Corner
Inbetween
And I know I was wrong
When I said it was true
That it couldn’t be me and be her
Inbetween without youThe Cure, “In Between Days”
There’d been a time, when he was younger, when his life had been full of fantasies. Nothing special, really, just the usual childhood daydreaming of a boy whose books outnumbered his friends. Dreams of secret portals to fantastic realms and magic talismans and becoming a saviour-hero to a race of alien warriors. It was almost ironic, really, that not a single one of those lonely, childhood musings came even close to the sheer mind-boggling ridiculousness that had managed, somehow, to catch up with him. At the tender age of six — hell, even sixteen — he would have thought it insulting and insane if anyone had tried to tell him that he, Sigmund Sussman, would grow up to become a goddess.
The whole thing was ridiculous, and not just for the obvious reason that he was simply the wrong gender. Oddly, that had never been the issue; it seemed almost mundane, really, a small hurdle to overcome in the face of the apparent fact that he was some kind of divinity at all. Because that had been the real crux of the matter. Every child had dreams of being special — of being The One, of being The Hero With a Thousand Faces — but by his early teens Sigmund had stoically resigned himself to the fact that he was, well, completely average. Average height, average build, average looks. Slightly smarter than average, maybe, but more than made up for by a distinct lack of any physical aptitude whatsoever. And it wasn’t exactly as if he was going to be winning any Nobel prizes. Maybe if he had been it would have made him a little less self-conscious about the softness in his belly and the… averageness of certain other areas as well. Nothing special, nothing to offer. He’d more-or-less resigned himself to finding an average wife and an average job and having an average amount of average kids in an average house in an average suburb. By seventeen, the idea wasn’t even really that unappealing.
And then he’d met Lain.
Lain had been the antithesis of average. He was tall and exotic and impossibly attractive. Not to mention he was good. At everything. He was witty and razor-sharp and strong and lean and he could bend over backwards and lick his toes in the kind of contortion that Sigmund thought shouldn’t be allowed outside of a foreign circus troupe. And he could sing. And dance. And — just to add insult to already debilitating injury — he was nice. Everybody adored the guy. Except for Sigmund. Sigmund loathed Lain from the moment he’d first walked into their class. Loathed the fact that Lain had smashed the tentative peace he thought he’d made with normality. Because somewhere along the line, Sigmund had come to think about talent as a kind of zero sum game — people were better at one thing, and a little wore at something else — and in the zero sum character creation game of Sigmund’s life, Lain was definitely cheating on his stats.
It would have been easier, he thought, if the feeling had been mutual; if Lain had treated him with the same indifferent disdain as he’d given the boy. But Sigmund had had no such luck, and for no reason he could even begin to fathom at the time, Lain seemed to like him. Lain was mostly nice to mostly everyone, of course, but it was a shallow, faux nicety born of charisma and practice rather than any actual affection. The friendliness of a salesman, of a confidence trickster, and Sigmund could smell it a mile off. He didn’t really like anyone.. except for Sigmund. It had baffled him at first, and made him resent Lain all the more that such a boy would dare to play games with him. Because, if he was being honest with himself — really, brutally, coldly honest — Sigmund was no different to anyone else, and he too craved Lain’s attention. There was a deep, dark part of his heart that revelled in the baffling thrall he seemed to hold over the impossibly perfect boy. But even that dark cruelty was only a ruse, really, for yet another feeling Sigmund could simply not bring himself to name. Something much brighter… and much more dangerous.
Because Lain had to be lying. There was no way he could really be interested in Sigmund, no matter how much it seemed to the contrary. That feeling had hurt, had made him doubt the one thing he’d always relied on, the one thing that he thought maybe — just maybe — had made him special. Sigmund could smell a lie a mile off, or had always though he could, and how dare Lain come in and force him to question that? To reduce everything in him to banal normality which, standing next to Lain — who, through a string of ridiculously impossible circumstances, seemed to almost be as attached as Sigmund’s shadow — was very, very normal indeed.
Just when he was beginning to think that maybe — just maybe — Lain was, impossibly, being honest, everything had gone to Hel. Literally.
It was only after the end of the world that things started to get really weird. Running around with a seven-foot-tall monster of a god who was absolutely convinced you were the reincarnation of his dead goddess wife while preventing the end of the world was very different to living with a seven-foot-tall monster of a god who was absolutely convinced you were the reincarnation of his dead wife on a day-to-day basis. Everything would have been almost mundane, really, were it not for the physical reality that was Loki himself.
The god was currently sprawled out across the couch, eating lazily from a bowl of popcorn resting on his chest — Loki ate like it was going out of style which, Sigmund supposed, for him at least it had done — and idly reading through a stack of Sigmund’s JLA comics. Loki’s own — and not insignificant — collection was predominantly Marvel, Sigmund had always preferred DC. It was all so terribly sweet and mind-bogglingly nerdy, and they’d laughed about it at the time and Sigmund had felt a kind of heavy warmth creep into across his face and settle in his belly. It wasn’t the first time, but coming so close off the events at the End, and right after Loki’s stilted, oddly business-like proposal of marriage (or remarriage, really), it had been the strongest. Loki had known, of course — could smell human emotions from a mile off — and had smiled his gentle, crooked smile, had caressed Sigmund’s cheek with an eternally blood-stained claw, had moved their lips so close and all Sigmund could feel was his heat and all Sigmund could smell was cinnamon and burning embers and in the end it had been him, not the god, who’d closed the distance into a kiss.
It wasn’t their first or their last or even their best, but Sigmund remembered it. Like he remembered all the mundane things.
Because that was it, really; that was why he stayed. Loki didn’t believe in love, and maybe Sigmund didn’t either, but he did believe in Loki. Believed in the way that rich, honey-glass voice would echo through the house when the god cleaned the bathroom. Believed in the way Lain chewed on his hair when he was thinking. Believed in the way Travis would play Pokémon in board meetings and manage to throw people off every time when it turned out he knew exactly what was going on in his company, down to the tiniest detail.
In the end, it wasn’t about being a goddess or even about having a billionaire as a lover. It wasn’t about the things that made him special or unique or different. It was everything else. The ordinary. The mundane.
“I think I should be insulted.”
The voice cut through Sigmund’s musings and he blinked, sharply, slightly off-guard. “Huh?”
“Calling me mundane in your head. I mean seriously.” The god was grinning wickedly over the top of his comic and Sigmund couldn’t help the furious blush that had somehow crept into his cheeks.
“You know what I mean,” he stammered eventually.
The grin faded into something slightly less sharp, then vanished back behind the JLA.
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the sceneBing Crosby, “Accentuate the Positive (Mr. In-Between)”