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“You haven’t been mischievous for an entire day, god of mischief,” Thor announces as he steps into Loki’s makeshift chambers. Loki’s half-sitting, half-lying down on something resembling a mattress on a bed, arms crossed and reading a leather book that’s hovering before him.
Thor struts about the room—silver-rimmed, but predominantly green; s’always been Loki’s color—and he senses that there’s some hazy bundle of tension there. Something near-inexplicable and unresolved.
He kicks a fragment of loose spaceship machinery under the desk and it makes a clunk sound.
“This is familiar,” Loki mumbles, eyes never leaving the page of his book. “You, all gold and shimmery, crimped by that lumbering gait—bothering me as I’m trying to scavenge an ounce of peace.”
Thor snorts. Then it occurs to him that he needs to get this settled now, during this shaky truce of theirs. Whatever the hell “this” is.
“So I never got to ask,” Thor begins, fiddling with a metal piece on his armor plate. “Why are you semi… good now?”
Loki blinks and the page turns. “Is that the current assumption?” he says with a single raised eyebrow.
“You’re no longer hell-bent on conquering planets, for one.”
“Planet, singular,” says Loki.
“And killing millions. Setting New York’s skyscrapers ablaze.”
“I have to say, Tony Stark was an absolute delight,” grins Loki. “The acerbic mouth on that man must be a coping mechanism for his myriad neuroses. Not that the rest of your motley bunch wasn’t equally afflicted.”
Thor stops himself from letting loose a sarcastic laugh. And what of you yourself, Loki—your own “afflictions”? Although the thought’s prickling on his mind, Thor doesn’t retaliate. Just waits.
Well, Loki simply returns to his book.
“Yeah, uh, why do you have that? I don’t think you had the time to peruse the shelves before Asgard was swallowed by fire.”
“You know me. Even in the case of apocalypse, I’ll find time for literature.”
"Why not just hold it, with your hands, like a normal person?"
"Fingerprints. Also, seidr needs flexing, like a muscle."
Nudging quickly to Loki’s side, Thor peers over his brother’s shoulder, and he takes a second to realize it, but—
“Hold on, is this Frigga’s—this is Mother’s handwriting,” says Thor.
There’s a pause. “Yes,” says Loki.
It falls from the air just as Thor moves to grab it. Flipping through its browning pages, Thor thinks it must be a spellbook, but he glimpses Loki’s name scrawled at various intervals. Feeling Loki stiffen beside him, he stops to read one of the lines, written in magic-permanent ink many centuries ago: Today, Loki conjured an impressive mirage of a Midgardian cat, a glorious silver tabby, which lasted quite a while longer than the previous. As ever, I’m proud of my son’s progress.
Oh. “Where’d you find this?”
“Took it from her room,” Loki says. “A while ago. It’s been with me ever since. Never read it until now.” Never felt prepared, Thor guesses.
He feels an amorphous nameless emotion now, his fingertips stroking the slight indentations of their mother’s flowing inscriptions; he’s suddenly remembering her voice—the gravelly, regal quality of it. “She had a great many wonderful things to say about you,” Thor says with a smile.
Loki closes his eyes. “Look,” he says serenely, “If you don’t want a dagger lodged in your backside, I suggest you leave.”
In the resulting silence, Loki snatches Frigga’s book from Thor and shoves it under his coat.
“So here we are again,” Thor sighs.
“What?”
“You’re doing that thing where you’re quiet about what bothers you, but it revisits me later in some violent form or another as you either betray me or denounce me with an elaborate speech. Both, usually.”
Rolling his eyes, Loki gets up from his bed. “I’m being charitable right now. I’m not casting some horrifying, disfiguring spell on you.”
“Loki.” Thor grabs his arm, and Loki’s hand curls into a fist.
Sincerity? Since when has Loki been susceptible to sincerity? Thor decides he’ll give it a go anyway. “Loki. Just… just lay it out,” he says. “I’m here. I’m listening. I wasn’t, before, but I am now.”
Loki breaks himself away. For a moment, Loki’s lip curls derisively and Thor is sure that he’ll pounce with some toxic retort, but Loki deflates.
“In answer to your ridiculous fucking question, I haven’t turned ‘semi-good,’ Thor,” he says, plopping into a nearby chair. “I’m me, as I always have been. That episode with Earth, that was just anger.”
“Anger,” Thor repeats.
His brother’s stare is incredulous. “You were always the favored child.” A glare settles in Loki’s brow. “Let’s be honest, now. You weren’t so much better than me. You didn’t win every contest or defeat me in every duel, and—oh, before you interject—you could only fly because of the hammer Father gave you. You were, as everyone, replete with flaws. And yet he loved you far more than he ever...” Loki stops himself. “I couldn’t understand why, not until the battle of Jotunheim showed me I’d been a Frost Giant all along. The monster that Odin hated, that the whole of Asgard hated—that I grew up hating. Not a fearsome one, either, but Laufey's mewling bastard runt.”
Something painful and indistinct throbs in Thor’s chest as he struggles to find his response.
“The time I spent falling alone through space and wandering barren planets,” Loki says, a dangerous note creeping into his voice, “felt like eons. Eons to think of the many instances you cast me aside, put me ‘in my place,’ blinded me with the light of your greatness.” He looks down briefly and back up again, as if to collect himself.
“So, yes, Thor,” Loki says sweetly. “Anger.”
“I’m sorry.” At Thor’s words, Loki’s eyes snap up to meet his. His expression is unreadable. “You never said anything. How would you have expected me to know?”
“I did try to speak to you! But because I wasn’t an oaf and I learned from your—your repeated indifference, I stopped when I realized that O Mighty Thor’s ears were clogged with his own self-importance.”
“Well, I am sorry. I… I really am.” Thor watches as Loki’s shoulders slowly loosen, and it’s a relief. “But faking your death? Really?”
Loki shrugs. “That was a jerk move. I agree.” He sounds as though he couldn't care less.
Thor might just electrocute him right now. When he’d discovered Loki alive and well, he had been, and still is, stuck between two warring attitudes: a desire to laugh away what he could acknowledge as a joke and preserve his pride, and the conviction that what Loki had done was cruel, that it had hurt him. On the one hand, he’d been duped by the Trickster and made a fool of yet again, and he should shake it off, but…
“No, you—” You don’t get to make light of this. His gut is churning. “You let me think you were dead,” Thor says, and laughs disbelievingly. “Of all the sadistic things you have done, this might just be the worst.”
Loki frowns for a second. A second later, he leans back, his face shifted to nonchalance. “You wanted me dead. I was doing you a favor. Without you lugging me around or moralizing at me, your spirits have been lifted tenfold. Honestly, if I’d had realized you’d be so disappointed in my not staying dead…”
Outraged, Thor opens his mouth to yell something that’d force his idiot little brother to see sense, but closes it as he realizes something: that Loki’s bracing himself for this, for a return to predictability, to the familiar iterations (Thor as ever resolute, impassioned, accusatory, and berating; Loki silently resentful, evading, deflecting), to patterns and circular paths and tedious little games.
“No more of that,” says Thor, steadying his voice. “Of—this. The dying, the quiet seething, the absences, not to mention—” His eye moves abruptly to the ceiling because it’s started to ache, and, by the Norns, he’ll gouge out his remaining eye too if it’ll stop the tears—“the jumping-into-Voids and leaving-us-to-hate-ourselves sort of deal. So yeah, mostly the dying. It’s become an old trick. Boy who cried wolf, right?”
Loki considers his words. “No more,” he says finally. He leans his head against the crest of his chair.
Thor’s ears are ringing. He can’t begin to comprehend what miracle work he’s done. He decides to wait awhile, and then:
“So you’re not angry anymore?” Thor asks, absurdly hopeful.
“I don’t know,” Loki admits. He glances at the book under his coat. “And to find that Mother really… truly loved me—but she’s gone. I suppose you’re all I have now.”
The two of them are quiet. Loki turns his head to gaze, from the window panel, at the immense, swirling mass of celestial fires.
Hm. What to do with this newfound calm of theirs? It feels quite a lot like the past.
Thor rubs the side of his arm and watches Loki, who, after a while, throws him a playful look. “Maybe it’s been replaced with amusement. I’m amused by the notion that a single month with a mortal woman had awoken your moral sensitivity, yet millennia of Father’s ramblings on duty and restraint did nothing to nudge you out of your recklessness and myopia. I mean, honestly? Honestly.”
Thor dips his head in mock defeat. “That’s a low blow.”