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Thor will not leave Loki alone.
Loki snorts when he reads the line.
He has returned to Frigga’s journals—it’s like an addiction. After forcing himself to dig through archival records in search of references to the infinity stones that predate Odin’s reign, he has crawled into the oversized chair next to Odin’s sleeping form and indulges himself again in her text. He hears her voice in his head as he reads, and cannot resist that pull.
He can barely walk, yet he refuses to be kept away from his new brother. When the nurse takes Loki, Thor follows. When Loki cries, Thor crawls into my lap and tries to pet his head. When Loki naps, Thor stands guard and shooshes my ladies when they gossip. He refuses to sleep in his own bed, but cries and shouts until we let him crawl into Loki’s cradle. I’m lucky that the baby doesn’t seem to mind. Loki is fussy sometimes—the summer heat is oppressive this year even for me. But Loki’s little fist latches onto his brother’s tunic and we have to pry them apart for baths and meals. I hope it lasts. My heart says they are two halves of a scroll whose message only makes sense when they are together.
Loki closes the journal.
Where, exactly, had everything gone wrong? It seems impossible to pin it down to any single event, or even a single year. They had just . . . drifted. And at some point the teasing, the competition, had turned more vicious.
“Both born to be kings!” He turned to Odin, shrouded under his golden dome, face infuriatingly serene. “That was a load of goat’s piss. Stupid old man, what were you thinking, pitting us against one another like that, raising my hopes? And why would you insist on crowning Thor just so you could go into your golden hibernation? Why not make Frigga regent once more? Your flawless golden child! You see how well that worked out!”
Loki throws himself out of his chair and is pacing before he even noticed he stood. “And why did I swallow it all? I fell into your game and played by your rules—obsessed over them, even as you kept switching out the dice.”
He finds he cannot possibly stay in that room with Odin for another instant. Loki wraps himself in shadow and escapes through the back passages—hallways and stairs that he’d mapped out as an adolescent with the help of the invisibles. So much mischief made possible through their help. Now he uses those back hallways to escape—walking just to expend his frustration, not really paying any attention to where he went. Until he opened a door and found himself surrounded by red curtains and stuffed dead things.
Thor’s front room.
Of course.
It is where he would usually end up when he utilized those halls. Thor was his most frequent target, after all.
Loki flopped down into a sheet-covered sofa facing an empty hearth, creating a cloud of dust in the process.
“You fell for it, too, you great idiot. Always thinking with your hammer—pun intended, thank you very much— never using the brains your mother gave you.”
All at once, the fight goes out of him and he lets his head fall back as he closes his eyes. Loki’s face has lost the gaunt look of starvation Thanos left him with, but exhaustion still darkens the skin under his eyes. He is tired—too tired, at least, to fuel the raging anger he had nursed for his brother while in prison, anyway.
The question was, what is there to fill the empty spaces now that those fires are out? He longs for Thor’s stubborn optimism just as much as he revels in Thor’s absence.
Thor’s presence had become stifling as soon as they had plunged into adolescence. Everything a competition, and Thor won them all—even when he lost. The forcefield of Thor’s charisma erased his every fault and eclipsed all of Loki’s victories. Loki feels as though his very breath comes more freely now that Thor is gone.
But the space into which he draws those breaths feels colder than they ought to have—and if that wasn’t that the most annoying realization he’s stumbled across in the last months, he couldn’t say what was. A lifetime measuring himself against the standard that was Thor, a lifetime loving and hating that golden child in equal measure, aching for Thor’s approval and despising himself for needing it, defining himself as Thor’s photonegative. Loki still feels as though he is not quite whole without his brother’s matching edges fitting into his own, even as everything within rebells against the idea that he cannot be complete in and of himself.
Without thinking about it, Loki finds himself wandering Thor’s room, fingers brushing over the items left out, as if he could feel a bit of Thor’s essence by touching what his brother had held in his hands. Loki runs fingertips over the rough horn of a bilge snipe and presses his thumb against its tip until he nearly draws blood; he casually opens a chest full of ancient toys and silently closes it again (why does Thor still have these?), swipes an index finger across a dust-free worktable (let it not be said that the palace staff neglect their absent prince), and his touch drifts over bed covers and pillows.
At last, his circuit around the room leads to Thor’s disaster of a closet. Here is the one place, it seems, where the staff conceded defeat. Old leather pieces pile in sad heaps next to torn, grass stained cloaks, which are in turn were buried by tunics in various states of wear, some clean, some clearly (oof, what is that smell?) not quite so clean.
The single concession to order is the tidy row of ceremonial suits and armor lining the back wall. Thor always cleaned up well, Loki thinks wryly, as he pulls out the hem of a cloak to get a better look. The cloth is surely the work of their mother, so soft he can’t resist running it over the sensitive skin of his cheek and across his lips, while those empty places in his chest echo back at him.
On most days, the odds seem pretty well balanced out, as to whether it would be easier to fight off the titan with or without Thor at his side. Loki is, after all, not the only agent of chaos raised in the House of Odin. Thor certainly causes as many problems as he hammers into shape. Today, though, reconciliation seems at least a tiny bit more desirable.
Possible? Loki couldn’t really say.
But it might be worth trying.