Archive of Our Own ^beta

Bathrooms were an issue that they hadn’t anticipated.

The Statesman was a large ship—a freighter, meant for long-haul, inter-system journeys. It wasn’t jump-capable, so its cabins, twelve of them, with room for twenty-four crew, were comfortable. It made those long journeys easier to bear if you didn’t have to slum it, after all. Each cabin consisted of a bedroom with two berths, a communal space, and a bathroom. They weren’t enormous, but they afforded enough space for two people to share without killing each other from lack of privacy over the course of what could be a several-years-long run.

Unfortunately, the vessel was running a bit over capacity. There were seven hundred and thirty-six Asgardians on board, nine gladiators of various races, one human/Hulk, and one Frost Giant. Seven hundred and forty-seven souls. Twelve bathrooms, plus the two off the main cargo deck, and one more all the way aft. It was the least of everyone’s concerns, and yet everyone complained about it.

Constantly.

Loki wiggled his fingers under his head as he shifted on his mattress. His hand was falling asleep but he didn’t feel like moving it. With his other hand, he was balancing an empty bottle of Contraxian spiced whiskey on one fingertip, doing magic just for the sake of doing magic. He could maybe have balanced it without the aid of sorcery, but not for this length of time.

He and Thor had emptied the bottle (and several others) the previous night, gotten very drunk, very talkative, and very open with their feelings in a way that Loki had spent the better part of a millennium trying not to. He thought he might have cried. He’d certainly told Thor he was glad they were brothers. Disgusting.

Thor had probably loved every minute of it. Probably? What was he thinking? Thor had definitely loved every minute of it. And when Loki had stood up from the table in their shared cabin, swaying, Thor had caught him before he’d toppled over and helped him stagger to bed in a position that was a bit too reminiscent of Get Help for Loki’s tastes.

As Loki had tumbled into bed, drunk off that cursed Contraxian whiskey, Thor had stood over him grinning idiotically. His stupid oaf of a brother had knelt down and leaned his elbows on the mattress. “Everything’s going to be the way it always should have been, brother.”

Loki had stared down his nose at Thor and considered several different responses. “How’s that?” was what he’d finally settled on.

Thor put a hand on his shoulder. “We shouldn’t have fought. Right? We’re brothers. We shouldn’t have fought.”

Drunk Thor really had the eloquence of a poet. Closing his eyes against the way the room was spinning, Loki had said, “Right.” It was mostly to get Thor to stop talking. It was also partly because in that moment, it really felt true. They were brothers, and they never should have fought. It had brought nothing but pain. This was better, even though Loki had felt a bit like he was going to throw up.

Thor had patted Loki on the chest and said, “Good-night, brother. Sleep it off.”

“Look who’s talking,” Loki mumbled, rubbing a hand over his face, then deciding it was probably best to do what Thor said.

Then, in the morning, someone had pounded on the door and shouted something about a dispute over the bathrooms. Both Loki and Thor had sat bolt upright in their beds, then sagged practically in tandem. “This sounds like a job for someone with excellent persuasion skills,” Thor said blearily.

Loki, somehow feeling even more like he was going to throw up, laid back down and put a hand over his face to try to stop the spikes from driving themselves through his eyelids. Contraxian whiskey. Never again. “This sounds like a job for His Majesty, King Thor of Asgard.”

There was a silence, and Loki slitted his fingers to peek through them. “You’re the worst, brother,” Thor grumbled as he hauled himself out of bed.

“Possibly,” Loki replied. When Thor grunted, he amended that, “Probably.”

Anyway, several hours later, Thor still hadn’t returned, the headache had mostly subsided, and Loki no longer felt like he was going to heave the contents of his stomach into the toilet. He was enjoying a peaceful morning, though at some point he’d have to put in an appearance. The people seemed to appreciate seeing him. A grateful populace, he supposed. Or maybe just a populace clinging to the scraps that were left of their old lives. One of their princes, even if it was the one that everyone had always liked less, was still one of their princes.

And after two weeks on The Statesman, they were actually becoming specific names and faces to him, rather than just ‘his people.’ There were so few of them left. It wasn’t all that difficult to remember all of them.

The thought made something sick and heavy twist in his gut every time it crossed his mind. So very, very few.

A knock on the door startled him into almost dropping the bottle on his face. “Thor’s not here at the moment,” he called, holding it securely by the neck only about half an inch from his nose.

“It’s about the aft toilets, Prince Loki,” a voice said.

He sighed in exasperation. Of course it was. Why was it always the bathrooms? It was almost enough to make him suggest people start using their bathroom. Not really. This was the royal freighter cabin, after all. The dispossessed king of Asgard and his until-very-recently wayward brother could still be afforded a little privilege.

Running Asgard had been much easier when he’d been pretending to be Odin and he’d just let others take care of the boring, day-to-day minutiae of ruling. If questioned, which was rare, he’d simply made a show of having misplaced something important, wondering loudly where he’d put it and making sure to look deeply perplexed. The whispers of, “He’s getting old, hasn’t been the same since the Queen died,” would follow him as he wandered off.

Which was true on all counts, actually. No one but him had ever realized quite how true.

“Thor will take care of it,” Loki said.

“We think someone died in there.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he muttered, but he swung his legs off the side of his bed and stood up. His head still ached a little, but nothing like it had earlier. Though, he had to admit, it was sort of tempting to just glamor himself clothes, rather than actually get dressed. No, that would probably make the headache worse. Anyway, he’d only gotten half undressed the previous night. Just the heavier leather and armor, really, because as he’d gotten progressively drunker, both had gotten progressively more uncomfortable. But he had an image to maintain now, so he put all of it back on—the cape too, for good measure, because he liked it—and went to answer the door.

A woman was standing there—Astrid, who had been one of “King Odin’s” handmaidens. She no longer curtsied when she saw him, but he supposed that was to be expected.

“Why do you think someone’s died in there?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the doorframe.

“Because,” she said, “there was the sound of someone pu— being ill, then a lot of coughing, then nothing. It’s been twenty-five minutes and whoever’s in there hasn’t made a sound since.” In a faintly accusatory voice, she added, “If you had to spend a quarter of your day lining up for the toilet, you wouldn’t want someone dying in there, either.”

“To be perfectly honest, I think that’s sort of a universal desire.” But he sighed and said, “Alright, I’ll take care of it.” He wasn’t hauling any bodies, though. Thor, or possibly Korg, could do that. Or the Hulk, but Loki would have to send someone else to ask him to do it. It had been two weeks, but Loki was still wary of Banner’s giant, green, foul-tempered side. “And by the way,” he added, “you can say ‘puking’ without offending my delicate sensibilities. I’m still Asgardian.”

“I know you are,” she said, and this simple statement, when part of him had thought she’d argue that he was Jotun, meant far more than he let on.

He gave her a quick, bright smile and said, “Show me where the problem is.”

Not that he didn’t know where the aft toilets were. He knew because he specifically avoided this part of the ship, for one very specific reason: this was where the Valkyrie lived.

It wasn’t that Loki didn’t get along with the Valkyrie. It was just…he didn’t get along with the Valkyrie. More accurately, she didn’t get along with him. She seemed to think his motives were questionable, which, coming from her, was pretty rich, considering she’d led a long, healthy career enslaving people for money (after pointing this out to her once, he’d learned a valuable lesson about not pointing it out to her).

The point was, the two of them had an unspoken agreement that he stayed away. They tolerated each other for Thor’s sake, but that was about all that could be said for their relationship.

When he used magic to force the lock on the door of the bathroom, it was her sprawled there, one arm flung over the toilet, which had vomit dripping down it. Of course it was. The stench was overpowering and he had to fight not to take several steps back. Instead, he breathed through his mouth and toed her leg, hoping she’d wake up and remove herself from the bathroom herself, alleviating the need for him to go any closer to the mess that she’d made. When that did nothing, he sighed heavily, then bent over to check her pulse.

Unfortunately, she still had one. Sucking in a breath, he took a step into the toilet, grabbed her by the ankles, and heaved her out. “There you go,” he said, waving towards the newly vacated room. A glob of vomit slid down the front of the toilet and landed on the floor with an audible splatter. Alright, so he he couldn’t really blame any of them for not rushing right in, though it still annoyed him that they didn’t, for show if nothing else. They’d gotten him out of bed for this, after all.

He glanced down at the Valkyrie again, sighed in an even more long-suffering way, and went to find some water.

By the time he’d overturned an entire bucket over her head, she came around, spluttering and swearing. “You might want to keep it down,” he said mildly. “There are children present.”

She grabbed him by a fistful of his collar and glared at him, her eyes bloodshot. Then, something—certainly not him—stopped her, and she released him as she looked around. Loki took advantage of this moment of weakness to grab her under an arm, haul her to her feet, and say with a cheerfulness that was only a little sneering, “Come on, Brunnhilde, we don’t want to make a scene, do we?”

Her eyes drifted to the line of people, all staring at the two of them, and then she jerked her arm out of his grip. Immediately, she teetered, and he grabbed her again, then shifted his hold so his arm was around her shoulders. He didn’t particularly relish the close contact, but it might be slightly less embarrassing for her if this looked friendly, instead of what it actually was. Gods knew the last thing Thor needed was for his lieutenants to be publicly at each other’s throats.

“Can you walk?” he muttered.

“Get your hand off me,” she replied.

He did so. She swayed but stayed upright. Loki smiled at the assembled Asgardians and said to the Valkyrie, “Why don’t I see you to your quarters?”

“Why don’t you go fuck yourself right out an airlock?” she asked, sotto voce at least. Charming.

When she stalked off, she just about made it to the end of the corridor before stumbling into the wall. Loki sighed and went after her, catching her again before she slid down to the floor. “Considering the sheer volume you normally consume, I have to imagine that this is the result of drinking something really special,” he said lightly, slinging her arm over his own shoulder.

“Don’t touch—”

“Yes, yes, we’ve done that already. Which room is yours?”

Grudgingly, she muttered the location of her room, and Loki steered them in that direction. Once they got there and they were inside, he shrugged her arm off his shoulders and said, “In the future, maybe confine your drinking escapades to your own quarters.”

She sank down onto her bed and just looked at him. For a moment, he thought she might say thank you. Now that he thought about it, no one had said thank you to him once that morning. He’d have to make sure Thor knew how responsible and royal he’d been, if only so someone would show some gratitude. “Right,” he said. The other side of the room was strewn with junk, including several weapons that Loki didn’t think had names. One of the gladiators, probably. She’d offered to room with the Hulk but everyone had agreed that it might be best to just give him his own quarters. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” Loki said.

“What’s your deal, Lackey?” she said suddenly.

He stopped on his way out the door and turned around again. “It’s Loki,” he snapped, knowing she was perfectly well aware of his name, that she was just doing it to get a rise out of him, and hating himself for the fact that it was working.

“Sorry,” she said.

“I very much doubt that.”

Rubbing her eye with a finger, she yawned and said, “You could just answer the question.”

Stiffly, he replied, “I don’t feel particularly compelled to answer questions when they’re posed in such a hostile way.” Not to mention when they were vague and stupid.

The Valkyrie rolled her eyes. “Oh, get off your high horse. I worked for your father, you certainly don’t scare me. What did you do? Thor won’t tell me. Just says it’s ‘complicated.’”

“That about sums it up, actually.” When she kept staring at him, he flicked a hand and said, “Oh, the usual. Usurped the throne, attempted fratricide, tried to take over Earth.”

Rolling her eyes again, the Valkyrie said, “Sounds about right for the Asgardian royal family.”

Loki smiled mirthlessly. “And yet here you are, serving the crown again.”

“I’m helping out a friend,” she snapped. “No more, no less.”

“Mm.” Loki raised an eyebrow. He wondered if she had a thing for Thor. That would make her like every other woman who’d ever come in contact with his brother. If so, she was barking up the wrong tree. Thor might like to think he’d had any kind of hand in ending his relationship with Jane Foster, but it was abundantly clear how hung up on her he still was. Still, Loki let him have his fiction. When Thor had said, halfway into the second bottle of Contraxian whiskey the previous night, “I wonder what Jane’s doing right now?” Loki hadn’t gone with his first instinct (a deeply sarcastic, “Oh, pining for you, I’m sure.”) nor even his second (“What time is it on Earth? Probably sleeping.”). Instead, he’d shrugged and remained silent.

Thor had looked at him. “Do you think she regrets dumping m—I mean, me dumping her?”

Loki had drained the rest of his glass and poured himself another. “I think you should forget her, brother,” he’d said. This was diplomatic, and he was quite proud of it.

Of course, Thor didn’t want to forget about her. “You never thought we should be together,” he’d said, though without rancor.

It was a moment before Loki responded to this. He’d watched light refract through the whiskey, then finally said, “I don’t believe in purposefully putting oneself in a position where the only outcome is pain.”

This was a lie, such a bald-faced lie, that he was surprised Thor, even drunk, didn’t call him on it. No, instead, Thor had looked at him with that dumb puppy-dog smile and said, “You don’t want me to get hurt.”

“What?” Loki had spluttered. “I—no—I didn’t—that is not what I said.”

“That’s exactly what you said,” Thor replied smugly.

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t.”

Loki had bolted down half his glass at that point. In hindsight, he should have detected that the conversation was heading in a let’s-talk-about-feelings route.

Anyway, this was all very beside the point. The point was that he didn’t really want to talk to the Valkyrie anymore, especially if she was going to start waxing rhapsodic about her friendship with Thor. She’d known him for two weeks. She knew nothing about him, nothing about them, nothing about their family. She thought she did, but she was wrong. For her to stand there now and ask him what his ‘deal’ was—it was insulting.

It occurred to him that this might look like jealousy to some people, which it obviously wasn’t. He’d never, at any point in his life, had his brother to himself. He’d had almost nothing to himself, ever, in point of fact. But…Thor had been willing to leave Loki on Sakaar. He’d been willing to never see him again. And yes, it had obviously all been to manipulate him—embarrassing—but it had been real to him. It made him feel like a child, hurt that his older brother had made new friends.

“Why do you care ‘what my deal is,’ as you so eloquently put it?” he asked.

She eyed him. “Because whether I like it or not, you’re the prince. You’re Thor’s second-in-command, and he seems to trust you.” In a mutter, she added, “For some reason.”

Yes, that last part was shocking to Loki, too.

“I don’t like it,” the Valkyrie said, as though this needed clarification. Then, after a moment, she added for good measure, “I don’t really like you.”

Well, you had to appreciate her candor, if nothing else. “I’m told I grow on people,” he said dryly.

For the first time, she laughed. “Maybe. Don’t hold your breath, though.” She put a hand to her stomach then, looking queasy, and he tried not to take it personally. “I have another question for you,” she said. When he raised his eyebrows, she said, “We didn’t fuck, did we? On Sakaar?”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked after a few seconds passed and it became clear she was serious.

At one of the Grandmaster’s orgies,” she said. “I was usually too drunk to remember anyone afterwards.”

He snorted. What a surprise. “No,” he said. Hesitated. Then added, “I never attended.”

“Ouch.” This rivaled his tone for insincerity. “I thought you were his favorite?”

“I turned down several invitations,” Loki clarified.

“Why?”

“You ask too many personal questions. Do I need to have had a reason?”

She shrugged, clearly under the mistaken impression he was going to answer. Why had he refused? Well, it hadn’t exactly been a great few weeks. The loss of one’s family and almost getting murdered by the sister you didn’t know you had was, just personally for Loki, a bit of a mood-killer. Orgies weren’t really his thing. Sex had been a card he’d used to manipulate the Grandmaster and it hadn’t been in his interest to give it freely. He’d heard what kinds of things the Grandmaster liked, and he wanted to avoid them as much as possible.

That hadn’t worked out, in the end.

“Is that why you hate me so much?” he asked curiously. “You thought we might have slept together?”

“No,” she said. “But it definitely didn’t help.” She eyed him. “I hate you because you forced your way into my brain and made me relive my worst memory. Is there really some question about that?”

This probably wasn’t the best time to remind her that not only had he forced her to relive it, but he’d experienced it himself. Sort of something he hadn’t had much time to unpack, the gruesome demise of every one of the Valkyries.

There probably also wasn’t much point in sharing with her that most people had several reasons to hate him, and that given enough time, he’d probably supply her with more than just the one, too. What did it matter, though? Why did he care? Did he actually care? The last time he’d nearly come to blows with the Valkyrie, Thor had physically had to separate them. The Valkyrie had gotten a stern, kingly glare. Loki had gotten of one Thor’s ham-handed fists clenched around his shoulder as they’d walked away, topped off with a muttered, “You’re embarrassing me, Loki.”

“I’m embarrassing you?” Loki had hissed back in affront. “What about her?”

“You’re my brother,” Thor said, as if that cleared everything up.

Loki had almost said, I wish I wasn’t, just to be childish and hurtful, but it was the kind of lie he’d resolved not to tell anymore. It hadn’t been a conscious decision. It was just, when he’d sought Thor out for the first time on The Statesman, and Thor had said, “Maybe you’re not so bad after all, brother,” so many responses had flitted through Loki’s mind, running the gamut of snide to sarcastic to sincere to flat-out speechlessness.

But instead, he’d said, “Maybe not,” because he’d heard in Thor’s voice a whole spectrum of things that he’d always longed for and never known how to actually obtain.

There didn’t seem to be anything more to say here. He clasped his hands in front of himself and said to the Valkyrie, “Well, if you’re not going to choke on your own vomit, I’ll be on my way.”

With a snort, she laid down on her bed, which he took as a dismissal. As he stepped through the doorway, though, she said, “Hey. Lackey.”

When he turned around, his eyebrow was raised so high that it served as the correction that he refused to be baited into again. She was staring at him. “I could maybe…at some point…see my way to hating you a little less.”

Unable to help it, Loki laughed. “What changed in the last minute?”

“Nothing.” She waved a hand dismissively. “But you’re Asgardian, and we have to stick together now.”

I’m not though, he thought about saying, before he dismissed it. She would know his history by now. She’d chosen to call him Asgardian, anyway. This was…something. He wasn’t sure what. But it was something.

“Give it another few months, at least,” she added. “I’m not saying I’m ever going to like you, so don’t get that in your head.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Loki said, which would have been more effective if he was sneering. Instead, a smile was just a little, just barely, twitching at his mouth. He inclined his head and shut the door behind himself as he left.

On the way back up to the bow of the ship, he managed to solve three other disputes for people (two over rations and one property, such as it was, dispute), and as a result was feeling quite proud of himself by the time he reached his quarters.

Thor was approaching from the opposite direction when he got there. His brother was covered in something green, dripping, and very foul-smelling. “You’re not going in our room like that, are you?” Loki said in horror. “You look you just crawled out of a sewer.”

“I did,” Thor growled. “And for your information, they’re my quarters, I’m just letting you stay in them out of the goodness of my heart.”

“You’re letting me stay in them because I already know all your embarrassing habits,” Loki said, realizing he’d moved to create a shield across the door.

“Loki.”

With a long-suffering sigh, he punched the code to unlock the door, extending an arm to allow his brother in first. He smelled even worse up close.

Thor went straight to the bathroom and Loki stared at the mess he’d tracked in before rolling his eyes and cleaning it up. In a few minutes, when Thor reappeared, de-gooped and smelling like recycled water instead of raw sewage, Loki asked, “I take it you had a successful morning making noble sacrifices in the name of serving your people?”

“Shut up,” Thor said, pouring himself a drink. After downing that one, he poured another, then cinched his towel tighter around his waist. Loki crossed his arms over his chest and perched on the back of the room’s one uncomfortable sofa.

“What was it then, a clog?” he asked.

“The clog to end all clogs.” Thor swallowed his second drink and then put the glass down with a clunk, his hand hesitating halfway to the bottle.

“Did you have to go inside the septic system?” Loki asked, horrified both by the question itself and the fact that he knew enough about the ship’s workings to ask it at all. He’d learned a lot about this class of freighter in the past few weeks.

That seemed to make Thor’s mind up about the third drink. Loki almost told him not to bother with a glass at all and to just drink straight from the bottle. With a shudder, Thor said, “It was either go in and fix the problem at the source or lose that bathroom.”

“The latter being untenable,” Loki said. He motioned to Thor to pour him a drink too and went to get it. “Your people appreciate you, I’m sure.”

“After that, I should get a holiday named after me.”

“Maybe a statue,” Loki said, his face expressionless.

Thor snorted. “Only if it’s bigger than that monstrosity you had built on Asgard.”

For a moment, Loki considered affront at this. That would be predictable, though, wouldn’t it? Instead, a smile twitched at his mouth and he said, “I’ll have you know the woman who designed that statue had a royal commission from Odin himself. She’s the very best.”

Was. Was the very best, if probability was anything to go by. Still, neither of them said that out loud, though it hung in the air always. Not just in this moment, but every minute of every day. Most of their people were just a memory now. Most of them could only be spoken of in the past tense.

He met Thor’s eyes, seeing the same thing reflected there, and Thor offered him a small, mirthless smile. But then he said, “To be honest, I don’t think Father had much in the way of artistic sensibilities. A royal commission from him didn’t necessarily mean much.”

Despite the potshot, Loki had to laugh. “Alright, I get the point. My public works program wasn’t to your liking.”

Thor snorted and repeated, “‘Public works program,’” under his breath. There was a silence. Then he said, sounding like he hated that he was asking the question, “How did you deal with this?”

“What, the statue?” Loki asked, raising an eyebrow. “I usually spent anywhere from five to fifteen minutes gazing admiringly at it every morning.”

Thor gave him a deeply unimpressed look, which made Loki smile slightly. His brother was too easy to wind up. “No,” Thor said. He took a sip of his drink, sloshed the whiskey around for a minute, then took another. Stalling. Loki’s curiosity was piqued. After another sip, Thor said, “Ruling. Being in charge of everything. People coming to you with problems and expecting you to know how to solve all of them.”

“Ah.” Loki opened his mouth, about to—well, lie, or at least be glib. The truth, and this was a hard truth for him, which he’d admitted only in stages over the course of the last several years, the final one having been only a few weeks ago—the truth was that Loki had never been a great king. He hadn’t been a bad king. At least, he liked to think that in the scale of things, if you lined up everyone who’d ever held a throne in the universe on a scale from washed lepers’ feet to bathed in the blood of sacrificed infants, he’d end up somewhere in the top fifty percent.

But what Thor was describing, solving people’s problems—that was more than holding the throne. That was being a king. And it was never, in his heart, what Loki had truly wanted. It was only when he’d been told he couldn’t, that he was a monster, unfit, unworthy, that he’d wanted it. Not to be king, but to prove that he could hold the throne. That he wasn’t the monster he was supposed to be. To prove to his father that he wasn’t less than everyone else. To prove to his mother that her faith in him, her trust and love, hadn’t been misplaced. Maybe that applied to Thor, too. It had to be said, whatever they’d been through, the look of unfiltered joy on Thor’s face when he’d first caught sight of Loki on Sakaar was worth more to him than he’d ever admit.

Thor was staring at him, and Loki realized he’d been silent too long. How to answer his brother’s question—sincere, guileless, plaintive, in a way—without displaying his own crippling faults?

Ha, wasn’t that always the challenge?

“To be perfectly honest,” Loki said slowly, “I think that’s why you’re king now.” When Thor just stared at him expectantly, Loki puffed his cheeks out with air and then let out the breath in a sigh. “I wasn’t very good at it,” he said bluntly.

If their places were reversed, if Thor were Loki, or even if Thor just had Loki’s snideness and sarcasm lacquered in layer after layer over his own vulnerabilities, he would have sunk a metaphorical knife into this admission and twisted. But Thor wasn’t Loki. Which was completely the point, Loki supposed. And Loki himself was—well, still himself. But he felt like maybe one or two of those lacquered layers might have come loose.

Thor looked at Loki, absently sloshing his whiskey around. Loki took a sip of his own drink to shield himself from this scrutiny, looking at the ceiling as though it wasn’t obvious that he just wanted to avoid eye contact.

“It’s a lot harder than it looks,” Thor finally said. There was a tiny smile on his face. Knowing, Loki might call it, if he wanted to sound like an adult. If he didn’t, then he’d call it a stupid, annoying, big brother smirk.

Loki inclined his head in acknowledgement of this truth, smirking a little himself. Then, he said, “But you know, brother, you’re not bad at it. Who but a truly great king would crawl into the ship’s overloaded septic system?”

Giving Loki an innocent look that he really didn’t like, Thor said, “Actually, that reminds me. While I was in there, I noticed the release mechanism on the tank venting hatch was looking a little dodgy. We’ll need someone to go in there and fix it, and I think I know just the Asgardian prince for the job.”

Paling, Loki said, “You wouldn’t.”

Thor finished his drink and laughed. This wasn’t comforting.

Then, with a sigh, Loki said, “Alright. I’ll do it. Hard to believe I’m the best equipped person on this ship for a repair like that, but if I have something to prove, I’ll do it.” He’d meant to say if you need me to prove something. Maybe it had come out wrong on purpose. Would that mean it had come out right?

The smile faded from Thor’s face. “You don’t have anything to prove.”

Loki gave a sniff of laughter. “I’ve always had something to prove.”

Shaking his head, Thor said, “To yourself.”

“Amongst others.”

“Not to me.”

“Not at the moment, perhaps.”

Thor raised his eyebrows and shrugged, then nodded. “Maybe I have the right idea. Ever think of that, brother?”

Arching an eyebrow in return, Loki replied, “Actually, no. That is one thought that I can assure you has never occurred to me.”

With a chuckle, Thor said, “Alright, fine. Be that way.”

Loki met his brother’s eyes. Eye. It was hard to get used to that. Of course he’d always had something to prove. Their father had set them against each other as children, pitted them in a contest for the crown that he’d already decided the winner of. You couldn’t have a Frost Giant sitting on the throne of Asgard. Except you could, he’d been there, he’d had the thing he thought would prove his worth, prove that he was an Asgardian.

And it hadn’t.

That moment had come when Korg had turned off the obedience disc and Loki had stood up to see his army. Not much of one, but it was what he had to return to Asgard and save his people. His people. They always had been, hadn’t they? He was Jotun by birth and Asgardian by everything else, and the way he’d spent the last seven years thinking of it was that it made him not enough of either.

He remembered what the Valkyrie had said, that they had to stick together now. It would have been easy for her to exclude him, and he wouldn’t really have blamed her if she wanted to keep hating him. People hating him was nothing new, but no matter how many times he told himself he was used to it, there was always a sting when he saw it in people’s eyes.

People on The Statesman didn’t look at him like that, though. He was one of them. After a lifetime of feeling like he didn’t belong, suddenly, he did. It wasn’t that he wasn’t enough of an Asgardian. He was himself, Jotun and Asgardian. The trickster. God of Mischief. Thor’s brother. Was this what it felt like to be at peace with oneself?

Finally, he smiled slightly. If he was ever at peace with himself, it would be because he was dead. And honestly? It probably wouldn’t even happen then. “You know me, brother. I can’t be any other way.”

A knowing smile twitched at Thor’s face. “Are you lying to me or to yourself?” When Loki just blinked, Thor added, “Maybe both?”

“You were the one who said I never change,” Loki said.

Putting his empty glass down, Thor said, “Loki, do you know how sometimes—often, actually—you say things that maybe you don’t mean, and it’s just to get a reaction from me?” When Loki raised an eyebrow, Thor said, “You’re not the only one who knows how to do that.”

For a moment, Loki swirled his drink around in his glass. Then he said, “Who says I don’t mean the things I say?”

Thor rolled his eyes, but smiled. “Loki.”

“What?”

There was a silence, and then Thor turned around to pull a shirt on. Presumably the armor would have to be hosed off. Not that Loki was going to suggest it, since that seemed like a good way for cleaning sewage off armor to become an official duty of the Prince of Asgard.

When Thor finally faced Loki again, there was an expression on his face that was difficult to read. Grief, humor, crushing defeat, happiness, glimmering hope—the same stew of emotions that was so familiar to Loki. Ah, well. Was it really a surprise? They were brothers, after all. For the first time in many years, he thought they were beginning to understand each other. It was a far cry from the centuries that they’d spent understanding each other less and less and less.

Loki was overcome by a rush of feeling, of happiness and gratitude and—and love, he hadn’t actually thought the words I love you about his brother in years, because he’d spent so much time trying to convince himself that he didn’t. That he was an outsider, a monster, who didn’t need anyone, certainly not his family, and certainly not the one person who never stopped trying to convince him that he was lying to himself about all of it.

He swallowed hard and looked at Thor, who was watching him. And somehow, somehow, Thor seemed to understand.

They weren’t at a point yet where Loki could say those words out loud. Nor was he sure he was at a place where he could hear them from Thor. But it was there.

It was there.

And then, they let the moment pass, as though by mutual agreement. There would be other moments. There would be time, Loki suddenly realized. Because for the first time in years, he didn’t want to run. Would that change tomorrow? Or maybe in five minutes? Probably. But he didn’t think he’d give in to the urge. People wanted him around. They needed him around. And he wanted to prove himself worthy of both.

Thor reached out and put a hand on Loki’s shoulder. “So,” he said, smiling that obnoxious big brother smile, the one that Loki would give up the universe for. “Did you do anything useful today?”

Loki’s mouth twitched into a smile of his own. “Possibly. I think I may have made a friend.” The Valkyrie and he had carried on an entire conversation without either of them trying to murder each other. If that wasn’t friendship, he didn’t know what was. He hesitated. “I think…I think that I’m happy to be here.”

For a moment, Thor just looked at him. Then, his fingers squeezed Loki’s shoulder tighter, and he put his hand briefly to the back of Loki’s neck. “I’m happy you are too, brother. I am too.”