for his efforts. Even imagination-Wayne drew the line at serving mead, though she’d been okay with the bustier so long as it had been adequately goth.

  That was all an awful lot to think about and, by the time Monday morning rolled around, Sigmund still wasn’t sure what he’d decided the answer to it all was. At least he understood the question better. Maybe.

  —

  At work, Sigmund caught up with Em in the parking lot. The first thing she asked him was, “What happened to your hands?” For someone with only a passing interest in other people, Em could be alarmingly observant.

  “Oh, uh. I fell,” Sigmund said, trying not to rub at the wounds. It was true, in a sense, though the edge of obfuscation still itched. It occurred to him that having a god for a boyfriend might get complicated.

  Em seemed to accept his explanation, however, and ribbed him for a while on his clumsiness. They exchanged some small talk and then, as they crossed the wide-open expanse of the LB foyer, Sigmund asked, “What do you know about Sigyn?”

  “As in, the god Loki’s wife?” Norse mythology was one of those things Em did. Had done, ever since Sigmund had known her. Saga (née Gangleri) wasn’t based on it for nothing.

  Sigmund nodded. Google hadn’t brought up much, but Em read all kinds of tediously dry books on the subject, so…

  Except she just shrugged. “That’s about all there is to know,” she said. “She’s an ásynja, a goddess. Her name means something like, ‘victorious girlfriend.’ Some of the main kennings for Loki are along the lines of, ‘Sigyn’s burden.’ They had two kids. She stuck with Loki through his imprisonment. That’s about it, really. She might’ve been more important at some point, but any other stories about her have been lost.”

  All of which Sigmund already knew, care of the magic of Wikipedia.

  Em took his silence as permission to continue. “There’ve been a few modern incarnations of her, but not many. Some paintings. A few comics. Mostly she’s misguided, long-suffering, and ignored.”

  “What about Loki?” Sigmund asked. “I mean, he’s supposed to be, like, evil or something, right?”

  Em rocked her hand back and forth in a maybe motion. “The thing you have to understand about Loki,” she said, “is that the stories we tell about him today have probably changed a lot over the centuries. Like, you know why Loki got imprisoned?”

  “He killed Baldr.” Sigmund tried not to think of pale skin and an eye that burnt like the sun.

  “Hah!” said Em. “No. Everyone thinks that, but no. Loki didn’t kill Baldr, not technically: He tricked Baldr’s brother into doing the deed. And it’s that poor schlub who got topped for the murder. Loki’s problem was that he crashed the wake uninvited, then went on a mad insult spree. Questioned everyone’s sexual morals and so on. That’s why they imprisoned him.”

  “That seems…harsh,” Sigmund said, hitting the floor button on the elevator panel.

  “Insults were serious business back in those days,” Em said. “There’s this word. It’s like…neath, except—”

  “Níð.”

  “Right.” Em’s eyes narrowed for a moment, and Sigmund did his best not to look like a guy who’d learned the term from the source. It must’ve worked, because Em continued, “Well, it was serious stuff. If someone accused you of it, you were legally obliged to kill them to prove them wrong.” She stepped into the elevator as the doors opened, Sigmund following behind in face-twisting incredulity.

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “That’s what it was like,” she said. “And remember, Loki insulted everyone, even Odin, his blood brother and ruler and grieving father. Getting bound was a light punishment, really, and only because the gods wouldn’t kill one of their own. Even a shitty one like Loki.”

  Sigmund thought of Sigyn and of Loki’s sons, cursed and murdered to chain their father. He thought maybe his definition of light punishment may have been different from Em’s.

  When they got to the seventh floor, Sigmund waved to Em as he went left at the lift and she went right. When she’d disappeared around the corner, he turned and almost ran straight into Harrison.

  “Sussman! Lain won’t be in today”—Harrison had never quite gotten the hang of pronouncing Laufeyjarson—“he’s been in a car accident.”

  “Is he okay?” Sigmund’s mouth blurted before his brain managed to catch up to common sense.

  Harrison’s expression was soft for once. “He says he’s banged up and a bit sore, but he’ll be okay. No major damage.”

  Sigmund had a sudden flash to a wind-scoured rooftop and a sound like wet liver and broken branches. “Th-that’s good,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose and wiping his palms against his jeans.

  “You should call him later,” Harrison suggested. “I’m sure he’d like to hear a friendly voice. Kid doesn’t have any other family in the country, right?”

  “Not that I know of” was about as truthful an answer as Sigmund could manage, and only because Harrison had accidentally thrown the word other in there. He tried not to shake.

  Harrison either didn’t notice or assumed Sigmund was upset over the “car accident” and was pretending not to notice out of kindness.

  Sigmund managed to escape back to his desk with a muttered, “I’d better go check the thing and stuff.” He was so ready for some kind of quiet freaking out—under the desk, maybe—he almost missed the envelope sitting on his keyboard. It was just a regular, tan-colored internal-mail envelope, his name written underneath a list of crossed-out previous recipients. The handwriting was thick and sharp, as if the writer never quite got used to the idea of curved letterforms.

  When Sigmund touched the paper, his fingers le
ft damp marks around the edges.

  Inside, was a pass card. Unlike the standard-issue staff cards, this one had no photo and no writing other than the LB logo printed in one corner. A mauve Post-it note was stuck to the back, written in the same angular handwriting as the front of the envelope. It said:

  S.

  For the top floors. Don’t let Nic take this one, k?

  —L.

  The words were hard to read. They kept jerking around weirdly and it took Sigmund a moment to realize it was because his hands were shaking.

  (car accident, for fuck’s sake)

  Then he was moving. Up and away from his desk, through the cubicles and past the potted plants, until he was standing between the rows of shiny chrome elevator doors, swiping the card against the reader. He was almost hoping it didn’t work.

  It did.

  It was still a long way up, all dull humming and the dim sounds from the other floors. No one else got on.

  When the doors opened, Sigmund hadn’t thought of what he was doing there, exactly. Other than striding across to where the LB logo gleamed against polished wood, warding the entry to Hale’s office. The doors weren’t locked when Sigmund threw them back, and it occurred to him that maybe Hale was up there doing something important only when he’d already stepped into the room.

  Hale wasn’t, as it turned out, doing anything important and neither was Lain. He was just leaning against Hale’s—

  (his)

  —desk, legs crossed, one hand tucked in his armpit and the other watching his cell phone. When Sigmund entered, Lain touched the screen and turned the device around. The room was huge and Sigmund’s eyesight was awful, but he was pretty sure it was the stopwatch app.

  “Seven minutes?” Lain almost sounded offended, though he was grinning. “What took you so long?”

  That was enough to derail Sigmund’s purposeful stride but not his anger. “You were waiting for me?”

  Lain shrugged, then put his phone in his pocket and leaned back against the desk, arms straight and hands gripping the edge. He looked like something out of a hipster fashion ad, and somehow that just made Sigmund angrier.

  “I can’t lie,” he said, striding into the room just enough to let the doors fall shut. “Not about this, not about you. Not about…about traffic accidents and swipe cards and…and everything.” He took a step forward, then another, and another, Lain watching, head tilted and expression guarded.

  Sigmund continued: “Em asked me about my hands this morning. She’s my best friend. It’s not just that I can’t lie to her, it’s that I don’t wan…” A motion in the corner of his eye caught Sigmund’s attention, but it was only Hale’s pet—

  “Holy shit, you kept the snake?”

  Sigmund was staring at it, rant forgotten, mouth slack, and something awful clawing at his heart. The last time he’d been up here, a pet snake in an open herpetarium was the foible of an eccentric billionaire. And it still might have been, except it wasn’t just a snake, Sigmund was sure of it. It was the snake, the one that had tormented Loki for an eternity underground.

  Jesus, its name was Boots. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Lain was quiet for a moment. Then: “In the end, I realized she was just as much a prisoner as we’d been.”

  Sigmund wondered whether Team Evil got compassion. It hadn’t been in any of the brochures.

  Boots regarded him with inscrutable red eyes as Sigmund approached its tank. He’d been too scared to get close before, and even now his heart was pounding, but by the time he was within touching distance he had to admit it wasn’t a python. Not that he was a big snake expert or anything, but pythons had that distinctive head shape, right? And this one didn’t. It was huge though, and the more Sigmund looked at the patterns on its back, the more they looked like knot work.

  It was definitely watching him.

  “Hey, Boots,” he said, and despite the fact that it was probably about the worst idea in the entire world, he put his hand out to touch it.

  Boots felt cool and muscular and scaly, pretty much what Sigmund remembered from the only other time he’d touched a snake, back in primary school when the man had come around to talk at assembly. This snake didn’t shy away from Sigmund’s hand or try to bite him—which, considering, was probably a good thing—but it did curl its head around to flick a dark, forked tongue against his fingers.

  “You can feed her if you want.” Lain’s voice was very close, and though Sigmund hadn’t heard him move, he could feel Lain’s body heat over his left shoulder. “Except she eats dead rats and it’s kinda gross.”

  Boots had started coiling her way up Sigmund’s arm, and he watched her hypnotic undulations. “Urgh. Pass,” he said. “I don’t think we’re at that stage in our relationship just yet.”

  Lain gave a chuckle, though it almost sounded sad. “I know you can’t lie, Sig,” he said.

  “Then why—?”

  “An excuse. For you. I need to be Hale for a little while. I’ve been putting some things off”—to spend time with you, was the implication, though Lain didn’t say so—“that I can’t put off any longer. I do actually have a company to run, you know.”

  Sigmund couldn’t see Lain’s expression, but his voice sounded more amused than accusatory.

  “But when people ask me about the ‘accident,’ I can’t—”

  “Omigod, Sig, you’ll never guess what happened on the weekend, right?” Lain’s voice was abruptly casual, a little bit disbelieving. “I was driving out past the hospital, you know on the road that goes between Torr and Aldershot, and, like, how there’s that set of lights there? Well, they went red, right? So I stopped, but the lady behind me? Totally didn’t. She must’ve been going, like, ninety. Knocked my car right out into the middle of the intersection, and I get T-boned by this guy coming the other way. Man. The car is wrecked. I’m okay, though. Bit banged up, so I probably won’t be in for a while. Totally sucks.”

  Sigmund understood. And he understood why Lain had been waiting for him, too. Lain and not Travis. Because now he didn’t have to lie, exactly, so long as he prefixed everything with, Lain told me… He could manage that. Just.

  “Okay,” he said, closing his eyes. “Okay, I get it.” He opened his eyes again, turning slightly. Lain was standing very close, warm and tall, waiting for Sigmund’s reaction. He was sweet, Sigmund thought. Not Team Evil at all.

  Sigmund shifted, just enough for his shoulder to rest against Lain’s chest. In response, a big, warm hand settled against his hip.

  This wasn’t too hard. World’s biggest virgin or not, being with Lain wasn’t difficult, even if Sigmund’s heart hammered and his palms were sweaty against Boots’s scales. And it was nice, standing here, feeling the ends of coppery hair ghost across his cheek and hearing the soft, wet sounds of Lain parting his lips and shifting his tongue. Not for talking, Sigmund knew. He also knew what would happen, should he happen to turn his face upward. Just a fraction.

  Instead, Sigmund looked at Boots, who’d made her way across his shoulders and was working on traversing Lain’s. Sigmund’s right hand was still wrapped around her body, feeling smooth, dry scales, shifting through his palm.

  It was hard to stay angry, he thought, wrapped up in a snake. Hard to stay angry with Lain not-quite nuzzling against his scalp, for that matter.

  So yeah. It was nice, just standing there, not thinking about anything except warmth and the smell of cinders and the huge and quite possibly deadly reptile that was slowly tying them together. Nothing to really do, nothing to say, and no pressure to say it. Except, oh.

  “Dad invited you to dinner.”

  Lain chuckled, the huff of his breath ruffling through Sigmund’s hair. “What did you tell him?”

  “Just that we’re, y’know. Dating.” A horrible thought occurred, and Sigmund pulled back, just enough to meet Lain’s big green eyes. “We are, right? I mean, dating? That’s what this is?”

  Lain made a strange sound, not quite a laugh,
not quite a sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, this is dating.”

  “Oh. Good.” Sigmund felt himself relaxing, enjoying the feel of Lain’s broad chest under his fingers. The skin beneath the T-shirt was ridged. More scars, clumped in a long slash across Lain’s chest. He had a similar set across his hips, a third across his ankles; Sigmund had seen them when Lain had been the godmonster. Three horizontal bands, like something had once rubbed those places raw, over and over and over. For a thousand years.

  So much pain, and Sigmund pulled himself closer to Lain at the thought. It was useless wishing he’d been there to stop it. He probably had been. It hadn’t helped.

  “Oh, it helped. I can’t even begin to tell you how fucking much.”

  Sigmund’s eyes snapped open, body pulled taut and heart skipping. He hadn’t said that out loud. He knew he hadn’t.

  Lain tensed too, and pulled back. Boots hissed her displeasure at his departure.

  (my, what big teeth you have…)

  Lain winced and ran a hand back through his hair, sending coppery curls bouncing around his face. “Ah, no. You did not say that out loud.” He looked as if the words were being pulled from him by force.

  “I didn’t say that out loud either!”

  “No.”

  “You can read my mind!” Sigmund took a step backward, almost tripping over a side table while he was at it. Boots hissed at him for the jolt, and he muffled a scream at the closeness of the faceful of fangs. She turned away, and Sigmund got the impression she’d be blushing if she could.

  Boots didn’t complain when Lain unwound her from Sigmund’s shoulders and laid her back on the branch in her tank. She went obediently, dragging herself off to some foliage-covered corner to sulk. Sigmund felt bad for her. She was just a snake, after all.

  Lain, on the other hand, was apparently a traitorous mind-reading asshole!