our hero, ladies and gentlemen
Apr 18, 2014 22:24:42 GMT -5
Post by Loki Odinsson on Apr 18, 2014 22:24:42 GMT -5
It had been almost three hours since Fandral had been dispatched back to the Elness girl's house alone. That seemed less suspicious than returning together, especially with the concern that their combined poker faces would cycle back around to looking guilty, and that assumed that they'd even be able to hold them up in the first place.
Loki's intention had been to spend some time alone and try to figure out what the Hel had just happened, and what it meant for his relationship with Teja.
Instead, Angie DiBartolomeo had happened.
"I mean..." The woman sighed and leaned sullenly over her coffee. They had wound up in the back of a dimly-lit greasy spoon in Hell's Kitchen, only a few blocks from where Dr. Manhattan had slaughtered a few hundred thousand people on national television only six months earlier, Angie shivering despite the heat under a denim jacket. When she moved her arms, a little of her gold lamé halter top showed underneath. "I mean, I figured I'd be better off just getting out of Daddy's business altogether, you know? Just cut the ties and get my ass out of there."
"I understand that, believe me," Loki said, nodding.
"And that was great until the money I took with me ran out. And I mean, what then? What was I gonna do? Go crawlin' back to them? No way, Charlie. I dunno if they'd even take me. S'pose I'd been a guy instead, they'd probably load my pockets and push me into the Gowanus Canal."
"Ah."
Angie nodded with firm approval at her own words. She was thin-faced and snub-nosed, with a lot of permed dark hair that didn't even reach her shoulders but deceived you into thinking it longer based on its mass alone, but with very large, dark eyes and a good, olive-toned complexion.
"But when you grow up with that kinda money, you know- I mean, you've gotta know, you're the fanciest-sounding bastard I've ever talked to- you know how it is, right? I did tap and jazz and all that, like all the other good little rich girls, so that's why I ended up dancing. I'd be rollin' in it too, real honest money, if my kidney hadn'a given out."
She made a shrugging sort of gesture.
"And what the fuck was that, anyway? I mean, I'm 28 years old, I don't drink none, I smoke sometimes, but who doesn't? So I had to take out a payment plan. Problem is, dancin's hard when you got one of these tryna heal."
She leaned back and grimly opened her denim jacket to show the C-shaped scar healing on her midriff. Loki glanced at it.
"Would they know if you didn't have the scar?" he asked quietly.
"They got trackers and shit," Angie muttered, lighting a cigarette. "Weak ones- bastard's probably running through every alley in the Kitchen right now tryna find me. They don't really go off til they're on the same block. Comin' in here bought time, that's all. People don't usually hide from Repo Men in plain sight. At least I put on my costume. Not a bad outfit to die in."
Loki had only encountered Angie in the first place because she'd nearly run him down in the pedestrian stretch of 63rd between Amsterdam and West End, looking terrified out of her wits. His first instinct had been to just ignore her except for glaring and let her keep on her apparently very important way, but the realization that everyone else in the vicinity was pointedly ignoring her ignited an almost vicarious sense of indignance. Next thing he knew, he was sitting in the back of a diner, listening to a stranger tell him her life story.
Now was apparently one of Angie's sometimeses, because she was pulling out a pack of cigarettes.
"So I kinda remember you," she commented. "You were the one who went all pazzesco after your folks died, right?"
He gave her a flat look, but didn't really have the necessary emotion to pull it off at the moment.
"Some outfit you got there. Would you've worn that kinda getup if you'd won?"
"Probably not."
"You look like one of the ones who goes to... fuck me, I can't remember. Another club. My friend Sheila dances there sometimes too, but in a corset. I dunno how she does it. I got enough trouble just with the Pop Girls. That's what they call the lineup at the Ruby on account of the song we always open the set with. You know the one? 'Let's do the milkshake, sellin' like a hotcake, try some, buy some-'"
"I get the idea," Loki said in a carefully unemotive voice.
"Yeah," said Angie. She had just brought her cigarette to her lips when the man behind the counter cleared his throat and pointed at a sign that read NO SMOKING. "Blow it out your ass," Angie retorted before turning to Loki again.
She studied him, looking a little wistful now while she took a deep pull on her cigarette.
"Shame about your folks," she said as she released the smoke. "It was kinda nice having some fresh blood in the race, without nobody's hooks in you. Not GeneCo or my family or anybody-"
"Veidt," Loki said, glancing at the window.
"Yeah, well, Veidt don't count," Angie commented. "I mean, sure, he had that issue with his marriage and all, but that ain't that bad. Man's practically a saint, you know? St. Adrian of Manhattan."
She laughed a smoky, slightly raspy laugh. Loki very nearly sneered, but managed to suppress it. Angie would be dead before morning. She didn't need her illusions shattered.
"You didn't have to do this, y'know," she said. "I mean, I haven't even told anybody else my name in more than a year. All the other girls at the club call me Diamond. I know it's kinda porny, and I ain't even that kinda dancer, but that's what's on the paperwork too. I guess it's nice, getting somebody to know I'm called Angela one more time before I die."
She was silent for a moment, and then she broke down crying.
"Oh- oh fuck. It isn't fucking fair! I got other assets they can seize, fuck- getting hunted down like this, it ain't fair, it's not fuckin' fair. If they care so much about their property, why don't they just pick us up and give us a shot like it's death row or something, make it like going to sleep and not getting carved up in the gutter-"
She collapsed forward onto the table with her face in her hands. Some of the other patrons had noticed and were beginning to stare; Loki feebly held out a hand and patted her shoulder.
"Hopefully," he said, "it'll be quick. You're only human, after all- I doubt you'll be conscious for most of it. Perhaps you won't feel it."
Angie looked up.
"How 'bout I carve out your kidney and see if you don't feel it?" she snapped.
The man behind the counter approached their table and knocked on it to get their attention. Angie stared, bleary-eyed.
"I'm gonna have to ask you to pay up and leave," he said, in a low, vaguely threatening voice. "I don't want any kind of scene in here."
"Oh- oh, fuck you," Angie muttered, starting to dig in her purse for money, but Loki, determining what was meant, quietly produced a $20 out of nowhere and started to rise from the table. He gestured for her to follow, and she stared after him, looking a little confused, until she decided to do what was clearly being suggested.
Angie was still rubbing her arms when they stepped outside.
"I can help you," Loki said, "but you might not like all of it."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Angie said loudly, but Loki made a hissing sound that cut her off. He started pulling her along, leaning in and speaking in a low voice.
"I can make you look like someone else," he said.
"You kidding me?" Angie said, quiet but rasping in her intensity. "What does that even mean-"
"A new face. They wouldn't know it was you."
"I already did that once," Angie said, touching her nose. "I ain't doing that again. And how could you do that, even-"
"Then you'll need to leave the city," said Loki. "At least for some time. You ought to disguise yourself as well."
"What are you talking about?"
Loki glanced at her. His heart was pounding now, and there was a kind of rising tightness in his throat from combined nerves and adrenaline.
It took him a moment to realize it was excitement.
"I'm going to save you, Angela DiBartolomeo."
She stared at him.
"...you okay, Mr. Ashton?"
"I'm going to save you," he said, gripping her by the shoulders and beaming.
Angie looked a little afraid and pushed his hands away.
"You're kinda weirding me out right now-"
"Where do you live?"
"235 63rd, apartment 34, why-"
They were there, very suddenly. Angie took one look at Loki before toppling onto the ground.
"How the fuck did you-"
"There's a great deal you don't know about me, Angela," Loki said, grinning at her. "There's a great deal almost no one in the city knows about me. You're going to dance at the Ruby one more time, and then you'll be able to go start over elsewhere, with no one there to breathe down your neck and try to carve you up in the gutter-"
"I'm scheduled for repossession, you- whatever the fuck you are-"
He paused, and he glanced around Angie's meager apartment, and then he smiled at her again.
"I am Loki," he said. "Of Asgard. And I am going to save you."
A brief look of recognition passed over Angie's face, followed immediately by one of suspicion, then resignation.
"Yeah, okay, whatever. What do I have to do, if this is the game we're playing?"
"Gather whatever you need to dance tonight at the Ruby, and anything you want to take with you," he instructed. "And anything that might make you less recognizable elsewhere, assuming you still wouldn't prefer any assistance with that-"
"I'm not letting some crazy magic asshole calling himself the Norse god of being a tool rearrange my face," Angie retorted. "And what do you intend to do about my effin' kidney, anyway-"
"Ah, yes," said Loki. "Hmm."
He glanced thoughtfully at her scar for a moment, and then reached forward to lay a hand on it. She recoiled.
"Hey-"
"I'm not going to do anything funny. Hold still."
He pressed his hand over Angie's scar. There was a strange feeling of warmth, and something shifting beneath her skin, and then a sharp sensation that made both of them gasp.
When Loki pulled his hand away, there was a dim inverse image of a bar code on his hand and a bit of blood dripping from where the tracking pod that had been inserted into Angie's skin was now embedded in his.
Angie was bleeding too, from a small gash in her abdomen, but the scar was gone. She stared at it, wide-eyed, and then at Loki.
"How did you..."
"I told you- Loki, Asgard, etc. Now hurry up."
Angie nodded and rushed into the bathroom. He could hear the sounds of things clattering in there as she threw them into her bag, and then the sound of her asking "Have we got five minutes for me to do something kind of stupid?"
"I don't know-"
"I'll make it quick," she called back.
Loki glanced down at his bleeding hand and frowned curiously, paying no mind to the continued clattering from the bathroom and then the harsh droning sound that followed. This was a rather reckless game he was playing, he realized, but it was almost like a kind of self-administered test. It certainly gave him something else to do tonight.
He didn't know how much time had passed before Angie emerged from the bathroom again. She seemed smaller, somehow, and looking at her made him uneasy in a way he couldn't quite put a finger on in his daze until he realized that the answer was obvious. She had shorn her hair down to a smooth-looking, even coating of dark fuzz, and was rubbing her head with a curious expression.
"My ex used to have me do parts of his between haircuts," she said, glancing at Loki. "Always kinda wondered what it'd be like. Having to look like someone else is as good an excuse as any, right?"
She frowned. "You okay there?"
Loki shook his head to clear the fog.
"I'm fine," he said swiftly.
Angie glanced back over her shoulder at her reflection in the bathroom mirror one last time and shrugged.
"I got a good face for it, don't I?" she said. "Maybe when I settle down somewhere else, I'll bleach it."
Loki unfolded his hand. There was a stack of bills amounting to a few hundred thousand dollars in there, which he handed to Angie without looking at her. Angie was in the middle of pulling on a bright blue bob-cut wig over her newly shaven head when she saw.
"Holy- are you for real-"
"I told you," he said, trying to rebalance himself, "I'm saving you tonight."
Angie slowly stuffed the money into her bag.
"Right," she said.
"Where's the Ruby?" Loki said, looking at her again and finding the wig made it a lot easier for him to do so.
"57th, between 11th and 12th-"
Angie staggered against the wall of the nightclub.
"You could have warned me before you did it again, you ass," she said sharply.
"Go inside," said Loki. "Dance. I'll handle the rest."
Angie looked confused for a moment.
"...if this works out," she said finally, "thank you. For everything."
She looked at him for a moment longer, as though expecting an acknowledgement, but all Loki did was bark "Go!" at her, and she rushed inside through the stage door.
Loki leaned against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them again, there was a man in a gas mask standing at the end of the block carrying a bag and a scalpel.
Loki smiled at him and hurried inside.
The other girls had already taken the stage when Angie managed to get out and join them, already a few lines into the song. She quickly scurried into her place and took on the proper position, beaming at the audience. She noticed Sheila glance at her and the missing scar, and the way Sheila frowned and looked confused, but neither of them said a word.
"Let's do the milkshake, selling like a hotcake, try some, buy some, fe-fi-fo-fum, talk about pop music, talk about pop music..."
Loki nimbly pushed his way through some of the other acts waiting backstage or preparing to go on, causing a few of them to spill something or look up in irritation, only to start screaming a moment later when the man in the gas mask came hurrying after.
"I wanna dedicate it (POP POP SHOO-WOP), everybody made it (SHOO-BE DOO-BE DOO-WOP), infiltrate it (POP POP SHOO-WOP), activate it..."
Loki glanced back at the Repo Man parting the crowd behind him, and started climbing a ladder to the small series of flies above the stage where Angie and the other dancers were performing.
"New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody talk about pop music..."
A grizzled-looking, heavyset man in a dark T-shirt and a headset was minding the lights over the stage when he felt the walkway tremble with the force of someone else climbing on it. He glanced up and saw Loki casually striding toward him.
"Hey! Hey, listen, buddy, you can't come up here without-"
The lighting man didn't even feel the Repo Man approaching from behind until he swung a billy club produced from somewhere in his bag to get the lighting man out of the way. The lighting man collapsed unconscious against the walkway as the light briefly swung up in a wild arc to illuminate the Repo Man on its way back down, for just a moment.
"Oh," said Loki. "I see you have a knife. So do I."
"Singin' in the subway, shuffle with a shoe shine, mix me a Molotov, I'm on the headline..."
He opened his hand and hurled one of his throwing knives toward the Repo Man's shoulder, but it didn't penetrate the thick leather. The Repo Man stormed toward him, raising the billy club again as Loki rushed at him.
The billy club collided painfully with the side of Loki's head. He staggered and grabbed at the sides of the walkway to steady himself while the Repo Man raised the club again. This time, however, Loki left the image of himself clutching the walkway behind while moving himself behind the Repo Man and proceeding to grab him in a chokehold.
"Can't imagine they send you for anything to do with the brain," Loki snickered as blood flowed out from under his hair and over the side of his face.
The Repo Man grunted and threw Loki over his shoulder, but Loki drove his knife into the space between the Repo Man's collarbone and neck as he went over, causing the man to drop the club with a howl of pain. Loki and the club both landed precariously on the walkway as the Repo Man tried to wrench out the knife. He did so, gasping, but Loki had already produced another one and was charging at him again.
"Icepick grip," the Repo Man grunted from behind his gas mask. "Not very professional."
"Is that what you call that around here?" said Loki. "You learn something every-"
He didn't get to finish. The Repo Man had shoved a knife through his face, in one cheek and out the other. He wrenched it forward, slitting the flesh on either side of Loki's mouth and filling it with blood, so much blood that he was coughing it and choking on it and instinctively trying to feel what had happened to his face. He pressed his hands over the gouged, torn flesh and stared with wide eyes at the Repo Man over his laced fingers.
"You could've died pretty," the Repo Man chuckled, "but you had to make it hard."
Loki pulled his hands down from bloodied but smooth, intact, scarless flesh.
"I'll take that as a compliment."
The Repo Man staggered back from him, shaking his head.
"All around the world, wherever you are... dance in the street, wherever you like... do it in your car in the middle of the night...
"What did you just-"
"You didn't even check the assignment, did you?" Loki said dryly. "Do I look like someone named Diamond Spurs to you?"
He stood and stretched, while the Repo Man stepped back in mute, head-shaking fear. Loki bent and picked up the dropped billy club.
He raised it and smiled.
"Fa la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la..."
When the Repo Man had fallen, Loki calmly straddled him on the walkway and wrenched off the gas mask. The face revealed beneath was middle-aged, very ordinary, and very frightened. Loki was about to say something to him when he heard a crackling sound coming from the man's wrist. He looked down and saw that there was a tiny hologram projecting the word CONTROL into the air, and a little radio-roughened voice coming out of it.
"Bryce? What the hell's going on out there?"
"Bryce is busy at the moment," said Loki.
"WHO IS THIS?"
Loki smiled.
"You are speaking to Loki of Asgard," he said, "and you've just been rendered obsolete."
He forced the barcode and tracker into Bryce's face, struck him in the temple one last time for good measure, and sent his body falling over the edge of the walkway, where he landed on the DJ's table with a wet thump, cutting off the song mid-"pop pop shoo-wop" and setting the club alive with screams.
He stood up and stretched and glanced back down at the stage, where Diamond Spurs, also known as Angela DiBartolomeo, also known as whoever she wanted to be after tonight, was staring up into the flies, unable to see him, until one of the other dancers pulled her offstage.
Loki bent to fish through the Repo Man's bag and pull out the file containing Angie's data sheet. After a moment, he pulled out the rest of the data sheets, too, and he casually whisked them away between his hands as he strode across the walkway in the flies and faded it into the hallway leading to his and Teja's apartment. He waved a hand to open the door. moved to push his hair back behind his ear.
His hand came away sticky, and he remembered too late that he was bleeding.
Loki's intention had been to spend some time alone and try to figure out what the Hel had just happened, and what it meant for his relationship with Teja.
Instead, Angie DiBartolomeo had happened.
"I mean..." The woman sighed and leaned sullenly over her coffee. They had wound up in the back of a dimly-lit greasy spoon in Hell's Kitchen, only a few blocks from where Dr. Manhattan had slaughtered a few hundred thousand people on national television only six months earlier, Angie shivering despite the heat under a denim jacket. When she moved her arms, a little of her gold lamé halter top showed underneath. "I mean, I figured I'd be better off just getting out of Daddy's business altogether, you know? Just cut the ties and get my ass out of there."
"I understand that, believe me," Loki said, nodding.
"And that was great until the money I took with me ran out. And I mean, what then? What was I gonna do? Go crawlin' back to them? No way, Charlie. I dunno if they'd even take me. S'pose I'd been a guy instead, they'd probably load my pockets and push me into the Gowanus Canal."
"Ah."
Angie nodded with firm approval at her own words. She was thin-faced and snub-nosed, with a lot of permed dark hair that didn't even reach her shoulders but deceived you into thinking it longer based on its mass alone, but with very large, dark eyes and a good, olive-toned complexion.
"But when you grow up with that kinda money, you know- I mean, you've gotta know, you're the fanciest-sounding bastard I've ever talked to- you know how it is, right? I did tap and jazz and all that, like all the other good little rich girls, so that's why I ended up dancing. I'd be rollin' in it too, real honest money, if my kidney hadn'a given out."
She made a shrugging sort of gesture.
"And what the fuck was that, anyway? I mean, I'm 28 years old, I don't drink none, I smoke sometimes, but who doesn't? So I had to take out a payment plan. Problem is, dancin's hard when you got one of these tryna heal."
She leaned back and grimly opened her denim jacket to show the C-shaped scar healing on her midriff. Loki glanced at it.
"Would they know if you didn't have the scar?" he asked quietly.
"They got trackers and shit," Angie muttered, lighting a cigarette. "Weak ones- bastard's probably running through every alley in the Kitchen right now tryna find me. They don't really go off til they're on the same block. Comin' in here bought time, that's all. People don't usually hide from Repo Men in plain sight. At least I put on my costume. Not a bad outfit to die in."
Loki had only encountered Angie in the first place because she'd nearly run him down in the pedestrian stretch of 63rd between Amsterdam and West End, looking terrified out of her wits. His first instinct had been to just ignore her except for glaring and let her keep on her apparently very important way, but the realization that everyone else in the vicinity was pointedly ignoring her ignited an almost vicarious sense of indignance. Next thing he knew, he was sitting in the back of a diner, listening to a stranger tell him her life story.
Now was apparently one of Angie's sometimeses, because she was pulling out a pack of cigarettes.
"So I kinda remember you," she commented. "You were the one who went all pazzesco after your folks died, right?"
He gave her a flat look, but didn't really have the necessary emotion to pull it off at the moment.
"Some outfit you got there. Would you've worn that kinda getup if you'd won?"
"Probably not."
"You look like one of the ones who goes to... fuck me, I can't remember. Another club. My friend Sheila dances there sometimes too, but in a corset. I dunno how she does it. I got enough trouble just with the Pop Girls. That's what they call the lineup at the Ruby on account of the song we always open the set with. You know the one? 'Let's do the milkshake, sellin' like a hotcake, try some, buy some-'"
"I get the idea," Loki said in a carefully unemotive voice.
"Yeah," said Angie. She had just brought her cigarette to her lips when the man behind the counter cleared his throat and pointed at a sign that read NO SMOKING. "Blow it out your ass," Angie retorted before turning to Loki again.
She studied him, looking a little wistful now while she took a deep pull on her cigarette.
"Shame about your folks," she said as she released the smoke. "It was kinda nice having some fresh blood in the race, without nobody's hooks in you. Not GeneCo or my family or anybody-"
"Veidt," Loki said, glancing at the window.
"Yeah, well, Veidt don't count," Angie commented. "I mean, sure, he had that issue with his marriage and all, but that ain't that bad. Man's practically a saint, you know? St. Adrian of Manhattan."
She laughed a smoky, slightly raspy laugh. Loki very nearly sneered, but managed to suppress it. Angie would be dead before morning. She didn't need her illusions shattered.
"You didn't have to do this, y'know," she said. "I mean, I haven't even told anybody else my name in more than a year. All the other girls at the club call me Diamond. I know it's kinda porny, and I ain't even that kinda dancer, but that's what's on the paperwork too. I guess it's nice, getting somebody to know I'm called Angela one more time before I die."
She was silent for a moment, and then she broke down crying.
"Oh- oh fuck. It isn't fucking fair! I got other assets they can seize, fuck- getting hunted down like this, it ain't fair, it's not fuckin' fair. If they care so much about their property, why don't they just pick us up and give us a shot like it's death row or something, make it like going to sleep and not getting carved up in the gutter-"
She collapsed forward onto the table with her face in her hands. Some of the other patrons had noticed and were beginning to stare; Loki feebly held out a hand and patted her shoulder.
"Hopefully," he said, "it'll be quick. You're only human, after all- I doubt you'll be conscious for most of it. Perhaps you won't feel it."
Angie looked up.
"How 'bout I carve out your kidney and see if you don't feel it?" she snapped.
The man behind the counter approached their table and knocked on it to get their attention. Angie stared, bleary-eyed.
"I'm gonna have to ask you to pay up and leave," he said, in a low, vaguely threatening voice. "I don't want any kind of scene in here."
"Oh- oh, fuck you," Angie muttered, starting to dig in her purse for money, but Loki, determining what was meant, quietly produced a $20 out of nowhere and started to rise from the table. He gestured for her to follow, and she stared after him, looking a little confused, until she decided to do what was clearly being suggested.
Angie was still rubbing her arms when they stepped outside.
"I can help you," Loki said, "but you might not like all of it."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Angie said loudly, but Loki made a hissing sound that cut her off. He started pulling her along, leaning in and speaking in a low voice.
"I can make you look like someone else," he said.
"You kidding me?" Angie said, quiet but rasping in her intensity. "What does that even mean-"
"A new face. They wouldn't know it was you."
"I already did that once," Angie said, touching her nose. "I ain't doing that again. And how could you do that, even-"
"Then you'll need to leave the city," said Loki. "At least for some time. You ought to disguise yourself as well."
"What are you talking about?"
Loki glanced at her. His heart was pounding now, and there was a kind of rising tightness in his throat from combined nerves and adrenaline.
It took him a moment to realize it was excitement.
"I'm going to save you, Angela DiBartolomeo."
She stared at him.
"...you okay, Mr. Ashton?"
"I'm going to save you," he said, gripping her by the shoulders and beaming.
Angie looked a little afraid and pushed his hands away.
"You're kinda weirding me out right now-"
"Where do you live?"
"235 63rd, apartment 34, why-"
They were there, very suddenly. Angie took one look at Loki before toppling onto the ground.
"How the fuck did you-"
"There's a great deal you don't know about me, Angela," Loki said, grinning at her. "There's a great deal almost no one in the city knows about me. You're going to dance at the Ruby one more time, and then you'll be able to go start over elsewhere, with no one there to breathe down your neck and try to carve you up in the gutter-"
"I'm scheduled for repossession, you- whatever the fuck you are-"
He paused, and he glanced around Angie's meager apartment, and then he smiled at her again.
"I am Loki," he said. "Of Asgard. And I am going to save you."
A brief look of recognition passed over Angie's face, followed immediately by one of suspicion, then resignation.
"Yeah, okay, whatever. What do I have to do, if this is the game we're playing?"
"Gather whatever you need to dance tonight at the Ruby, and anything you want to take with you," he instructed. "And anything that might make you less recognizable elsewhere, assuming you still wouldn't prefer any assistance with that-"
"I'm not letting some crazy magic asshole calling himself the Norse god of being a tool rearrange my face," Angie retorted. "And what do you intend to do about my effin' kidney, anyway-"
"Ah, yes," said Loki. "Hmm."
He glanced thoughtfully at her scar for a moment, and then reached forward to lay a hand on it. She recoiled.
"Hey-"
"I'm not going to do anything funny. Hold still."
He pressed his hand over Angie's scar. There was a strange feeling of warmth, and something shifting beneath her skin, and then a sharp sensation that made both of them gasp.
When Loki pulled his hand away, there was a dim inverse image of a bar code on his hand and a bit of blood dripping from where the tracking pod that had been inserted into Angie's skin was now embedded in his.
Angie was bleeding too, from a small gash in her abdomen, but the scar was gone. She stared at it, wide-eyed, and then at Loki.
"How did you..."
"I told you- Loki, Asgard, etc. Now hurry up."
Angie nodded and rushed into the bathroom. He could hear the sounds of things clattering in there as she threw them into her bag, and then the sound of her asking "Have we got five minutes for me to do something kind of stupid?"
"I don't know-"
"I'll make it quick," she called back.
Loki glanced down at his bleeding hand and frowned curiously, paying no mind to the continued clattering from the bathroom and then the harsh droning sound that followed. This was a rather reckless game he was playing, he realized, but it was almost like a kind of self-administered test. It certainly gave him something else to do tonight.
He didn't know how much time had passed before Angie emerged from the bathroom again. She seemed smaller, somehow, and looking at her made him uneasy in a way he couldn't quite put a finger on in his daze until he realized that the answer was obvious. She had shorn her hair down to a smooth-looking, even coating of dark fuzz, and was rubbing her head with a curious expression.
"My ex used to have me do parts of his between haircuts," she said, glancing at Loki. "Always kinda wondered what it'd be like. Having to look like someone else is as good an excuse as any, right?"
She frowned. "You okay there?"
Loki shook his head to clear the fog.
"I'm fine," he said swiftly.
Angie glanced back over her shoulder at her reflection in the bathroom mirror one last time and shrugged.
"I got a good face for it, don't I?" she said. "Maybe when I settle down somewhere else, I'll bleach it."
Loki unfolded his hand. There was a stack of bills amounting to a few hundred thousand dollars in there, which he handed to Angie without looking at her. Angie was in the middle of pulling on a bright blue bob-cut wig over her newly shaven head when she saw.
"Holy- are you for real-"
"I told you," he said, trying to rebalance himself, "I'm saving you tonight."
Angie slowly stuffed the money into her bag.
"Right," she said.
"Where's the Ruby?" Loki said, looking at her again and finding the wig made it a lot easier for him to do so.
"57th, between 11th and 12th-"
Angie staggered against the wall of the nightclub.
"You could have warned me before you did it again, you ass," she said sharply.
"Go inside," said Loki. "Dance. I'll handle the rest."
Angie looked confused for a moment.
"...if this works out," she said finally, "thank you. For everything."
She looked at him for a moment longer, as though expecting an acknowledgement, but all Loki did was bark "Go!" at her, and she rushed inside through the stage door.
Loki leaned against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them again, there was a man in a gas mask standing at the end of the block carrying a bag and a scalpel.
Loki smiled at him and hurried inside.
The other girls had already taken the stage when Angie managed to get out and join them, already a few lines into the song. She quickly scurried into her place and took on the proper position, beaming at the audience. She noticed Sheila glance at her and the missing scar, and the way Sheila frowned and looked confused, but neither of them said a word.
"Let's do the milkshake, selling like a hotcake, try some, buy some, fe-fi-fo-fum, talk about pop music, talk about pop music..."
Loki nimbly pushed his way through some of the other acts waiting backstage or preparing to go on, causing a few of them to spill something or look up in irritation, only to start screaming a moment later when the man in the gas mask came hurrying after.
"I wanna dedicate it (POP POP SHOO-WOP), everybody made it (SHOO-BE DOO-BE DOO-WOP), infiltrate it (POP POP SHOO-WOP), activate it..."
Loki glanced back at the Repo Man parting the crowd behind him, and started climbing a ladder to the small series of flies above the stage where Angie and the other dancers were performing.
"New York, London, Paris, Munich, everybody talk about pop music..."
A grizzled-looking, heavyset man in a dark T-shirt and a headset was minding the lights over the stage when he felt the walkway tremble with the force of someone else climbing on it. He glanced up and saw Loki casually striding toward him.
"Hey! Hey, listen, buddy, you can't come up here without-"
The lighting man didn't even feel the Repo Man approaching from behind until he swung a billy club produced from somewhere in his bag to get the lighting man out of the way. The lighting man collapsed unconscious against the walkway as the light briefly swung up in a wild arc to illuminate the Repo Man on its way back down, for just a moment.
"Oh," said Loki. "I see you have a knife. So do I."
"Singin' in the subway, shuffle with a shoe shine, mix me a Molotov, I'm on the headline..."
He opened his hand and hurled one of his throwing knives toward the Repo Man's shoulder, but it didn't penetrate the thick leather. The Repo Man stormed toward him, raising the billy club again as Loki rushed at him.
The billy club collided painfully with the side of Loki's head. He staggered and grabbed at the sides of the walkway to steady himself while the Repo Man raised the club again. This time, however, Loki left the image of himself clutching the walkway behind while moving himself behind the Repo Man and proceeding to grab him in a chokehold.
"Can't imagine they send you for anything to do with the brain," Loki snickered as blood flowed out from under his hair and over the side of his face.
The Repo Man grunted and threw Loki over his shoulder, but Loki drove his knife into the space between the Repo Man's collarbone and neck as he went over, causing the man to drop the club with a howl of pain. Loki and the club both landed precariously on the walkway as the Repo Man tried to wrench out the knife. He did so, gasping, but Loki had already produced another one and was charging at him again.
"Icepick grip," the Repo Man grunted from behind his gas mask. "Not very professional."
"Is that what you call that around here?" said Loki. "You learn something every-"
He didn't get to finish. The Repo Man had shoved a knife through his face, in one cheek and out the other. He wrenched it forward, slitting the flesh on either side of Loki's mouth and filling it with blood, so much blood that he was coughing it and choking on it and instinctively trying to feel what had happened to his face. He pressed his hands over the gouged, torn flesh and stared with wide eyes at the Repo Man over his laced fingers.
"You could've died pretty," the Repo Man chuckled, "but you had to make it hard."
Loki pulled his hands down from bloodied but smooth, intact, scarless flesh.
"I'll take that as a compliment."
The Repo Man staggered back from him, shaking his head.
"All around the world, wherever you are... dance in the street, wherever you like... do it in your car in the middle of the night...
"What did you just-"
"You didn't even check the assignment, did you?" Loki said dryly. "Do I look like someone named Diamond Spurs to you?"
He stood and stretched, while the Repo Man stepped back in mute, head-shaking fear. Loki bent and picked up the dropped billy club.
He raised it and smiled.
"Fa la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la..."
When the Repo Man had fallen, Loki calmly straddled him on the walkway and wrenched off the gas mask. The face revealed beneath was middle-aged, very ordinary, and very frightened. Loki was about to say something to him when he heard a crackling sound coming from the man's wrist. He looked down and saw that there was a tiny hologram projecting the word CONTROL into the air, and a little radio-roughened voice coming out of it.
"Bryce? What the hell's going on out there?"
"Bryce is busy at the moment," said Loki.
"WHO IS THIS?"
Loki smiled.
"You are speaking to Loki of Asgard," he said, "and you've just been rendered obsolete."
He forced the barcode and tracker into Bryce's face, struck him in the temple one last time for good measure, and sent his body falling over the edge of the walkway, where he landed on the DJ's table with a wet thump, cutting off the song mid-"pop pop shoo-wop" and setting the club alive with screams.
He stood up and stretched and glanced back down at the stage, where Diamond Spurs, also known as Angela DiBartolomeo, also known as whoever she wanted to be after tonight, was staring up into the flies, unable to see him, until one of the other dancers pulled her offstage.
Loki bent to fish through the Repo Man's bag and pull out the file containing Angie's data sheet. After a moment, he pulled out the rest of the data sheets, too, and he casually whisked them away between his hands as he strode across the walkway in the flies and faded it into the hallway leading to his and Teja's apartment. He waved a hand to open the door. moved to push his hair back behind his ear.
His hand came away sticky, and he remembered too late that he was bleeding.