Another Chance

Audition

"Loki Odinson?"

Loki, who was about to enter his first class on Monday, stopped in his tracks. He had already gotten used to his classmates paying little or no attention to him, so being named was curious. He turned to the young man who had called out to him. He must have been the same age as him, but he was shorter.

"Who is looking for me?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Oh, I'm Alex. Hmm, I'm from the drama club. They told us you might be interested in being in the term play, and they sent me to deliver this to you." He held out a thin blue cardstock folder. "If you are interested in knowing more about the play, we meet every day at 5 in the afternoon, in the theater. You know, the building across from the dorms. If you don't know where it is I can..."

"I know where it is," Loki cut him off. "Thanks. You can go to your classes now."

The young man gave him a nervous smile.

"I hope we'll see each other later, then," he said before turning to leave.

Loki watched him for a few seconds as he walked away among the few students who still walked the halls, the stragglers. When he disappeared around a corner Loki turned and went to his seat, looking at the folder he had in his hands.

Natasha was certainly efficient. Why wait for him to decide to go around the theater, if he could make the theater go see him? He had to grant her that. What he wasn't sure he wanted to give her was the benefit of the doubt about her intentions.

He had been here for two weeks now, and he could still feel Fury's surveillance on him. He had seen the man a few times around campus, but his eye kept giving him that same suspicious look, as if he expected to catch him red-handed at any moment. And that wasn't doing his desire to cause a bit of chaos any good, especially since he had regained his seidr. It still wasn't enough to hide him from the thousand (paradoxical) eyes of the director, but it was enough to move things around, and make them disappear for a not too long time. Besides, the illusion of his nails had endured a nervous breakdown and almost a full weekend before needing a booster. He had even tried modifying his appearance altogether, though that wore him out too much to last more than a few minutes. Of course, a more significant shapeshifting was out of the question at the time. But the time would come... And he wasn't sure he could control his chaos much longer.

He needed to release the tension, but he wasn't sure how to do it without falling into the same cycle that had doomed him in another life.

Without opening the folder, Loki buried it at the bottom of the backpack and took out a notebook and the textbook, willing to look one more day as if some of all that mattered to him in the least.

"This is a terrible idea," he muttered to himself, as he made his way to the greenhouse at 5:10 in the afternoon.

As he stepped out from between the plants and into the small concrete plaza he could hear the distant screams and laughter from the rowing club, hidden from his view by the building and the several-meter drop into the water. Hesitating a second in the square, he reconsidered his decision. But he was bored. More bored than he had been in years. And Sigyn rarely left the art club before seven, or eight, as the days grew longer.

Even with the books he read in the borrowed ebook (he had already read at least six, carefully avoiding any bare torso, thanks), there was a limit to the amount of reading even him could tolerate in a day.

And then there was curiosity. Very curious. What kind of plays did mortals perform in those days? What kind of plays were some young people locked up in that place planning to represent?