Chapter Text
Thor is leaning against one of the stone pillars in the atrium. Gazing into the starry night, he brings his mug of mead to his lips and takes another long, satisfying drink. He can no longer tell how much of the sweet poison he already consumed but it is finally beginning to numb the pain inside his chest. Behind him, the sound of festivities in the banqueting hall of Asgard begins to fade into a dull murmur and his vision begins to blur at the edges. Achieving this feeling of reality fading into something no longer accessible to his senses is all that currently matters to the god of thunder and if he empties two or maybe three more mugs, he will fall into a dreamless slumber and, for once, he will not think of—
A soft voice rings out somewhere beside him, speaking his name. He glances around and spots the Lady Sif, who is stepping forth from the shadows. “You have retreated again,” she states, her forehead wrapped in a frown of concern.
“I am enjoying the view,” Thor replies, his tongue lying heavy in his mouth.
“The view, hm?” Sif raises an eyebrow at him, not bothering to conceal how worried she is. “You are quite drunk, aren’t you?”
Thor forces himself to meet her gaze. “So? Have you come here to lecture me?”
“Not at all,” Sif replies. “I have come here because I am worried about you.”
“Worried?” Thor laughs, then gestures for her to continue. “Why?”
“I know you doubt that I could possibly imagine the burden you carry, but I know the feeling quite well.” Sif sighs and then her hand travels to his arm, squeezing it gently. “It is one of life’s greatest hardships when you cannot be with the one who you truly wish to spend all of your time with.”
Thor feels his mouth gape open in surprise. “You think this is about Jane Foster?”
“Please,” says Sif. “You need not spare my feelings. I have accepted long ago that you only see me as a companion.”
“This isn’t about Jane,” Thor clarifies, feeling his fury stir. Why does everyone assume that his heart is breaking over a mortal woman whom he would be able to visit anytime now that the Tesseract’s power restored the Bifröst? If she even still wants him to, that is. Jane was very upset about the fact that he did not come to see her in the aftermath of the battle of New York and told him she needed some space; whatever that means.
“No?” The suspicion on Sif’s face angers him more and saddens him at the same time. If only he could still confide in her his troubles. “Then who else would it be about?”
“You would not understand,” Thor mumbles and turns away from her.
“You cannot know this if you do not tell me,” Sif says after a moment of silence. It is an observation first and foremost but carries an unspoken directive nonetheless.
“I-I can’t,” Thor stammers, mental images he tried so hard to flush out of his brain the previous months overshadowing the fuzzy nightscape in front of his eyes.
“Thor,” pleads Sif. “We have been friends for eons unthinkable.” She squeezes his biceps once more. “You can trust me.” A weighty pause, pregnant with meaning. “With anything.”
Thor can feel his emotional defenses taking to arms but at the same time, he knows that she is speaking true. They have been friends for a long time and he has always been able to confide in her. Deep within his heart, he knows that she would not judge him. Perhaps at first, yes, but she would eventually try to see his perspective.
Sif is looking at him expectantly.
“I miss my brother,” Thor finally concedes, and the words gain so much more force once spoken, as if leaving the confines of his mind infused them with power. “I know I shouldn’t, but I do. We have been together all this time and now father forbids me to see him?” He brings his cup to his lip and takes another swig. “He is still my brother, Sif!” he howls, the truth and his emotions breaking free now that he let his guard down. “This is not fair.”
Sif pulls him into an embrace and simultaneously takes the mug out of his hand with one swift motion. “Have you talked to the queen?”
Thor lets go of her and wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “How could I?” He snorts a sad laugh that hurts in the deepest reaches of his soul. “Father is urging me to take the throne. I cannot possibly disappoint him again by questioning”—he stumbles over the ‘s’ and the word leaves his mouth in a slur—“the rightfulness of Loki’s sentence. Not now.” He pauses thoughtfully. “Not even in front of my mother.”
“I can assure you the queen will understand,” Sif whispers conspiratorially, “considering that she does not seem to agree with the harshness of the king’s verdict either.”
Thor’s befuddled brain needs a moment to reveal the meaning behind her words. “What are you saying? That she ... What are you accusing her of?”
“I accuse her of nothing. I heard her speak to Loki from her chambers using her seiᵭr,” Sif says. “She also grants him access to books.”
“As I imagine she would,” Thor mumbles and, suddenly, he yearns for her comfort as fiercely as he did when he was nothing but a boy. He gazes into the hall, his gaze searching for her amongst the reveling Aesir.
“She has already retreated to her chambers for the night,” says Sif and he feels a stab of disappointment in his stomach. “And so should you. You are not well, Thor.”
“Nonsense,” he exclaims. “I am drunk, is all.”
“Which is my point exactly.” She smiles at him and, despite his grief, Sif’s smile warms his heart as few things in all the realms ever could. “Come on, I will escort you to your chambers. And tomorrow, you can tell the queen about this. I am sure she will be delighted to see your love for your brother has not waned.”
“You really are sure of this?” Thor asks.
“Oh, please,” says Sif. “There is no person in any of realms who loves Loki more than she does.”
~•~•~
After a night of light sleep interrupted by ghastly nightmares of a deranged Loki leading a Chitauri army into Midgard, Thor finds his mother in her garden where the queen is tending to the flowers she brought back from Vanaheim. The thunderer clears his throat, loathe to disrupt her moment of peace but yearning for the attention she lavishes on her plants.
She rises immediately, a sad smile ghosting her lips. “Thor. How do you fare, my son?”
He can hear the concern in her voice and curses his neediness. “I am well.”
“I could not help but notice,” says his mother and bridges the distance between them with two steps, “that you seem to be deriving a little too much comfort from the drink lately.” She stands on her toes to cup his cheek. “What ails you so, my son?”
Thor practiced a speech when he walked from his chambers to his mother’s gardens but it flees his mind the moment his mother looks at him like a mother. “Sif told me you have been visiting Loki,” he blurts out.
“I have sent spectral apparitions of myself to converse with him, yes,” Frigga clarifies, her voice carrying the same pain he feels inside his chest every day. “But I have not visited him. I wish I could. He is in sore need of my presence. As, I suppose, are you.”
She strokes his cheek and the god of thunder savors the gesture for a moment, allowing the love for his mother to breathe new life into the barren wasteland inside of him.
“Are you at all angry with him sometimes?” Thor asks when they part, unable to keep at bay any further the emotions he has been trying to hold off by fighting the foul creatures that had used the Bifröst’s destruction and Asgard’s helplessness to their advantage and by drinking himself into a stupor after every victory. “Because I am. I am so angry that he betrayed me like this. On some days, I am glad that he is locked away and that I do not have to endure his scathing humor and his hostility towards me but then, on other days, I just …”
“You miss him,” says Frigga.
“I do,” Thor confesses in a low voice. “And I just want to understand what happened. He had everything and still he …” He leaves the rest of the sentence hanging in the air, not daring to give it a voice.
Frigga reaches for his hand and squeezes it reassuringly. “No, he did not,” she corrects him, tears pooling into her benign blue eyes. “Loki is very troubled. He always has been. Even from a very young age, there has been a shadow growing inside his heart. I thought I could kindle enough light in him to make it go away but I …” She lets go of his hand and turns away.
“But?”
“I am angry with myself mostly,” Frigga concedes quietly. “All these years and I never managed to, well, I think I could have made a difference if only I had been forthcoming with your brother about his true lineage. If I had defied your father. But I stood by him and I stand by him now, as befits the queen.”
Thor gazes at her, dumbfounded by her unexpected confession and her pain.
“Mother, please,” Thor says and pulls her back towards him by the wrist. “You did everything you could. You loved him more than anyone and you always made sure that he knew it. There is no better mother than you in all the nine realms and beyond.”
“And yet I lied,” Frigga whispers, choking on the words. “I lied to him for more than a thousand years. I could have told him what he was from the beginning. I could have prevented his breakdown. I could have been a mother. I could be one now but instead, I am choosing to be queen, to present a united front to the realm.”
Thor draws a deep breath. “This is not right. It has been months, mother! Is father ever going to alter the sentence?”
“I do not know.”
“This is not right!” Thor repeats in a roar, and thunder rumbles across the sky. “He can’t deny Loki our company, can’t forbid us to be a family! Why would he deprive us of all people of the ones we love?”
Tears glister in the queens eyes. “Thor, please.”
Thor narrows his eyes at her. “What?”
“Believe me, I am trying to convince your father to alter the sentence but you know him as well as I do. You know how stubborn he is. If we are to convince him, we must proceed with care. There is a reason for everything—”
“For everything he does, yes, I know,” Thor finishes for her. He heard that speech more than a hundred times. “I also know that he is not only my father but my king and that I am sworn to obey him, as are you.” He takes another breath to curb in the sparks of electricity crackling in his fingers. “But what if I no longer believe in the justness of his verdicts, mother?”
Frigga gazes at him with an interest he never before saw in her eyes.
“Loki is your son,” Thor continues with far more emphasis than he probably would have needed to convey his point. “And he is my brother. Father cannot just decide that we are never going to see him again! That is bullshit!”
Frigga flinches from his choice of words. “What did you just say?”
“Bullshit,” Thor repeats. “It is an expression that Midgardians use to refer to something truly outrageous I was told. Which is what this is.” He spears his mother with his blue eyes. “You can be the all-mother but you shall not be Loki’s mother? Last I heard, Jötunheim was still part of the nine, wasn’t it? Father’s logic is twisted, mother, and the only ones that can defy him and hope it makes a difference are you and I. Did you know that parts of Midgard do not even have kings anymore? One person who decides what is best for everyone? One person whose powers are unchallenged and unquestioned? That is not wise.”
Despite the severity of the matter they are discussing, Frigga’s face lights up with a pleasant smile. “You will make Asgard very proud when you are crowned king one day,” his mother tells him. “You will bring about a sorely needed change and lead us all into a new age.”
“Yeah, well,” Thor replies. He is still wary of the responsibility he so fiercely craved until Odin exiled him to Midgard and he understood that the brutality of the sacrifices a king has to make would forever change him. “I will not wait for that day. Today, I shall be a brother, not a prince.”
“And I will not stop you,” says Frigga.
~•~•~
Thor descends the stairs leading deep into the belly of the realm eternal, his steps echoing off the walls of stone. When he approaches the entrance doors, two armed guards rise from the two chairs positioned on either side of the door and bow their heads. “My Lord Thor.”
“I wish to have a word with my brother.”
The guards exchange a quick glance. “But my Lord, the all-father—”
“I care not what my father decreed,” Thor speaks over them, his chest aching under the memories of New York. “Now, I do not want to fight you but if you deny me passage, fight you I shall.”
The guards gauge his threat for a few heartbeats but, eventually, they step aside in awe and Thor walks the length of the corridor with its magically sealed cells until he reaches the one that imprisons his brother. He inhales a long breath, stealing himself for the encounter, and shudders as he exhales. It is cold in the weapon’s vault but it is colder in the dungeons still. Thor steps towards the glass that is pulsating with the seiðr of old.
His brother is sitting in an armchair, clad in casual leathers of green and brown, a pair of loafers on his bare feet, his gaze focused on a book in his lap and his brow furrowed in concentration.
Thor clears his throat. “Loki?”
Loki glances up from his book and his lips part. Confusion dances across his face for the fraction of a second but then his mouth curls into the devious grin the god of thunder grew to despise almost as much as the tone of his brother’s voice when he spits his name.
“What a glorious sight,” Loki snarls and slams his book shut. “The son of Odin chooses to grace me with his presence, disobeying his father’s commands.” He rises and glowers at Thor as he steps closer to the barrier. “I suppose I should be rather grateful that I have lived long enough to witness such a marvel.”
The hostility in his brother’s voice twists something low in the thundergod’s gut but even so, a part of him recognizes it as something familiar and has grown eerily fond of it.
Thor chuckles and Loki’s glower intensifies. “What is so funny?”
Thor ponders his next words very carefully. “It is funny how, despite all that rage and hatred I know is festering inside your chest right now, I still missed your company.”
Loki huffs a mirthless laugh. “You should really leave the lying to me. It does not suit you.”
“I have never lied to you in all my life,” Thor counters. “You should know that.”
“Of course not,” Loki snarls in that peculiarly condescending tone designed to scathe that ultimately springs from a dark place of self-depreciation (as mother phrased it). “We all know you are the virtuous one, brother.”
Despite Loki’s intractability, Thor feels a genuine smile creeping onto his lips. “So, you still think of me as your brother?”
Loki’s brows draw together in a suspicious frown. “What?”
“You just called me brother,” Thor says, daring him to oppose.
“Force of habit,” Loki replies briskly. “What do you want?”
“I want nothing,” Thor tells his brother with a hesitant smile. “I merely wished to see you.”
“And seen me you have,” says the trickster and turns away again.
“Brother, please,” Thor begs, unsure how to proceed. He lost the key to his brother’s mind long before Loki’s rage and his hatred snapped it in two. “I … Don’t you feel the urge to speak about, well, you know. Don’t you want to—”
Loki whirls around again, boring his ice-cold gaze into him. “I want you to leave.”
Thor clears his throat. “No, you don’t.” He locks eyes with Loki, forcing himself not to break the contact. “I know you don’t.”
Loki bristles. “You have never known much, though, have you?”
Thor exhales a breath he did not realize he was holding. “I will not deny that I am angry with you still,” he begins. The truth, the only weapon besides his hammer and his charm he knows how to wield. “We grew up as brothers. You were my best friend, Loki. You should have known that I would not have treated you any differently after coming to know that you are not my brother by blood. You could have come to me and I would have been there for you but, instead of reaching out, you chose to keep me exiled, tell me the lie of our father’s demise and send the Destroyer to kill me.”
“You know what they say on Midgard, don’t you, brother?” Loki snickers. “What does not kill you makes you stronger.”
“You have betrayed my love and my trust,” Thor continues, firmer now. “And I will not pretend it does not ail me still.”
“And I will weep for you,” Loki snarls. He leans forward, hands clasped behind his back. “You have been through so much, haven’t you?” he continues, his voice dripping with so much contempt that the very blood in Thor’s veins seems to freeze at the sound. “I will pray to the Norns that they relieve you of all your torment.”
Before he can pacify his temper, Thor lunges forward with a frustrated roar and his fist crashes into the barrier of seiᵭr that separates his brother from him. As soon as his skin comes into contact with the yellow tendrils of magic laced through the pane, a sharp pain bites into his hand and cuts through his entire forearm before exploding in his right shoulder. He stumbles backwards, overwhelmed by the powerful sensation.
“You really should not have done that,” Loki tells him brightly. “The barrier has to be quite strong to contain a beast such as I. It will give you a nasty burn.”
Thor grunts and cradles his injured hand to his chest. “I wish to help you,” he says, shame and despair leaving cracks in his voice. “I am sure I can convince father to alter your punishment but you have to help me too.” The thought has been silently growing inside of his mind for the past weeks but now it finally bears fruit. “You need to tell me what happened to you.”
The trickster’s lips twitch ever so slightly. “What do you mean?”
“After you fell,” Thor begins, groping for the right words and knowing that he is never going to find them because he does not possess his brother’s silver tongue, “something happened to you. I can tell. That insane stare in New York? That was not you. I know that it was not. You are not the kind of person that would attack another planet out of greed!”
Loki works his jaw and a flicker of madness blazes in his stare. “Well, I am not really a person though, am I?”
“Nonsense,” Thor snaps and attempts to curb his impatience. His brother revels in antagonizing him. If he gives in to anger, he’ll only give him what he wants. “Of course you are a person. You are my brother.”
“Oh, I am sure the all-father begs to differ.” Loki bares his teeth and repeats the beginning of one of Odin’s tales in a perfect imitation of their father’s solemn growl. “In a barren realm of cold and darkness the name of Jötunheim live the Frost Giants. They are brutish and unruly beasts that know no warmth. Their skin is of a dark blue, disfigured by bone-shaped crests on their heads and narrow silver ridges on their face and torso that mark them as sons of Jötunheim. Their eyes are as red as the flames raging in the fiery depths of Muspelheim and their ice-cold touch can sear our skin until there is nothing left”—he leans forward then, with a feral grin—“but black patches of burned flessssh.”
He looks mad, beyond redemption or even repair, his mind unaccepting of any comfort, any consolation. “To me, you’re none of these things,” Thor tries nonetheless, for surrender is not in his nature. “Your true blood, it changes nothing between us.”
“No?” Loki cackles, and spit flies out of his mouth. “Then why did you let go? Why did you toss me into the abyss?”
“You were the one to let go,” Thor insists. “Your memory is warped. I tried to hold on. I’ve never held on to anything or anyone with such despair. My heart shattered that day, when I watched you fall, when you sent the Destroyer, and yet you remember me as the one who hurt you. I never meant to fight you, Loki, never meant to lose you.”
“You should go now,” Loki says.
“Remember when I asked you who showed you all this power? I know that attacking Midgard was not your idea. Someone convinced you to do that.” Thor pauses to let the weight of his words settle on his brother’s shoulders, waits until Loki can feel their ache. “Who did this to you? Who used you as a pawn and pitted you against your own family? Who stole your memories and planted lies in their stead?”
Moisture glints in Loki’s eyes. He draws a breath to steady his trembling voice. “I might not be the Mighty Thor but I’m no one’s pawn.”
The god of thunder frowns. “I don’t believe you and I will not leave you until you told me what happened to you.”
“Then prepare to be here for a very long time,” Loki replies, settles back into his armchair and picks up the book he was reading.
“Do you not understand?” Thor cries out. His anger feasts on the realization that his brother is purposefully ignoring him, that he’s purposefully not lifting a finger to request another trial and rather wither away in this cell with nothing but books to keep him company. “If it wasn’t your fault—”
“It was my fault,” Loki cuts him off without glancing up from his book.
“Fine,” Thor grumbles. He turns away for show and murmurs, seemingly to himself but certainly loud enough for Loki to hear, “I bet Mother will be able to get the truth out of you.”
Loki is on his feet in an instant. “No!”
Thor turns around to watch Loki step as close to the barrier as he can and extend his hand towards him. “I cannot speak of this,” he whispers and the tremor in his voice sends shivers of fear down Thor’s spine. “And neither can you.”
“You would rather endure this sentence, which prevents you from seeing me or even Mother, than to confide in me?” Thor asks and his heart breaks all over again. It is as fragile as a statue of glass these days and it grows steadily harder to mend the cracks.
Loki does not hesitate for as much as a heartbeat before he gives Thor his answer. “I am where I belong.”
“Loki, I,” begins the thunderer but then a part of him realizes that he’s never accepted his brother’s ‘no’ for an answer and that perhaps, Loki will come to him if he stops pestering him. Not that he has dabbled in much pestering over the past months but he might be more successful if he begins with other conversational topics. “If that is your choice, I cannot help you.”
“I do not expect you to.”
Thor clears his throat. “I will comply with your wish then,” he says, his intestines churning, “and leave you alone.”
“Thank you,” Loki presses out.
Thor knows that Loki does not truly crave solitude—he can feel his brother’s longing for his company pulsating through the air as much as he can sense the magic emanating from the dungeons—but he turns away nonetheless because he knows, too, that he cannot impose his help on him until Loki is willing to accept it.
“Goodbye then,” Thor whispers.
“Goodbye, brother,” Loki whispers, almost intimately.
A tear spills out of Thor’s eye as he walks away from the cell and back into reality.