Darkness swaddles Loki.
He lies curled at the foot of a glacier. A blanket of snow has settled over his shoulders and thighs. Fingers of frost encircle his ribs. A numbing, beautiful cold is sinking deeper and deeper into him, stripping back his flesh and gnawing at his bones.
The night is heavy and endless, a purer black than he’s ever seen. The abyss bears down on Loki like a promise collecting its debts.
Hush, child. The pain is nearly past now.
You need only lie still beneath me, and it will never be light again.
You told me you were mine.
Death wants him. He longs to surrender.
But something else has him in its grip. Something tugs, demanding as a child, at his soul.
Loki struggles, trying to nestle deeper into the snow, but the grip only tightens. It grabs him by the scruff of his neck and pulls desperately, dragging him back until-
The snows melt. The darkness fades.
Loki is awake.
Loki is alive.
His lips are cracked, his tongue painfully dry. His heart races like a rabbit’s, and with every frantic beat a sharp, hot twinge passes through his head and his bandaged throat.
He wants to keep his eyes closed, to lean into their red-tinged darkness and slip away again, back into sleep or something more. But he knows he can’t. He will not be allowed.
Without moving, he blinks open his gritty eyes.
This is not the bright, sterile healing room he expected, but his own bedchamber, glowing gently in early evening light. He sees no guards, no healers – just Thor.
Thor is hunched in a chair he’s drawn up to the side of the bed. His head hangs wearily, tangled hair spilling over scabbed and folded hands. One fist is clenched; the other grips it far too tight. His clothes are rumpled and stained with blood.
Loki pushes himself up, prompting a wave of dizziness and further pounding of his heart – and Thor starts, wide-eyed.
“Loki,” he breathes.
Loki cannot meet his gaze.
“Here.” Thor fumbles with something unseen, and a bowl is pressed into Loki’s hands. “Drink.”
It’s a wine-black liquid, a sweet soup – bilberries and honey. An old balm for the nervous, sickly boy who used to faint in the summer heat, almost forgotten by what he became.
It feels wrong to look at it now – like theft. Or desecration.
But Loki is too weak to refuse it, so he lifts the bowl to his lips. It’s cool and soothing on his raw throat. Its tartness stings his eyes. In his chest, magic flickers, beginning to untangle his pains.
(It’s clumsier work than he expects, perhaps a novice healer’s – but certainly not Mother’s. Not any more.)
Beside him, Thor lets out a shaky breath.
“I meant to help you last night,” he says quietly, “but I was an idiot. I’m sorry.” In Loki’s periphery, Thor’s grip tightens on his own hand. “I shouldn’t have struck you.”
Loki laughs bleakly and shakes his head. “If ever I deserved it…”
“You didn’t.” Thor halts, and softens his voice. “You don’t.” He bows his head, but Loki can still feel the weight of his gaze. “I shouldn’t hit you at all.”
Loki frowns faintly, and looks at Thor.
Thor’s shadowed eyes are pinned on Loki, pained and almost imploring – although what Thor could yet want from him, Loki cannot say.
“There is something very wrong with me,” Loki tells him hollowly. “There likely always has been, but…” – his lip twitches, a mockery of a rueful smile – “Father’s made it worse. And now I am… this.” He stares into the bowl, and it shines red. “I’m not a fool. We both know what I am.”
“You are wounded,” Thor says forcefully. “Father has injured you gravely, in body and in mind. You’ll never heal if I do the same.”
Loki scoffs. “You assume this can be healed.”
“If we assume it can’t, we’ll never know.”
“And if Father is right?”
“He is wrong.”
“So you’re certain I pose no danger to you,” Loki says flatly.
I, whom oaths cannot bind.I, who have damned myself a thousand times over.
Thor lifts his chin doggedly. “I do not fear you.”
Loki rolls his eyes in despair. “How many times, brother? Fear and risk are separate matters.”
“How many ways must I tell you that you are worth any risk to me?”
Loki stills.
Thor has never told him that – not in any way he understood. But there is much Loki still does not understand about his brother. And if Thor has proven anything since his coronation, it’s that he’s more often naïve than a liar.
Loki lifts his eyes and stares at Thor, head tilted. “Why?”
Thor’s fierce eyes shine with tears. Beneath the scabs, his knuckles are white. “Because I love you.”
“Why?”
“I need no reason.”
Loki opens his mouth to scoff, but cannot make a sound.
He looks away, blinking hard.
“I-”
love you too.
Loki has no right to those words any more. They rot on his honourless tongue.
“You are-” He falters again. “Thor…”
The silence hangs for a moment – then Thor unclenches his hands and stands.
“May I…?”
Loki frowns at Thor, and he gestures vaguely to the bed.
After a moment, Loki nods.
Thor smiles unconvincingly, and slowly, gingerly sits on the bed beside Loki. He holds one of his hands out loosely towards Loki as he does so, as if calming an animal.
Loki shifts sideways and draws his arms in over his knees to make room.
Thor lowers his open hand slowly, and it comes to rest on Loki’s forearm.
Loki stills.
He stares at the hand. It squeezes gently. He thinks it might be trembling.
Loki turns to face Thor fully for the first time.
Thor looks back at him, brow creased, studying. He tilts his head to look at the far side of Loki’s jaw and the bruise he left there, and he swallows.
Thor draws his hand back. Loki bites his tongue.
But rather than recoiling, Thor puts his fingertips to his mouth in a whisper of a kiss, and then gently touches them to Loki’s bruise.
Loki thought he had forgotten this centuries ago.
When it started, Loki was barely even walking, scraping his knees as he stumbled through his first steps, and Thor didn’t know what magic was yet. He just knew that this gesture helped when Mother did it for him.
Thor’s hand hovers over Loki’s face, a faint, fragile warmth. He is not quite holding him, but neither is he letting go.
Loki breathes in slowly, and leans his head just enough to rest in Thor’s palm.
Thor blinks hard. He tries, unsteadily, to smile. His thumb brushes along Loki’s cheek.
Then, sudden as a storm breaking, Thor throws his arms around Loki and pulls him into a crushing hug.
It’s a shock – his warmth, his closeness – and Loki braces instinctively for a pain that doesn’t come.
When the tension leaves his hands, the soup bowl slips onto the bedding. He takes several seconds to realise that he can hug his brother back.
Thor is shaking now. His chest rises and falls rapidly, as if he’s just dragged them both off the battlefield – or perhaps as if Loki dragged him. He doesn’t quite feel real.
It’s been so long since Loki was touched this fearlessly, since he could be held without being chided or punished or used. He thought it had left him dirty; a pitiful thing, too polluted for Thor’s noble hands to touch. But Thor doesn’t seem to care.
Tears spill unbidden from Loki’s eyes, and a sob escapes his lips. He twists away, clamping a hand over his mouth and trying to choke back the noise – but Thor does not draw back as he expects. Instead, one hand holds Loki’s shoulder steady, and the other rubs circles into his back.
It’s overwhelming. Loki did not know that crying could feel like this. It still hurts – Norns, it hurts – but not like he’s being torn open, blood and entrails spilling through his desperate, scrabbling hands. No, this hurts like a fever, like poison being drawn out.
Loki presses his fist to his forehead and gasps as if he’s been drowning.
“Stay with me, brother,” Thor whispers. “Please.” His voice is thick with tears of his own. “I know you’re in pain, but promise me you’ll stay.”
Loki tenses his jaw, trying to get his face under control. “You really want that,” he murmurs.
Thor’s thumb strokes his shoulder. “Of course.”
“How can you?”
“How can I not?”
Loki tries to laugh, but it comes out jagged. “Because I am an insane argr whore who tried to seduce his own brother?”
Both of Thor’s hands tighten. “A list of what Father has done to you is not who you are.”
Loki swallows, and forces himself to meet Thor’s gaze. “I was argr long before he touched me.”
“I’d rather see you argr and safe than honourable and dead.”
Loki searches Thor’s face, disbelieving, desperate – and in spite of the tears on his cheeks, Thor does not blink.
Loki’s lips twitch. He draws another deep, shuddering breath, then lets it go.
“I really am your monster, aren’t I?” he mutters.
Thor frowns at Loki for a moment, then offers him a small smile. “Perhaps I’m yours.”
Loki gazes up at him, twisting his hands together. At length, he says, “I’ll try. I can make no promises.”
Thor inclines his head. “Thank you.”
He lets go of Loki and rolls his shoulders, looking a little lost. Then he notices the forgotten bowl of soup – which, miraculously, has not spilt – and sets it back in Loki’s hands.
Loki wraps both hands tightly around it. A tremor passes through the soup.
His tears are dry and stinging his cheeks now. Soon he will need to bathe, to change his bandages, to eat something solid that will turn his stomach, to step outside and face the world beyond his brother, face Mother, face Father, face his failure and try to find a new excuse for his existence-
But for now he is here – alive, untouched, in his own body, in his own bed.
The threat of rape still looms, as ever, over him, but it is farther away than it has been in centuries, as far as it was when he still fought back. As if what he wants might mean something again.
And right now, he is sore and exhausted, and all he wants is something to drink.
Loki closes his eyes and takes a slow draught.
The sharpness is still a shock, and the sweetness too. But he can feel the magic beginning to take hold, all those little flickers building into a glow.
Loki runs a knuckle over his cracked lips, then offers the bowl to Thor.
Thor looks at it, uncomprehending, then up at Loki.
“No,” he says, pushing it away. “You need it more.”
Loki raises a pitying eyebrow. “Have you eaten today?”
Thor shakes his head, but not as an answer. “It’s my magic. It won’t work on me.”
Oh.
Loki takes one of Thor’s hands in his own.
The scrapes look worse up close. Thor’s knuckles are ragged and swollen; his fingers and even his palms are littered with little cuts. He looks for all the world as if he’s put his hand in the mouth of a wolf.
Loki tries to picture how Thor got these wounds – punching walls, or windows, or mirrors. Gripping a fistful of broken glass. Alone in his chambers, fighting an invisible enemy. Fighting himself.
He pictures Thor clutching his unconscious body as blood pooled beneath them, shaking him, howling at him, begging him to stay.
He pictures Thor, not so long ago, staring up at Father as blood gushed from his nose.
The wound on Loki’s throat aches. But with a breath and a thought, Thor’s cuts fade.
“Now it’s just soup,” Loki says, and he manages to say it lightly. “Drink it.”
Thor rolls his eyes, almost smiling, and gives in.
Thor’s shoulder bumps Loki’s as he takes the bowl. For a split second, Loki stiffens – but there is no danger in his proximity, no duty, no debt. Thor is simply here, warm, steady, inexplicably undemanding.
Loki thinks he could even ask Thor to leave, if he wanted to.
He does not.
Thor doesn’t look like Loki’s master any more, nor even his king. He looks like the boy Loki shared a nursery with, the boy who would shake Loki awake from his nightmares, and slip quietly into Loki’s bed when he had nightmares of his own.
He looks young, and exhausted, and like he is trying excruciatingly hard to be brave.
I love you, Loki thinks. I love you. I love you.
He still can’t bear to say those words, but perhaps if he holds onto them long enough, Thor will hear him anyway.
And perhaps Thor is right about Loki, because the awful, aching nothingness within him is easing, just a little – and it doesn’t feel like a hole being filled. It feels like a wound beginning to close.