i
There is constant noise on the Ark. Whether it be the humming lights in the stillness of their imagined night. Or the loud conversations that bounce off the stainless steel walls. Or the thrum of bodies moving, shifting, trying to find space where there’s no space left to find. Loki is going mad with it. Well, more mad than usual.
While it has only been a few weeks since Loki was on Asgard, he feels as if he has been estranged for centuries. Without Odin’s visage as a shield, it is just him, walking these halls, and ducking curious questions about Sakaar, Hela, Thor .
And really, if they want to know about Thor, they should go talk to Thor. Loki doesn’t know what his plans for settlement are. Yes, he’s fairly certain that he’s not seeing the Lady Valkyrie. No, Thor really has no eye and it’s because of Hela, not some homage to their father.
He’s massaging his temples, finding minute respite on the observation deck, when the door frushes open. It is the small hours in their manufactured night. Everyone should be asleep. Except for this interloper. And Loki.
“I come up here to think as well,” Thor says, his voice low and raspy. He must have been asleep, although he doesn’t look like it. His clothes are straightened and his cape is well appointed. The only thing somewhat askew is that golden eyepatch. Loki’s noticed he can’t find a comfortable angle for it yet and keeps moving it throughout the day.
“I wasn’t aware you had that faculty,” Loki says. Thor smiles and Loki feels a warmth in his stomach. He tries to ignore it by looking out towards the stars. “What troubles our illustrious king?”
Thor sits heavily next to Loki. He knocks their shoulders together. “The usual. Petty squabbles. Rationing supplies. A pain in the ass little brother.”
Loki sniffs. He had been pointedly not causing mischief. Even his irreverent self had understood the intensity of the situation they are in and knows humor has a time and place. Not now. Not yet. He bumps Thor back. Loki tries hard not to linger.
“And how am I such a pain in your side?”
Rather than a cheery rejoinder, Thor looks at his hands. They are large and strong; Loki used to marvel at them. When Odin had presented Mjolnir, he knew she was made for Thor’s hands. Anything smaller would have disappeared. Anything less powerful would have broken.
“I know you’re here,” Thor confesses after a lengthy pause. “It’s not like you can jettison yourself into space to get away from me, from us, but--” he plays with his hands. They touch each other, then his thighs and then one big paw pats Loki on the thigh. “Ah, there I go being sentimental.”
The burn in Loki’s stomach has made its way to his throat. It has been so long since something as tender as sympathetic sadness has coursed through him. He has raged. He has weeped. But it has been long since his heartstrings has pulled for anyone but himself. Thor is plucking them carefully with the lingering touch of his fingers by Loki’s knee.
Maybe it’s madness from the close confines. Maybe it’s the spell of Thor’s melancholy expression in the starlight. But Loki covers Thor’s hand with his own.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He promises and his voice is rawer than he expected. He clears it, but the lump is still in his throat and that burning is at the back of his eyes. Oh Norns , he’s going to cry.
“Asgard had always been some place I went back to,” Loki says softly. Maybe if he says these thoughts they won’t spill down his cheeks. Maybe if he gives Thor a little comfort, he won’t burn so much to give it. “I knew that no matter how far I strayed that Heimdall or father or you would open the bifrost to me; and I’d have my place again. Now, Asgard is gone, but it’s as you said. Asgard is not a place, it’s a people.”
“I don’t recall you being too fond of the people,” Thor says with a bitter laugh. He squeezes Loki’s hand.
“Well now my big oafish brother is King and I’m fond of him, for some unknown reason. So I’ll come back to that.” Loki squeezes back. “ I’m here.”
No more words are shared, but their hands remain clasped and the starlight crawls slowly across the floor as they creep further and further into deep space.
ii
Loki wakes up in a cold sweat in the coming days. He berates himself for being so soul-bearing before his brother. It was a moment of irrevocable weakness. It was a mistake he cannot seem to unmake.
Thor now smiles more warmly than he had before. He walks closer when they leave his hearings towards the mess hall. Sometimes, when the hour is late, Thor will come to Loki’s chamber just to talk. Loki hates the last one the most. He has yet to say yes.
Tomorrow, he promises. But it would seem that tomorrow never comes.
Loki finds fortitude in that one rejection of Thor’s affection, although, he has little fortitude elsewhere. He attends more hearings so that they may walk side-by-side after them. He attends to tasks that the king has a stake in, coming by to check progress.
Loki can’t escape his orbit. Thor is inexorable. Thor is a lodestone. Loki likes to tell himself he had exaggerated for Thor’s benefit that he is here solely because of Thor, but as the days drag on, as he keeps tripping over his own leash, he realizes it’s no exaggeration at all.
Thor is who he will come back to.
And he always has been, hasn’t he?
iii
When engineering had come very frantically to one of Thor’s public hearings, about a critical pipe being clogged, Loki would think himself last to volunteer. But all eyes immediately turned towards him. Even Thor’s eye, which Loki could not meet. In the end, Loki only shrugged as graciously as he could.
“Lead the way,” he intoned and the engineer scuttled off, with him striding behind.
The critical pipe was not a waste one, which Loki really thought they should have led with. Rather, it’s one that leads to their filtration system from the kitchens. Someone had been dumping grease it would seem and Loki can see the culprit through the shimmer of his seidr.
He bites his lip as he works, focusing on slithering the grease through the smallest joint in the pipe. It’s difficult to move it and maintain pressure so that he doesn’t get sprayed by the backwash. He thinks he has the hang of it when there is a flurry of activity behind him.
He knows what’s going to happen in the way someone watches an arrow loosed. One knows the target. One can guess the trajectory. But the moment the arrow meets its mark is still a surprise. In Loki’s case, the arrow is Thor, the trajectory is him trying to help , and the moment of culmination is the pipe spewing grease over him and Asgard’s King.
Thor has the temerity to say “Oops.”
Loki wants to curse at him but he’s fearful if he opens his mouth something unidentifiable might get in. He begins stepping away, passing a hand over his face, when he hears frantic squawking. “In the shower!” they are shouting. “Now! Now!”
“It’s grease,” Loki states. It’s certainly not anything too dangerous, maybe for his skincare, but whoever is squawking doesn’t need to make it feel like life and death.
“And water!” they add. Loki feels a hand on his side and is being manhandled towards the engineering lab, which is down the hall. “We need to conserve all that water!”
Loki gives into his fate and both he and Thor are unceremoniously thrust into a cubicle shower hardly big enough for one of them, let alone two of them. “We can’t even take turns?” Loki asks with a twitch in his eyebrow. The engineer, who he can now see is a squat woman with fierce eyes, puts her hands on her hips.
“No, you cannot, your majesties. I’m sorry, but you must.”
She looks hardly sorry as she stumps off, leaving Thor and Loki alone in the cramped shower.
“We haven’t bathed together since we were boys,” Thor says. He twists to face Loki and he clearly did not get a face full of grease. He got mostly water and he glistens in the fluorescent lights. Loki tries to ignore the invasive thought of beautiful that follows that observation.
“I don’t remember the baths on Asgard being quite so cramped,” Loki says. Stiffly, he works to get at his clothes, but can barely bend his arms without hitting the walls. He growls.
“Allow me,” Thor offers. He helps Loki out of his shirt and Loki does so in turn for Thor. Their pants require a lot of shimmying to be removed and then they designate a corner, kicking the pile there. Front to front, there is barely a breath between them, and Loki prays his anatomy behaves him better than the last time Thor and he had shared a bath. His cock had a mind of its own back then.
With little finesses, they work at washing. The water pelts down hard and Loki scrubs his face beneath the spray. Thor, behind him, plays with his hair. Loki swats his hand away. “Do you mind?”
Thor doesn’t. “I asked mother if she wouldn’t let you grow your hair out, when we were young.”
This earns Loki’s attention. “What? You loved my hair. You would plait it for me,”
Thor runs his fingers through it, working in water and working out some of the grease. The soap is harsh but Thor’s fingers scratching against his scalp is nice. “I thought it made you look like a girl,” Thor teases, breath warm. His pinky brushes the sensitive skin behind Loki’s ear.
Loki’s face heats and he turns it resolutely into the spray to cool it. “You never thought I looked like a girl,” Loki argues when he finally comes up for air.
“No, I never did” Thor admits gently. The moment is caught and Loki feels captured. He is trapped between Thor’s body heat and the cold pulse of water from above. He is bound by Thor’s confusing words and the meaning swirling beneath. And his feelings, Loki’s feelings are worst of all, because they imprison him in inaction, even his clever tongue.
Thor’s hands leave Loki’s hair and he sees to washing himself.
“You never did say sorry for getting us into this mess,” Loki says after a while, a little weakly, a little different from what he wanted to say.
You never said .
Thor huffs a laugh. “I suppose not. I’m sorry.”
And Loki forgives him, but keeps those words to himself.
iv
After the shower, the fever between them seems to break. Something comfortable takes its place. They continue doing the same things, but Loki no longer fights it and Thor no longer fights for it. They reach an equilibrium.
Although, there are moments when Loki can still feel the distance. It’s when Thor looks away a little sooner than expected. It’s how they linger beside one another even when their directions are different. It’s as if there is a stutter, something missing or being skipped, and Loki tries to avoid thinking about it.
Because it’s good. Overall, it’s so much better than he could have expected. It’s too delicate between them to go searching for more.
Loki is on his way to the greenhouses, taking a shortcut through residential Section 5, when Valkyrie steps into his path. Well, step is over-generous, she is half out a doorway with a blonde woman depositing a sweet parting kiss on her lips. The door slides shut between the lovers. Valkyrie looks up to see Loki.
“Hello,” she says, the warmth that had been on her face remaining but an impish color added on top. “Can I help you?”
Loki blinks. “I wasn’t aware you and Hilde were such close friends,” Loki says, at a complete loss at what else to say. How was the lay? How long have you been doing that? Can your neighbors hear or are the walls thicker than they seem?
Valkyrie snorts. “Close friends. You know, Loki, it might do you good to get some close friends .”
No close friends come to mind. But one brother does. “I have plenty friends and I like their distance.”
“Sure.” Valkyrie pats his arm. “We all need some comfort, especially now, given all this.” she gestures vaguely to the station at large. “ I sure know your brother does.”
“And is he getting it?” Loki asks--too quickly--and curses himself.
Valkyrie smirks. “I don’t know, is he?”
She spins on her heel and leaves. Loki has to physically stop himself from marching to Thor’s chambers to find out.
v
It’s the small hours. The stars are different, Loki knows, but they look the same as when he was here a week ago. He tries to pick out constellations in the distance. But they are far from home. He doesn’t know these ones.
Like clockwork, Thor arrives. He is sleep mussed this time, in loose pants and a thin tunic. He sits beside Loki, who is still dressed from the day, and searches the same stars.
This is Loki’s universe--right here. Thor is his sun and his center. The distance between them must remain if he wants to survive. But his orbit is degrading. He wants that warmth more than he wants to survive.
He thinks he needs it to survive.
Maybe Valkyrie’s words had needled a hole to his core. Maybe the tight press of space is forcing this out. Or, just maybe, Loki is growing little by little in the gentle radiance of Thor’s presence.
Loki leans over and presses a kiss to Thor’s cheek. He withdraws quickly, nervously toying with his hands in his lap. He should have said something. He shouldn’t have done it. He should certainly say something now.
Carefully, Thor disentangles Loki’s hands so that he can hold one. Then, with his other, he carefully turns Loki to face him. His kiss is searing as he presses it to Loki’s forehead.
The situation may be delicate, but they may just navigate it yet.
Little by little.