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Chapter Text

Loki is gasping for breath.

He gags on air as though it were water in his lungs; it feels as thick and heavy and unyielding. The air does not wish to enter his body, but it is pressed inside by degrees by an outside force, and on his fifth breath it thins and starts to feel like air again.

He breathes, shuddering. But he breathes.

He opens his eyes with effort. He is cold, colder than he has ever been, colder than he thought it possible for a Jötunn to feel. His eyelashes are triangled with ice crystals. He blinks to clear his vision. It wavers stubbornly.

All he can see is a tall form looming over him, a face he need not glimpse the details of to know that it is worried. Loki relaxes, the fear of waking in such a way draining away with recognition. Safe.

“Thor,” he tries to say. His voice sounds cracked and broken, discarded. It emerges as a croak.

“Loki?” There’s an urgency in his brother’s tone that Loki has never heard before, but Thor has always been impatient.

If Loki had more of a voice he would make it sound sharp and snappish. He swallows, his throat a desert. “Who else?”

Thor makes a strangled noise, half a laugh, half something like a sob. “It has been a long time, brother.” His hand is warm—so warm—as it curls around Loki’s shoulder and seeks to guide him upward. “Can you sit? There is water.”

“If I must,” says Loki, refusing not to be peevish in such a state. Every part of him is frozen and aches with inertia, as though his muscles have forgotten how to be used. His vision is slowly but stubbornly resolving itself, Thor becoming clearer around all of his glorious edges.

They are alone in a dimly-lit room that has the trappings of a scientist’s lab; Loki is lying on a high metal table such as might be used for surgeries or the dissecting of specimens. He shivers. He is so cold.

Loki lets Thor pull him into a sitting position, remembers how to lift his hand, how to close it around the glass of water. He is afraid the water will pour from his mouth, that swallowing it down will prove an insurmountable challenge, but in the end he succeeds in a few proper sips.

It shouldn’t feel like such an accomplishment, but it does, and Thor watches the proceedings like it’s the most incredible act he’s ever witnessed, so Loki is somewhat mollified.

For a long moment he lets himself sit, breathing, propped up by Thor’s strength at his side. Then Loki says, “Tell me.”

“You died,” says Thor, matter-of-fact about it.

“I see,” says Loki. “That appears to be somewhat of a recurring condition.”

“What do you remember?” Thor’s tone is grim but determined.

Loki thinks about it. His brain—his memory—is as disused as his muscles, but all of him is now in thaw. He thinks.

He sees: the world on fire. Asgard lost. Death everywhere surrounding. Death inevitable. A face of evil, shaded a purulent violet, obscuring all else.

All else save Thor—Thor, bound, desperate, vulnerable, his eyes pleading with Loki not to do what Loki will do. Thor, for whom there is still hope remaining. Thor, who is hope.

“Thanos,” Loki whispers. Unbidden, his hand flies to his neck, but all is impossibly whole. He is uninjured. Save for the having been dead.

Thor nods. His eyes track Loki’s motion. “The Princess Shuri repaired the damage to your body,” he explains. “She is a great Midgardian healer and leader. You were then kept in cryostatic freeze in the country of Wakanda to prevent decay.”

“Lovely,” says Loki. “I suppose I should be grateful. I only feel a little decayed.” He clears his throat. His mouth tastes foul around the name when he repeats it: “Thanos?”

Thor looks away. It is the first time his eyes have left Loki—his eyes have been devouring every proof of Loki’s living with a fierce hunger that Loki does not understand.

“We could not stop him,” Thor says. His hands clench into fists. “I could not. I failed to deliver the killing blow, for I wanted to look him in the eyes and have him know who it was that handed him his fate. I wanted you and Heimdall and the others avenged, and it was our undoing.”

“Let’s put the blame on the monster, where it belongs,” says Loki mildly, “rather than on the slayer of monsters.” But Thor’s words sink in, and if Loki’s cheeks had color they would be leached of it. “He—he used the Gauntlet?”

“I am selfish,” says Thor, which is an unexpected response. Thor is staring down, studying his balled hands. “I have been so selfish. I beg that one day you can forgive me for what I have done. I brought you back into a world that knows only sorrow and despair. I do not know where you were before; but you will not thank me.”

“He used the Gauntlet,” Loki says, horrified and impressed. If his lips remembered how to whistle he would whistle. “Son of a bitch.”

“Yes.” Thor raises his eyes, looks back at Loki again. Loki’s vision is good enough now to see what first the shadows had hidden: his brother is beyond exhausted, dark half-moons under his eyes, all of him fraying at the seams. It is a vision of Thor that he has never seen before, worn down and nearly spent. “Half of the life in the galaxy has been extinguished. Chaos and mourning rule most worlds. Those that remain—we seek a reversal, but all our efforts have failed.”

“Why bring me back?” Loki is genuinely curious. It seems a terrific expenditure of energy in a non-Thanos-defeating direction. A distraction when Thor should be focused.

“I had to,” says Thor. “I need you, Loki. I need you to show me the solutions I cannot see. I need you to think for me as you ever have. I know that if we are to win, it will be with your assistance. I know it. In the dark of night, as I lie awake, you are the only answer. My dreams also tell me it is so.” He heaves a breath. “I have been selfish, but I could not see another way.”

Loki blinks. Blinking is a nice action to recollect and execute. “That’s rather flattering, brother,” he says carefully. “You put too much faith in—”

“I did it for me,” says Thor, all at once: “It was also for me. I am tired. I did not wish to continue on without you at my side. This project—finding a means to restore you—has been my only respite. I have gone to many worlds, met with many sorcerers and priests and charlatans, read more books than you would believe of me.” In any other situation Thor would be smiling, but his mouth is a flat line. “This is all that I have hoped for. Most—most of us have forgotten what it is to hope.”

“Is that so,” says Loki. His restarted heart proves itself by seeming to squeeze in his chest. Then it thuds painfully. He gazes at Thor, unflinching, to ensure that Thor cannot look away again. “And what was the price?”

“What do you mean?” Thor has been an awful liar since childhood, and his recent times in tumult have not done anything to change that. His guileless expression might deceive or distract someone else, but Loki is wholly unmoved.

“The price, Thor,” Loki says. He folds his arms across his chest, allows a little thrill that he has accomplished such a thing as arm-folding. His muscles are starting to recall what it means to be alive. “For bringing me back. There is always a price.”

Thor stares at him for so long in silence that Loki is sure he will not answer. Then he says, “It was mine to pay, and I did so gladly. I would have given anything.”

“But—”

“I love you more dearly than anything else,” Thor says, and he must be truly, exceptionally exhausted, for Thor has never looked nor sounded so raw. “It took losing you this third time to understand just how much. Yet for all of my grief I was lucky in one thing: you did not fall victim to Thanos’ Gauntlet—your death was one that could be reversed by someone with the knowledge to do so.

“I searched for and retrieved your body with the assistance of my brave raccoon companion, and you cannot tell me that you were not preserved—that you also came free of the destruction of our ship intact—so that I might restore you. The Gods have been cruel to Asgard but they let me find you and bring you back. They have shown me that mercy.”

It would take a much stronger and much less narcissistic man than Loki to remain unaffected by the depth of Thor’s affection. In truth he is somewhat taken aback by it; he knew before he died that Thor cared for him—they were always too bound up in each other, for good and ill—but this display before him is something else. Never in his most daring dreams would he have imagined it. Thor seems so on the verge of breaking, and Loki will not be the one to push him there. Not yet.

“All right,” Loki says at last. “We will speak of it another day. Did you say that a brave raccoon helped you find my body?” He tilts his head. “When was the last time you had a full night’s sleep?”

“Perhaps it will be tonight,” says Thor. His great shoulders sag with relief. “It is a very long story.”

“I seem to be lacking in other appointments,” Loki says, “what with being dead.”

Thor moves from where he has been leaning against the table at Loki’s side to stand before him. Loki is exceptionally proud that he does not topple over sideways without Thor’s support.

Thor tilts in, presses his forehead to Loki’s. Loki is exceptionally proud that he does not startle like a surprised horse. He focuses instead on the heat of Thor’s skin against his own, how Thor’s heat seems to radiate down through Loki’s veins, chasing away the ice.

“You cannot know how I have missed you,” Thor says.

“Start at the beginning,” Loki advises. “Begin with the missing.”

* * *

They are in the Avengers compound. Loki never thought to see the inside of such a building except perhaps in chains, and he observes various empty rooms with interest as he goes past in Thor’s arms.

His legs are still unsteady; it was a wheelchair or Thor carrying him, and Loki rather enjoys the spectacle of the latter, the King of Asgard bearing him through the halls as though Loki is the most sacred of treasures. That’s how Thor carries him, his anxious face searching Loki’s for any sign of discomfort.

“No crowd to witness the resurrection?” Loki asks, curious. He’s not disappointed—he doesn’t have the energy to expend on trying to convince Thor’s upright friends that he’s no longer of the mindset to destroy any of their cities.

“They are in Wakanda,” says Thor, climbing a staircase carefully, smooth-footed so as not to jostle Loki, “at a summit of world leaders. I asked to stay back. They will be some days.”

“Did they know what you planned to do?” Now Loki is even more curious.

“They did,” Thor says. “I do not think that they quite believed me. Certainly there was doubt.”

Loki coughs, delicate. “And I’m sure some disagreement as to the wisdom of bringing one such as me back.”

Thor half-shrugs, unwilling to let the motion affect Loki in his arms. “The testimonials of myself and Dr. Banner did much to put their worries to rest. You will find that my friends are forgiving. All have made decisions in the past that they are not proud to recount.” He rounds a corner, determined; his jaw is set. “All have suffered great losses due to Thanos. There is not one among them who would hesitate if there was a way to restore the people that they loved and lost.”

“It seems unfair,” says Loki, philosophical, as Thor shoulders a door open, “that I should return, while so many great heroes remain unretrievable.”

“It is not unfair to me,” says Thor.

To this Loki finds he can say nothing. Thor has brought them into a large, airy room, two walls lined with windows to let the sunlight in. Loki, who was recently dead, and before that in a cramped ship sailing through space, finds that he has dearly missed the sun.

The room is mostly unadorned, with a wide bed set against one of the walls of windows, two broad dark leather armchairs positioned by the other wall. A low table between the armchairs hosts a smattering of bottles and glasses.

There is a desk messy with papers and electronic tablets, a bookshelf beside it crammed full of books. Haphazard heaps of armor spill forth from the open closet door. High above the bed’s headboard, an enormous axe is mounted.

Though weakened, there is enough magic yet left in Loki for him to feel its great power even at this distance. Thor’s tale of the axe’s forging had made Loki shake his head—only his foolhardy brother would think taking the full blast of a dying star to be a reasonable trade for a weapon—but he cannot help admiring it.

“This is my chamber,” Thor announces, as though anyone else could leave his garments in such a state of advanced disorganization. “I thought to share it until you are well enough to claim your own.”

“A room of my own in the Avengers compound,” Loki says drily. “Will wonders never cease?”

“I hope that they do not,” says Thor, still not making any move to set him down. “What do you wish? I will leave you if you desire to sleep. I can prepare food if you are hungry. There is an electronic device that can show you the news of all that has passed since you were gone. I have been collecting books I thought you might like for some time. I—”

“Thank you,” says Loki, cutting through the flow of Thor’s nervous words, touched by these gestures and inspired to rare sincerity. “Truly, thank you. All I wish is for a hot bath for approximately three days.”

Thor smiles at that. “I will draw it myself.” He lowers Loki gingerly into the embrace of one of the armchairs. Then he disappears into the attached bathroom.

The sound of running water is more delicious to Loki than any feast could be. Loki tips his head back, lets himself remember what sunlight on his skin is like.

He closes his eyes, then quickly opens them: darkness is not something that he wishes to see, and a sick feeling of falling knots in his stomach. He jolts upright in time to smooth the panic from his face when Thor returns.

Thor lifts him again, easy as anything, and Loki tries to hide his sudden terror behind a rather decadent smile. “I could get used to this,” he says, as Thor carries him to the bath.

Thor refuses to be baited. “You should.”

Loki keeps being left speechless, a strange state for him indeed. He chalks it up to being rusty after being dead. It’s only when they’re in the bathroom that he realizes the logistics of this demand all the more participation from Thor, but if Thor is unfazed, Loki will act the same.

Thor sets him on his feet, keeps an arm looped around Loki’s waist for support. His other hand reaches to find the hooks on Loki’s ill-used leathers, but Loki bats him away.

“I can do this much,” Loki says, refusing to flush with Thor so near—there is nothing to be revealed that he is ashamed of. Thor helps him ease out of the open doublet, then to peel free of his pants, and it is such a blessed relief to be released from what had become his funerary wear that Loki is overjoyed to be naked.

It’s not as though he and Thor haven’t shared a bathing-room a thousand times before. Normally, however, Thor is not quite so near, nor holding onto him, nor staring at Loki’s face with his eyes incandescent. Loki is aware of him in a suddenly pressing fashion, and he pivots toward the bath to avoid it.

Thor’s assistance is needed for the final steps, and a steadying hand as Loki climbs in, and then Loki quite melts into the scented water. It is bliss; the first time the water closes over his head, drowning out all else, even sound, it feels better than breathing again. He emerges only when it occurs to him that Thor will worry.

For a moment Loki thinks that Thor will stand there in the doorway and keep watch over him. At any other point in their lives Loki would have found this hovering attention patronizing, or unbearable; he could not have countenanced needing Thor’s help so badly. But now it seems that neither he nor Thor have any inclination to be apart for very long. Loki would not mind if Thor chose to stay.

He nearly voices this, but in the same breath Thor says, “Do you need anything else?”

“Yes,” says Loki, languishing in bubbles. He lets a pointed look rest on the pile of leathers on the floor. Even free of them he thinks he can smell how they are scorched—even this far away he can see where blood has dried and caked. “Promise me you’ll burn those.”

Thor’s answering grin is nearly feral. He whisks the offending garments from the ground and bunches them under his arm. “With pleasure, brother.” Then he shuts the door.

* * *

It is not three days, but Loki remains in the bath at least three hours or more, running the tap hot when the water cools.

His fingers and toes prune, yet it’s hardly a care—it’s wonderful proof that his body is whole and functioning again. He feels disjointed, as though his skin does not quite fit yet, but the strange disassociation is a small price to pay.

The price. What Thor has paid Loki cannot begin to fathom, nor wishes to contemplate, though the thought consumes him. He knows there can be no bargain struck that would favor Thor.

The line between life and death is a barrier that few magickers dare to meddle with. It is dangerous territory, and always terribly exacting. His mind runs through endless scenarios, none of them pleasant, and he is still in the process of puzzling through it when Thor taps on the door, then sticks his head in.

“Dinner is ready,” he says, chest puffed with pride as though he’s killed and dressed a bilgesnipe for them.

Loki raises an eyebrow. “The terror of Asgard’s kitchens,” he says. “I’ll need to see it to believe it. I’m rather afraid to taste it.”

Thor pulls a who, me? expression. “It’s not my fault I set the kitchens on fire,” he protests. He produces towels and a robe from a cupboard under the sink. Loki shows that the bath has been restorative enough to stand up and get out on his own strength. “If the cooks had simply shown me the correct way to—”

“You know that they could not,” Loki tsks, drying off, then slipping into the robe when Thor holds it up. “It wasn’t proper. Father would have—”

“A ridiculous bit of etiquette,” Thor says, sounding as annoyed as he had a thousand years ago. “Where’s the pride in having a prince who could not produce a simple meal for his guests?”

“Where indeed,” Loki agrees, as he had then: he’d been Thor’s willing accomplice in the adventure down to the kitchens at night, and helped dampen the inevitable fires with magic when he finally stopped laughing.

He turns back around, belting the robe, to meet Thor’s eyes, and then both of them are laughing helplessly, shaking with it, leaning into each other to stay upright.

They keep laughing for far too long, verging on hysteria, past hysteria; it is no longer about the kitchens; it feels like expelling demons.

At last, tears streaming down their faces, they stumble from the bathroom arm in arm. Loki is immensely pleased to find that he can walk now of his own accord, though if he holds too tightly to Thor neither of them mention it.

Dinner is laid out on the low table by the armchairs. It consists of Midgardian wheat noodles with a creamy sauce, and slices of crusty bread coated in garlic butter—simple fare, but it smells shockingly good, considering that Thor prepared it, and Loki finds that he is starving.

He curls up in the chair in his bathrobe, the plate tucked into his arm, and eats with the relish that only a man brought back from the dead can muster. Thor happily goes back downstairs for seconds, then thirds, bringing also bottles of a fine red wine that Loki consumes with as much or more enthusiasm.

They speak animatedly of old, old memories from an easier time and place, passing the most pleasant hours that Loki can recall in a very long while.

It is also the most casual meal that he and Thor have shared save for the nights, too far away to properly name, when they would sit by the fire on some hunt or misadventure, a wineskin lodged between them. The future was bright and bold, then, and never was there finer company found than in each other.

Loki aches, suddenly, sharply, too sharp, a dagger between his ribs. He hurts for all that is gone: all that has been taken from them, and those things that he willfully lost.

“Thor,” he starts, and Thor must see the way his face changes, because he leans forward too quickly, stays Loki with a hand on his knee.

“Not tonight,” Thor says—pleads. “We will have many days to discuss what has come before and what has happened. Give me this one night at ease with you.”

Loki nods. He does not see how he could deny his brother anything now. Nor does he wish to. “Very well,” he agrees. “Pass me the wine.”

* * *

They fall into bed, hazy and giggling, not bothering to turn down the sheets. Loki struggles out of his robe, and Thor helps him, his hands hot as brands on Loki’s skin.

“You’re so warm,” Loki says admiringly. “I’m still so cold.”

Thor wraps his big body around Loki at once, drawing Loki into his arms; it’s like sharing bedspace with a furnace, and Loki all but purrs at the sensation.

“Is that better?” Thor asks into Loki’s hair.

“Much better,” Loki confirms, his words, he thinks, only somewhat slurred.

“Do you remember …” But Thor’s voice trails off, dreamy, sweet, drunk, into memory.

“I might remember many things,” says Loki, “if one were more specific.”

Thor laughs against him. “I was thinking how we used to lie like this, and pretend at being grown-ups.”

“Some of us are still pretending,” Loki says, and Thor laughs again. “Yes. I remember.”

“The first time I kissed you,” Thor says, contemplative, “you slapped me.”

“One of my finer memories of youth,” Loki agrees.

“I believe it rather established a pattern,” Thor says, and then it is Loki’s turn to laugh.

“We were ridiculous children,” Loki says around a yawn.

“Perhaps we were smarter than we knew,” says Thor.

“I was, anyway,” Loki allows.

Thor puts a gentle finger under Loki’s chin, tilts his head up so that Loki can see his face. Thor is pink-cheeked from the wine but his eyes have the same burning intensity that he’s evinced since Loki’s return. “If I kiss you now, will you slap me?”

“Probably,” Loki says, as though this were a perfectly reasonable question.

Thor leans down anyway, presses his lips to Loki’s cheek. His mouth is warm and wet, and Loki squirms and laughs and kicks at him.

Thor draws back, but tightens his arms around Loki, seals his body to the slopes of Loki’s, so that there is no room left between them. “Goodnight, Loki.”

“Goodnight.” It seems to Loki that Thor drops off at once—his brother’s exhaustion is unexaggerated, and his sleep is immediate and deep.

Loki lies still for a long time thereafter, feeling Thor breathing at his back, feeling himself breathe.

* * *

Loki comes awake because Thor has jerked into motion behind him, Thor’s arms closing around him convulsively before relaxing.

“Brother?” They both speak the word at once.

“Loki.” Thor presses his face to the back of Loki’s neck, inhales there, as though taking in Loki’s scent for reassurance. “I dreamed that all that happened yesterday was a dream. It was most cruel.”

Loki turns under Thor’s arm to face him. Thor is still in his Midgardian jeans, which he had not bothered to remove, now wrinkled and creased with sleep. His chest is bare, shirt tugged off at some point in the night, the expanse of his muscles infinite.

Thor’s hair is mussed, and he looks frightened for the first time that Loki can remember since they were small; he looks, despite the heavy world-weariness on his brow, strangely young.

Loki finds himself moved to tenderness by the sight. He is surprised he remembers how tenderness feels. He catches Thor’s hand, guides two of Thor’s fingers to the pulsepoint on his neck, so that the echo of Loki’s heartbeat jumps beneath Thor’s fingertips.

“I’m really here,” Loki says.

Thor’s ragged breathing slows, but his gaze remains lit up, too alert. “You said that once before,” he murmurs, “and still I lost you.” He swallows audibly, determined. “I will not again. I will not ever again.”

“You know such a promise is impossible,” Loki says, as delicately as he can manage. It should be unnerving to be the focal point of such unrelenting attachment—but he has always been hungry for this from Thor, jealous of all else that drew his brother’s attention, and he quite basks in it to have Thor so intensely focused and utterly to himself.

“It is not,” says Thor. “The promise is already made.” For a charged moment Thor is so close that Loki can feel sparks from Thor’s lips against the soft skin of his throat. Then Thor draws away, as though suddenly aware he is generating electricity, and he rolls over onto his back, releasing Loki.

Loki does not go far; he props his head on his hand, studies Thor’s face. “Has it truly been so bad?”

“It has been unimaginable,” says Thor, and once begun the story pours from him as though a dam has given way. “Our time here now is an anomaly—a gift my friends have given to me. Soon enough there will be no quiet for us. Every world we have been able to contact is broken, Loki—each along different fault lines. Some lost all their leaders; some, their laborers; others are now bereft of their scientists or artists or holy people. All have lost; all. There is not a soul left that was not torn asunder by Thanos.

“He left not only grief in his wake, but tragedies without end: On Midgard alone, planes fell from the sky, captainless; boats capsized and sank in the oceans; vehicles crashed, causing more massed death that has no hope of reversal. Madness is commonplace now—one does not blink to see a person stumbling glassy-eyed down the street, weeping and wailing. It is strange if one goes outside and does not see that. In many places order has broken down, production broken down, wars broken out. What good are laws and rules if all that you love and have to live for is gone? The Avengers, too, are fractured, like all else, but we do not rest, for there is always something else that must be done.”

Thor is halfway to panting by the end of this speech, and Loki curls his hand around Thor’s wrist, grounding, trying to pull him free from it.

Thor cants his head to look at him. “I told you that you would not thank me for bringing you back. I am sorry that I was not strong enough to leave you at peace.”

“Dear brother,” says Loki, “do shut up on that account. You have no idea where I was—nor, indeed, do I remember,” he admits. He will not admit to knowing only falling darkness as he was pulled back into his body. He can recall nothing else. “Know that I would rather be here with you at the—after the end of the world.”

Thor closes his eyes and lets out a breath, as though releasing a great weight. “I had forgotten what it felt to be happy,” he says softly. He opens his eyes. “The mere sight of you now fills me with such joy that I can barely speak.”

Loki—blushes, like a youth, like a maiden caught unawares by the full force of Thor’s charm. He should know far better by now, but he has never learned. “Thor,” he tries, unsure.

“Loki,” says Thor. His eyes are so bright—there is lightning behind them. “Please.”

”Loki, please,” Thor says, bright-eyed, the sweet scent of crushed grass beneath them. They are stretched out under the blue Asgardian sky, a perfect cloudless day, hidden from sight in their favorite grove. They are no longer boys, but not quite men; still, they know enough to know they should be past such games as this. “How will we learn if we do not practice?”

“Oh, all right,” Loki says, magnanimous, as though he is not trembling for Thor to continue with every fiber of his being. What he wanted was for Thor to ask him. “One or two more kisses—I’ll allow it, if you’re more careful with your tongue this time. I don’t appreciate being slobbered on.”

And that is all that Thor was waiting to hear—he catches Loki by the back of the neck and yanks him in too close and, both of them laughing, they tumble through the grass—

Loki stares back at Thor from the distance of centuries. “We were children then,” he says. “We did not know what we were playing at.”

“I was never playing,” says Thor. He is too close now. “Were you?”

Loki’s fate seems precariously balanced on a knife’s edge; should he but feint one way or the other, there will be a swift wound; but there are two different wounds to choose from, both painfully deep and unmistakably fatal.

“No,” Loki hears himself say, before he has decided what to say. “No, I was not.”

Thor’s expression is that of the sun breaking through a storm. “If I kiss you now, will you slap me?”

“That depends,” Loki answers, his heart in his throat. He tries on a smile that slips across his face, ill-fitted. “Are you better with your tongue? I don’t appreciate being slobbered on.”

“I think you’ll find that I am,” says Thor, his voice dropping low, and then—then he is moving to bridge the gap between them, but he doesn’t try to kiss Loki all at once.

No: first he takes Loki’s face between his hands, Thor’s eyes full bright as he runs his thumb across Loki’s cheekbone. Then he bends, and he kisses one of Loki’s cheeks, then the other, then the hinge of Loki’s jaw, then the soft flesh of his ear, until Loki is shaking beneath these ministrations. Thor’s tongue on his ear proves that his technique is shockingly improved; Loki stifles a gasp.

Only then does Thor move to claim his mouth. It is nothing like the inquisitive kisses traded when they were young: it is directed and desperate, as though held back for a long time and at last released.

Thor’s lips are hard upon him—not ungentle, but leaving no room to interpret this as anything like brotherly. Loki opens up to the urgency of it, and Thor licks deftly into his mouth, keen to demonstrate all the fine skills that he has gained.

Loki is fast dizzy with sensation, breathing too quickly through his nose so that they need not break apart. His brain is a symphony of raucous messaging, some thoughts saying this is Thor and others this is your brother and yet more still this is all that you love and all that you have and this is all that you have ever had and will ever—

Thor draws away with a gentle nip to Loki’s lower lip. Loki wants to chase after the fading kiss at once, but he holds still. It is much for them to adjust to, it is too much all at once and not nearly enough.

“Oh,” Loki whispers.

“Yes,” Thor agrees. “I had rather thought so.”

Their eyes are having a deeper discussion than their minds and mouths ever could; still, Loki will require some vocal clarification.

“For how long, Thor?”

“I cannot remember a time I did not feel toward you in ways that I thought I should not,” Thor says easily enough, as though he’s gone through it so many times in his head as to emerge unashamed. It’s an unwieldy sentence, but Loki thrills to hear it said.

Thor is saying, “When I learned that we did not share blood my guilt was somewhat reduced, and at the same time inflamed, for that did not make you any less my brother. Yet my relief showed me how boldly I wanted. When you left Asgard behind I often thought it was because you saw what was in my heart, and fled from me.”

“Fool,” Loki snaps, disbelief making him vicious. “If I had known I would not have gone.” As the words leave his mouth they ring harshly true, and both of them flinch from the pain and waste of it.

“Then there is some branching of the tree where we found each other long ago, and perhaps were happy,” Thor says. “Here we have both of us blundered and squandered much time. It was not until you died again that I was forced to understand the truth of what I felt—that it was not simply desire that might be better left hidden. I realized what I lost was the one person I needed to continue. I realized what was taken from me was not only my brother, but my partner, the other half of me. Can you see, now, why I told you I would gladly have given anything—anything—to have you back again?”

There are dark and jagged places within Loki that are slowly closing. His throat feels thick with mixed grief and giddiness. He blinks back burning tears.

“Fool,” Loki says once more, breathless this time. “I spent my entire life in your thrall, and thought you did not see me. I did great and terrible things in the hopes that you might.”

Thor reaches out a hand—Loki is somewhat pleased to see that the hand is unsteady—and threads his fingers through Loki’s hair. “Let us find forgiveness together,” he says. “All of that was in another life.”

“Yes,” says Loki simply. “It was.” He turns his face into Thor’s touch; it is mind-boggling that he should suddenly be permitted to touch his lips to Thor’s wrist.

“Well,” says Thor at length. His voice sounds shattered and pieced back together again. “What would you like for breakfast?”

* * *

It is the strangest meal that Loki has ever taken. He perches on a barstool by the kitchen countertop, watching the astounding sight of Thor succeeding at food preparation.

Yet Thor is also distracted, so the process proceeds slowly, haltingly. For each egg that he cracks, he must kiss Loki twice. For every tomato sliced, another kiss, or the brush of his fingers along Loki’s skin wherever he can find it exposed.

The eggs nearly burn because Thor is too busy tasting the inside of his mouth.

They are acting—like children, thinks Loki, heady with it—no, it is more like a couple newly wed and convinced of unfaltering bliss. That thought is so ridiculous that he fast pushes it away, but he does not push away Thor, who is bent to the task of kissing Loki’s neck and better left uninterrupted.

After they clean their plates, Loki says that he feels well enough for a walk, and Thor agrees that the fresh air will do him well.

They set out arm-in-arm, this time the posture wholly intentional, and Thor holds him close but not over-tight. They have agreed, for now, not to dwell overmuch on where they so badly failed each other in the past; but there is much of the present that Loki would know.

They stroll in comfortable silence through the green fields around the compound before Loki can bring himself to break the peace. The open air is indeed doing wonders—he feels stronger with every step out under the sun, and so at last he lets himself say: “The ship. There were survivors?”

Thor seems unsurprised at the question, though anguish and fury crease his brow. “They are few enough,” he says. “Half the ship escaped—then another half again the Gauntlet claimed. I left the Valkyrie to lead them in my stead. She leads well. They take refuge on a planet well-known to Rocket, distant and hidden and safe. I would not risk them here. I fear Midgard will long be a battlefield.”

“Asgard yet lives,” Loki says, hushed and amazed. He has been so afraid to ask; Thor, so very forlorn.

“It does,” Thor says. “In time, it will grow. The memory of what we knew—what we were—will be passed down and not forgotten. That has given me great comfort.”

“You will rule there again,” says Loki, “when this is over, and more of your—of our people are returned.”

Thor glances at him sideways, then looks straight ahead. They pass over a short wooden bridge that spans a fast-running brook.

“No,” says Thor.

“Pardon?”

“I have abdicated,” says Thor, his arm shifting against Loki’s, as though the words still fit him ill. “My final decree was to abolish the monarchy. There will be no more thrones or kings in Asgard.”

Loki nearly trips then—he is so astonished that his feet lose forward motion. Thor keeps him balanced. “Brother, whatever for?”

“I was Asgard’s doom,” says Thor dispassionately. It is clear that he has worked hard to distance himself from this: it is clear that there is a limit to how many burdens even Thor can shoulder. “Surtur decreed it so, and it came to pass. I was responsible as any. As was Father. As was our sister. As were you. Our family long acted like a poison on the people. I have cut them free.”

“Thor—”

“It is done, and will not be undone,” Thor says. “It was overdue. The Valkyrie takes point until this time of crisis is past, and then leaders will be elected by the people’s will. It is simple enough, and good, and what remains of Asgard threw their support behind this change. It is done.”

Loki’s mind struggles with the soundness of his brother’s democratic reasoning against fifteen hundred years of imperial training. “You were born to be a king,” he says.

“As were you,” says Thor again.

Loki closes his mouth with an audible snap.

“Now neither of us will be,” says Thor, propelling them on. “It was, perhaps, the one solution we never saw.”

Loki shakes his head, but all argument has left him. He feels unmoored, on less steady ground than even returning to life felt like. He has rarely imagined a future that did not concern Asgard’s throne in some capacity.

Once, he thought to seize it; later, he did so; later still, he found himself content to consider a life at Thor’s right hand, helping to advise the course of their diasporic people. What else is there save Asgard?

“But what will you do?” Loki manages.

“Do?” Thor has led them from the main path onto a narrow, more scenic route, along a line of tall pine trees and craggy boulders.

“When all of this is over,” Loki says, aware then of how naive he sounds. He handwaves them through it. “Thanos defeated. Families reunited. Order restored.”

“You suppose those things are possible,” says Thor with an unexpected smile. “It is odd to hear optimism from you, Loki, though I like it well. Supposing such a thing could come to pass, and that we survived it—it is difficult to think so far into the dream that has escaped my friends and I, time and again.”

“You have done so, though,” says Loki, reading the faraway look on Thor’s face. A sudden spark of apprehension lights in Loki’s belly. “Tell me what it is.”

Thor is not looking at Loki. His gaze scans the green horizon. “I should like, I think, to travel for a while,” he says. “Rocket is an accomplished captain, and tells many tales of lands that I desire to see. I would like also to see happiness restored in places that are now so bereft.”

“Then,” Thor goes on, and suddenly his eyes with their faraway look are fixed on Loki. “We might open a school, here or on some other world that pleased us, and teach others the gifts that we were given. The idea came to me of many young people trained in our dual arts, and it was most pleasing.”

Loki blinks at Thor as though he has never seen him before in his life. “A school,” he repeats, trying to ignore how the warm concept of it blooms in his chest.

Thor nods, guides them deeper into the wood.

“A school,” Loki repeats. “You. Retired to a life of teaching. You.”

Thor tosses a rather haughty look over his shoulder. “You think me incapable of it?”

“I do not,” says Loki quickly. “Though I think you would go mad with restlessness after a few hundred years, and return to adventuring, and rescuing galaxies.”

They break through the treeline into a little clearing dense with grass and yellow wildflowers. It is as though Thor can sense that Loki needs a rest but is too proud to ask for it, and has brought them here on purpose.

Thor sits first, in a sprawl, then offers a solicitous hand to guide Loki down. He fixes Loki close under his arm. The fingers of his other hand are idly plucking at the grass, the flowers.

“That is the thing, brother,” says Thor slowly. “We do not have hundreds of years.”

Sharp fear spikes up Loki’s spine. He whips his head to look at Thor in profile, but Thor will only gaze downward, examining the petals that have come loose.

“Thor,” says Loki. “What did you do?”

“The price was this,” says Thor. “We will live out the lifespan of so many others around us—a human lifetime, not the years given to Asgardians or to the Jötunn. We will age and grow old. You and I are bound; should one perish the other will follow, and, Loki, know that when the witch told me this bargain, I wanted to laugh in her face, for it seemed to me far more of a prize than a price.”

Loki finds himself kneeling before Thor in the grass, shaking his brother’s shoulders. “No,” he says. “Thor, no. How could you?”

Thor’s eyes—one the blue Loki has always known, the other, amber-colored and new—Thor’s eyes regard him mournfully. “I know it was much for me to presume,” he says. “Taking away your own years also, binding you to me for a length of time that once would have passed in a blink for us. I told you, I have been terribly selfish. I am sorry.”

“You would apologize to me?” Loki shakes Thor again, this time with greater violence. “You idiot—you complete and utter imbecile. You’d rob the universe of all the good that you might do—all the light you’d bear against darkness for thousands of years, for thousands—all the lives you’d save, the change you’d bring about, the evil slaughtered—you’d think to do this thing for the likes of me?”

Loki is gasping for breath. He feels like he had the day before, like he is drowning in oxygen. He wants to slap Thor, wants to hit him, wants to claw at him until he bleeds red and realizes that no man ever made a worse decision since time began. Thor only stares back at him, infuriatingly silent.

Loki is shouting now. “I am nothing, don’t you understand? I am small and petty and vindictive—I have amounted to nothing—I have done horrible things—I can only ever be your downfall—Gods, now I am, in truth, in full—how could you? How dare you? For sixty years, at most? Nothing, that’s nothing—I am nothing—we might have but a year, or less—madness, you’ve gone mad—”

Surely it is Loki who has descended into disorder—the words are ripped from him, the words are clawing their way out of his throat, while he shakes Thor and beats his fists against Thor’s immovable chest, as though some common sense might be hammered back into Thor’s damnfool heart.

At length, however, Loki’s hands are caught by Thor’s, who presses them together between his own; and Thor is also kneeling now, facing Loki in the grass.

“Loki,” Thor says quietly, into the onslaught, “I would have done it for a single day.”

Loki collapses against him, racked with sobs of anguish and outrage. Thor’s arms circle around and hold on, and they stay like that so long that the sun starts to sink down overhead.

“Come,” says Thor at last. His lips are pressed to Loki’s hair. “It grows cold.”

All of the strength he found before seems to have left Loki’s limbs. He does not protest when Thor lifts him into his arms and sets them off like that.

Loki hides his face against Thor’s neck so that he needn’t look at his face. “Damn you,” he says with vehemence.

Thor almost sounds amused, damn him, damn him. “This is why I did not tell you yesterday,” he says gently.

“I despise you,” says Loki. “You are the stupidest man I’ve ever met.”

“It’s not reversible,” Thor says. “You can’t goad me into changing my mind.”

Loki slumps further in Thor’s arms. “Why,” he says at last. “Tell me why.”

“I have told you many reasons already,” says Thor. “How much I missed you. How dearly I wanted for your guidance. How deeply I found that I love you. How selfish I was on all counts.” Thor’s grasp tightens around him. “The truth of the matter is that the promise of one lifetime with you is more precious than a hundred thousand years without you. The math was simple.”

“You are terrible at mathematics,” snaps Loki, his face burning. “You drove three separate tutors to leave Asgard entirely so that they might not be compelled to teach you again.”

Thor’s laughter radiates throughout Loki’s body. “I had forgotten that,” he says. “And in the end, who was it that drilled enough into my thick head to let me pass the fourth tutor’s tests?”

Loki freezes the sarcastic retort on his tongue, for he can hear how Thor swallows and takes a breath, in preparation to speak again, and all Loki can do is cling to him.

Thor says: “Don’t you see, brother? I might be at the forefront of battle, but I had you at my back when I won my greatest victories. How well have I ever fared without you? You saved me so many times there is no way to count them—from some danger, or from myself, or most often the two together: the danger I would find by not following your counsel. I do not know who I am when you are gone from me, and every time I have been forced to live that way, life feels cheap and purposeless. While there remains some chance that we may be together, I will always pursue it.”

“You are an insufferable, pathetic, incurable romantic,” Loki mutters.

“That is true,” says Thor. “I have not yet shown you just how much that is true.”

Loki shivers, and not from the cold. When they arrive back at the compound, he asks Thor to take him straight to bed.

Thor clearly intends to leave him there to rest, but Loki catches his wrist. “Show me, then.”

Thor’s surprised expression is a co-mingling between obvious desire and an abundance of caution. “You aren’t well enough to—”

“Bullshit,” spits Loki, still aching and so, so angry. Furious is a far better feeling than feeling helpless in the face of what Thor has done. He starts to strip out of his Migardian clothing. The mixed garments, pieced together from Thor’s friends, fit him ill. “You think I can’t lie back while you fuck me?”

Thor’s eyes go dark. “No, but—”

“No, but,” Loki sing-songs meanly. He throws the shirt as far from him as he can, works on skimming down the trousers. “You say you want me so much you’d give up the life of a god,” he says, the words like shards of glass in his throat. “Well, have at me then. Take your reward. I think you’ll find the bargain rather lacking. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m good in bed, but not renouncing-immortality-good, you know? What do you think, brother? Not so much to look at, am I, when you consider how you got it?”

“I think you are the most stunning sight that I have seen,” says Thor. “If you knew the empty nights I lay alone and wished for nothing more than you before me, you would understand.” He crouches beside the bed, takes up one of Loki’s hands and kisses the palm of it. “Loki, my love, not like this.”

Loki wants to punch Thor clean across the face. It occurs to Loki, for a molten-hot moment, that he could destroy Thor, here and now, finish it between them for good. All he need do is destroy himself, and Thor will follow.

Instead he is horrified to feel the pinprick of tears threaten his eyes. His vision blurs.

“How, then,” Loki snarls, and when Thor gets to his feet, shaking his head, Loki shouts, “How!” at his retreating back, but Thor is already out the door and closing it behind him.

Then Loki lies dazed and unmoving and choking on unshed tears, trying to understand why a morning so wondrous turned into a night so fraught.

He tries to think through it, tries to make any possible sense out of the choice that Thor made, the price Thor paid, but he only grows more incredulous and irate by the moment. He tries to—

The door bangs open, the doorway framing Thor in the light from the hall. Lightning crackles from Thor’s fingertips, goes out when his hands become fists. Thor stalks back into the bedroom the way he enters a battlefield.

“Fine,” says Thor. “Since you asked.”

In the skies outside the compound there’s an echoing boom of thunder.

Thor is tearing his own clothing off as he goes, naked by the time he reaches the bed, huge and nude and gorgeous beyond all descriptives as he climbs in and straddles Loki’s body. Loki’s mind blanks out, loses all the words for describing. He gazes up at Thor slack-jawed.

“You want to know how?” Thor says. “How I have thought to have you in my bed—these last months since I lost you, and all my life before? Then I will tell you, Loki,” he says, ducking his head. “Listen closely. I always start at your neck, like this—this spot exactly, where I touched you so many times, when I thought that I should not.”

He puts words to deed, kissing and laving his tongue along Loki’s neck, sucking a fierce blood bruise into the juncture of Loki’s shoulder, sucking so hard that Loki gasps and then groans. Loki arches shamelessly beneath Thor, not knowing what to do in the face of this unexpected ambush.

“Yes,” says Thor against his throat, “that is like the sound I imagined you would make; only it is far better than I imagined. Then, brother—are you listening?—then I claim every part of you that I can with my mouth, and I am convinced I can attend to every part; and I leave many more marks along the way, so that there is no mistaking that you are mine.”

“Thor—”

Thor’s mouth seems to be everywhere at once, hot and possessive, lingering indeed to add redblue bruises—on Loki’s hip, the tender inside of his thigh, his wrist by the pulsepoint, the tendon at his ankle.

Thor’s teeth often drag in the wake of his mouth and tongue, and now the sounds that Loki is making are frequent and incoherent, his world narrowed down to the circumference of Thor’s lips moving across his skin.

Thor parts his thighs again and slides between them, slides down. He drops a lazy sort of kiss to Loki’s cock, which has been hard since Thor straddled him; and Thor says, “Sometimes I spend whole hours with my mouth on your cock, never letting you come though you beg me—but I think today is not a day given to teasing. Do you agree? Yes? Then there is only one last remaining place to claim,” and then he is tonguing his way inside Loki, careful and confident about it in the same breath.

Loki bites his own knuckles so hard that he draws blood. Helplessly, he spreads his legs and lifts his hips so that Thor can work deeper. It is as though every time Thor touches him there is an explosion under his skin, and Loki is buffeted by such a wave of aftershocks that he can no longer hold still.

He reaches for Thor, feeling all of him that he can grasp, gripping desperate hands into his hair and tugging in encouragement; and when he does that Thor works his tongue wickedly in such a way that Loki all at once becomes intimate with the expression seeing stars.

“Thor,” Loki says, then with increasing urgency, “Thor.”

Thor pulls away, glances up. His expression is ferocious, focused. “I am very busy, Loki.”

“Brother, please,” Loki says, suddenly so far past caring about anything save this that he has forgotten all else. “What happens next?”

“Always one to skip ahead,” chides Thor, biting into the meat of Loki’s thigh in a punishment that makes Loki keen instead.

Thor gets up and vanishes into the bathroom, and for a suspended, shocky moment, Loki’s brain tries to come back online, but the connection falters when Thor returns with a small bottle in his hand.

“Next,” says Thor, resuming the narrative, “next you take my fingers. How many do you think you can manage? In my imaginings I stop at four, but I do not have to.” Then slick fingers are against Loki’s skin, Thor’s thumb circling his entrance as though in consideration.

When Thor meets Loki’s gaze again some of the bravado is gone. “If I do this I cannot go back,” he says quietly. “I will never be able to go back to before.”

“Oh, I see,” says Loki, rolling his eyes at this sincerity, not unexpected, and so very Thor he must keep from laughing, “was your tongue not enough to convince you?”

Even so goaded the first breach of Thor’s finger inside him is astonishing, a revelation. Loki says, “Fuck,” with feeling, and Thor says, sounding stunned, “Brother,” and then they stare at each other in heady silence as Thor presses on.

“When I thought on this,” murmurs Thor from between his knees, after what feels like a long while and not nearly long enough, “I did not know that you could be this tight, yet still yield this beautifully for me.”

“Flattery will get you more fingers,” says Loki, and Thor, surprised into a grin, kisses Loki’s knee and is quick to comply.

Loki focuses on the extraordinary sensation—the extraordinary knowledge—that those are Thor’s capable fingers working so diligently, Thor’s clever fingers that seek to please, that succeed in making him gasp and writhe.

When he looks down there is Thor, so lovely and so loved. There is Thor, who has given up so much for him, too much. There is Thor, waiting, as he ever has, as both of them have waited.

And Loki thinks he can at last understand the choice that Thor made, for he knows then with perfect certainty that he would have made it himself, had Thor been the one lost to him. How gladly he would have made it. How easily.

“Come here,” says Loki, and Thor does.

He balances over Loki, his cock hard and thick and ready between them. Loki reaches for the bottle and slicks Thor’s length himself. That length is more than considerable—Loki’s hand keeps going and going, but all the usual quips are caught in Loki’s throat.

There is only this: Loki guides Thor into him, and Thor thrusts in slow and deep. Both of them are quiet as it happens, though Thor kisses him, and Loki bites Thor’s lip. Thor opens up Loki’s body unimaginably on his cock, and Loki wraps his legs around Thor’s hips, wraps his arms around him, takes all of him.

“Loki?” says Thor, holding still.

“Yes, brother,” Loki says. “Yes.”

After that there is nothing to hold them back, no barrier left between them, and Thor is trying to be careful but Loki urges him quickly past that. So what if he was recently dead, he tells Thor, he is now quite unexpectedly and spectacularly alive, and he wants nothing of gentleness.

Soon enough the force of Thor’s thrusts is such that the bed knocks against the wall, again and again and again and again and again, it is possible that they will ruin the bed and topple the wall.

Loki cares not. His body is alive in ways it has never been before, aware of Thor absolutely everywhere, everywhere they touch electric. He has ceased to care, also, about any sort of vocal restraint; he moans whenever Thor moves just right, which is often, and sometimes he begs; he licks the salt of sweat from Thor’s neck; he holds Thor’s lower lip between his teeth.

He is rabid, he realizes, to touch Thor—once begun there is no stopping Loki, he has been wanting to explore this bicep for centuries, and that shoulder blade for a thousand years; Thor’s marble-carved buttocks fit just so in his hands; and Thor’s cock fits him so well neither of them know what to make of it.

“You feel …” Thor says after a demonstration of stamina that luckily does not destroy the wall, but gauges vast dents into in the plaster. “I do not have the words.”

“Good words or bad words?” Loki asks, rolling his hips in time, glad to have regained the wits he lost in the first shock of it.

“Good ones,” says Thor on another thrust that inspires Loki to set teeth into Thor’s shoulder. “Very good words. Exceptional words.”

“You can just say ‘exceptional,’” Loki suggests.

Thor grins. His hair has gone dark with sweat, all of him is glistening; it is unfair that such exertion could make him look all the more breathtaking. “No. I mean to say, yes, but that is not it.”

“Extraordinary,” Loki provides helpfully. “Remarkable. Exquisite. Unparalleled.”

“Yes and yes and yes and yes,” Thor agrees, punctuating each word with an outstanding—should Loki have offered outstanding as an option?—drive of his cock, “but I—I do not know if the words yet exist for how it feels to be inside of you.”

“Complete,” says Loki, muffled against Thor’s shoulder.

“What did you say, brother?”

“I said, stop dawdling and really fuck me, Thor. I have places to be.”

“What places?”

“Places,” says Loki. “Oh,,” he groans. “Yes, like that.”

“You have exactly zero places,” says Thor, “outside of this bed, where I intend to keep you.”

“And when your—ah, ah, ah—when your friends return?” Loki wants to know.

“You would have them watch?”

“I truly, truly despise you,” Loki says, and Thor responds to that by following Loki’s injunction to really fuck him; now the wall is trembling dangerously, the entire structural integrity of the compound may be threatened.

“Brother,” Loki manages at length, “spend within me before you take the whole house down.”

Thor wraps his hand around Loki’s cock, stroking him to the rhythm they have made. “Come with me, then.”

“Such confidence,” Loki tries, but it is all bluster—he gives himself over to it, surrendering to the pure pleasure that crashes over him and has him tighten up on Thor, who exclaims Loki’s name like an invocation above him.

Loki feels his own profound release in the space between them, feels the way he stripes wet across their bellies and Thor’s fingers, feels the shape of Thor’s name on his lips, how Thor steals it by kissing him. Thor sinks back in, one last time, drawn impossibly far, and the hot spill of him is such that Loki cannot remember what it was ever like to be cold.

They stay like that, by mutual, unspoken accord, for a long while. When Thor pulls out of him at last, Loki’s first instinct is to protest the move on principle, but in the end he forces himself to lie still. Then he finds he has few options but to lie still.

“Loki?”

“What do you want now?”

“You’re shaking, brother.”

Loki is able to squint at Thor, an exertion that feels like an accomplishment. “You go try sleeping with a fertility god and see what happens.”

Thor’s tone shifts from concern to warm amusement. “Then you are well?”

“Define ‘well.’”

“Have I pleased you?”

“Define ‘pleased.’”

“Loki—”

“Oh, shut up, Thor,” Loki snaps, his arm stretching across Thor’s stomach, delighting to feel the evidence of his own pleasure drying on those chiseled planes. “You were there. You know what that felt like. Your cock is magical and I emerge a changed man.”

“Do not tease, for once,” Thor says, but he is laughing all along the lines of Loki’s body where they are still pressed together.

“For once, I do not tease,” Loki says. “It’s the truth, more’s the pity.”

“My cock is—”

“I said shut up, Thor.”

“Loki?”

“Please let me rest. I was dead yesterday. I am not yet as limber as I’d like.”

“How I love you,” says Thor.

“Harrumph,” says Loki. But he lets Thor gather him up in his arms, and he sleeps with his head pillowed on Thor’s shoulder.

* * *

When they wake up Loki is feeling a great deal more limber. Thor has him on his hands and knees, his teeth fixed at the base of Loki’s neck, and it’s as easy between them as if they have always done this.

It’s so good. It’s so good that once started it is quite impossible to stop, and they spend the day finding new and inventive surfaces to fuck upon. Thor takes him on the kitchen counter at breakfast, burning the eggs this time. Thor lays him out on the billiard table in the basement, and Loki quite enjoys the burn of the green felt against his bare skin. On their after-dinner walk Loki pushes Thor down on the wooden bridge and straddles him there, rides him hard until the creak of wood grows ominous.

They break three chairs, a bookshelf, the pommel horse in the gym, and several beakers in Dr. Banner’s laboratory, thankfully empty.

“You’re going to be in so much trouble,” says Loki as Thor backs him up against the pristine white wall in a meeting room.

“I care not,” says Thor, and the rule-breaking from him is so delectable that Loki lets Thor lift him and fuck him into the wall, Loki’s nails quite thoughtfully scratching down Thor’s back instead of scrabbling at the paint.

“I think this has been the finest day of my life,” Thor says, when they collapse late at night on the floor of Thor’s bedroom after their final bout, too spent to move to the bed. The pulled-down quilt suffices.

“How discouraging for tomorrow,” says Loki, and Thor kisses him.

* * *

In the middle of the night, Thor wakes up and collects Loki to transfer them to bed. Loki is content to sleep through it, but cracks an eye when Thor lets out a soft, surprised exclamation.

No one is more surprised than Loki to find herself like this; she had not, she thinks, intended it, at least not consciously, but here she is.

“Stop gaping at me,” she says, resisting the urge to draw the sheet up over her body. “I expect you have seen a naked woman before?”

Thor bows his head, chastised, to press a kiss to the back of her hand. “I apologize, sister,” he says. When he glances up again his eyes are blazing, brilliant. “I have at that, though never one so captivating.”

It is not the first time that she has shown herself to Thor in this skin; but it is, of course, the first time wearing only skin.

“Oh, all right,” Loki says, before Thor’s hungry look can devour her. “If only so that you’ll spare me any more compliments like that one. Next you’ll try and tell me that line has actually worked for you before.”

“The sight of you has driven away the memory of any other woman,” says Thor. “I’m sure I cannot recall.”

Loki hits him in the face with a pillow. But she lets him crawl over her, where his mouth seeks out her breasts at once—how like a man—and she sighs to hide the shivery pleasure this induces. The bristle of his beard on her skin feels unbelievable now, not that she’ll let him know it.

When Thor can be coaxed away at long last from her nipples, he trails enquiring fingertips up the outside of her thigh, gentlemanly enough, Loki supposes; she lays her own fingers over his before he can venture further.

“I,” Loki starts, stops, maddened by how easily heat rises to her cheeks. “Thor, I—I have never been with anyone in this body,” she says. “Have a care at first.”

She tries to sound flippant about it, but her heart is beating fast, she finds, then faster still when Thor draws back. She ought not to have told him. How foolish she must seem. Fifteen hundred years of inexperience. Ridiculous.

Thor reaches for her hand again, folds it in his own. Her hand looks so small. “Truly, sister?”

“No,” says Loki bitterly, “I thought to entice you with every man’s fantasy of deflowering a centuries-old virgin.”

Thor looks confused at that, and in the end she takes pity on him. “Of course I did not,” she says. “Who would I have trusted save you?”

His expression then is of such sweet admiration and adoration that Loki knows that she will have him. That she wants him now—as she has always wanted him. She starts to pull him down towards her to indicate that without further preamble, for the right words in this are not known to her yet.

“Are you certain?” says Thor, doing a far too earnest thing, which is to touch her lips and cheek with a feather-soft fingertip. “You would let me have this honor?”

“Not if you keep saying things like that,” says Loki. “Put your mouth to better use.”

And oh, he does. He does. Thor buries his head between her legs for so long that she loses count of the number of times he brings her to pleasure with his able lips and adept tongue.

He is so profoundly skilled therein that she would fly into a rage were she capable of anything save crying out and running her fingernails through his hair to fix him in place.

How dare Thor be so masterful where she is so untried. It is, perhaps, the most out of her depth that she has ever felt around her brother, but she keeps forgetting to mind as he torments and teases her with his lush mouth and knowing fingers.

When he enters her at last Loki is so well-prepared, so loose-limbed with satisfaction, that there is no pain at all. Thor moves carefully, overly attentive and watching her face for reaction, but she shakes her head, and speaks his name as a plea not to stop.

Thor kisses her and kisses her, he won’t stop kissing her, and her breath catches to feel how different it is to hold him inside of her like this. She soon learns how she can tighten all around him in such a way that he gives a breathless moan she has never heard from him before. The power is fast intoxicating.

He rocks them slowly and leisurely and gorgeously that first night, a change from their rough acrobatics of late, his hand slipping back between her legs as he thrusts to introduce ecstasies decadent and new.

She is glad of the gracefulness of movement that he uses with her, he who so often prefers to hack and slash; still, after she comes down once more from gasping, she fixes him with a pointed look.

“You needn’t treat me as though I am fragile, just because I am a woman,” Loki tells him.

“If I have done so, it is only because your skin deceived me, and I thought you made of porcelain,” answers Thor.

Loki groans for several reasons. “You are unbelievable. Please do not say that women have fallen so easily for these preposterous statements in the past.”

Thor smiles against the skin of her throat as he kisses her there. His hips give a sensuous push; his cock slides slick and deep. “It is not that they have been easily flattered, no,” he admits. “It is more like a game. Women are so sharp-eyed; and so we try for distracting endearments and bring gifts in the hopes that you won’t see right through us.”

“That’s a losing game,” says Loki, but now she is smiling also.

“Indeed,” says Thor. “The oldest one.”

He is faster here to unravel than when he is buried in her other body—she supposes that this is new to him, too, to have her like this; and he has shown great restraint in holding back his own pleasure for so many hours, and sharing so much of her own. She curls a leg around his back, urging him to completion, and he makes a grateful, stimulating sound; but then his motion stutters.

“Wait,” pants Thor. “I—Loki, is it safe?”

It is far too long since she wore this shape, for she nearly forgot the blessings and trials of womanhood. She gives a short nod, which is enough to assure Thor and let him chase his end inside of her—but she is still thinking about it even as his cock and fingers and his mouth on her breast bid her follow him once more. When he fills her then with his seed it is no mere figure of speech.

Thor lies beside her afterward, carding his fingers through her long hair, and she knows that he is thinking on it also. He is thinking so loudly that she sighs to cut through the ungreased wheels turning in his brain.

“Nothing would keep,” she explains, unsure of how to speak of this, “unless I chose to stay in this form that long.”

Thor presses his lips together, nods. His eyes flash.

“You might well ask me,” says Loki, exasperated, “before you explode and injure yourself.”

He draws a line from her breastbone down to her navel with one finger. “Is it something that you might—that you might consider someday, sister?” His own phrasing is awkward now; they are so awkward in this, suddenly a pair of ungainly foals.

“Undead less than seventy-two hours, and already you would see me swell with child,” Loki says, trying for humor, which usually does not fail her—but everything is failing her now. This is unknown territory in an alien land.

“I did not say that,” says Thor. His expression is far too serious, bereft of any humor at all. “I would not suggest such a thing in the world that we have now.”

Loki shuts her eyes. When she opens them again Thor is studying the curve of her cheek with the intensity of a portrait-painter.

Loki says, not knowing what she will say until she says it: “In truth, I do not know. It always seemed such a total impossibility. Circumstances being altered—” Time; they have so little time. “—I do not know.”

“Nor do I,” says Thor. “It is well enough for the thought to exist.”

“It is well,” Loki agrees cautiously.

“Then to more pressing business,” says Thor, face split by a blinding smile, satisfied and self-satisfied. “Say if I succeeded in pleasing you, or if i might labor further in your service?”

“Norns, not this again,” Loki says. “Brother, you are conditioned to be insufferable to me in all the forms I take.”

“And I, bound to adore you no matter that form.”

“See if I turn into a snake next,” Loki mutters.

“My most admired serpentine sibling—”

She hits him dead-on with the pillow.

* * *

Loki opens his eyes to a faint dawn light. Thor is awake beside him, turned toward him, has been watching him sleep.

“Well, that isn’t unnerving at all,” says Loki around a full-bodied stretch.

“I do not know how I can be so lucky,” says Thor, by way of answer.

Loki pokes a finger into Thor’s chest; won’t tell him that it is a delight to feel how his chest won’t give way in the slightest; won’t tell him that there is anything devastatingly attractive in being a hulking wall of muscle.

“Save such cloying declarations for your sister,” Loki suggests. “She likes them, though she’ll never tell you that.”

Thor gives a lopsided grin. “I thank you for the advice.”

“Wasn’t that a fun and entirely unexpected adventure,” says Loki, somewhat ill at ease about it. “I don’t think you’ll be content until you’ve had me every which way there is to have.”

“You’re right,” Thor agrees too readily. “I strive to know all of you, brother.”

He’s still staring at Loki, so intent that Loki starts to feel as though Thor’s gaze will flay skin from bone.

“Stop that,” Loki snaps. “What are you going on about?”

Thor seems to be considering whether he should speak further—a sure sign that he should not. But logic and caution rarely keep him back, and soon enough he is saying, soft, “You have never shown me your Jötunn shape.”

“No,” says Loki, horror-struck.

Unconscionably, Thor is still speaking. “I should like very much to see you.”

You, Thor dares say, you, not it. Not monster. You. Monster—

“No,” Loki says, the word wrenched from him, bitterness filling him like bile. He scrambles across the bed, away from Thor, keeps his back to the wall. “No. You go too far.”

“But I—”

“You do not know what it is you ask,” Loki says, lip curling back to bare teeth. “Do not ask me again.”

Once Thor would have argued with him, rash and arrogant as anything. He has grown wiser, for he chooses to lay down the hand he extended toward Loki, and he nods. “Be at ease, Loki. I am sorry. I will not, if that is your wish. I did not mean to offend you.”

“Offend me,” Loki repeats. “Offend me!”

“Please,” says Thor, and lucky for him he stays where he is. “I do not understand.”

“Since that is your natural state, I would think you more comfortable in it,” Loki says savagely, quite needing then to be cruel. He laughs, shrill and cutting, at Thor’s flummoxed expression.

“You see yourself as so great, so magnanimous, the mighty Thor, so kind and forgiving and generous of heart—you think that it will be nothing to look at me and find there the face of an enemy you hated and hunted, whose blood you howled to spill? You expect that fifteen hundred years of learned disgust and stewed prejudice will vanish, because you try and make yourself forget what I am, and can bring yourself to fuck me while I wear this Aesir skin? Do you think that two days of fucking has fixed all this in you, and that your stomach would not turn to gaze upon me blue-skinned and black-horned and red-eyed, like a devil out of your Midgardian hell? Do I offend you, brother?”

“Indeed you do not,” says Thor, looking as though Loki has blown him back with a foul blast of magic Loki dearly wishes then that he could summon. “I deserve every word. I take no pride in the arrogant fool that I was—I have renounced him, and I will spend what years I am given trying to atone for where I was so short-sighted. But, Loki,” and his blue eyes are stupidly, unspeakably sincere, “I do not make myself forget. I never forget. I would not lose anything about you.”

Loki’s smile is dangerous, a curved knife. “Is that so,” he says. “Then you have some Jötunn-fucking perversion, is that it? How many other monsters did you bed before you slew them?”

Thor is on his feet. “Stop this,” he says, suddenly angrier than Loki can remember seeing him. “Say what ill you would of me—I beg that you do—but I will not hear you speak of yourself in this manner. You cannot think I should stand to let anyone—even you—say such things about my brother.” He strides forward forcefully, and Loki, caught out in surprise, can only gape at him, shrinking back against the wall as Thor advances.

But Thor marches past, headed to the bookshelf in the far corner. He yanks free a broad stack of books and scrolls from the top shelf.

Loki has not yet had the time—given their other activities—to investigate the library that Thor amassed, but as Thor returns to the foot of the bed he can see that most of the books are old, very old, near to crumbling; on other spines he sees words written in a range of languages from many worlds far beyond Midgard’s stars.

Thor pours the lot of it at Loki’s feet. “What little I could do while you were gone from me, to feel that sometimes you were closer,” he says, and Loki looks up from the books, astounded to hear Thor’s voice tight with tears. “I collected and read every work of history and lore that I could find or buy or barter for on the people who first made you.”

“What,” Loki says, staring.

“It is a pathetic start, I know, a tiny step backward from the long road of prejudice you described, but I—Loki, do you not understand, even now, what place you have in my heart? That you have all of it? There is nothing about you that I do not wish to know, so that I might love you the more for knowing more of you.”

Thor is moving to the closet next, blindly grabbing after clothes; then he turns on his heel and is gone with a slam of the door.

Loki sits staring for a long time. When movement seems like an option again, he reaches for the scroll on the top of the pile, unwinds it as though in a daze. Instead of a history he finds it full of painstaking notes, written in Thor’s scrawling, unmistakable script:

The Jötunn are a noble folk who trace their lineage all the way back to—

“Fuck,” says Loki, scrubbing his face with the palm of his hand. “Fuck.”

He spends an hour or more with the books, paging through them, uncaring that there are soundless tears trickling down his cheeks.

Thor does not come back—Loki does not blame him. It would be so much the better for Thor if he never came back at all.

Finally he gathers up the literary collection—it is impressive, really, and touching in a way that Loki does not know how yet to grapple with—and he returns the books and scrolls to their shelf.

He fusses over puzzling out an efficient order of organization to them that he knows is a distraction from the maelstrom of his thoughts. Then he goes into the bathroom, refusing to look at himself in the mirror-glass, and he runs a scalding shower, letting the water serve as a rebuke.

Only when he steps out at last does he stand before the mirror. His skin is an angry pink-red from the heat. His dripping hair is soon combed smooth of the tangles acquired from rolling so much against the bedsheets.

He has long been a vain creature, working hard upon his body and his appearance in an effort to differentiate himself from Thor. No one could stand next to Thor and hope to outshine him; that was impossible; but Loki could stand in stark contrast.

His hair worn sleek and dark as night to Thor’s unruly sun-gold.

His limbs, lithe and supple where Thor was solid mass.

He favored clothing of extravagant cuts and cloths, preferring lines that flaunted the feminine in him. Thor put on whatever came first to hand, armor clunky and practical.

If Thor would have wings upon his helm, Loki walked beside him wearing horns.

On the ship carrying Asgard away from its ruin Thor had asked Loki for the first time to help him dress. “I know not what a king should wear in such a hall as this,” Thor had said, and Loki had thrilled and smiled and known exactly. He’d wrapped Thor in black leather, with a jet breastplate that set off the gleam of the eye still left to him, and brought some order to the glorious hair the Grandmaster’s henchmen had so callously hacked away; and when he was done a king had stood before him.

Loki has not tried to use magic since Thor brought him back to this life. It was drained away with the rest of his strength, and has been as slow returning; but he can feel it now flooding through him and pooling in his fingertips. Illusions are always the easiest.

He looks at himself once more in the mirror, the web of bruises strung across his body from where Thor’s hands have gripped so tightly, where Thor’s mouth has sought and marked.

Then he closes his eyes, and when he opens them he is wearing a belted tunic of dark, rich green; he has made the form not after Asgard’s archaic fashion, nor Sakaar’s eccentric one, nor Midgard’s unadorned style—he has dressed, he thinks, like himself. Whatever that means. He is not sure anymore, if ever he was.

He keeps his feet bare. He likes how quietly he can move, he always has. When he slips downstairs it is without sound.

Thor is in the kitchen. The relief that Loki feels to see him bent over the sink tells him many things. He heard an outside door slam after Thor’s leaving, and wondered if it would take his brother a long while to return.

But Thor is washing dishes with fixed, methodical energy—maybe a bit too much of it, there’s a wet broken bowl on the countertop—and Loki is able to approach without giving himself away.

Once, he would have used this to painful advantage, driven a knife in low on Thor’s back and taunted him about letting his guard down.

Now, Loki goes to him. He touches his forehead between Thor’s shoulder blades. Slides his arms around him, Thor so broad yet still a circumference he can span.

Thor startles but does not tense. He shuts off the faucet.

“Forgive me,” Loki says to Thor’s back. It’s easier not to have to see his expression in this. “You are too good. How are you so good?”

Thor’s hand, damp and sudsy, comes up to clasp over Loki’s at his midsection. “There is nothing to forgive. It is I who should apologize, for what I thoughtlessly asked of you, and for leaving you like that.”

“Let me have this one,” Loki tells him. Thor goes quiet. Eventually he ducks his head in a nod.

How long they stand like that Loki cannot say. It is strange and rare to hold Thor in his arms, and not the other way around—to comfort and calm Thor, and not need to be the one reassured.

“Sit,” says Loki at length, though reluctant to let him go. “I’ll make some food since I made our breakfast so late.”

Thor turns in his embrace. His eyes widen at the sight of Loki, and he rubs the edge of one silken sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. “You look—well,” he says. “You look far beyond well. Your magic—?”

“Back, to some degree,” Loki says, preening only a little at the praise. A little. “Not, unfortunately, enough yet to produce something delicious for us out of thin air.”

“But you did,” says Thor, smoothing the tunic down Loki’s sides, lingering as his hands dip lower.

“Sit down.” Loki shoves Thor toward a stool across the counter, but he’s smiling.

“When did you ever learn to cook?” Thor wants to know. “They wouldn’t let you in the kitchens either.”

“I did not,” Loki admits. He can concoct fantastic potions from nettles and stardust, but not prepare a soup. He works instead on piecing together passable sandwiches from the supplies in the refrigerator. He brews them a strong pot of coffee, a skill they both knew well enough from morning campfires; it is not so different using an electric stove. It is not so different from potion-making.

A thought occurs to him as he sets cup and plate before Thor. “How did you pick it up, what you’ve made for us these last days?”

Thor tucks into his sandwich. “Jane,” he says around a bite. “She was very busy. It was something I could do for her.”

Loki has not been keen to ask. He is surprised when his stomach does not knot with fearsome jealousy, as it ever did. Instead he feels only curious, and oddly sad. “She is—?”

“Gone,” says Thor. The rest of the sandwich vanishes under his next, convulsive swallow. “We will restore her also.” It is said as almost more of a plea than a statement. Loki can hear how badly he wants to have it confirmed.

“This world will surely benefit from her brilliance thereafter,” Loki says neutrally, and, he thinks, rather genially. It is a fine thing not to feel jealous. If Jane were to appear at that moment he would make her a cup of tea.

Thor’s face is creased with sadness but Loki earns a soft, surprised smile for that.

“You loved her,” Loki says.

“I did,” says Thor, unhesitant, “as best I knew how. She was so much cleverer than I. As I told another lady—as ladies often do, she saw right through me.”

Loki hmms, sips at his coffee. “You have a type, dear brother.”

“Raven-haired geniuses,” Thor agrees. “I have never been subtle.”

This renders Loki willing to indulge the topic further. He cradles the mug in his hands, staying quiet, sensing that this is good for Thor to speak through. For all of Thor’s quick generosity of feelings it has ever been hard for him to examine wounds.

Even so, his next words startle Loki. “She knew how I felt about you,” Thor says, investigating his empty plate, “after Svartálfheim, she knew.”

Loki feels a sharp pain run through his chest. His jaw clicks when it drops. “You told her?”

“I did not need to tell her anything,” Thor continues. “She witnessed how we were together. Little escaped her quick mind. I returned maddened with grief. For a time I could do naught but mourn you. One day, she asked me if it was so.”

“Oh, Thor,” says Loki. He sets down the coffee and takes his brother’s hand. “You are such a fool. I was dead.” That you knew, Loki does not remind him.

Thor lifts his shoulders in a shrug, not caring to deny the charge. “Jane and I parted as friends,” he says. “I hold her in the highest regard. She did not quite understand, I think, how it was between you and I; but she saw, and she knew. She was right to call for an end.” Thor tosses back his coffee as though taking down a draught of liquor.

Loki chews his lip, debating, then unable to stop himself from asking. “What did you tell her?”

“That I loved you beyond all else,” says Thor. “That I always would. That death does not rest so easily upon you, and that if I could find you again in this lifetime I would not be parted from you again.”

“Just exactly what one dreams of hearing their paramour declare about his treacherous sibling,” Loki says with a roll of his eyes. But he squeezes Thor’s hand.

Thor stands up abruptly. “Let’s go outside.”

“Right behind you,” says Loki, relieved.

Outside it’s much easier to breathe. They walk together around the length of the compound, silent but still joined by interlaced fingers. There was a time when Loki would have relinquished any claims to thrones or dreams of fame and infamy to be seen walking in Asgard’s gardens in such a way with Thor.

The fine weather reminds him of Asgard. It is warmer than recent days, with a high, blazing sun and only a bare handful of clouds to trouble the blue sky. A thin winding breeze stirs their hair.

“I wish we could ride,” Loki hears himself say wistfully.

It was the singular activity where they’d been evenly matched from the start—thrown into the saddle as mere babes, both grown to be highly skilled on horseback. Neither Thor’s strength nor Loki’s tricks could ever gain much of an advantage, not that they hadn’t spent years in escalating competition to try and prove otherwise.

Thor blinks. His face lights up. “Perhaps we can,” he says. “I will make some phone calls.”

“Will you, now,” says Loki, amused, but enjoying the hopeful feeling in his chest.

“Race you back,” Thor says, letting go of Loki’s hand.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Loki says, but Thor has already taken off, and with a curse and a laugh, Loki lopes after him.

The thought of riding has put them into mind of Asgard indeed, and Thor was always trying to race him somewhere or another there.

It isn’t until he is hard upon Thor’s heels and trying to trip him with a magical barrier—Thor sidesteps it—that Loki realizes he isn’t winded at all, and that breathing comes easily.

At the doorway, Thor rewards Loki’s second-place finish with a kiss that sweeps him off his feet.

* * *

“So this is what it’s like to be an Avenger,” Loki muses, watching with his arms folded as the horse trailer backs slowly up the driveway. “Ask for something outlandish and receive it within the hour.”

Thor frowns at him without heat. “The service is paid for. I thought you wanted to—”

“Oh, I do, very much,” says Loki. “I’m impressed, is all.”

“Loki,” Thor starts, then pauses; he’s been hesitant, hiding something, since getting off the phone.

Loki feels his jaw tighten. He nods. “They’re coming back,” he guesses. “Your friends.”

“Tomorrow night.” Thor seems unable, or incapable, or elaborating further.

“Back in action then, I suppose,” Loki says, trying to keep his voice even. He’s known that this could not last, that these stolen days would come to an end; still it is hard to look upon it.

“I must,” says Thor. He clears his throat. “You will work beside me?”

Loki stares at him, so surprised that he takes a half-step sideways. “They’d let me—what! A war criminal among Earth’s mightiest heroes?”

“We have several of those now,” says Thor, as though it were that simple. He ghosts his fingers across the small of Loki’s back. “We want for able hands and minds. You are richly gifted with both.”

It’s a sign of what these days with Thor has done to him that Loki feels himself nod before he has even worked through the tangled knot of considering it.

“If you think it can be so,” Loki says. Norns, but Thor has ruined him. Here he is bargaining to join the Avengers. He tries for levity. Desperately. “Will I get a costume?”

Loki may be well and truly fucked now, but the look that Thor throws him is so full of loving warmth that he stops remembering why he should care.

Thor is saved from having to reply by the arrival of the trailer. The driver hops down from his cab and Thor must busy himself with paperwork on a clipboard.

The driver, a man with a chipped-tooth smile, a cap of white hair, and the calloused hands of a farmer, looks them over without much curiosity, projecting a strong sense of it being Not His Business.

He’s the first Midgardian that Loki has seen since returning, and it’s only when the man comes closer in order to open the back of the trailer does Loki see that he isn’t as elderly as he thought—the man is bent as though beneath a great weight, the wrinkles on his forehead newly made. Above his empty smile his eyes are haunted. Thor did not exaggerate about the toll Thanos has taken, Loki thinks.

“I’ll be back for them in the evening,” the driver tells them, unlocking the trailer’s back door and sliding free a ramp. “You boys ride?”

He clucks with his tongue, and two fine thoroughbreads—one bay, one black, nearly so alike in pacing as to be brothers—emerge down the walkway. Their lines are strong and proud, their manes and coats healthy; they make pleased whinnying sounds to be back in the fresh air; the sight of them makes Loki feel something difficult to parse until he realizes that it is happy.

“Once or twice,” says Loki.

Thor claps his shoulder just a little too hard. “My brother makes a jest. They are in expert hands.”

“Eight o’clock,” says the driver with a nod, as he retrieves saddle and tack from the trailer. It’s clear that he’s in no mood for smalltalk, nor given much to wondering why they should want to ride in a world such as this; he seems glad enough to be employed. With a departing wave, he is back in the cab and driving off.

Loki goes to the horses. Horses choose him, not the other way around. They stare at each other appraisingly, then the bay ducks his head. Loki pats his flank with a thankful hand.

“Race you,” he says to Thor.

In everything riding it was a competition between them. He sees Thor’s answering grin in the periphery of his vision before they’re both diving for the gear, wrestling it out between them.

They can saddle horses mid-battle, falling-down drunk, one-handed, backwards, blindfolded. Thor is fast but Loki more precise. Each buckle feels like an extension of his hands as he works; bridle and harness glide exactly into place; not once does he hesitate. Then he is swinging himself up into the saddle just as Thor sets his boot to stirrup.

Loki doesn’t even gloat. Not overmuch, at least. He is beaming. “I win.”

“That wasn’t fair,” Thor gripes, settling in.

“It was perfectly—”

“I became distracted,” Thor says. “The look on your face when you’re concentrated like that—”

“Excuses, excuses, brother,” Loki says, but he surprises all four of them as he sidles the horse alongside Thor’s and pulls Thor into a bruising kiss. When Loki lets go, Thor’s eyes are shining.

“Thank you for this,” Loki says. Being earnest suits him like an itchy garment but there’s nothing else for it.

Thor cups Loki’s cheek with the hand not holding reins. “Do not thank me yet,” he says. “You’re about to lose again.” Then he’s off at a gallop with Loki giving chase.

They ride all afternoon, through the fields and over hills around the compound, discovering distant meadows to race and jump in.

Loki laughs in delight when his horse clears a high wooden fence in a perfect arc of a leap. The wind whips his hair as he turns to watch Thor follow after with as much grace.

Thor’s horse falls into a slow walk beside his, and for a while they pace unhurried.

“I have not heard you sound like that,” Thor says, “in a very long time.”

Loki does not deny it or seek to throw off the observation. “Buy me a horse,” he says instead.

“I will buy you a stable,” says Thor.

They lead the horses to water and then Loki drags Thor down from his saddle, pushes him back into the tall meadow grasses.

He takes up residence between Thor’s thighs and passes what feels like a delirious century swallowing Thor’s magnificent cock and sucking it and tonguing it and choking on it until Thor pulls him free with a growl. He rolls Loki onto his back beneath him and fucks into him hard and fast, as fast as they’ve been riding.

Loki gets a hand around his own cock and jerks himself to Thor’s punishing rhythm. “Race you,” Loki gasps out, and is rewarded with a startled laugh from Thor that vibrates all the way down to his bones.

Thor complies, of course—Thor is incapable of not accepting a challenge when issued—and the quick snap of his hips would be overwhelming if Loki were not so focused on his own hand, his own cock. In the end they come together, at a distance of seconds for which no clear winner can be discerned, excepting that they both have won.

“A tie,” Thor declares, kissing the tip of Loki’s nose before collapsing onto his back in the grass, breathing fast short breaths from the exertion.

Somehow it’s the little kiss that does it. Thor buried inside of him and fucking at a mad pace is not so moving as that casual, affectionate act, intimate and teasing and kind.

“I love you,” Loki says. Once said it’s irretrievable and so he says so again, turning to rest his head on Thor’s shoulder so that he needn’t gaze into his eyes—this isn’t a fairy tale, and they are not a courting couple. “Thor. I love you.”

Thor takes in a shuddering breath, lets it go free. His hand moves up and strokes through Loki’s hair, then again, again. He seems to understand that Loki does not desire a long discussion about this declaration, that Loki simply needed to have it said.

That Thor did. He puts his arms around Loki and draws him close, and Loki can feel that the bunched-up tension long present is relaxed from his brother’s bold muscles. They lie there unwound, holding onto each other, until the lateness of day bids them to ride again or lose the last few precious hours with the horses.

When the driver returns to retrieve them Loki relinquishes his bay with a mournful stroke along the horse’s neck and a sigh. They thank the man and the horses both, and return to the compound still pressed together, listing into each other's space.

“I think I could grow accustomed to a day like this,” Loki tells him, as they work side by side improvising a sort of dinner from canned foods in the pantry.

“We will have horses, wherever we come to live after Thanos is defeated,” Thor says, shaking onion salt over the beans he has carefully not burnt. “I will make sure of it, even if I have to raise them myself on a planet without horses.”

Loki pours them generous glasses of wine and drinks half of his before he ventures: “And if Thanos cannot be defeated, brother?”

It takes Thor a while to answer. He’s been looking far more refreshed and at ease these last few days—near-constant sex can be restorative, Loki supposes—but the shadows under his eyes show that he has often considered that outcome.

“The others—my friends—they cannot let themselves address such a possibility. It is the hope alone that the Gauntlet’s damage can be reversed that keeps them on their feet.” Thor looks up, looks at Loki. His eyes have gone dark. “I am not always so sure. I feel guilty that, having you back with me, I can see a way forward regardless.”

The events of the day have worked on Loki to be far more sentimental than is generally given to him. The wine also helps. “I swear to you now—if there is a way to do it that is within my power to find, I will find it.”

“I told you when you came back,” says Thor, the expression on his face so fiercely approving and appreciative that Loki would flush if the conversation were not deadly serious. “I feel you to be essential. I know it, Loki. We need your help.”

Loki rolls up his sleeves—both literally and figuratively. “Since we are so soon to return to the work at hand,” he says, “tell me some of the ways that you have tried and failed.”

They sit at the table, eating and drinking, and Thor does. It is a series of tragic stories after the great tragedy. Plots to find and capture and subdue Thanos, plots to use magic, use powerful objects, use technology, use every tool at Midgard and its allies’ disposal that might catalyze a reversal of circumstance. None have succeeded, and each has successfully worn down the Avengers’ energy and initiative.

“I will kill him,” Thor is saying, draining the dregs of his first bottle of wine. “Even if we cannot undo what he has done, one day I will kill him.”

“Of that I have little doubt,” Loki says mildly, truthfully, for there is a look of grim resolution in his brother’s eye such as he has never seen before. “I should like to assist you, or at least stand nearby, smiling.”

“He slaughtered Asgard as though we were sheep,” says Thor, pouring more wine, his grip tight upon the bottle, “as though we were less than bleating sheep. He murdered the finest man among us like livestock.” This glass vanishes in a single swallow. “Death is too good for Thanos.”

“Heimdall died a valiant death,” Loki says, letting himself feel the ache of it. “He will surely be the first to greet you in Valhalla.”

Thor says nothing. Then he says, in the softest voice Loki has ever heard emerge his mighty body: “I miss him, Loki. I miss him and Volstagg and Fandral and Hogun and Sif—” Here his voice falters. “My fearless Sif. I miss my friends. I miss Father and Mother and the Asgard that was. How have we lost it all? All?”

It’s a strange sight to see Thor so close to breaking, but Loki has been expecting it for a while. Even Thor cannot abide such grief without outlet. Especially Thor, with the soft heart that he has.

Loki reaches for his hand across the table. Clasps it. “Not all is lost,” he reminds. The role of comforter does not come naturally to him, but it is not an anomaly: he used to placate Thor in his childish rages and his fits and passions when they were small. “Asgard yet lives in a place that you have found for it, hidden among the stars. Your friends and our family stay in your heart, and—” He pauses; sentiment is so very difficult to phrase. “—and in mine. We will not soon forget them. We preserve them.”

Thor’s eyes are bright with tears. One tracks down his cheek. “You are the only thing that I have,” he says. “You are everything, Loki.”

Loki’s heart does an odd thing, which is to leap and then proceed to race very fast. There are so many different ways to respond that war within him: sarcastic, flippant, romantic, cruel, calm, indifferent.

Instead, he presses Thor’s hand, and says: “Well, what are you going to do with me?”

* * *

In bed that night Thor is different. He is worshipful in a way Loki struggles to put to words, as so many mysteries of religion escape definition.

Even the sweet attentiveness that Thor displayed with his lady-self cannot be compared to this. Thor speaks them through every touch, explains why he wishes to deliver it, begs of Loki to know his response, describes to Loki how it feels to feel him thus.

When he is inside Loki after a very long while, Loki is so moved and worn down and emotionally wrenched that he hears himself returning the favor.

Loki says, “You cannot know what it is like for me to hold you, so I will tell you. You make me believe the bards’ tales too late, damn you.”

Thor’s eyes are wide, pupils turning his blue gaze nearly black. He thrusts once, hard, smooth, sure, like a prompt. “How is that, brother?”

“All that I once thought abject nonsense,” says Loki, who has definitely had too much wine and not yet begun to realize it, “the epics about great love, love that transcends even death. I often scoffed. You will remember.”

“I do,” Thor allows, kisses his forehead. “Your criticism sent not a few musickers from court in tears.”

“I may have spoken over-hastily,” Loki admits, catching Thor by the back of the neck to fit him yet closer. “How you prove me wrong.”

They lie together afterward, tangled up, sharing air.

“I know that you have reservations about tomorrow,” Thor says eventually. “Nothing will change between us.”

“Everything will change,” Loki says, “but I suppose it needn’t be for the worse. Promise instead that when things seem dark or strange, you will remember this day, and bid me to remember it.”

“I promise, love,” says Thor. “I promise.”

* * *

“Hello,” says Loki.

The silence then is such that a pin-drop would be deafening.

The remaining Avengers, whom they have met on the lawn, disembark from the quinjet with their eyes on him.

The reactions are much as Loki expected. Natasha Romanoff is wary, brokering no nonsense. Her hand openly flirts with the weapon at her belt. James Rhodes regards him with tired curiously, with a tilted head and a hundred questions on his tongue. Steve Rogers is the most surprised. He stares unblinking at Loki, and this is the one aspect that Loki could not have anticipated—that Steve’s expression would be such a mix of hope and hunger upon seeing him.

“Son of a gun,” breathes Steve. “Would you look at that.”

Bruce Banner is the first to approach. He comes straight over to Loki and Thor, puts out his hand in offering, a gesture deeply meaningful and deeply kind when Loki has time to think back upon it later.

“It’s good to see you again, Loki,” Bruce says. He reminds the others of just how much time has passed since New York. “You seem a whole lot better than when I saw you last.”

Loki takes the offered hand, shakes firmly, gravely. “And you, Bruce,” he says on both counts.

Thor looks like he could kiss them both.

Bruce’s welcome does much to dispel the tension—that is, until Clint Barton clatters down from the quinjet.

The moment that their eyes meet, Loki can glimpse the arrow that Clint wishes to plant in his chest. He sees it—feels it, and so does Clint: Clint nods. Loki nods. The arrow will always exist between them.

But Clint’s face is the most wretchedly grieved of the lot of them; no man should have to bear what he has borne, Loki knows.

Clint does not pause to be part of the greeting party on the lawn. As he goes past, however, he says over his shoulder, “You gonna use your tricks to find a way to bring back my family?”

Everyone is watching them now.

“That is my intention,” Loki says, shocked at how earnest the words emerge—it is not mere self-preservation that propels him to speak. He tells them what he told Thor. “If it is within my power I will not rest until it is so.”

“Good enough,” says Clint, and he goes inside without a backward glance.

The strained mood is broken when a small body barrels across the lawn and hits Thor’s legs. It’s an attempt to send him toppling over that Thor manages with a laugh. Loki has seen many sights in his life, but few like that of his brother, looking delighted, bending to engage in a complicated series of welcoming hand-gestures with an upright, extremely vocal raccoon.

“I’m Rocket,” the raccoon informs Loki when he acknowledges him. “I’m at least seventy-five percent responsible for saving your dead ass, so we can discuss proper recompense later. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve earned some R&R. What does a guy gotta do to get a proper drink around here?” With another playful shove at Thor’s knee, he, too, vanishes toward the compound.

Next a regal, bald-headed woman in elaborate red dress exits the quinjet. She has a spear in her hand that looks like an extension of her body, and an air of such deadly capability about her that Loki is taken aback and instantly intrigued. She stares at him without expression, telling him that his death is easily met at her hands. But her expression softens when another passes in front of her, and she stands at attention.

“Thor!” The girl who emerges from the plane is that: a girl. Nearly a child, and yet very far from one, Loki sees: there is hard-earned wisdom already on her brow, and her sharp gaze is far-seeing. Grief and many other burdens rest heavy on her slim shoulders, but nothing can keep the brightness from her eyes.

She heads for them without hesitation, picking Loki apart with the curiosity of a natural scientist—even Bruce had not puzzled through him like this. By the time she reaches them she has reverse-engineered him, Loki thinks.

Thor gives her a gallant, courtly bow such as would make their mother proud. “Princess.” He kisses the hand that she extends. “Shuri, this is my brother, Loki, that I told you so often about.”

Loki follows Thor’s example—royalty is royalty, even on Midgard, and he will hardly be found eschewing etiquette. He bows low, and when he straightens he finds that her eyes are sparkling.

“Loki,” she says. “I am glad to meet you properly. I have so many questions.”

“It will be an honor to answer them to my ability, Princess,” Loki tells her. “I am at your service.” It’s really inappropriate for Thor to be staring at him like that in such company. His brother’s approving smile might open wide to swallow him whole. “I’m told that I have you and your country to thank for my current condition.”

Shuri inclines her head. “It was the least we could do,” she says graciously, her clever gaze alighting on Thor, “for a great hero of Wakanda.”

“I feel like we need a group hug,” says Bruce, looking around at the lot of them with relief.

“Let us begin with dinner,” says the fearsome warrior that Loki will learn is called Okoye. “The journey was a long one.”

“That,” Steve says, diving for the concept like a lifeline, “that’s a great idea, General. You think we can still get pizza delivered out here?”

“Pizza,” Loki repeats. The odd word seems to tickle his tongue.

“Oh my god,” says Rhodey.

“Oh my god,” says Natasha. “You were in New York City and never—”

“Okay, so, we’re getting pizza,” Steve says, smartly steering them all from ruminating too much upon New York. He leads the way, letting Loki draw up beside him. Thor nods at Loki when he looks back, like he’s never been so proud or pleased. “Granted, this’ll be nothing like a proper Brooklyn slice. For that, it’s all about the crust, and you need a real good sauce passed down for generations, and home-grown basil, and the cheese should—”

* * *

They order a dozen pizzas, and Loki fast learns to appreciate the delicious baked Midgardian confection. It’s not neat with the melted cheese running to strings, and it feels vaguely barbaric, eating thus with their hands—but everyone is so hungry and celebratory upon its arrival that he fails to care.

He eats his slices the way that Steve Rogers shows him, folded in half.

Loki is far from naive. He knows that none of them trust him—not even Thor, who knows and loves him enough that he knows not to trust him—and he’s aware that one false move would result in three-quarters of the room aiming a weapon at his throat, many of them happy for a reason to use it.

For Thor’s sake alone they give him the benefit of the doubt, and he is surprised to find how badly he wishes to prove worthy of it.

He mostly stays quiet, letting the thrum of conversation pulse around him, learning more from offhand remarks than he could from direct questions. It is strange to see these people from the inside as an ally instead of an enemy or an asset to seize. Begrudgingly, however, as the night wears on, he begins to understand why Thor values them so.

They are smart, the lot of them, but beneath intelligence all are deeply feeling. That seems to be the mark of an Avenger. It is not so much bravery or outlandish abilities that distinguishes them as it is the necessity of caring for the welfare of others above all else.

Once Loki would have laughed and mocked this as folly. Such a weakness it is to feel so deeply. But he looks at Thor eating pizza and all of the old instincts die on his tongue.

They are not perfect, Loki learns. They are far from perfect, profoundly flawed. Their strength comes from teamwork, from the lot of them pooling resources so that together they are more capable than apart. They have been so grievously wounded by what Thanos has done that he can see that they are propping each other up, running on fumes, sharing fumes.

The beer, wine, and liquor pour quickly that night, the rare occasion where they feel themselves off-duty. Eventually easiness and some laughter comes to bear in the fluid conversation.

For a while now Loki has felt Thor’s eyes upon him but thought that in this alone his brother might be prevailed upon to have a little sense. Not so.

Late into the evening, Thor clears his throat. “There is something that I would like to share with you, my friends,” he says, and the raucous noise around them goes quiet.

“Do not,” Loki hisses. “Thor. I will stab you even here.”

Thor ignores him, gesturing proudly to indicate Loki with the beer bottle in his hand. “Loki and I are lovers,” he announces. “He stays in my chambers and will remain there going forward.”

Silence.

A deafening pin-drop would be simply marvelous.

Loki has enough magic now to disappear, and he strongly considers it. They’re all staring, the lot of them, such a variety of disorienting expressions chasing across the myriad faces that he cannot stand to look.

Finally the Princess Shuri reaches daintily for a slice of pizza as though untroubled by the situation at hand. She is followed by Rocket cracking open a beer for himself and another that he passes to Thor.

The chatter resumes around them. Thor is beaming. Loki is the color scarlet but he has not vanished. His escalated heartbeat starts to slow. He feels incredulous, knocked over, yet his fight-or-flight response is proving unnecessary.

“You owe me fifty dollars,” he hears Natasha say under her breath to Bruce.

* * *

“Why did you do that?” Loki makes himself ready for bed with all frustration, throws his tunic—black, and new made for the formal occasion that day—across the back of the armchair rather than fold it. “Are you quite insane?”

“It would not be the first time you suggested that is so,” says Thor, sounding unfairly calm, and going about the same preparations. Loki refuses to be distracted by Thor’s bared torso, bound with diamond-cut muscles and impossibly strong limbs for days. He looks decidedly everywhere else in the room save at Thor, and Thor says, “Would you have had me lie to them?”

“Certainly you should have fucking lied to them,” Loki snaps, taking out his indignation on a pillow, which he angrily fluffs. “Or else said nothing. They are not like us, Thor. They do not understand our history.”

Thor shrugs. “Be that as it may,” he says, at least conceding the point, “they would have quickly found out anyway. That was my thinking. How could they fail to see the way I look at you, or that we share a room?”

“You were not thinking,” says Loki. But he feels himself caving in, the battle already lost. He has grown unspeakably soft. He swallows to hide his panic, turns his face away.

“Besides,” says Thor, and then he paces so purposefully around the bed that Loki stumbles back in surprise, drops his pillow. “I am not ashamed. Why should I attempt to hide what I would shout for all the world to hear?”

“You are mad,” says Loki, decisive. He raises his hands as though to ward off an attack. He should have kept hold of the pillow.

“Just so,” says Thor. There is lightning in his eyes, lightning under his skin, lighting threatening to crackle along the lines of him. “Marry me.”

Loki’s heart stops. Starts. Stops. Pauses. He cants his head, looks around for an escape. He lowers his gaze and cannot look at Thor. He cannot remember how to breathe. He remembers what it was to gasp for breath as though the air would not broker with him.

“You speak of impossible things,” he manages at last.

“Do I?” says Thor. Closer, he’s closer; why is there so much of him? “You named yourself Odinson and swore yourself to me before my world ended. Did you think I had forgotten?”

“I—” At the time, Loki hadn’t expected to ever have to account for what he knew to be his last words. “I don’t see how that’s—”

“Loki Odinson,” says Thor, and a terrific shiver seizes Loki from crown to toe. “I would have you bear that name because it is mine as much as your own.”

Loki looks up. The words come unbidden after a wrenching stretch of silence. “As you said. That is already the case.”

Thor crowds him against the wall, all of him blazing hot and heated, his eyes twin torches. ”Then perhaps we need no ceremony to affirm it.”

“Is that so,” says Loki, dry-mouthed, and more dazzled than he’s ever been. Still he cannot merely back down and give over without further commentary. “What do we need, then?”

“A consummation,” says Thor.

He has Loki first against the wall, helping to muffle Loki’s cries now that there is the danger of disturbing the others. Then Thor has him on the bed, where Loki’s cries are no quieter, and last, when the sun is rising, standing with Loki’s hands braced against the window frame and Thor’s hands settled over his, so that they can watch the approaching dawn.

“Speak it but once, as you did before,” whispers Thor into his ear as he moves, the both of them slick with sweat and unwilling to admit exhaustion but both pushed far past their limits. “Please. For me.”

“Loki,” Loki says. For the first time in a very long time the names do not burn in his mouth with anything like uncertainty or anger. All he can feel is relief. All he can feel is Thor inside of him, around him, urging him onward. All he can feel is loved. “Odinson. Loki Odinson.”

“Beloved,” says Thor. “Loki Odinson. We need never tell another soul of what has passed here this night, but know that I am sworn as though it were a high priest who bound us.”

Loki turns his head sideways so that Thor can kiss him. “Perhaps not for a while—the timing seems inappropriate to tell others of it,” he concedes, so dizzy with what he realizes is euphoria that it is Thor’s arms alone that keep him upright. “But do you really think when all of this is over that I am going to miss the chance to plan a party about me?”

* * *