Carry You Home
We left the next morning. Loki said not to bother to clean the room up. We left the room, the boxes from last night’s dinner, my backpack, and the books. I changed my clothes, put comfortable shoes on, and left the tote bag. Loki had brought nothing so he took nothing, and was still dressed in the clothes he wore the night before. He looked unwrinkled and clean, though. Something about him seemed collected in a way no one here on Hel could ever, even the most fashionable. It was strange to me, that his outward appearance could be so crisp but he could be such a mess internally.
We took a long walk to a waiting car. I was surprised that we would get anyone else involved with things, as dangerous as they were, but Loki never even exchanged words with the driver, not even to tell him where to go. I never caught the driver’s face for he never turned around. Something had been agreed upon before I had come back into the picture and I decided it was best not to know.
The whole escape felt unreal, fragile, tenuous. Loki wasn’t speaking so I figured I should just be quiet today and follow what he was doing. The odds, he had said last night over dinner, were not too great. He knew how to get out, but we had to get out undetected and the bounds of Hel, he said, were crawling with things that were designed to keep all the souls in and everyone and everything else out.
I had asked him why we were even doing it at all, if the odds were so bad. He reiterated, as he did the first time we had talked of escaping, that the alternative was worse. The least we could do was try.
The car drove along the edge of the city and soon we were in the country side, with rolling hills, trees, and houses dotted along the way. I settled in next to him in the backseat, leaning my head against the window, watching everything as it passed, memorizing the way things looked.
I wasn’t tired but I tried to go to sleep. The time in the car seemed long, like hours and hours were passing us but we were not moving anywhere. My eyes refused to shut as I sat there, relaxing my breath and stretching and shifting to get comfortable.
Next to me Loki unbuttoned the sweater he had been wearing. He handed it over to me, bunching it up like a pillow. “Here.” He said, simply.
“Thanks.” I said, putting it behind my head.
He crossed his arms, leaned back in the seat and looked over at me. I met his gaze with my own eyes and he shifted uncomfortably and went back to staring out the window.
Outside my window the miles flew by. The trees turned into flat fields, the fields turned into low ditches and sandy dunes with the same tall grass I recognized from my trip to the ocean. Instinctively, I started looking for the first glimmer of the ocean.
“It’ll be there.” He said, as if he knew what I was looking for. “The ocean is constant. It will carry you home.”