Fic: The Reign of Lodbrok (Thor: Thor/Loki, Explicit), 3 of 3
Title: The Reign of Lodbrok
Author:
eyebrowofdoom
Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Category: M/M
Fandoms: Thor (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Relationship: Loki/Thor
Characters: Thor (Marvel)Loki (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Thor: The Dark World, Cats, Grief/Mourning, Shapeshifting, Shapeshifter Loki, Sibling Incest, Loki Redemption, Lokitty
Words: 11880
Chapters: 3/3
Summary: Grieving the death of Frigga and what he believes to be the death of Loki, Thor meets the only creature alive with a poorer grasp of sportsmanship than his brother: a small, black cat.
Notes: Set at the end of Thor: The Dark World. Thor has refused the throne, but remains in Asgard. Contains violence, ambiguous intimacy with a cat, abuse of Westermarck effect, and imperfect negotiation of consent. Many thanks to GloriaMundi for beta-reading and egging on. This fic is finished but being posted in parts because suspense is fun. :)
They go to the roof first, where the sentries scratch themselves, unaware of being observed, and dawdle on their patrol. Loki directs Thor by tugging his arm, for Loki has enchanted their voices and the sound of their passage away, after complaining that Thor breathed, and stomped, too loudly.
One sentry stops entirely and leans on the railing. Loki brings them forward to lean next to him, breathtakingly close.
The man begins to pick his nose with singular, exploratory diligence.
At last he leaves, and the agitation, which Thor took to be laughter, in Loki’s body - for they must keep contact lest they lose each other while invisible and inaudible - stills itself. But Loki does not seek to move from the railing right away.
The lights of Asgard are below them, and the stars above, as though one is a reflection in dark water of the other, in some vast, deep cavern.
Loki was locked in his cell underground, without sun-, moon- or starlight, a long while, Thor supposes.
Next they go to the kitchens. Some young women kitchenhands are lounging with a flagon of wine, at a fire in a smaller hearth. One of them has her skirts hiked up into her lap and is examining a large pimple on her thigh, while the others look amused.
‘No princes between these for a while.’
‘Have you even seen him recently?’ another asks.
‘Barely at all. He’s gone strange, if you ask me. I mean, a Midgardian woman. Isn’t that like fucking a child?’ She swigs her wine.
Loki’s arm twitches in Thor’s grasp.
‘He hasn’t wrestled for ages! Have you all seen that?’ another says.
‘No!’ another replies. ‘Do they take their clothes off?’
‘All of them! Or practically all of them. He just has this little loincloth,’ the first says. ‘Let me tell you: those thighs. Like a whole side of ham!’ She mimes tearing a hunk of meat with her teeth.
Several pretend to fan themselves.
Loki is now rocking back and forth, which makes it hard to hold on to him.
‘Don’t laugh, but I used to like that Loki,’ one says.
The others gasp.
‘I thought he was sweet!’
They all groan and shake their heads.
‘You can’t say he’s not handsome!’ she protests. ‘When he’s not trying to kill us all.’
The rest of them grimace theatrically.
‘He looks like a lizard!’ one of them says, hamming up her disgust. She gets up to stoke the fire.
Loki, who has become very still, slips from Thor’s grasp.
As the woman sits down again, her chair twitches out from under her, sending her sprawling.
‘Was that Nell?’ one says, in a squeak.
‘Dead Nell?’ the one on the ground squeaks back.
They all sit up like frightened rabbits.
‘I’m sorry, Nell, I know you fancied him!’ the one on the ground warbles towards the ceiling, gaze darting around in the air.
Thor strides forward to where he guesses Loki must be, and nearly trips over him - for Loki is almost bent double with laughter. He tries to hit Loki chidingly on the shoulder, but misses and strikes the side of his face. Loki retaliates with an outflung arm, and elbows him in the groin. They scuffle. Their scuffle bumps them into some shelves, sending pots and pans crashing to the floor.
The women, as one, scream.
Outside, Thor taps Loki twice on the shoulder vigorously, which was their agreed signal for Loki to give him his voice back. But Loki does not comply. He does, however, embrace Thor and pat his back soothingly. Thor chooses to take this as an apology, and pats him back, and finds Loki’s ribs are still rising and falling quickly. As Thor carries on patting him, Loki quiets.
Loki leads him on, Thor knows not where.
Then they are in a service corridor, and Thor has a terrible premonition. Behind the turned backs of some guards, they enter the hallway that serves the private entrances to the family rooms.
Thor’s premonition is right, but it is already too late. He pulls back on Loki’s elbow, but Loki carries on. Thor does not think they can risk another scuffle here.
They approach the door to Odin’s chambers. In the doorway, Loki stops. Thor grabs Loki’s hand and holds it to his jaw, so Loki can feel him shaking his head. But Loki brings both hands to Thor’s face and stills him. He kisses Thor on the mouth, off-centre and clumsy. From the puff of his breath, it seems as though he is saying something.
Loki depresses the door handle, and they must get inside at once.
Odin’s bed, thank all the fates, is empty. In fact, the covers are taut - it is unslept in. Thor bangs on Loki’s shoulder wildly. ‘He’ll come back!’ he whispers, when Loki gives him back his voice.
‘He won’t,’ Loki says. He steps away, and Thor sees a corner of the covers being pulled loose, and a dint being punched into the pillow.
‘Do you see this?’ Loki’s voice says seriously. The cover of the book of history on the bedside table lifts itself. It seems it is a secondary cover that can be lifted right off the book. The primary cover underneath is different. It’s the cover of a book of sorcery.
‘What does it mean?’ Thor says.
He is probably imagining that Loki’s invisible silence has a slightly critical air.
‘All right, there’s more,’ Loki says. ‘Have you finished talking for now?’
‘Loki,’ Thor says.
Loki takes his voice away.
Loki finds Thor’s hand in the air, and leads him away, out another door, which leads to a private stairway downwards.
It is very awkward to descend a staircase without being able to see your feet, and having to hold on to someone else lest you lose him. It is probably for the best that Loki is unable to offer comment on Thor’s progress.
They walk between oblivious guards, beneath a golden arch, and take the dark stairs to the vaults.
This was a site of childhood play on occasion, when they were brought here with Father on errands. The first rooms are familiar, though the objects in them come and go at Odin’s command.
Then a deeper chamber, plain-walled, no longer gilded or stencilled like a room in the palace. Large things lie under sheets. They once played a game of hiding here, before being scolded and sent out.
Then a deeper room again, where Thor has seldom been, which is more like a cave, and where the natural light does not rise above a deep, dark blue. The steps down into it are hewn roughly from stone. It takes a long time to stumble down them, holding hands. At the bottom of the steps, Loki stops, and places Thor’s hands on the backs of his shoulders. Thor understands he is to follow him thus, now.
They proceed into the dimness. Loki, it is clear, is now navigating by means other than sight. Where Thor’s eyes see only a wall of indistinguishable dark, sheeted forms, Loki finds a serpentine path. Only once do they come unstuck: Thor bumps his head on some overhanging thing that Loki, being shorter, has passed below. Thor reels back, losing contact with Loki. Loki must come back for him and, lacking language, pat Thor’s forehead in apology.
They carry on. Some quality of the air changes, and the last of the dark blue light is extinguished for perfect black. They must be passing through a tunnel, low overhead. Thor did not even know there was a passage here. The boy in him quails, though the man marches on.
The air moves differently - they are in another cavern. Another serpentine path, now in utter darkness. A drapery brushes Thor’s face in passing, and he startles. Another tunnel. Another cavern, empty now, for Loki cuts a straight, confident path across it.
They go on. It is long since Thor could have told which direction is sunrise and which sunset.
Loki stops. Thor almost knocks him down, and they apologise with their hands, as they have learned to do.
Loki pushes him a step to the side, and holds him there, with a clasped forearm.
There is a clank. It pains the ear, after the silence. Light lances Thor’s eyes.
Loki tugs him by the wrist through a heavy, slow-swinging door. Thor cannot focus yet. He hears Loki pull the door shut behind them and settle a bolt back into place.
Loki does something. Thor can see himself again! It is a boon beyond price. He can see Loki, too, and claps him on the shoulder. It is good to see him. Though they look absurd, still in their robes.
He goes to move down the tunnel and into the room. But Loki says, ‘Wait a second. Till your eyes adjust.’
After a moment, they move. They enter a smaller cavern, cut roughly from the rock and scattered with fresh debris, as if it was only hewn recently.
‘This is what I have to show you,’ Loki says.
It is a golden capsule bed, shining and ringed with lights. In it lies Odin, asleep.
Thor’s fist strikes Loki’s face with a sick, meaty sound.
For a second, the look in Loki’s eye has a terrible honesty: it is pure, childlike betrayal. Though he threw the punch, Thor feels sure his own face looks the same.
The second passes. Loki squares his stance. His whole body seems to grow. With a look of naked malice, he launches something, overarm, at Thor.
Thor hurls himself aside to the ground, and the freezing air of it whips past his ear and shatters into fragments of ice against the cave wall behind. Loki casts again, and Thor rolls away. The magic clips his shoulder and he bleeds there, half frozen.
He rolls to his feet and leaps the capsule bed. Loki, startled, sends a cast that goes wide. Thor lands with his fist halfway to Loki’s face. It connects like a building falling. Loki’s head snaps back. Thor lands a second to his undefended middle, bowing him over in pain. He pulls his arm back to deliver a third, to the back of the head, to fell him.
But Loki breaks from his feint, and surges from his crouch to strike Thor hard in the jaw, sending him staggering. At once Loki kicks him in the chest.
Thor falls. Loki is on him. A fist to the face rings Thor’s skull like a bell. Then another, and a third. Thor’s right eye no longer sees.
Thor seizes Loki’s robe and, with a bleary heave, rolls them over. He strikes Loki in the mouth, and wet spatter flies. Loki twitches, and some percussive magic hurls Thor off him. Thor flies several feet and lands with his robe flipped up, painfully on his bare backside, on rubble.
His predicament, or perhaps just the look on his face, stays Loki’s hand a moment. They stand and brush themselves off.
‘This is quite a good fight,’ Thor says, cheerfully, for the joy of battle is upon him.
Thor has lost time, but now he is awake. There is a woolliness in the air around his body, sharpened almost to static around his head, as if the body has become confused where its edges are. It means he is hurt, but not, he thinks, mortally.
His hair is stuck under something, and he cannot raise his head. It is a large rock, he discovers by touch. He also discovers there is almost no part of the back of his hand that is not cut and bleeding. He pushes the rock away awkwardly with his palm.
The sound of it falling a short way, then rolling and crunching, vibrates a dull, hot pain loose, deep in his inner ear.
He sits up, to a great surge of nausea that blanks his vision.
When he is able to spare the attention from his distress, he looks around him.
Loki, also in a pile of rubble, is leaning slumped against the wall, a few steps away. His face is a beaten side of meat.
‘You look like I feel,’ Thor says. His voice comes out worse than he thought; some syllables are barely voiced.
Loki looks at him dully, and lays himself down on his side in the rubble.
Thor lies back down too.
Time has passed - quite a deal of it.
Thor opens his eyes. Loki is standing, looking down at him. His face is such a disaster that it is difficult to interpret his expression. He is dirty, cut and bleeding all over, and his robe hangs open, the sash lost. A prodigious bruise blooms at his middle. But he seems steady on his feet, and calm.
Thor returns his look, and sits up. It is much less baleful to do than it was earlier. He reaches out his hand to Loki.
Effortfully, Loki manoeuvres his swollen face into an expression of irritation. Thor continues to hold out his hand.
Loki gives in and helps him up.
They are both startled, in the instant they encounter each other at eye level. Loki takes a jerky step back. Suddenly he pulls his robe closed and sticks it there with a fingerful of magic.
Thor wants to snicker, but it hurts his face.
Thor leans on the rail of the golden capsule, and looks at Odin.
‘You -’ he begins, but his voice is still difficult to operate. He pauses to clear his throat and swallow a few times. ‘You combed his hair out like Mother used to.’
Loki’s eyes are murderous for a second. He turns away, walking a few steps, stiff.
‘Is this still revenge?’ Thor says. ‘Your long revenge. Will you torture him, murder him, in time?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Loki says.
Thor slumps, his weight on his hands. ‘Can I not love you enough that you will stop this?’
Loki’s back straightens, but he does not turn around.
‘You do not love me enough for any purpose of mine.’ Loki’s voice is terrible.
‘You have blighted our lives with that error!’
‘Oh I have, have I? Well, of course it was me. Half the reason…’ Loki does turn around now, to show Thor his face - because he has begun to weep, ragefully.
Loki stares at Thor, grimacing like an animal. ‘Half the reason I passionately wish I’d killed him… is that for years, years, I loved you as I never loved a woman. I mean that I loved you. I mean I spilled my seed dreaming of you. And I thought I was an abomination.’
He turns away again, paces, and turns back. ‘And then, it turned out I was an abomination. It was just a different kind of abomination than I thought!’
He sags where he stands.
Thor shambles across to him, his arms neutral.
Loki allows an embrace.
‘I do not have the wit to comfort you,’ Thor says, his face in Loki’s hair.
‘Now, as at so many times in life, wit is not required,’ Loki says, muffled. ‘Or else you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you.’
Thor kisses his wet cheek, catching a place where the skin is broken.
‘Ow,’ Loki says. He pokes Thor in the ribs, where earlier he kicked him.
‘What are we to do?’ Thor kisses Loki’s hair, more carefully.
Loki breaks away. He wipes his tears. ‘There’s more.’
‘Tell it to me,’ Thor says.
Loki retreats to the cavern wall and leans on it, with an air of settling in. He begins, ‘When I brought the Chitauri to Midgard, I did so in collaboration with a very unpleasant individual called Thanos.’
When Loki has finished his story, Thor says, ‘And do you wish for this? For all the realms to be enslaved by this Thanos?’
Loki opens his mouth to speak. Thor interrupts. ‘For Asgard, overthrown and in chains? Jotunheim, in chains? Me, in chains? Me dead?’ In his heart he adds, Midgard, in chains?
Loki opens his mouth again.
‘Do not answer glibly,’ Thor says. He cannot quite pronounce ‘glibly’ right, with his beaten mouth.
They look at each other.
‘No,’ Loki says.
‘Then what are we to do?’ But this time Thor he does not mean this rhetorically.
His hand twitches for his hammer.
‘If I were king,’ Loki says, with an ironic mince, standing up, ‘I would do what I have already begun to do. Which is ready our armies, for it will come to that soon. Pull back from any position we cannot defend.’
‘That, I can do,’ Thor says with relief. He remembers how helpless he felt when Odin would not act against Malekith.
‘The Infinity Stone that the Allfather entrusted elsewhere must be retrieved. But no-one but the Allfather has standing to retrieve it.’ Loki holds Thor’s eye.
The bed where Odin’s body lies is spilling golden light.
‘Well, then,’ Thor says.
The women of the palace are delighted to see that Thor of Asgard has taken up wrestling again. Once again he welcomes all challengers with the dreadful joy of one destined for Valhalla, clad in his small loincloth. His return to warriorly high spirits is watched over by his father from the galleries, who claps and shouts as though he himself has been restored to some old, lost vitality. Gone is that sense of Odin’s dwindling, of twilight descending, that has cast a shade of melancholy over the court in recent years.
Soon Thor returns to all the sports of battle, and the warriors rise to meet him, their hearts hot with the yearning for victory. All is life; all is summer. Everywhere is the flowering of valour. The mead flows till late; the toasts ring out; the songs of old are sung.
King and heir are so inseparable that even when there is not a public feast - Thor inevitably in the victor’s place, at his father’s right hand - they dine together in private, sending all attendants away so that they may take counsel late into the night.
A curious note is struck by Thor’s adoption of a small, black cat, which he has named Lodbrok. Attempts to bring it a fish on a saucer are rebuffed, for he will feed Lodbrok only from his own plate. So smitten is their prince that he cannot bear to leave the cat behind even when he goes to dine with his father. Sometimes it is seen, quite scandalously, walking upon the very table where king and prince are supping, menacing the tankards with its tail, though never, it is noted, at the precise moment that Odin is there to witness it.
There is talk that Asgard prepares for war. Frontiers long held peaceably are now abandoned for a closer position. New recruits shadow the ground in the training yards, till there is scarcely a shoulder’s width of sand unoccupied. Thor is shield-brother and scourge alike; his voice alone is thunder.
Upon the defeat of Malekith, gossip recalls that Sif and Volstagg were sent on an errand to a far world, carrying a package. Now they are sent again, this time with escort of armed warriors. They return, days later than expected, bloodied, with two of the warriors dead, and no package. Thor greets them in the throne room with an embrace, but his face is grim. Odin seats himself taller on the throne.
One night, a horn blares out, thrilling in the air. The warriors of Asgard are summoned to feast in the great hall of Odin, the Allfather.
Their king stands straight atop the dais, age unbent from his frame as if by force of will. Gungnir shines gold in his hand. A step down, in arm’s reach, stands golden Thor, whose bare head shines just as bright.
‘Warriors of Asgard,’ cries Odin, ‘drink and feast and make merry! For tomorrow, fell deeds await.’
The company shouts its acclamation.
‘An enemy rises,’ Odin intones, like some deep bell, ‘who would lay fire among every leaf, twig and branch of Yggdrasil. Who would make slave and thrall of every living creature. Asgard will meet him. Asgard will spill his blood and cast him to the void! Are you with me?’
Thor, in his passion, summons thunder in the sky. But the roar of the company drowns it out.
Notes:
I was delighted to discover from research that Thor is also the Norse god of wrestling. I regret to advise his small loincloth has no particular historical justification.
Thank you all for coming with me on this journey from ambiguous cat eroticism to saving the universe.
x-posted at Dth with
comments. Comment wherever you like (scraps of paper posted in the tree outside your house may not be received right away).
Author:
eyebrowofdoom
Rating: Explicit
Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Category: M/M
Fandoms: Thor (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Relationship: Loki/Thor
Characters: Thor (Marvel)Loki (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Thor: The Dark World, Cats, Grief/Mourning, Shapeshifting, Shapeshifter Loki, Sibling Incest, Loki Redemption, Lokitty
Words: 11880
Chapters: 3/3
Summary: Grieving the death of Frigga and what he believes to be the death of Loki, Thor meets the only creature alive with a poorer grasp of sportsmanship than his brother: a small, black cat.
Notes: Set at the end of Thor: The Dark World. Thor has refused the throne, but remains in Asgard. Contains violence, ambiguous intimacy with a cat, abuse of Westermarck effect, and imperfect negotiation of consent. Many thanks to GloriaMundi for beta-reading and egging on. This fic is finished but being posted in parts because suspense is fun. :)
They go to the roof first, where the sentries scratch themselves, unaware of being observed, and dawdle on their patrol. Loki directs Thor by tugging his arm, for Loki has enchanted their voices and the sound of their passage away, after complaining that Thor breathed, and stomped, too loudly.
One sentry stops entirely and leans on the railing. Loki brings them forward to lean next to him, breathtakingly close.
The man begins to pick his nose with singular, exploratory diligence.
At last he leaves, and the agitation, which Thor took to be laughter, in Loki’s body - for they must keep contact lest they lose each other while invisible and inaudible - stills itself. But Loki does not seek to move from the railing right away.
The lights of Asgard are below them, and the stars above, as though one is a reflection in dark water of the other, in some vast, deep cavern.
Loki was locked in his cell underground, without sun-, moon- or starlight, a long while, Thor supposes.
Next they go to the kitchens. Some young women kitchenhands are lounging with a flagon of wine, at a fire in a smaller hearth. One of them has her skirts hiked up into her lap and is examining a large pimple on her thigh, while the others look amused.
‘No princes between these for a while.’
‘Have you even seen him recently?’ another asks.
‘Barely at all. He’s gone strange, if you ask me. I mean, a Midgardian woman. Isn’t that like fucking a child?’ She swigs her wine.
Loki’s arm twitches in Thor’s grasp.
‘He hasn’t wrestled for ages! Have you all seen that?’ another says.
‘No!’ another replies. ‘Do they take their clothes off?’
‘All of them! Or practically all of them. He just has this little loincloth,’ the first says. ‘Let me tell you: those thighs. Like a whole side of ham!’ She mimes tearing a hunk of meat with her teeth.
Several pretend to fan themselves.
Loki is now rocking back and forth, which makes it hard to hold on to him.
‘Don’t laugh, but I used to like that Loki,’ one says.
The others gasp.
‘I thought he was sweet!’
They all groan and shake their heads.
‘You can’t say he’s not handsome!’ she protests. ‘When he’s not trying to kill us all.’
The rest of them grimace theatrically.
‘He looks like a lizard!’ one of them says, hamming up her disgust. She gets up to stoke the fire.
Loki, who has become very still, slips from Thor’s grasp.
As the woman sits down again, her chair twitches out from under her, sending her sprawling.
‘Was that Nell?’ one says, in a squeak.
‘Dead Nell?’ the one on the ground squeaks back.
They all sit up like frightened rabbits.
‘I’m sorry, Nell, I know you fancied him!’ the one on the ground warbles towards the ceiling, gaze darting around in the air.
Thor strides forward to where he guesses Loki must be, and nearly trips over him - for Loki is almost bent double with laughter. He tries to hit Loki chidingly on the shoulder, but misses and strikes the side of his face. Loki retaliates with an outflung arm, and elbows him in the groin. They scuffle. Their scuffle bumps them into some shelves, sending pots and pans crashing to the floor.
The women, as one, scream.
Outside, Thor taps Loki twice on the shoulder vigorously, which was their agreed signal for Loki to give him his voice back. But Loki does not comply. He does, however, embrace Thor and pat his back soothingly. Thor chooses to take this as an apology, and pats him back, and finds Loki’s ribs are still rising and falling quickly. As Thor carries on patting him, Loki quiets.
Loki leads him on, Thor knows not where.
Then they are in a service corridor, and Thor has a terrible premonition. Behind the turned backs of some guards, they enter the hallway that serves the private entrances to the family rooms.
Thor’s premonition is right, but it is already too late. He pulls back on Loki’s elbow, but Loki carries on. Thor does not think they can risk another scuffle here.
They approach the door to Odin’s chambers. In the doorway, Loki stops. Thor grabs Loki’s hand and holds it to his jaw, so Loki can feel him shaking his head. But Loki brings both hands to Thor’s face and stills him. He kisses Thor on the mouth, off-centre and clumsy. From the puff of his breath, it seems as though he is saying something.
Loki depresses the door handle, and they must get inside at once.
Odin’s bed, thank all the fates, is empty. In fact, the covers are taut - it is unslept in. Thor bangs on Loki’s shoulder wildly. ‘He’ll come back!’ he whispers, when Loki gives him back his voice.
‘He won’t,’ Loki says. He steps away, and Thor sees a corner of the covers being pulled loose, and a dint being punched into the pillow.
‘Do you see this?’ Loki’s voice says seriously. The cover of the book of history on the bedside table lifts itself. It seems it is a secondary cover that can be lifted right off the book. The primary cover underneath is different. It’s the cover of a book of sorcery.
‘What does it mean?’ Thor says.
He is probably imagining that Loki’s invisible silence has a slightly critical air.
‘All right, there’s more,’ Loki says. ‘Have you finished talking for now?’
‘Loki,’ Thor says.
Loki takes his voice away.
Loki finds Thor’s hand in the air, and leads him away, out another door, which leads to a private stairway downwards.
It is very awkward to descend a staircase without being able to see your feet, and having to hold on to someone else lest you lose him. It is probably for the best that Loki is unable to offer comment on Thor’s progress.
They walk between oblivious guards, beneath a golden arch, and take the dark stairs to the vaults.
This was a site of childhood play on occasion, when they were brought here with Father on errands. The first rooms are familiar, though the objects in them come and go at Odin’s command.
Then a deeper chamber, plain-walled, no longer gilded or stencilled like a room in the palace. Large things lie under sheets. They once played a game of hiding here, before being scolded and sent out.
Then a deeper room again, where Thor has seldom been, which is more like a cave, and where the natural light does not rise above a deep, dark blue. The steps down into it are hewn roughly from stone. It takes a long time to stumble down them, holding hands. At the bottom of the steps, Loki stops, and places Thor’s hands on the backs of his shoulders. Thor understands he is to follow him thus, now.
They proceed into the dimness. Loki, it is clear, is now navigating by means other than sight. Where Thor’s eyes see only a wall of indistinguishable dark, sheeted forms, Loki finds a serpentine path. Only once do they come unstuck: Thor bumps his head on some overhanging thing that Loki, being shorter, has passed below. Thor reels back, losing contact with Loki. Loki must come back for him and, lacking language, pat Thor’s forehead in apology.
They carry on. Some quality of the air changes, and the last of the dark blue light is extinguished for perfect black. They must be passing through a tunnel, low overhead. Thor did not even know there was a passage here. The boy in him quails, though the man marches on.
The air moves differently - they are in another cavern. Another serpentine path, now in utter darkness. A drapery brushes Thor’s face in passing, and he startles. Another tunnel. Another cavern, empty now, for Loki cuts a straight, confident path across it.
They go on. It is long since Thor could have told which direction is sunrise and which sunset.
Loki stops. Thor almost knocks him down, and they apologise with their hands, as they have learned to do.
Loki pushes him a step to the side, and holds him there, with a clasped forearm.
There is a clank. It pains the ear, after the silence. Light lances Thor’s eyes.
Loki tugs him by the wrist through a heavy, slow-swinging door. Thor cannot focus yet. He hears Loki pull the door shut behind them and settle a bolt back into place.
Loki does something. Thor can see himself again! It is a boon beyond price. He can see Loki, too, and claps him on the shoulder. It is good to see him. Though they look absurd, still in their robes.
He goes to move down the tunnel and into the room. But Loki says, ‘Wait a second. Till your eyes adjust.’
After a moment, they move. They enter a smaller cavern, cut roughly from the rock and scattered with fresh debris, as if it was only hewn recently.
‘This is what I have to show you,’ Loki says.
It is a golden capsule bed, shining and ringed with lights. In it lies Odin, asleep.
Thor’s fist strikes Loki’s face with a sick, meaty sound.
For a second, the look in Loki’s eye has a terrible honesty: it is pure, childlike betrayal. Though he threw the punch, Thor feels sure his own face looks the same.
The second passes. Loki squares his stance. His whole body seems to grow. With a look of naked malice, he launches something, overarm, at Thor.
Thor hurls himself aside to the ground, and the freezing air of it whips past his ear and shatters into fragments of ice against the cave wall behind. Loki casts again, and Thor rolls away. The magic clips his shoulder and he bleeds there, half frozen.
He rolls to his feet and leaps the capsule bed. Loki, startled, sends a cast that goes wide. Thor lands with his fist halfway to Loki’s face. It connects like a building falling. Loki’s head snaps back. Thor lands a second to his undefended middle, bowing him over in pain. He pulls his arm back to deliver a third, to the back of the head, to fell him.
But Loki breaks from his feint, and surges from his crouch to strike Thor hard in the jaw, sending him staggering. At once Loki kicks him in the chest.
Thor falls. Loki is on him. A fist to the face rings Thor’s skull like a bell. Then another, and a third. Thor’s right eye no longer sees.
Thor seizes Loki’s robe and, with a bleary heave, rolls them over. He strikes Loki in the mouth, and wet spatter flies. Loki twitches, and some percussive magic hurls Thor off him. Thor flies several feet and lands with his robe flipped up, painfully on his bare backside, on rubble.
His predicament, or perhaps just the look on his face, stays Loki’s hand a moment. They stand and brush themselves off.
‘This is quite a good fight,’ Thor says, cheerfully, for the joy of battle is upon him.
Thor has lost time, but now he is awake. There is a woolliness in the air around his body, sharpened almost to static around his head, as if the body has become confused where its edges are. It means he is hurt, but not, he thinks, mortally.
His hair is stuck under something, and he cannot raise his head. It is a large rock, he discovers by touch. He also discovers there is almost no part of the back of his hand that is not cut and bleeding. He pushes the rock away awkwardly with his palm.
The sound of it falling a short way, then rolling and crunching, vibrates a dull, hot pain loose, deep in his inner ear.
He sits up, to a great surge of nausea that blanks his vision.
When he is able to spare the attention from his distress, he looks around him.
Loki, also in a pile of rubble, is leaning slumped against the wall, a few steps away. His face is a beaten side of meat.
‘You look like I feel,’ Thor says. His voice comes out worse than he thought; some syllables are barely voiced.
Loki looks at him dully, and lays himself down on his side in the rubble.
Thor lies back down too.
Time has passed - quite a deal of it.
Thor opens his eyes. Loki is standing, looking down at him. His face is such a disaster that it is difficult to interpret his expression. He is dirty, cut and bleeding all over, and his robe hangs open, the sash lost. A prodigious bruise blooms at his middle. But he seems steady on his feet, and calm.
Thor returns his look, and sits up. It is much less baleful to do than it was earlier. He reaches out his hand to Loki.
Effortfully, Loki manoeuvres his swollen face into an expression of irritation. Thor continues to hold out his hand.
Loki gives in and helps him up.
They are both startled, in the instant they encounter each other at eye level. Loki takes a jerky step back. Suddenly he pulls his robe closed and sticks it there with a fingerful of magic.
Thor wants to snicker, but it hurts his face.
Thor leans on the rail of the golden capsule, and looks at Odin.
‘You -’ he begins, but his voice is still difficult to operate. He pauses to clear his throat and swallow a few times. ‘You combed his hair out like Mother used to.’
Loki’s eyes are murderous for a second. He turns away, walking a few steps, stiff.
‘Is this still revenge?’ Thor says. ‘Your long revenge. Will you torture him, murder him, in time?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ Loki says.
Thor slumps, his weight on his hands. ‘Can I not love you enough that you will stop this?’
Loki’s back straightens, but he does not turn around.
‘You do not love me enough for any purpose of mine.’ Loki’s voice is terrible.
‘You have blighted our lives with that error!’
‘Oh I have, have I? Well, of course it was me. Half the reason…’ Loki does turn around now, to show Thor his face - because he has begun to weep, ragefully.
Loki stares at Thor, grimacing like an animal. ‘Half the reason I passionately wish I’d killed him… is that for years, years, I loved you as I never loved a woman. I mean that I loved you. I mean I spilled my seed dreaming of you. And I thought I was an abomination.’
He turns away again, paces, and turns back. ‘And then, it turned out I was an abomination. It was just a different kind of abomination than I thought!’
He sags where he stands.
Thor shambles across to him, his arms neutral.
Loki allows an embrace.
‘I do not have the wit to comfort you,’ Thor says, his face in Loki’s hair.
‘Now, as at so many times in life, wit is not required,’ Loki says, muffled. ‘Or else you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you.’
Thor kisses his wet cheek, catching a place where the skin is broken.
‘Ow,’ Loki says. He pokes Thor in the ribs, where earlier he kicked him.
‘What are we to do?’ Thor kisses Loki’s hair, more carefully.
Loki breaks away. He wipes his tears. ‘There’s more.’
‘Tell it to me,’ Thor says.
Loki retreats to the cavern wall and leans on it, with an air of settling in. He begins, ‘When I brought the Chitauri to Midgard, I did so in collaboration with a very unpleasant individual called Thanos.’
When Loki has finished his story, Thor says, ‘And do you wish for this? For all the realms to be enslaved by this Thanos?’
Loki opens his mouth to speak. Thor interrupts. ‘For Asgard, overthrown and in chains? Jotunheim, in chains? Me, in chains? Me dead?’ In his heart he adds, Midgard, in chains?
Loki opens his mouth again.
‘Do not answer glibly,’ Thor says. He cannot quite pronounce ‘glibly’ right, with his beaten mouth.
They look at each other.
‘No,’ Loki says.
‘Then what are we to do?’ But this time Thor he does not mean this rhetorically.
His hand twitches for his hammer.
‘If I were king,’ Loki says, with an ironic mince, standing up, ‘I would do what I have already begun to do. Which is ready our armies, for it will come to that soon. Pull back from any position we cannot defend.’
‘That, I can do,’ Thor says with relief. He remembers how helpless he felt when Odin would not act against Malekith.
‘The Infinity Stone that the Allfather entrusted elsewhere must be retrieved. But no-one but the Allfather has standing to retrieve it.’ Loki holds Thor’s eye.
The bed where Odin’s body lies is spilling golden light.
‘Well, then,’ Thor says.
The women of the palace are delighted to see that Thor of Asgard has taken up wrestling again. Once again he welcomes all challengers with the dreadful joy of one destined for Valhalla, clad in his small loincloth. His return to warriorly high spirits is watched over by his father from the galleries, who claps and shouts as though he himself has been restored to some old, lost vitality. Gone is that sense of Odin’s dwindling, of twilight descending, that has cast a shade of melancholy over the court in recent years.
Soon Thor returns to all the sports of battle, and the warriors rise to meet him, their hearts hot with the yearning for victory. All is life; all is summer. Everywhere is the flowering of valour. The mead flows till late; the toasts ring out; the songs of old are sung.
King and heir are so inseparable that even when there is not a public feast - Thor inevitably in the victor’s place, at his father’s right hand - they dine together in private, sending all attendants away so that they may take counsel late into the night.
A curious note is struck by Thor’s adoption of a small, black cat, which he has named Lodbrok. Attempts to bring it a fish on a saucer are rebuffed, for he will feed Lodbrok only from his own plate. So smitten is their prince that he cannot bear to leave the cat behind even when he goes to dine with his father. Sometimes it is seen, quite scandalously, walking upon the very table where king and prince are supping, menacing the tankards with its tail, though never, it is noted, at the precise moment that Odin is there to witness it.
There is talk that Asgard prepares for war. Frontiers long held peaceably are now abandoned for a closer position. New recruits shadow the ground in the training yards, till there is scarcely a shoulder’s width of sand unoccupied. Thor is shield-brother and scourge alike; his voice alone is thunder.
Upon the defeat of Malekith, gossip recalls that Sif and Volstagg were sent on an errand to a far world, carrying a package. Now they are sent again, this time with escort of armed warriors. They return, days later than expected, bloodied, with two of the warriors dead, and no package. Thor greets them in the throne room with an embrace, but his face is grim. Odin seats himself taller on the throne.
One night, a horn blares out, thrilling in the air. The warriors of Asgard are summoned to feast in the great hall of Odin, the Allfather.
Their king stands straight atop the dais, age unbent from his frame as if by force of will. Gungnir shines gold in his hand. A step down, in arm’s reach, stands golden Thor, whose bare head shines just as bright.
‘Warriors of Asgard,’ cries Odin, ‘drink and feast and make merry! For tomorrow, fell deeds await.’
The company shouts its acclamation.
‘An enemy rises,’ Odin intones, like some deep bell, ‘who would lay fire among every leaf, twig and branch of Yggdrasil. Who would make slave and thrall of every living creature. Asgard will meet him. Asgard will spill his blood and cast him to the void! Are you with me?’
Thor, in his passion, summons thunder in the sky. But the roar of the company drowns it out.
Notes:
I was delighted to discover from research that Thor is also the Norse god of wrestling. I regret to advise his small loincloth has no particular historical justification.
Thank you all for coming with me on this journey from ambiguous cat eroticism to saving the universe.
x-posted at Dth with
comments. Comment wherever you like (scraps of paper posted in the tree outside your house may not be received right away).