The Last Days of Magic and Glory Chapter #10
So, I've started cleaning up this story and posting it on AO3 here. In order to force myself to better proofread, I'll be posting a 1 proofread version here and then after letting is percolate for a few days, post the polished version to AO3 (please don't forget to leave comments even though it's less comment friendly than LJ). Please feel free to point out any errors or do some concrit on the phrasing or even on the plot.
Also, the updates are now chapters, with titles! When I split up the parts that I posted to the kinkmeme, there were more chapters than updates, so we're now on Chapter 10.
In this part, Thor and Loki realize they can't just put the past behind them.
Chapter 10: Denouement
Loki’s plan worked remarkably well, though Thor probably should not have been surprised, considering that Loki’s plans usually achieved their objectives. It was the aftermath that tended to be the problem.
Frigga had readily agreed to Thor taking a more backseat role at Royal Audience. Thor wondered why he’d never gotten his mother to agree to much of anything before now. She loved him, but if she disagreed, Thor could not persuade her the same way that he could his father. Loki explained that it had to do with humbleness and empathy. Frigga did not appreciate Thor’s arrogance or his frustration with things that did not come easily to him, but if he showed her vulnerability instead, her instincts as Thor’s mother were to help him not chide him. The number of boring lessons did not decrease, however.
After Thor had successfully taken the Princess of Dismail on a horseback ride (and managed to get nowhere close to getting her with child), Frigga had proposed that Thor be allowed to take the actual ambassadors out to the tour the Iridium mines on the far plain.
Frigga and Thor’s friends still puzzled over how much time he spent with the horse, but now that Thor knew the truth it was even more difficult to pry him away from his brother. Not only was this the closest Thor had ever felt to Loki since they were children, but he certainly wasn’t going to miss a moment of Loki’s conspiratorial smiles or the fond look in his eyes as the two of them watched Sleipnir curiously explore the world.
Above all, Thor relished having Loki’s full attention. Well, he shared Loki’s attention with Sleipnir, but before his pregnancy, Loki had usually been knee deep in a handful of different schemes and machinations. He was involved in politics and devoted considerable amount of time to magic and though he would willing drop everything if Thor had a serious need, he rarely had time for his brother. Compared to the Loki of a year ago, the time Loki took to nurse or teach Sleipnir barely took a fraction of Loki’s considerable intelligence. Thor felt almost drugged by the glut of his brother’s intense attention and even began to understand why Loki enjoyed the intricacies of politics (even if Thor would probably never enjoy it himself).
“It’s all about balance,” Loki said from where he was lounging with his head against Thor’s belly while they looked up the trunk of one of the giant fir trees near the south wall. Sleipnir slept a great deal, prompting Loki and Thor to pause in the game of hide and chase they had been playing with Sleipnir. The little horse had tired himself bounding awkwardly between the trees, looking behind every one methodically. Thor didn’t believe it to be very horse-like behavior, but took great pleasure in running up behind Sleipnir to gently pull on his tale before chasing after him.
“I thought politics was about gaining advantage, not balance,” Thor mused, running his hand through Loki’s now-long hair. He wondered if his brother would cut it before he returned to the palace.
Loki chuckled. “I didn’t say it was a fair balance. Of course you want to tilt the scale in your favor, but you need to balance your objectives against the objectives of those in the position to allow you to achieve them. The correct balance is you achieving what you want for as little as you can possibly give away in order to get it. In order to do that, you have to understand what the other person wants, obviously. But more importantly, you need to understand what it is you want.”
Thor chuckled. “That is easy, brother. I want peace and prosperity for the kingdom.”
Loki pushed up from his comfortable position reclining against Thor just so he could give Thor an expression of wondering disdain. “Oh, Thor, sometimes it’s a wonder you can manage to feed yourself with a mind so simple. Peace is temporal and ultimately unsustainable. You must decide when and with what intensity you will fight a war. Will it be a brief war to preempt a future deadly one? Will it be an epoch of peace until the system dissolves into anarchy in the far future? Will it be bloody as a deterrent for those who might think to cross you? Or will you show mercy even when your troops scream for blood so you need not fight to genocide? And prosperity, there’s the joke. Prosperity for whom at the cost of what? What does it even mean and how will you achieve it? The objectives of a king must be nuanced. They must cover the short and the long game, they must consider the tools at the king’s disposal and the people who will be affected by them, and most of all they must be intimately linked with realism, not dreams. How father ever expects you to rule is beyond me. He would be wiser to put Sleipnir on the throne.”
Thor shoved Loki away from him, suddenly irritated by his constant jabs at Thor’s intellect. It had been going on since they were children and sometimes Thor found it amusing, but he wasn’t a backcountry dullard. He was the crown prince and he’d devoted a considerable amount of time to study. So he mostly studied when forced, it was still study. And he was trying to learn how to rule, even subjecting himself to mother’s horrid lessons. He was trying and he was tired of getting dumped on by his mother, Tyr, his friends, half the court and now Loki, who was supposed to be his ally in this.
Thor tackled his brother back into the bed of pine needles that spread like a blanket between the roots of the great tree and moved to straddle him. He expected Loki to fight back, using his magic to cast Thor off him, but instead he winced, moaning.
Thor immediately stood, worried.
“Valhalla, Thor,” Loki gasped, pushing himself up painfully in order to rest back on one of the tree’s roots, “Need I remind you that I just gave birth to an eight-legged horse only two weeks ago?”
Thor frowned. There didn’t look to be anything wrong with Loki and with his magic, Loki usually healed quickly. “Is something wrong? You should not still be injured.”
Loki sighed. “I won’t go into the magic involved in transformation, but there are two relevant points. One, constantly transforming as I have been takes a good deal of magical energy that I might otherwise devote to healing. Two, my form of shapeshifting is not mere illusion or simply converting matter to energy and back again, but more a holding of several different physical possibilities at once. One manifestation is at the forefront interacting with the physical world, but consciousness, as vast and multi-dimensional as it is, inhabits all forms simultaneously. Thus, when I am a horse, I am myself as a horse. But if I wanted to be Volstagg, for example, I would have to do so using illusion, because Volstagg already exists as Volstagg.”
Thor frowned. He remembered briefly studying transformations in their sorcery lessons. Loki had asked endless questions while Thor composed a war ballad of his imagined future battles and drew pictures of dragons on his scroll until the spellmaster finally dismissed him. Thor had never paid attention to the spellmaster because he would never be a sorcerer and Loki would be around to help him if he needed one, but he now realized that the object of the lessons had never been to make him a sorcerer. They were probably never even meant to teach Loki how to perform magic, based on the spellmaster’s surprise at his brother’s enthusiasm for the topic. No, the point had been to learn exactly what Loki was trying to teach him now: the limits of the uses of magic in case one needed to use it or faced an enemy who wielded it. Thor really should have listened better to all the tools his parents had tried to give him.
“Have I lost you?” Loki asked, a small amount of bitter distaste in his tone. Loki usually acted amused by Thor’s lack of understanding, but every once in a while he seemed to actively resent it.
“I was not raised by swampbeasts,” Thor snapped. “I do understand basic concepts when explained to me, brother.”
Loki had a look that said he had a hundred ‘Thor is stupid’ jabs waiting to be released from his poisonous mouth, but was refraining from doing so only because the implication was too obvious for his insults to be clever. When the horse gave Thor that look he’d found it cute, but on Loki it made Thor want to punch something - namely Loki.
“I liked you better when you couldn’t talk,” Thor complained.
A brief hurt flashed across Loki’s face only to be replaced with a sneer. That, too, was a familiar expression. The only difference was now it hurt Thor to see it.
“Of course you preferred me at your mercy and helpless.”
“You were hardly helpless, Loki. Even as a horse you had me doing your bidding, as always. You didn’t even have to lie or manipulate me in order to achieve it.”
Even though so far as Thor could tell, Loki hadn’t bothered manipulating him since he’d regained his ability to shift forms, the old hurts still stung. Sometimes Thor felt like nothing more than a warpiece for Loki to move around his tactical board. Even worse, sometimes Thor felt that Loki did it all for his own amusement and not even for a concrete advantage. With his brother absent, Thor had spent hours remembering how sweet and protective Loki could be when the mood struck. He’d missed his brother so terribly that he’d conveniently forgotten all the times Loki had been absolutely horrible to him. He’d trapped Thor in a well with a serpent for two whole days and manipulated Thor into believing he had a romantic rendezvous in a dark tower only to find Volstagg there instead of a maiden whose sweet letters Thor had grown to love. And there was the time that Loki lied and managed to make Thor look responsible for losing a crucial battle, causing Odin to banish him from the front for weeks. For every time the brothers had been united in mischief, there were two times that Loki made the mischief at Thor’s expense.
Then it occurred to him. Loki, having gained Thor’s trust as a horse, had Thor begging him for every little scrap of advice. He didn’t need to manipulate Thor further and he didn’t need to lie. He already had complete control and how long could Loki hold such power before using it to his advantage? He’d just said that balance wasn’t meant to be fair and so far as Thor could tell, such politics ran thick in Loki’s blood. He could help Thor with one hand and push him down with the other. Thor had to remind himself that Loki’s absence had been unwilling and not some act of defiance meant to lose him the throne. He was now in the position to force Thor into such a grave mistake that would guarantee that Thor would not be considered. It could also set him up for a heroic return. Not long ago, Thor had been convinced that he did not want to be king and that Loki would both enjoy and excel at it much better, but he wanted a fair chance at it.
All those nights spent sleeping under the stars with the horse and magic pulsing all around him had done something to Thor. It had made him weak with self doubt and forgetful of this horrible feeling of powerlessness - a warpiece being pushed around a tactical board by an invisible cue. Thor had shown Loki the ultimate vulnerability by sharing all his secrets with the horse (including how much he loved and missed Loki himself) and now all his brother could do was insult him? Lure him into false trust with the innocence he’d displayed as a horse? Even though Thor trusted that it had never been Loki’s intention to spend 11 moons as a pregnant mare, he knew that his brother rarely found himself in a situation he didn’t try to take advantage of.
The anger built in him until before he knew it, Mjolnir was in his hand and his face was a breath away from Loki’s. Thor took great gasping breaths with rage, barely restraining himself. Eventually he put the hammer down, knowing that he could never using it against his brother, but his hands still itched with the need for violence.
Loki’s eyes met his with his usual defiant stare. Thor had bested Loki thousands of times on the training fields. He’d drawn blood in their personal quarrels and even put Loki in the healing chambers on multiple occasions, but his brother never showed fear when confronted with Thor’s anger. Half the time he seemed pleased to have caused it and some of those times, Thor’s temper had been the object of his scheming all along.
This time, Loki didn’t look smug, but before Thor could puzzle out his expression, he felt a furry nose pressed into the back of his neck. He turned to find Sleipnir staring at him expectantly, as if wondering what new game his uncle had invented. Just like that, Thor’s anger subsided. He pulled Sleipnir to him, scratching behind his big ears and letting him chew at his cape where it was attached to his shoulder.
Loki watched them for a moment, the fond smile he usually reserved for Sleipnir’s antics completely absent.
“As I was saying,” Loki continued as though moments ago Thor had not been on the verge of striking him, “having my consciousness inhabit multiple bodies at once means that I still experience that hurts of one body or another even if no evidence appears on the one I currently occupy. In my horse form, my udders are sore from feeding Sleipnir and the labor nearly killed me, so it is no surprise that I would still be feeling the effects.”
That was when the guilt hit. Thor had been about to strike his brother when he was still recovering from near-fatal trauma.
“It did not seem so horrible to me,” Thor replied.
“If I were an ordinary horse, without my magic, I most certainly would have died,” Loki replied cooly, as though his near death were no more than comment on the Misheim Ambassador’s cheese collection.
Thor was still in Loki’s space, enough to cup the back of his neck. “I am glad you had your magic, then. And I am sorry for my outburst earlier.”
Loki shrugged. “I’ve spent a thousand years dealing with your temper, Thor. One year of its absence is not enough to untrain me.”
That was the heart of it, Thor supposed. They had been locked into their respective roles for a thousand years. If they wanted to change, it would take considerable effort.
“And I have spent a year without your insults and your lies.”
Loki looked away, but did not apologize. Maybe it was futile. Even if Thor fought the training of years in order to change, there was no guarantee that Loki would as well.
Thor cupped Loki’s cheek and forced his brother to meet his eyes. “I did not enjoy you as a horse because you were helpless. I enjoyed you as a horse because I had no need to mistrust you. You did not hide your vulnerabilities and you were stronger in my eyes for it. You could not lie and I would fight monstrous sea creatures and drug princes and abandon my responsibilities to explore the hidden wonders of the world at your mere indication. You speak of balance, but the minimum I will trade for my complete cooperation and trust is for you to give me the same.”
Loki gulped. His green eyes seemed fathomless, coated over with moisture as though he were on the verge of tears. "And when I give you that, you will have all of me, irrevocably. You will have the power to hurt me and to manipulate me with your knowledge." Loki whispered it as though it were some great secret, petting Sleipnir absently where the foal had inserted himself between them.
Thor laughed. "Oh, brother, you have always had those powers over me. I have rebelled occasionally, but my life has not been worse for you scheming to possess the secrets of my soul. And even if you did give me everything - the key to every lock, a map to every treasure that you guard so jealously - what makes you think that I would have the skill or inclination to use them? What have I done to make you distrust me?"
Loki broke from Thor's grip, hanging his head in shame. "Nothing," he rasped. "In truth, brother, you have not shown a drop of guile or a hint of dishonesty to make me distrust you. It is in my nature, I suppose, a tortuous poison that I cannot be rid of. That is the first key I will give you. Maybe later, I will give you the map that shows you why."
Thor smiled. Loki had been open with him, genuine the way the horse had been, without a miasma of lies and stratagems hanging around him.
Loki looked slightly alarmed at Thor’s face-splitting smile. “That is all you shall get for now, brother. I will save your from glutting yourself on my secrets. I will consider your proposal and perhaps we, like two kingdoms formerly at war, will find our way to alliance.”
Thor groaned. “Loki, you know that I am terrible at diplomacy.”
“But you are learning,” Loki smiled, mischievously and happy. “I trust that you will come out of these negotiations with some benefit.”
“If that is the case, I shall eagerly await your next diplomatic overture.” Thor couldn’t help himself, he drew Loki to him for a swift brotherly kiss.
When he pulled back, Loki seemed almost to be blushing, but before Thor could tease him about it, Sleipnir started to squirm between them nudging suggestively at Loki’s crotch.
Loki giggled. “Sleipnir, my love, you have not yet learned Aesir anatomy. Not only is there no udder there, but you are looking entirely in the wrong place.” Loki stood, easily shedding the simple tunic he had no doubt stolen from one of the poor stable hands for some imagined slight against him in his horse from. “If you’ll excuse me, brother, the little one demands his meal.”
Next Chapter: Interlude: Sif Snoops
Also, the updates are now chapters, with titles! When I split up the parts that I posted to the kinkmeme, there were more chapters than updates, so we're now on Chapter 10.
In this part, Thor and Loki realize they can't just put the past behind them.
Chapter 10: Denouement
Loki’s plan worked remarkably well, though Thor probably should not have been surprised, considering that Loki’s plans usually achieved their objectives. It was the aftermath that tended to be the problem.
Frigga had readily agreed to Thor taking a more backseat role at Royal Audience. Thor wondered why he’d never gotten his mother to agree to much of anything before now. She loved him, but if she disagreed, Thor could not persuade her the same way that he could his father. Loki explained that it had to do with humbleness and empathy. Frigga did not appreciate Thor’s arrogance or his frustration with things that did not come easily to him, but if he showed her vulnerability instead, her instincts as Thor’s mother were to help him not chide him. The number of boring lessons did not decrease, however.
After Thor had successfully taken the Princess of Dismail on a horseback ride (and managed to get nowhere close to getting her with child), Frigga had proposed that Thor be allowed to take the actual ambassadors out to the tour the Iridium mines on the far plain.
Frigga and Thor’s friends still puzzled over how much time he spent with the horse, but now that Thor knew the truth it was even more difficult to pry him away from his brother. Not only was this the closest Thor had ever felt to Loki since they were children, but he certainly wasn’t going to miss a moment of Loki’s conspiratorial smiles or the fond look in his eyes as the two of them watched Sleipnir curiously explore the world.
Above all, Thor relished having Loki’s full attention. Well, he shared Loki’s attention with Sleipnir, but before his pregnancy, Loki had usually been knee deep in a handful of different schemes and machinations. He was involved in politics and devoted considerable amount of time to magic and though he would willing drop everything if Thor had a serious need, he rarely had time for his brother. Compared to the Loki of a year ago, the time Loki took to nurse or teach Sleipnir barely took a fraction of Loki’s considerable intelligence. Thor felt almost drugged by the glut of his brother’s intense attention and even began to understand why Loki enjoyed the intricacies of politics (even if Thor would probably never enjoy it himself).
“It’s all about balance,” Loki said from where he was lounging with his head against Thor’s belly while they looked up the trunk of one of the giant fir trees near the south wall. Sleipnir slept a great deal, prompting Loki and Thor to pause in the game of hide and chase they had been playing with Sleipnir. The little horse had tired himself bounding awkwardly between the trees, looking behind every one methodically. Thor didn’t believe it to be very horse-like behavior, but took great pleasure in running up behind Sleipnir to gently pull on his tale before chasing after him.
“I thought politics was about gaining advantage, not balance,” Thor mused, running his hand through Loki’s now-long hair. He wondered if his brother would cut it before he returned to the palace.
Loki chuckled. “I didn’t say it was a fair balance. Of course you want to tilt the scale in your favor, but you need to balance your objectives against the objectives of those in the position to allow you to achieve them. The correct balance is you achieving what you want for as little as you can possibly give away in order to get it. In order to do that, you have to understand what the other person wants, obviously. But more importantly, you need to understand what it is you want.”
Thor chuckled. “That is easy, brother. I want peace and prosperity for the kingdom.”
Loki pushed up from his comfortable position reclining against Thor just so he could give Thor an expression of wondering disdain. “Oh, Thor, sometimes it’s a wonder you can manage to feed yourself with a mind so simple. Peace is temporal and ultimately unsustainable. You must decide when and with what intensity you will fight a war. Will it be a brief war to preempt a future deadly one? Will it be an epoch of peace until the system dissolves into anarchy in the far future? Will it be bloody as a deterrent for those who might think to cross you? Or will you show mercy even when your troops scream for blood so you need not fight to genocide? And prosperity, there’s the joke. Prosperity for whom at the cost of what? What does it even mean and how will you achieve it? The objectives of a king must be nuanced. They must cover the short and the long game, they must consider the tools at the king’s disposal and the people who will be affected by them, and most of all they must be intimately linked with realism, not dreams. How father ever expects you to rule is beyond me. He would be wiser to put Sleipnir on the throne.”
Thor shoved Loki away from him, suddenly irritated by his constant jabs at Thor’s intellect. It had been going on since they were children and sometimes Thor found it amusing, but he wasn’t a backcountry dullard. He was the crown prince and he’d devoted a considerable amount of time to study. So he mostly studied when forced, it was still study. And he was trying to learn how to rule, even subjecting himself to mother’s horrid lessons. He was trying and he was tired of getting dumped on by his mother, Tyr, his friends, half the court and now Loki, who was supposed to be his ally in this.
Thor tackled his brother back into the bed of pine needles that spread like a blanket between the roots of the great tree and moved to straddle him. He expected Loki to fight back, using his magic to cast Thor off him, but instead he winced, moaning.
Thor immediately stood, worried.
“Valhalla, Thor,” Loki gasped, pushing himself up painfully in order to rest back on one of the tree’s roots, “Need I remind you that I just gave birth to an eight-legged horse only two weeks ago?”
Thor frowned. There didn’t look to be anything wrong with Loki and with his magic, Loki usually healed quickly. “Is something wrong? You should not still be injured.”
Loki sighed. “I won’t go into the magic involved in transformation, but there are two relevant points. One, constantly transforming as I have been takes a good deal of magical energy that I might otherwise devote to healing. Two, my form of shapeshifting is not mere illusion or simply converting matter to energy and back again, but more a holding of several different physical possibilities at once. One manifestation is at the forefront interacting with the physical world, but consciousness, as vast and multi-dimensional as it is, inhabits all forms simultaneously. Thus, when I am a horse, I am myself as a horse. But if I wanted to be Volstagg, for example, I would have to do so using illusion, because Volstagg already exists as Volstagg.”
Thor frowned. He remembered briefly studying transformations in their sorcery lessons. Loki had asked endless questions while Thor composed a war ballad of his imagined future battles and drew pictures of dragons on his scroll until the spellmaster finally dismissed him. Thor had never paid attention to the spellmaster because he would never be a sorcerer and Loki would be around to help him if he needed one, but he now realized that the object of the lessons had never been to make him a sorcerer. They were probably never even meant to teach Loki how to perform magic, based on the spellmaster’s surprise at his brother’s enthusiasm for the topic. No, the point had been to learn exactly what Loki was trying to teach him now: the limits of the uses of magic in case one needed to use it or faced an enemy who wielded it. Thor really should have listened better to all the tools his parents had tried to give him.
“Have I lost you?” Loki asked, a small amount of bitter distaste in his tone. Loki usually acted amused by Thor’s lack of understanding, but every once in a while he seemed to actively resent it.
“I was not raised by swampbeasts,” Thor snapped. “I do understand basic concepts when explained to me, brother.”
Loki had a look that said he had a hundred ‘Thor is stupid’ jabs waiting to be released from his poisonous mouth, but was refraining from doing so only because the implication was too obvious for his insults to be clever. When the horse gave Thor that look he’d found it cute, but on Loki it made Thor want to punch something - namely Loki.
“I liked you better when you couldn’t talk,” Thor complained.
A brief hurt flashed across Loki’s face only to be replaced with a sneer. That, too, was a familiar expression. The only difference was now it hurt Thor to see it.
“Of course you preferred me at your mercy and helpless.”
“You were hardly helpless, Loki. Even as a horse you had me doing your bidding, as always. You didn’t even have to lie or manipulate me in order to achieve it.”
Even though so far as Thor could tell, Loki hadn’t bothered manipulating him since he’d regained his ability to shift forms, the old hurts still stung. Sometimes Thor felt like nothing more than a warpiece for Loki to move around his tactical board. Even worse, sometimes Thor felt that Loki did it all for his own amusement and not even for a concrete advantage. With his brother absent, Thor had spent hours remembering how sweet and protective Loki could be when the mood struck. He’d missed his brother so terribly that he’d conveniently forgotten all the times Loki had been absolutely horrible to him. He’d trapped Thor in a well with a serpent for two whole days and manipulated Thor into believing he had a romantic rendezvous in a dark tower only to find Volstagg there instead of a maiden whose sweet letters Thor had grown to love. And there was the time that Loki lied and managed to make Thor look responsible for losing a crucial battle, causing Odin to banish him from the front for weeks. For every time the brothers had been united in mischief, there were two times that Loki made the mischief at Thor’s expense.
Then it occurred to him. Loki, having gained Thor’s trust as a horse, had Thor begging him for every little scrap of advice. He didn’t need to manipulate Thor further and he didn’t need to lie. He already had complete control and how long could Loki hold such power before using it to his advantage? He’d just said that balance wasn’t meant to be fair and so far as Thor could tell, such politics ran thick in Loki’s blood. He could help Thor with one hand and push him down with the other. Thor had to remind himself that Loki’s absence had been unwilling and not some act of defiance meant to lose him the throne. He was now in the position to force Thor into such a grave mistake that would guarantee that Thor would not be considered. It could also set him up for a heroic return. Not long ago, Thor had been convinced that he did not want to be king and that Loki would both enjoy and excel at it much better, but he wanted a fair chance at it.
All those nights spent sleeping under the stars with the horse and magic pulsing all around him had done something to Thor. It had made him weak with self doubt and forgetful of this horrible feeling of powerlessness - a warpiece being pushed around a tactical board by an invisible cue. Thor had shown Loki the ultimate vulnerability by sharing all his secrets with the horse (including how much he loved and missed Loki himself) and now all his brother could do was insult him? Lure him into false trust with the innocence he’d displayed as a horse? Even though Thor trusted that it had never been Loki’s intention to spend 11 moons as a pregnant mare, he knew that his brother rarely found himself in a situation he didn’t try to take advantage of.
The anger built in him until before he knew it, Mjolnir was in his hand and his face was a breath away from Loki’s. Thor took great gasping breaths with rage, barely restraining himself. Eventually he put the hammer down, knowing that he could never using it against his brother, but his hands still itched with the need for violence.
Loki’s eyes met his with his usual defiant stare. Thor had bested Loki thousands of times on the training fields. He’d drawn blood in their personal quarrels and even put Loki in the healing chambers on multiple occasions, but his brother never showed fear when confronted with Thor’s anger. Half the time he seemed pleased to have caused it and some of those times, Thor’s temper had been the object of his scheming all along.
This time, Loki didn’t look smug, but before Thor could puzzle out his expression, he felt a furry nose pressed into the back of his neck. He turned to find Sleipnir staring at him expectantly, as if wondering what new game his uncle had invented. Just like that, Thor’s anger subsided. He pulled Sleipnir to him, scratching behind his big ears and letting him chew at his cape where it was attached to his shoulder.
Loki watched them for a moment, the fond smile he usually reserved for Sleipnir’s antics completely absent.
“As I was saying,” Loki continued as though moments ago Thor had not been on the verge of striking him, “having my consciousness inhabit multiple bodies at once means that I still experience that hurts of one body or another even if no evidence appears on the one I currently occupy. In my horse form, my udders are sore from feeding Sleipnir and the labor nearly killed me, so it is no surprise that I would still be feeling the effects.”
That was when the guilt hit. Thor had been about to strike his brother when he was still recovering from near-fatal trauma.
“It did not seem so horrible to me,” Thor replied.
“If I were an ordinary horse, without my magic, I most certainly would have died,” Loki replied cooly, as though his near death were no more than comment on the Misheim Ambassador’s cheese collection.
Thor was still in Loki’s space, enough to cup the back of his neck. “I am glad you had your magic, then. And I am sorry for my outburst earlier.”
Loki shrugged. “I’ve spent a thousand years dealing with your temper, Thor. One year of its absence is not enough to untrain me.”
That was the heart of it, Thor supposed. They had been locked into their respective roles for a thousand years. If they wanted to change, it would take considerable effort.
“And I have spent a year without your insults and your lies.”
Loki looked away, but did not apologize. Maybe it was futile. Even if Thor fought the training of years in order to change, there was no guarantee that Loki would as well.
Thor cupped Loki’s cheek and forced his brother to meet his eyes. “I did not enjoy you as a horse because you were helpless. I enjoyed you as a horse because I had no need to mistrust you. You did not hide your vulnerabilities and you were stronger in my eyes for it. You could not lie and I would fight monstrous sea creatures and drug princes and abandon my responsibilities to explore the hidden wonders of the world at your mere indication. You speak of balance, but the minimum I will trade for my complete cooperation and trust is for you to give me the same.”
Loki gulped. His green eyes seemed fathomless, coated over with moisture as though he were on the verge of tears. "And when I give you that, you will have all of me, irrevocably. You will have the power to hurt me and to manipulate me with your knowledge." Loki whispered it as though it were some great secret, petting Sleipnir absently where the foal had inserted himself between them.
Thor laughed. "Oh, brother, you have always had those powers over me. I have rebelled occasionally, but my life has not been worse for you scheming to possess the secrets of my soul. And even if you did give me everything - the key to every lock, a map to every treasure that you guard so jealously - what makes you think that I would have the skill or inclination to use them? What have I done to make you distrust me?"
Loki broke from Thor's grip, hanging his head in shame. "Nothing," he rasped. "In truth, brother, you have not shown a drop of guile or a hint of dishonesty to make me distrust you. It is in my nature, I suppose, a tortuous poison that I cannot be rid of. That is the first key I will give you. Maybe later, I will give you the map that shows you why."
Thor smiled. Loki had been open with him, genuine the way the horse had been, without a miasma of lies and stratagems hanging around him.
Loki looked slightly alarmed at Thor’s face-splitting smile. “That is all you shall get for now, brother. I will save your from glutting yourself on my secrets. I will consider your proposal and perhaps we, like two kingdoms formerly at war, will find our way to alliance.”
Thor groaned. “Loki, you know that I am terrible at diplomacy.”
“But you are learning,” Loki smiled, mischievously and happy. “I trust that you will come out of these negotiations with some benefit.”
“If that is the case, I shall eagerly await your next diplomatic overture.” Thor couldn’t help himself, he drew Loki to him for a swift brotherly kiss.
When he pulled back, Loki seemed almost to be blushing, but before Thor could tease him about it, Sleipnir started to squirm between them nudging suggestively at Loki’s crotch.
Loki giggled. “Sleipnir, my love, you have not yet learned Aesir anatomy. Not only is there no udder there, but you are looking entirely in the wrong place.” Loki stood, easily shedding the simple tunic he had no doubt stolen from one of the poor stable hands for some imagined slight against him in his horse from. “If you’ll excuse me, brother, the little one demands his meal.”
Next Chapter: Interlude: Sif Snoops