st_ormbreaker | (no subject)

(no subject)

Thor started off by knocking. When Loki didn't answer, he let himself in.

It doesn't take him long to find him. The first floor is easy enough to survey, and he saw from outside that Loki wasn't on the roof or the balcony, which left only the upper floor of Loki's room. As gifted as an illusionist as Loki was, it was easy enough for him to see through the alcove, particularly since he was already intimately familiar with the layout of the room.

Thor passes through it easily and drops the journal on the edge of the bed with a little thump.

"We're going to talk about this," he says in a tone that broaches no argument. It is simply a fact. Thor has no interest in wallowing in his own misery, and he has even less interest in allowing his brother to wallow in his own because of him.

It's time to talk.

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The knock on the door hadn't been a temptation to answer. Loki hadn't even managed to drum up the interest to look through his watch-spell on the door. It didn't matter. Whoever it was, he wasn't interested.

Of course, since it was Thor, that didn't matter. He just came in anyway. Because of course he did. "You know it's impossible to stay out of your way when you insist on putting yourself in mine, don't you."

Thor looks down at the bed, the back over at Loki.

"I don't recall asking you to stay out of my way permanently."

"Was it not implied? Irreconcilable differences and so on." Loki closed his eyes. Thor wasn't going anywhere, it seemed like the closest he was going to get to avoiding the man was avoiding looking at him.

Not close at all. But he wasn't exactly on-point at the moment.

"You're being ridiculous."

"So?" Loki shrugged. "Fine. You didn't say it. I'm just cutting to the end result."

Thor sits down on the edge of the bed, mattress sinking under his weight. He picks up the journal again and taps it lightly against the top front of his brother's head.

"Read it," he says again, and he holds the book out for Loki to take.

Loki knocked the arm holding the book aside, then closed his hands to enforce the point. It helped, in a way, that between misery (who knew, forced contemplation of probable endless solitude was upsetting in itself) and a number of bottles pulled from his stash over the last few days, he wasn’t actually tempted to take the book.

That would take effort, after all. More than opening his eyes and glaring, which he did. “I already told you, no. Feel free to assume I did and fell short of your standard once more. You don’t need me for that.”

Thor allows his arm to be knocked aside; he just taps Loki's head with the book again.

"Why do you so convinced you fell short of my standard?"

Loki gritted his teeth at the tap, but it was one of Thor’s tactics. Belittle enough and the target will give in just to keep from being reduced any more. Well, too bad for the god of thunder, Loki intended to accept nothingness this time. “Are you joking, or do you truly not listen to anything you say?”

"Mmm." Thor lets out a thoughtful hum at that. "Both, maybe?"

A beat.

"At any rate, I'm not leaving until you read it," he says. "At least the parts in Asgardian. So you can choose to prolong your torture, or you can give it a read. It's your choice."

That actually produced a flicker of anger, and Loki did his best to scoot a little away. (The bed was a single, the alcove barely wider than the bed was: there wasn’t much space. Ideal for a cell. Bad for evasion.) It shouldn’t have touched anything that Thor considered it nothing but a joke, setting impossible secret standards and then claiming he did no such thing. Just Loki being unreasonable by being angry and upset at....

He strangled the anger, doused it to ash. It didn’t matter. Fighting back didn’t help. Making an effort wouldn’t help. They’d just keep having this fight over and over as Thor produced new hoops and moved the line. “Do what you want.”

And so Thor does. He opens the journal and pages past all the Infinity Stones stuff, then stops at the first page with Asgardian runes.

He takes a breath and begins to read.

"Loki, I wish I had told you earlier that you had died. I shouldn't have told Tony first. I want you to know everything that happened on The Statesman and I want you to know before Tony."

It wouldn’t help or do anything but delay this farce by a few seconds, but Loki snatched the book out of Thor’s hands, snapped it closed, and flung it out of the alcove. On the other side of the illusory wall, there was a quiet pair of thumps as it hit a real wall and then the floor. “I don’t care what carrot you put on the string. I won’t play a game I can’t win. If I risk losing a different game for it, so be it. I’ll roll those dice.”

"There's no such thing as an unwinnable game," he inform Loki.

Thor pushes himself off the bed, pads through the illusionary wall, then sits back down, grip on the journal tighter than it had been before.

He opens it up again and sets his fingers against the page. He really doesn't want to have to say any of this aloud; it's been months, but everything still feels raw. That rawness only ever really feels numbed when he's somehow managed to distract himself completely, or else drowned himself in spirits when he was not.

He looks down at the book, at the Asgardian runes so neat and tidy that it hardly looked like his own handwriting.

"Thanos' forces disabled the ship and its life support. We tried to get as many Asgardians off the ship as possible. I explicitly told you to leave with them, with Banner. I thought the both of you had."

Edited 2018-10-25 01:22 (UTC)

“Bullshit,” Loki snapped back, glaring at Thor’s retreating back and returning form. The universe was full of unwinnable games. Thor didn’t realize it only because the universe didn’t constantly rub his face in them.

Snatching the book wouldn’t work a second time. If he’d been up to his usual standard he’d have stashed it over there to be forgotten or burned later. Ah, missed opportunities. There was only one play left to make, and no words could express how much Loki resented being driven to it.

He’d passed a good deal of time on the Isle of Silence as a child, youth, and even later. His constant punishment. Of course Loki had tried to create a spell to reverse the effect, rendering the place bearable. He’d only ever succeeded in copying the Silence, a spell he never wanted to cast, as it was nothing but torture..

He didn’t want to cast it now - Loki hated silence with an absolute purity of hate - but he did. Silence settled on the alcove like physical weight, not simple absence of sound but impossibility of sound. Maybe it was only in Loki’s head that it muted color and deadened touch too. Maybe it was only in his head that the air thickened and became hard to breathe. But maybe not.

Fortunately he didn’t have to face the Silence even slightly sober if he didn’t want to. He flipped Thor off in case a gesture would communicate his anger/frustration/resentment/resolve, then pulled a bottle of vodka out of his stash, opened it, and commenced drinking.

Thor hears (or more appropriately doesn't) as the sound of his voice snaps out of existence. The colors around him appear to vanish with the sound, becoming more muted, more grayscale.

Thor shuts the book and sets it down on the bed. He'd come into this determined, wanting to make things right, wanting for Loki to understand, but he was quickly finding that even his significant willpower was being diminished.

Thor raises a hand, though he doesn't try to take the bottle away. It hovers there in the air for a moment, as if he's not entirely sure what to do with it before letting it rest on the back of Loki's head.

He lets it run down the curve of his neck and stop on his shoulder where he gives him two pats on the shoulder.

I'll stop, he mouths at him, when Loki finally looks at him.

Loki glared, trying to communicate I don’t trust that while trying not to be comforted by the touch; every muscle in his body felt tense, and the gentle touch helped. Still, he finished the vodka before dismissing the spell just to make it even clearer that he could cast and dispel it whenever he wanted.

Ambient noise, rustling, air movement. No one knew how comforting that was, either. “I won’t be trapped, Thor. It’s not a joke to me.”

"I'm not trying to trap you, Loki," he says. "I know --" Thor removes his hand from Loki's shoulder. "-- that there's a chance that no matter how winning your efforts, you may not come out on the other side okay."

Thor looks down at his hands, the one that had been touching Loki's shoulder just a minute before.

"I just want you to know what's coming. Just like I want Tony to know. I truly believe that knowing might be the one thing that keeps everyone's futures from winding up like mine."

“And where Stark is concerned, I’m sure that’s true. It’s provably not true for me.” The same fight again. Maybe this time would be the last, there was already less hissing and spitting involved.

It was worth one more try. One more effort at explaining his reasons and reasoning. “Without knowing a single thing about my thoughts or plans, you decided that they were insufficient and had no chance of success. It didn’t matter what they were or weren’t, you decided I’m an incompetent idiot in need of instruction. Therefore, the only decision I have to make is whether or not I want to keep having this argument over and over or if I want to have it once and be done, because I have no actual chance of....” He paused, considering. “I say ‘winning’, but it’s inexact. ‘Your belief’ maybe.”

Thor listens and after Loki finishes, he doesn't say anything. Not immediately.

"I think something happened that forced you to change your plans," he says quietly. "I don't understand your plans, I don't often even understand you, but I don't think you're an incompetent idiot. Whatever plan you had might have worked, if events hadn't forced you along another course."

“But you left no room for the possibility that my plan, whatever it is or was, had that same flaw. You didn’t even pretend to have any confidence in my ability to not die when I’ve been warned to see it coming from possibly years away.” Loki spread his hands. “How am I supposed to translate that? It’s one thing to offer additional information and something else entirely to stomp and bellow about how I’m determined to die based on I don’t even know what.”

Thor takes a breath, briefly steeples his hands over his nose, then rubs one side of it.

"I'm sorry that you felt that way," he says. "It wasn't my intent."

It wasn't.

"I know that I'm not going to ever know what comes of you when one or the other of us returns," he says. "But that doesn't stop me from being afraid that some other me is going to lose you again. I've gone over everything that has happened hundreds of times now, trying to figure out what I could have done differently and sometimes it makes me crazy."

It had, too, immediately after his brother's death; he'd been so consumed with grief that he couldn't truly see or think straight. Even now, there were moments where his plans to kill Thanos and attempt to destroy the stones transformed into thoughts of using them himself to fix everything.

Thor still wasn't sure things could truly be fixed in his timeline. He could only hope they could be fixed in others.

After a moment, Loki nodded once, provisional acceptance. After another, he moved to sit next to Thor, making their positioning similar to one that had been commonplace when they were younger: close enough for private conspiracy (most often, Loki whispering to Thor), convenient for hanging off each other that they seldom actually did because Loki didn’t encourage physical contact. Old comfort. “I... admit that part of the reason I reacted badly is I don’t especially consider my survival a priority, there. Make no mistake, I intend to survive if I can. But it doesn’t distress me to consider I might not. On that score I only care because you apparently do.”

Thor wishes there was some way to make his brother care, but he can no sooner change that than he can their present circumstances.

"It's extremely important to me that you live," he says. "I know there are no guarantees and maybe there really isn't any real way to make this right, but you being alive would fix so many things."

Thor doesn't elaborate any further. Instead, he looks over at the journal, still sitting on the bed beside him.

Loki had to smile and shake his head. “Sentimental ass. You know you’d just have different problems.” He considered the journal as well, then sighed and reached to pick it up.

It wasn’t a battleground anymore, it might do as a peace offering.