all_inclusive | Think of all the luck you got.

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Think of all the luck you got.

There were a lot of really weird and screwed-up scenarios that Fiona Gallagher could imagine herself in. Her involvement in these scenarios was usually begrudging and her father usually the cause, but picturing herself caught up in something beyond most people's limit of belief had officially became much easier after this past summer. (Finding yourself crouching in a hole in your backyard, covered in sweat and dirt, and ecstatic over having unearthed a dead relative's remains could do that to a girl.)

Despite that, she had to admit that the Nexus was pretty fucking crazy, even by Gallagher standards.

It had been just at a week hotel time since she'd opened the downstairs bathroom door and found the Nexus beyond, but having a magical luxury hotel where her toilet should be freaked her out a lot less than the fact that the place was essentially free. In Fiona's experience, if something sounded too good to be true, it always was, and she probably should've gone home, chalked the whole experience up to some bad seafood and never thought about it again.

She probably would have, too, if the people at the desk hadn't told her the bit about time differences and job openings.

Christmas was right around the corner, and she'd spent almost everything Jimmy had left her on that damned deal for work. (Not that she was complaining; the money had come at the perfect time, and now they'd have enough plastic cups in the house that they probably wouldn't need to wash a single glass for half a year.) Back home, it would cost her 150 bucks to get herself licensed to sell alcohol, and she'd have no guarantee of being hired anywhere. Here, they apparently only cared that you could mix a drink, and a lifetime with Frank had more than prepared her for that. The great hourly wage and tips she was earning meant she could actually afford to get everything out of lay-away this year and maybe even buy some extra stocking stuffers for the kids. The circumstances may have been weird, but for Fiona taking the position was a no-brainer.

Today was her third day behind the bar at the Smoking Room. She'd allowed herself to come through early enough to get a solid nap before her shift and was now practically chipper, turning a wide smile to the guests waiting for a drink.

"What can I get you?"

For the first time in a long time, she actually felt good about the future.

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"Nah, it was completely voluntary," Fiona answered with a shake of her head. "I've got five younger siblings I'm trying to support, so I can't really afford to turn down a job that pays this well. Plus, I don't miss anything back home when I'm here."

Yet, she mentally added, and then immediately pushed the thought aside.

"Maybe everybody who works here is in the same boat," she allowed with a considering cant of her head. "I know a lot of people back home who will overlook a hell of a lot for a good paycheck."

When it came to wealth, Loki had never been wanting. Even now it was all within his reach; a tiny spell, a reach through time and space, and he could grasp hold of it. He was a prince, and such worries never reached his mind. His concerns were elsewhere - politics, government, sorcery, science, war. That didn't mean he didn't understand that others might have such concerns, but he truly had no personal experience of it.

"Five is quite a lot," he mused. He could barely stand the one he had; imagine if there were five of him. He'd have thrown himself off the Rainbow Bridge much sooner if he'd had to deal with five people Odin loved more than him, instead of just Thor.

"Yeah, well," Fiona began with a resigned tilt of her head. "My parents were never big on Planned Parenthood." Too late she realized that Loki wouldn't know what that was, but hopefully it was self-explanatory. He seemed like a pretty smart guy.

"What about you? You have any family?" she asked, swiftly sidestepping further discussion of her own circumstances. She reached to needlessly polish a clean glass and offered Loki a look of polite curiosity.

"One brother. You might see him around. He's the fellow who doesn't look a thing like me."

He knew she probably wasn't even really interested, and he was wondering if this was the part of person-to-person interaction where you hit bland smalltalk once you've run out of anything truly compelling to say. That would be a shame; she'd started out with such promise.

"He tends to break things, though."

"Yours, too?" Fiona asked, breaking into a unguarded smile. "Four of my five are brothers. Absolutely nothing is safe in our house, destructive little shits." This was all said, however, with an air of fondness that made it difficult to lend her complaints much weight. They were growing boys with Frank for a male role model, it wasn't as if they could help it.

"So no breaking things for you, or are you just better at getting away with it?" she asked, her smile shifting into a knowing smirk. God knew she'd broken enough in her own lifetime, even if she wasn't as prolific as Lip or Carl.

"It's a specialty of his, I think. He gets away with it better than I do." True, and not true. Thor was expected to be more rough and tumble, after all, so why not take advantage of it? But when Loki broke something, he hid it. If smashing things was a specialty of Thor's, half-lies were a specialty of Loki's.

"I only have the one, though. His path of destruction is rampant and wide, but at least it's singular."

It was hard for Fiona to tell whether Loki was bitter about his brother's destructive streak. Projecting her own situation onto his was natural, and she had to wonder whether his brother was more like her own—Messy but ultimately well-meaning—or like Frank, who'd been leaving a wake of chaos for Fiona to deal with since she could walk.

"You end up having to clean up after him a lot?" she asked, genuinely curious if only because Loki looked and sounded like he'd never had to clean up anything in his entire life.

For a moment he just looked at her - it was barely a split second of a blank expression, but it was enough for someone who was watching for that sort of thing. He had never been asked that question before, and it legitimately startled him for a moment. He was far too used to being overlooked when it came to Thor, even though more often than not he had operated as his brother's good sense.

"Whenever required," he said, and tipped his empty glass towards her in a wordless request for another.

"I know the feeling," Fiona replied as she reached for the bottle and poured him another neat measure of scotch. That it wasn't her brothers that she was mostly referring to didn't bear mentioning. Frank was a sore subject on the best of days, and lately…

On impulse, she reached for a clean glass, poured herself some scotch, and proceeded to knock it swiftly back with all the aplomb of an alcoholic's daughter.

"So if you're not human, does booze affect you the same way?" she asked after a brief wince, already setting the glass aside to be washed.

Though he viewed Midgardians with a vague amount of disinterest - they were delicate creatures, short of lifespan, and generally madcap - that wasn't to say he was beyond noticing them. Perhaps their short, blink-of-an-eye lives brought to the fore an activity of the mind that was often difficult for Loki to find on Asgard. In any case, she had surprised him; that alone merited his notice. Even if her one advantage was not knowing a single thing about him, it was, he had to admit, a difficult advantage to a member of a royal family.

Besides, she drank like an Asgardian.

He smiled at her. It was a good smile, the sort that would sometimes make a girl pause, before her eyes invariably strayed to Thor. He motioned to the glass she set aside, indicating she should keep it. "It will, eventually," he said. "Pour yourself another, Fiona. I'll settle the balance. Not to butter you up; but generally drinking is better with company."

If the smile didn't give Fiona pause, it at least caught her notice and held it for a moment, if only because it seemed like the first truly unguarded gesture the guy had made. Well, and it was a nice one, she could admit that much. Outwardly Loki seemed the polar opposite of her tastes, but he wasn't difficult to look at.

Fiona's own smile was instinctive, and she considered the bottle a moment before looking back to him.

"I do have other customers I'll be expected to occasionally serve, you know," she said, but was reaching for the bottle anyway. "One more," she said, holding up her index finger for emphasis. "I like this job, so I'd kinda like to keep it."

"And you'll serve them. Just far more cheerfully than normal, perhaps," he replied, teasingly.

He was mentally going back through their conversation, sifting out the parts he found interesting. "So you work here for your siblings?" he asked. His fingertip touched his glass, immediately sending a fine layer of frost through it, chilling the liquid. It was an action that was not unconscious, but not to show off, either. Mostly he wanted to see if she would notice, to see how sharp she was. "Do they do anything for you, or are they too young?" Or selfish, maybe, but judging by her looks, he doubted they were old enough.

Working for her siblings wasn't anything Fiona would balk at, but it was odd to hear it phrased that way, a bald fact that didn't take into account their circumstances. It almost made her sound like the kids' maid, which… okay, some days she felt like.

"Everybody contributes," she was quick to clarify as she set her own glass back up onto the bar. "Well, not the baby, but even the younger kids do odd jobs or babysit to help out. Team effort."

Having poured her own scotch, Fiona added a splash more into Loki's glass but then paused, bottle still poised in midair, and squinted as she reached out to rub a fingertip across the frosted surface.

"…the fuck," she murmured, and then flicked an uncertain glance up to Loki.

"Well, that's different," he mused. The situation she was describing suggested lower class, which did not actually cause any pity to manifest in him. He was entirely aware, however, of what that may entail. Loki was too old to be shocked by such things, or to feel lucky or entitled. The princes were raised to be tacticians and leaders; being spoiled just happened to go alongside it. "I doubt my family could survive that for longer than a day."

He picked up his glass to take an experimental sip. It was good cold, without the watery benefit of ice. It was the faintest of tricks he had learned when it came to his Jotun heritage, and while he was not particularly proud of that bloodline, he still had it, and supposed he could use it. "Not human, remember?" he said, catching her expression. "I could do the same for yours, if you'd like."

"Okay, but saying not human is not the same as saying you've got crazy magical powers," Fiona replied with an awed little burst of laughter, and then immediately pushed her glass Loki's way.

"I don't even care whether it's cold, I just want to see this," she admitted, and hunched forward across the bar to watch, her attention fixed on the glass.

His mouth twitched slightly with that hidden smile again. "Isn't it?" he asked.

Still, when she pushed her drink forward, her agreeably reached out. The tip of his finger barely brushed the glass, but there was a strange feeling, as if an exhale, and frost gathered on the side, an effect of the cold he had just pushed through the liquid.

So being a member of an accursed race had at least one perk.

"Holy shit," Fiona said, breaking into a delighted grin that she now turned on Loki. "That's like the world's greatest party trick. And here I thought I was impressive, tying cherry stems into knots with my tongue."

She reached for the glass and took a small, experimental sip, just to confirm the temperature, and then leveled Loki with an imploring look.

"Seriously, where are you from? You know where I'm from, it's only fair."

"Well, that's also impressive," Loki said, raising his drink to salute her and her own talents. That had really been the first time he'd revealed any ability he'd inherited from his Jotun blood, but at least it came in useful. Beyond turning people he didn't like into icicles, anyway.

"If I told you where I was from, I'm not sure you'd recognize the name," he replied. "But I am of Asgard. It's a different world."

"You're right, I don't recognize it at all," Fiona admitted and then shrugged, worth a try. "Is everyone there magical, or are you just super-special? Or your world's Jack Frost?"

"Everyone there isn't human, but in particular I'm not so much special as I am an oddity," Loki said, unperturbed. His blood heritage made him even more of an outcast, but he preferred not to consider it. He was used to being different and had found some comfort in it, even, and at the moment he was in no mood to stir up bad feelings. "And what is a Jack Frost?"

Fiona laughed, a short, good-natured burst that was out before she could catch it. "He's like… a story?" she answered. "I guess you could call him a myth, but he's more of a thing you tell kids. He's supposedly the guy who brings winter around every year, but once you get to a certain age you obviously stop believing in him. Kind of like the Tooth Fairy." She scrunched up her face, tiling her head. "…which you won't know about, either. My bad."

He raised his eyebrows at her when she laughed, but he didn't feel particularly mocked, so he just gave her a small smile. "Your kind like stories," he remarked. "Far more than mine, I've noticed. But I suppose we all still believe everything we are told, up to a certain age."

"You're telling me you don't like stories?" Fiona asked, although her disbelief was mild. She'd never been particularly enamored of fantasy herself; the times she hadn't been thoroughly grounded, she'd always ended up paying for it one way or another. But she encouraged it in the kids. They deserved to dream of something better.

"I do like stories," Loki assured her. He was a god of lies, and what was a story except for one long string of them? But at the same time he detested them. He resented their presence in his own life, their hand in shaping a part of his personality. Of course, while explaining to a bartender at length about your personal woes was not unheard of, he preferred to keep a secure lid on that sort of thing. "But we like tales of battle, on Asgard. Not so much small lies to explain even smaller mysteries."

"It is kind of weird, the way we excuse lying to our kids," Fiona replied, and looked down to her drink, still mostly—Purposely—untouched. "I hadn't thought about it that way before, but we feed kids all kind of lies where I come from." She began counting them off on her fingers as she continued. "Jack Frost is a pretty minor one, but there's Santa Claus, he's huge, and the Tooth Fairy, and Easter Bunny. I don't think any of my brothers or sisters ever bought any of that, but most normal kids do. Is there something so wrong with just giving your kid a present on Christmas and it being from you? Do we really have to say it came from some imaginary fat guy in a red suit? It's a little fucked up."

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thelostprince - 2013-11-17 02:21 (UTC) - Expand

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