The Ragnarok Trials

Day Fourteen: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Day Fourteen
         Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
Focus Word: Intention
Word Count: 1954

Leaving Athena's apartment, I realized that I was in no condition to go see Ares. That woman is rough, I'll tell you. Had me singing in octaves heretofore unknown in Loki-land, she did. The occasion had left me sore and more than a little worse-for-wear, so instead of heading to the War God's abode (at which location Aphrodite surely awaited), I scooted around God Town and back to my apartment for a well-deserved shower.

It had been a while since one of those. Not that I was smelly, mind--I have enough power left to push dirt and odor from my body, thank you very much--but I'd put it off for long enough.

Showers for me weren't about cleanliness (see above), but rather the feel of scalding water working loose the knots and easing the soreness of my overworked muscles. I always felt cleaner, of course, because I was, but it was a spiritual thing. It was a washing away of all of my problems, all of my stresses and cares, if only for a 15-minute period.

Everyone has one, so don't stare at me like I'm crazy.

My apartment was blessedly empty. I'd spent too much of the last two days surrounded by people, on the move, or in pain. It was wonderful to come home, to my own corner of the universe, and hear nothing but the whirring of the air conditioner in its closet. A sense of everything being at peace, that the world had come to a complete stop around me and I was free to finally take a breath, left me staggering as I pulled off my jacket and tossed it on the couch.

I am not used to peace.

I was more careful with the gun and its holster. Tossing around weaponry seemed like a bad idea at the best of times, so I placed that in a lock box with the utmost care. Blowing a hole into one's shoulder was not high on my list of priorities that day, thank you very much. In fact, I'm not sure it was ever high on that list. If it's high on yours, that's great, but I think you're crazy. And you should probably work on that.

Maybe I'm a little weird, but I like to listen to the radio when I shower. I'm a great lover of music. This should come as no surprise to anyone, really. I am the god of chaos, the maelstrom at the heart of all things. Music is the one thing that can calm that churning maw, that ever-ravenous beast behind this veneer of order we cling to do desperately. It reaches into my soul, it touches the raging nothing-everything to be found there, and it soothes me. Even the angriest of music can tame me, though it might rile my blood.

It is the same for all of us, though others might not realize it.

People and Gods cannot escape chaos. I believe that, perhaps, only God can, because he was here before all of us. He is the only entity in all of existence to neither ascend or descend. He is constant, and yet ever changing, always there in every moment and in no moment. We came after Him. We rose and we fell under His watchful eye. Perhaps only God can escape it because He created it, and Order, and everything else we know as existence. He alone is immune to human belief. And, between you and I, I don't believe He gives a damn what anyone thinks.

How must it feel to be so alone? No wonder God has grown apathetic over the years. I am almost happy Christ has ascended, because the Son has all the passion his Father lacks. If not for Christ, this would be a very different world.

Michael would be in charge, for one.

I have never been partial to Nina Simone. She sings with too much soul, too much feeling for me. For a long time, I tried to hide from it. I tried to hide how much her voice spoke to me, how much it reached down into my soul and reflected what it was that lingered there. But the sound of her voice coming out of the radio as I switched on the water, her rich, wonderful croon, was exactly what I needed. It reflected exactly how I felt.

So few people understand what it's like to be chaos. I am at the whim of my own choices. It sounds stupid, I know, and nonsensical, but I used to make choices before I even thought of them. So rarely were they the result of a conscious ability to decide. The whims of nature took me where they would, and sometimes the unnatural, too. I wanted too much to do good for my kind and for my world, but it is hard to do when so many of the winds within me blew dark and cold.

I was so little understood, and so often disbelieved.

It matters not the intention, when the action is not beneficial. And I was a being meant entirely to balance out the predominance of order in this world.

People fear chaos, I thought, as the water pounded into my head and down my skin in wending rivulets. They fear what they cannot understand and even more what they cannot control. Such was the imposition of order upon our world that the universe (or perhaps God Himself, now that I think about it) created beings of pure chaos to balance it out. It sounds odd to think of it this way, as balance might seem a product of order, but chaos is inherently balanced in nature. Rather, it seeks balance with order. When chaos existed alone in this universe, it was free to be and do as it would--balance was a distant concept not yet recognized within the whims of our chaotic beginnings--but with the creation of order, the rules and regulations that would allow life and stability, balance became necessary.

Chaos changes easily, adapts quickly, learns often. It is often order that must needs be forced to accept that things cannot stay the same.

Order overcame chaos on this plane. God forced it to, as did the universe. But for order to exist, there must be chaos to compare it to, and so myself and the handful of other chaos entities that wander the planet. We are the balance-makers, the chaos swirling around you so that you might know what order is.

We are not evil. I have faults like everyone--no chaos entity can be perfect, else lose the point completely--but, ultimately, I'm just a soul whose intentions are good. But damn do I seem to be misunderstood, nonetheless.

I am glad, you know, that I seem to be getting better. Not that I thought I was bad before, mind; I would never dismiss myself as good or bad in my time as a god. I was everything, then. What I mean is that I now have more control, my conscious ability to direct myself in the direction in which I want to move. I can pick and choose which of the many whims I want to follow, if I want to aid chaos or order, balance this or leave it unbalanced. I am no longer compelled to follow the choices that chaos made for me.

It seems to be working for me. Hell, I've gotten laid twice in two days, and damn near solved a crime that could have gotten me killed. Things were looking up for me. I had friends.

OK, so it sounds a lot like a high school drama now. The teased kid finally meets the right group of people who accept him for exactly who he is, or something like that. But...it kind of is. People only accepted me when I helped them, when it benefited them to have me on their side. I'm not sure they expected me to betray them, to buck their plans for me, but they were certainly all too keen to toss me to the wayside when I fulfilled that eventuality. Beings of order can never seem to grasp their chaotic counterparts. They seek to thrust upon them their own understanding of right and wrong, civilized justice and law, and cannot understand that an entirely different set of regulations is required for someone such as me.

In fact, they are incapable of grasping that such a different set of rules exists at all.

I remember when Odin caught me, after I denied Baldur's return to life, disguised as Thokk. He reached into the stream (I'd turned into a salmon in order to get away) and grabbed me hard, his warrior's hands nearly squeezing the life from my fishy body before I could change into something else. Never before have I been unable to escape someone, such was his anger with me.

No story shares how I felt in that moment. The terror racing through me, the helplessness and the limp acceptance of my own punishment. I fought, of course, but it was halfhearted. I knew I was caught. Hell, and this is the part that no one knows, I half believed that I deserved it. I was not vociferous in my own defense, I did not believe in my own innocence. The choices I had made were not my choices, I had not consciously decided them, and yet I had done the things they demanded of me. I had provided the means for his death, and had been the means for his remaining so. It was, in essence, my fault.

That did not mean I wasn't angry. I was. Devastatingly so. Hurt, angry, and, above all, betrayed that my kind would so judge me. I was chaos. Theirs was the imposition of rule, of law, of order. I could not be held to such standards, and yet I was. I was being punished for doing exactly that I was created to do. And the punishment was for damn near forever, until such a time as I could sacrifice myself for Baldur's return.

There would be no forgiveness, though I had often forgiven them for their faults. Hell, I'd fixed the problems they caused through their faults! And yet I was to remain, chained and slowly poisoned, my body healing even as it burned away, until the great war at the end of time.

I am glad that such things are no longer done. And that I am no longer so bound to follow my own, fleeting whims. I am very glad for that.

My skin had turned to prunes by this point, but I didn't feel very relaxed. My own tendency to think too much had prevented the simple bodily pleasures of warm water from doing any good. I thought about going to the bar to drink--not Bacchus' place, but Sif's, where my own kind dwelt and drank--but I didn't really want to see any of them. Not really. They would never apologize for what they did, and I was not quite ready to apologize for my own deeds; I didn't know if I would ever be, such was the anger still seething within me. But I couldn't stay home, not if my own thoughts would undermine the peace to be found there.

I would have to go to Hermes' then, and play video games. Blowing things up was precisely what I needed, and Hermes would be a more than capable foe in the perpetual war against alien invaders and synthetic destroyers.

Not to mention the beer. There was a very good chance that I would need a lot of beer.

Thus endeth my second day on the case.