Chapter Text
The days pass. Loki prefers to stay in the quarters they all call ‘his’ and... well, not do much, sit on the balcony, lie on the bed. Pace the floors when his mind won’t calm. (Change his form in the washroom and shatter the mirror and let it cut into the horrible skin, let the blue bleed everywhere, drag the shards to puncture the disgusting hide and let it suffer).
Thor and Frigga prefer otherwise. So Loki walks with Frigga in the gardens. They tend to her plants in her hidden crops in the mountains. Thor takes him to the library (“brother, you love it here, remember?” ) and Loki does remember and begins to spend a great deal of time in the more dusty, desolate corners of the halls.
He stays away from the public. He does not attend meetings, sparring, and he forgoes most of his regular duties, taking on instead ones he can do in private. Organization, propositions, plans, and outlines that other officials can discuss within themselves, never knowing where the original idea came from.
He prefers it like that because every time anyone as much as looks at him (a guard watching him as he passes, a librarian checking on him, people he passes when suddenly the uncrowded path he chose is not uncrowded anymore) he feels like they can see straight through his skin.
Because they can - or, well, they cannot see the blue (can they?) but they do know.
It isn’t private anymore, it isn’t a secret. Sif and the Warriors saw, and it was probably inevitable anyway since, apparently, all of Jotunheim knew. Frigga, Odin, and Thor are dealing with the aftermath of that (the demands that Loki be banished for good, the accusations of Odin’s reliability when he will invite something like that willingly into his home) and Loki would rather stay out of all of it.
They would not let him die, and he doesn’t have the strength to defy them. So he stays away from most things that would remind him that he is, indeed, still alive.
Like a ghost wandering the halls, he sneaks around the castle, the streets when it’s dark and empty and he cannot sleep.
Frigga forces him to eat and she talks to him. Thor tries to get him to the training grounds. Loki refuses. He snaps too often at Thor. He knows he is irritable and on edge, unreasonably so, way more than he has the right to be (you don’t have the right to be anything, anymore, do you? ). Thor gets angry with him, sometimes, and certainly, he should.
“It would make it easier, you know,” Thor says one day, both of them in Frigga’s gardens. Loki is sitting on a bench while Thor paces the blooming grass. “If you would show your face in public. Just sometimes.”
Loki stays quiet. Thor is in a mood and the only way out of it is to let him work through it with as little resistance as possible.
“Everyone thinks we are hiding you, you know?” Thor continues, “as if we don’t want you to be seen, as if, as if there is something to be hidden, which there isn’t, there’s just you and your damned pride and it is making everyone think -”
“My pride,” Loki interrupts him, apparently getting enough of it. It just blurts out. As soon as it does, though, he can’t stop the heat from burning in his throat. Thor stops pacing to look at him. “You’re right, it is my pride,” Loki continues, temper rising regardless. “The pride that is not especially keen to get thrown rotten vegetables to the face.” He crosses his arms, lowering his voice a pitch so he won’t sound quite so hysteric. “It is not your choice, Thor.”
They have conversations like that, sometimes. Thor gets frustrated, and with reason. Loki is less... unhinged than he was on the first day after he’d killed Helblindi, which gives Thor further reason to insist that nothing is different, that they should just go back to the way things were. Back to pretending.
“It isn’t pretending,” Thor says, “we don’t have to pretend. We are brothers, Loki, if not by blood then everything else. You are my brother. We don’t have to pretend anything but show them all the truth.”
Most of the time, Thor is... well, he’s remarkably soft. At times to an irritating degree where it seems more like a mask he puts on rather than any genuine intention (but you are not in any place to make any demands). They talk, and Thor listens in a way he hasn’t in years. Before the coronation, he’d been growing more arrogant and ignorant (always favored qualities of his, although in recent decades they’d been growing out of hand) and now it’s as if he’s … realized it. And has set out to change it.
Loki skips feast days. He skips anything official. The public excuse as to why he doesn’t attend foreign exchanges or negotiations or celebrations is that the younger prince is sick, which his appearance matches rather well if anyone is to glimpse him regardless, so that is all good.
Everyone knows what ‘sick’ means, though, because everyone knows he goes to the library, goes for walks, works. They know he isn’t bedridden. They know he’s hiding, and they know why.
It’s a lot, to not only have his true heritage revealed to himself and almost simultaneously the entirety of Asgard, but then also the madness. Which he has carefully been controlling for centuries, keeping in check, kept from the public, from Thor, anyone he could fool. Now, it’s public knowledge that the second prince (or the Jotun Bastard as Loki imagines people have rather switched to calling him in the privacy of their homes by now) had an ‘episode’. Lost his mind.
He certainly prefers to keep to himself.
If it wasn’t for Thor and Frigga, keeping to himself wouldn’t be enough. He would have no place to belong to whatsoever, however much of an illusion it all is, and he would surely have jumped into the void long before now to escape it all.
Things get... better, one may say, over time. The self-isolation certainly helps more than the alternative would, Loki believes. He goes back to being the ‘Prince of Asgard’, this time around in quotations, and this time around in hiding.
Weeks pass. Months. He falls into a routine, one of how to have time pass with somewhat neutral emotions and how to avoid seeing most people. Thor, of course, can’t be helped, but at least he does not drag Loki anywhere he doesn’t want to be.
It’s nicer, in fact, than it ever was to be in the public eye. The knowledge of what people say about him (what he’s heard whispered in crooks when nobody thought they were being heard)... it hurts, but it feels fitting at the same time. It’s not as if he doesn’t agree. And anyway, it’s nice to just get to bury himself in work, studying, practice, all in quiet and stillness. Well, mostly.
“You need to eat,” Frigga tells him, a hand on his shoulder as he sits bowed over the desk in his quarters. She has told him many times before but it doesn’t particularly change the state of anything. “You grow much too thin, my son.”
He nods, still scribbling notes from the book lying open, eyes flicking between its pages and his own notebook. “I know,” he says.
“You know, yes, yet you keep neglecting it.”
He stops writing. Takes a small, steadying breath through his nose. “It’s not on purpose.”
He doesn’t, truly, know if it is. But he’s saying it to calm her, which is better than any alternative.
“Maybe not,” Frigga says as if reading his thoughts, “so I thought I’d bring it up. To remind you. Take a break, Loki.”
He does, that day, but she cannot be there for every meal. She cannot be there at all seconds of the day to make sure he isn’t... forgetting things.
Thor is not happy about it, either. “You should start training again,” he says another day, one evening on the balcony. He brought mead and they're drinking it in the early bloom of dark. Thor eyes Loki’s body, a quick sweep down and up, and Loki wishes he’d dressed in more layers but refuses the urge to wrap his arms around himself.
“That’s rude,” Loki retorts, eyes on the horizon, taking a sip of the bottle he’s clutching. He moves, just a little, to get his jacket to fall better from his shoulders. Less revealing.
“You’ve gotten scrawny,” Thor continues, and Loki scowls at him.
“Did you not hear me? It was not an invitation to keep insulting me.”
Thor frowns. “I am not insulting you.”
“I don’t think you can be the judge of that, being the perpetrator.”
Thor rolls his eyes when Loki glances at him. “I am only saying, you know it well already. It would do you good, you would be stronger. You know well the strength of your body affects the mind as well, maybe you would feel better if you were out more, getting some sunlight, moving, you know -”
“As you say,” Loki interrupts sharply, “I know it well already, so I do not need your perspective. And I do not care for your opinion on the matter, either.”
“Someone has to give it to you,” Thor objects, “you cannot do everything alone.”
Loki raises an eyebrow at the horizon. “Can’t I?” he mutters.
Thor scowls in his peripheral vision. “I am just saying. Perhaps if you began attending feasts again, for a start, being in the eyes of people, you would become motivated to better fit your clothes -”
“Thor,” Loki says sharply, turning finally to look at him. His face feels tight. “Stop. Please,” he adds, less harsh.
Thor looks at him for a long moment, then relents, looking back out at the sky. There is silence for several seconds.
“It scares me, Loki,” Thor says finally, substantially quieter and uncomfortably honest, “when you don’t take care of yourself.”
Loki sighs, willing himself to give up some of the hostility. He glances at Thor and smiles crookedly. “I’ve survived it before, haven’t I?”
Thor looks back at him but doesn’t return the smile. “Yes. So I cannot help but wonder when will be the time you do not.”
It’s a punch to the stomach. Loki draws back but doesn’t comment further. He is not interested in that line of conversation.
Not long after that evening, he begins to spar with Thor. Or, he proposes it. Thor’s face lights up in such an exasperating way when Loki asks (very deliberately in a casual and off-hand manner) if he would like to train a few moves in one of the private sparring rings.
They go that afternoon. Loki has made certain to eat some breakfast that day: he does not want to be humiliated more than need be.
Thor seems intent on the same thing and moves carefully as they work. Thor depowering himself so obviously only highlights further how embarrassingly weak Loki has gotten: he wears long-sleeved and loose training clothes but it doesn’t sufficiently hide… all of it. The state of his body (never kept weight well, what do you expect when you don’t make an effort at all). How pathetic his attempts at jabs are.
Loki gets increasingly frustrated with it all, naturally, and ends up snapping at Thor to stop going so easy. That turns out to be a mistake. Thor does not go hard, per se, but when he blocks Loki’s blow and punches him in the side in turn, forcing the air out his lungs, Loki’s thoughts blank out for a moment.
Left in their wake is unadulterated fear. He falters and Thor grabs him in the second off guard, throwing him to the ground. Loki ends up on his back, unable to force back in the breath he lost, vision failing as the fear clouds his mind, sure now that this is it, Thor is finally taking his opportunity. He is far superior and Loki does not stand a chance, he is going to die (but does it matter, is that not what you truly desire? He is scared, though, why is he so scared? Why is he scared) -- Thor is going to kill him. The man Loki called brother for his whole life hates him and he is going to kill him, now, finally. He has been waiting for the right moment, he hates him and he is going to -
He comes back to his mind sitting pressed back against a wall and not remembering how he got there. Thor is crouching some steps away, pale as a sheet.
“I’m sorry,” he says, gasps, when Loki’s eyes focus on him. His hands are raised palms out, and they’re shaking. “I didn’t mean to - Loki, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry -”
It takes a few days before they try that again. That time, they both go more carefully at work, Loki conscious not to get snappish, Thor… very careful. Which is probably fitting, as much as Loki loathes it.
He gets more coordinated, over time. Thor was right, irritatingly enough, as it turns out: the movement helps. It makes him not necessarily much stronger (because he still can’t get himself to eat at all enough, why can’t he make himself eat?) but he gets in touch with his body in a way that feels familiar, comfortable. He moves differently, doesn’t .. stumble as much. He begins to regain some of the confidence he had before. Not just forced to put up a facade or trick the world into thinking he is unbothered, no, genuine… confidence. Well, as much as he can manage of it, anyway. There’s a lot else to outweigh it, after all, but it is there.
It helps his relationship with Thor, too. The physical contact, fighting together, thinking complementarily, they move in sync in a way Loki is suddenly remembering they used to when they were younger. Reminding him just how much they’ve lived through together.
“It could’ve gone worse, I think,” Thor says one day. They’re sitting on the edge of a cliff looking over the landscape of Asgard’s shores. In the distance, the moons, stars, and nearby planets are painted as faded shades on the sky of swirling color. Loki glances at him sideways.
“Don’t make me ask what you mean, I’m not playing.”
Thor huffs, and looks down at his hands. “Right. I mean… I’m just thinking, if you hadn’t told father that you let the Jotnar in at my coronation, I think… I think things could’ve gone worse.”
Loki frowns, raising an eyebrow. “If I hadn’t been banished with you. Why?”
Thor shrugs and lifts his gaze to the distance, squinting. “If you’d been on Asgard… father fell into the sleep after he banished us, which means you would’ve been Prince Regent, all alone.”
Loki feels his own expression tighten and he looks away from Thor. “So you think the throne would have fit me ill, is it.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“It really is, though.”
“No, you’re -” Thor cuts off and sighs. He looks at Loki, who doesn’t return the look. “I only mean,” he says softly. “You would have isolated yourself, pretended everything was fine. And it would’ve been easier, with being on Asgard, you could hide better, and - and I just imagine .. with the responsibility of the throne and you, you feeling like you did … you know?” He pauses. “Loki, I don’t mean to offend you. I shouldn’t have -”
Loki cuts him off with a handwave. “You’re making sense,” he says, only a little bitter to admit it. “You noticed correctly that I was slightly more mad during that time than usual. I would have… likely cracked under the weight of the throne.”
Thor is still looking at him. “I’m not saying you necessarily would have. Just that it would’ve been difficult and...” he trails off. Loki hears the note of fear underneath, which is what keeps him from snapping at the accusation. Fear of what, he wonders - what would’ve happened?
Besides, Thor is right. Realizing he is Jotun and then being given the throne would… not have been a good mix. He would’ve tried to prove himself, not thinking the case was lost yet. He would’ve known it was a matter of time, that Thor would return and Loki would have to prove himself better than him before he did in order to be anything at all, to not be the failed son, to be a worthy son. He would’ve tried to stop the war but would take drastic measures. He would not have been patient.
Everything would’ve gone wrong, he is aware of in retrospect. At the time, however, his mind had been far enough out that he would’ve dove headfirst into .. well, insane measures to get his way, probably.
“You’re right,” he tells Thor, “I’ve done stupid things before, trying to prove myself. We’ve both experienced that first-hand. This time it would likely have gone too far.”
Thor nods but doesn’t say anything. He looks away.
“I’m glad we were together, Loki,” he finally says. “And… thank you, for staying with me, back on Midgard. When I was being unreasonable.”
You weren’t , Loki wants to tell him. You were right to be upset with me. You still are.
He shrugs instead because he knows that Thor… knows that. “Thank you for staying with me, too, I suppose,” he mutters.
Thor looks at him with a cheeky smile. “You suppo-ose ,” he drawls, a mocking echo.
Loki glares back. “Do not stretch it, brother,” he says, then stiffens when he realizes too late what he said. He opens his mouth to… take it back, somehow, but it feels dry and uncooperative.
Thor’s smile just softens, however, and he reaches out to clasp a hand on the back of Loki’s neck.
“That’s right,” he says. “Brother. I’m your brother. You are mine.”
Loki swallows, eyes wide on Thor and seeming glued on the familiar lines in a familiar face. “I’m sorry,” he says, feeling suddenly very small under Thor’s warm hand and not sure at all why he is apologizing.
Thor just nods. “I am, too.”
They sit there for a little while longer, in silence. Thor moves the hand to wrap his arm behind Loki’s shoulders, drawing him in to lean against him, and Loki allows it. He slumps against his brother’s side, eyes on the golden light of early evening bathing the shores, the forests, the streets and mountains where they’ve grown up together.
He cannot quite find it in himself to feel like he belongs there, in this world, but maybe he never could in the first place. If Loki doesn’t trust it, if he doesn’t believe in trust at all, he still knows that sitting there wrapped in Thor’s arm, it’s a little less frightening to know of the cold that runs in his veins. He doesn’t know if he belongs here, either, but he can… try, just for now.
He allows his mind to drift for some time, anyway. It feels a little better like that. Not allowing the fear to steal him away. Just for now.
A little calmer.