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coruscSummary: Loki and Thor grow up together on Jotunheim.
• • • • •
I.
The vast chamber behind the throne hall is pitch dark when he enters, but Loki doesn't need light to find the heart of Jotunheim resting on the dais. The casket glows faintly when he nears as though it were greeting his approach. Loki doesn't need a sign to know that it knows him, thrums with the same slow beat that courses through his blood and the blood of everyone else on Jotunheim save one.
He kneels before the casket and lays his left hand across the deep crack that runs down to its very core, soothing, coaxing. The blue light slowly spreads, and now there's enough of it to make out the faint runes etched across the floor and the walls, but the outermost reaches of the chamber remain dark. Once upon a time, the entire planet would have shone with but a single word. The little dome of cold light Loki manages to produce grows smaller year after year.
While he's chanting, Laufey stomps in and sits down heavily on the shallow steps that lead to the dais. They exchange no greetings, no pleasantries. The impossible weighs more heavily on the king than his heir, but Loki knows well that the task before him is merely delaying the inevitable. The casket still has enough power to keep their enemies at bay, but for as long as he's known, the thing that gives their world light, and life, shines ever dim.
Loki murmurs old spells and older rhymes while Laufey listens and occasionally corrects. The set of his shoulders tells of a war of pride and bone-deep fatigue. Loki's task would be the purview of the king, but the wounds in his body run as deep as the wound in the casket for all that Laufey remains the strongest of the Jotun. It's a testament to how bad things are that in reality even Laufey is just hanging on. Loki is not as physically powerful as the others, but his magic is the best on the planet, and it's a faint comfort that he has life necessary for his small body, not like his towering cousins who always hunger and can never be cold enough. He's the youngest of the Jotun and has been the youngest for a long time. Time still unwinds for him, slowly and steadily from the hands of fate, and if sometimes Loki is thankful, most of the time he's tired, too.
Laufey starts to mutter about the treachery of the Aesir as the casket's light seeps into his brittle bones. One day he would cut their hearts and entrails out, drown them in their own bile, build everlasting continents out of their flesh and bones, sink unfathomable oceans out of their blood. The casket hums in agreement, and Loki thinks the light should hold for now. He bows as he leaves, but Laufey doesn't look down.
Loki dodges a shower of ice and dust as he makes his way out of the throne room. He looks up at the arches, half rotted through from wind. There's probably something they can do to try to speed up the growth of the protective ice but Loki doesn't know what. The few books they have in the otherwise empty vaults below the palace have interesting things to say about faraway things he's never seen, never even heard of, but they don't tell him how he might restore their people, save their planet. Loki climbs up out of the tumbledown entrance to the throne hall and tries to see what the king might have seen in his youth. In place of white spires piercing the sky he finds ruins and dingy pits, and even if they had the resources Loki doubts anyone remembers how to make those vast mosaics Laufey recalls with such fondness.
He can go more places because more places can bear his weight, but there's nothing much to see anymore on their world. A flash of gold down in one of the abandoned courtyards catches Loki's eyes as he crosses the bridge from the throne room to the lower palace, and he amends the thought.
Not for the first time Loki wonders why Laufey brought the Aesir prince to Jotunheim. Thor makes for a useless hostage; not once have the Aesir tried to take him back by either force or ransom. Having failed at destroying Jotunheim, slunk off to some infernal corner of the universe to lick their wounds, Loki thinks with contempt. They probably don't miss him. The king would never miss him, and that's as far as Loki's conjectures go. His sire is too often possessed of incomprehensible moods and laughs at inexplicable jokes, and Loki fails to find meaning in any of the patterns before him. What stayed Laufey's hand when he discovered that his long-awaited heir would be, at best, a magician, for example. Not a warrior, not even a bloodthirsty beast.
A real heir would have torn out Laufey's throat and claimed the throne a long time ago, but Loki doesn't really want to be the king of a realm condemned to a slow death, nor a people who look upon him with regret.
Loki finds Thor crouched near a crumbling wall, a sharp flat stone in his hand. Loki sits next to him and watches Thor patiently scrape lichen from the stones and stuff his face, chewing each bite for as long as he can. He's always looking for something to eat. He eats so often that Loki would call him a glutton, and yet Thor always looks hollow and wanting, and Loki thinks, we know how to keep famine on the inside, not wear it so shamelessly out for all to see.
Thor moves on to a fresh part of the wall. He straightens to kick the ice off the dark gray stone, all skinny angles obscured by grimy leather and fur. Loki scoots out of the way of the ice chips. A piece of ice flies across Thor's funny smooth skin, leaving a pink mark, but Thor doesn't stop until the ice is lying in cracked sheets at his feet. He looks savagely pleased. In all of Jotunheim there's nothing else in the shade of Thor.
"It's not as cold as it used to be," Loki says. Thor grunts and crouches back down to scrape at the exposed lichen.
They've become allies of a sort, two princes no one expected to survive to childhood. Laufey ignores Thor to about the same degree as he does Loki, and the court has a hard time deciding which of them is more repellent, the pigheaded son of their greatest enemy, or the smart-mouthed weakling with a single saving grace. Loki doesn't feel like much of a prince, but Thor is effortlessly haughty and contemptuous, and if he were among his own people, Loki is sure that Thor would be the biggest bully around. He can't imagine that anyone would challenge Thor's right to be a king.
A sound catches his attention, and Loki turns and rises to his feet to see a pair of courtiers emerge out of the shadows. They stop when they see the two of them near the wall. The taller courtier makes an ugly comment as his companion snickers. Thor's shoulders tighten and he rushes to his feet, right hand clenched tightly around a ball of moss and lichen. Loki steps in front of him in a well-practiced move.
"You presume much, my lords," Loki says, facing the courtiers. His tone makes them shift. They look nervous, but that's not good enough; it would be better if they were cowering in fear. Loki goes through the litanies at his disposal, lingering where he should linger. He doesn't want to waste anything. The first courtier makes a lewd gesture and Thor shoves past him to throw the stone at his head. Loki sighs a little and pulls Thor out of an incoming ice-crusted punch and calls.
The circle of energy he summons spins out into smoke and nothingness as the courtier's arm goes through, but the skin on his hand and forearm is already cracking open, oozing steam. The courtier hisses with pain and goes down on one knee. Loki keeps an iron grip on Thor's arm and shoves him behind him. He just wants to make a point, not do lasting damage; he needs to keep his magic near full reserve if he's to avoid the king sneering at him tomorrow. Loki pushes Thor towards the courtyard gate and levels a glare at the courtiers behind his shoulder. They grumble, but don't try to fight, or follow.
"If I were king—" one of them yells, and Loki speeds up.
When they're a good distance away, Loki drops his hand from Thor's shoulder. Thor is still stiff with anger, and is never more boring than when he's this stupidly angry. They're just words, and Loki knows Thor has heard worse. He turns to go.
"Can you teach me?"
Loki looks Thor up and down. "I think," he says, "we are meant for different paths."
Thor flinches and looks at his feet. His torn hands fist in his matted fur cloak.
"It's not a matter of being strong enough," Loki adds. He doesn't know why he's offering this; the lessons he learned were never so easy, and never free. But Thor raises his eyes to his and demands, "Then what!"
"Magic takes. Sometimes you can't pay."
"You mean I have nothing worth giving," Thor says bitterly.
"Or gifts are best poured into the right vessel. For some people, magic is a bottomless urn," Loki says. "It would not serve you well."
"Then my gifts?" Thor asks, sarcastic.
"Breaking your knuckles on the faces of bumptious courtiers? Humiliating the sentries until they cry?" Loki says. "But you do that so well already."
Thor's lips twitch. He presses them together, hard, and his face returns to its normal sullen state.
"They always start it."
"It's really disturbing to see them sniveling, you know."
"So you will not teach me."
"I think you should remain as you are," Loki says, turning away. He can feel the casket flickering in the room where Laufey mutters and sits, and Thor's eyes on his back, steady.
• • • • •
II.
Thor keeps pestering him whenever he's not rooting around for something to eat; in the end, Loki gives in, and has the satisfaction of seeing Thor green-faced and shuddering, head down and wedged between his knees, scarred palms rubbing the shells of his ears. Loki doesn't say, I told you so, but goes to sit next to him.
"I was sure that I could," Thor says after a while, his head still down.
Loki feels sorry for him, a little. "Perhaps you could. But even I have trouble nowadays. And ice isn't very forgiving." Loki studies Thor's fingers, wrapped around the back of his head and tangled in his golden hair. He looks down at his hands, and grows a tiny forest of ice in his cupped palms before banishing it into mist and blowing it away. His hands are fine; Thor's hands are still tinged with blue and shaking.
"There are other kinds of magic, you could be good at those," Loki ventures. The books mention such things, unbelievable, brilliant, fantastic things. "But I don't know them."
"I suppose I'll just keep being good at hitting people," Thor says, sitting up and shaking out his hands with false cheer. "Want to spar?"
"No," Loki says, then sighs and lets Thor pull him up. Thor with cold hands is nice, even if cold for Thor means that he's feeling sick. They go raid the armory, where no one's around anyway, and Loki spells the broken metal bar Thor pulls out from behind a stack of decomposing armor so that it won't bite his hands. He reluctantly grows out an ice spear and lets Thor smack and chase him around a deserted training hall before Thor cries for a break and goes down for a lie, an arm draped around his eyes and his throat spasming from nausea.
"What about you, then?" Thor asks after a while, his breathing evening out. He has a headache. Loki can hear his blood thumping and rushing, so much faster than it ought to flow. Loud, like everything about him, nothing like silent, empty Jotunheim.
"What about me?"
"Magic."
Loki pauses. "A great house, and the doors and windows open. Or a fine ship, and I can go— I can go anywhere I want."
"How fair."
"Sometimes," Loki says. Sometimes the difference in the price he's willing to pay and the price he has to pay wakes him up in the middle of the night and burns him from the inside even on the coldest of days. Whatever the price, he never fails to pay, and that's how he knows the arcane arts suit him. He glances at Thor, wonders where he would draw the line if he were asked.
The casket stutters and groans, several levels above, and Loki gets up to leave. Thor lifts his arm at looks at him.
"Do you think you can repair it?"
Loki knows the answer, but instead he says, "The day we are whole, the Aesir will die."
Thor sits up and rests his weight on his elbows. "If you had all the power of Jotunheim."
"Not much power at all," Loki says lightly.
"But if you did. You could do whatever you wanted."
Loki shrugs, and waves as he makes his way out. "I already do."
When he's done temporarily stabilizing the casket, Loki follows Laufey out to the throne hall where the king spends the afternoon adjudicating a feud (both sides: idiots), receiving reports of recent cave-ins and collapses (too many), and yelling at the incompetent general who is in charge of the clean-up (until the moment his broken corpse hits the far wall) and then appointing a new one in his place.
Loki respectfully stands to the right of the throne until Laufey dismisses the entire court in a foul mood. Loki trades a few courtesy barbs with the ministers before ducking out to find Thor loitering. They traumatize the guards for a little bit before heading down to the frozen lake under the palace. Loki cuts out a hole in the thick ice so that they can fish for sleepers in the dark water. They can't stay long, and in spite of Loki's precautions the chill is too much for Thor, who spends days shivering under all the furs that Loki can manage to scrounge up. Loki doesn't like to see him hurt, but the delight he remembers on Thor's face when they catch the rare plump fish is more than ample salve for the guilt that he feels.
Miraculously, bafflingly, Thor's starting to get taller than him, which would irk were he not so busy. The more Laufey slides closer to death, the more he gives in to rage. The already sparse population of their court dwindles, and the realm shakes from fear more devastating than earthquakes. In the room behind the throne Loki sits with the broken device that gives their world its light, and life, and does his best now that Laufey refuses to come near it. The king is bound to the heart of Jotunheim, and can't help but draw from the energy that they all so desperately need; Laufey spends more and more time away, but it's not much of a reprieve.
Thor has never stepped foot in the room behind the throne, lest the cold burrow into his soul, but Loki always sees him in the now-deserted hall outside the throne room when he staggers out. Waiting. They don't talk much, now. Loki's head flows over with eulogies; Thor looks up at the sky, and waits.
An old dream revisits him. He's a little boy again. Laufey is unbent and scornful and cruel, the entire world is on its knees before the king, and Loki stands beside him. He's a child, and Laufey is telling him how there's a wolf with wide-open jaws for every star that twinkles in the sky. Jotunheim shivers and despairs, and when he wakes up Loki goes to the room behind the throne, and sits, and the verses that fall from his lips are the immortal paeans of the end of time and the dawn of time.
• • • • •
III.
The world ends in fire.
The casket fails for the last time, and the moment it shatters Loki's knees buckle, and his vision goes white, then dark. When his eyes swim back to the front of his face everything is in chaos. He runs out into the throne room where angry shouts and screams ring in the air. Loki calls forth a blade and steps into the battle raging through what remains of the palace. The walls are crashing around him and heat blossoms everywhere the Aesir strike for the love of their prince, cry vengeance for his stolen life.
Loki almost goes unnoticed in the fray, and he's killed half a dozen Aesir warriors before the maces and swords seek to split his skull in two. They don't seem to know that he's the prince, or Laufey's son. They know of no prince but the one they've been seeking, all this time. Loki leaves the warriors battling a mirror of himself and searches for the king as bodies crack and disintegrate all around him.
The voices of the invaders rise in triumph as the Jotun start to falter, and Loki barely has time to roll behind a pillar as a terrifying beam of fire scours the earth of ice. The Aesir cheer the Destroyer as it burns and pummels its way through the ruined palace and its defenses. It's simple and sleek, brighter than the sunlight breaking through the clouds for the first time in millennia. All it knows is destruction and it's beautiful. He could have built something like that. But the truth is all he knows is Jotunheim, and as the war unfolds around him Loki knows what true silence is. Exhaustion claws at his legs but he has to keep moving, dodging, killing.
Loki sights the king atop a pile of Aesir torsos and limbs, raising his ax to cut down a bloodied, defenseless Thor. Loki runs towards them, shouting things that make no sense, that could never move either one even were time to bless him, just this once.
He's too far away when a hammer shrieks down from the heavens and flies through Laufey's heart into Thor's palms, has taken only two more steps when Thor smashes Laufey into ice and ash. The air is wet and heavy and electric, and a roar goes up from the Aesir as Loki goes to Thor for the last time. His hands grip ice and he aims at Thor's heart, because the king is dead and he's the king now, the defender of doomed Jotunheim, because he's Laufey's son, whether anyone lives to remember or not, because they've grown up side by side, and in all the realms the laws that govern honor and murder are the same for bastards and princes alike.
His birthright glitters in his hand and he's been found and so he should be happy, but Thor's face twists when he brings the hammer up, parries and shakes off the blood Loki draws on a second swing, reminds Loki that gravity is the principle. Loki can't move fast enough. He's so tired, and it's almost a relief when Thor's struck the last blow, and his hands around Mjolnir do not tremble. It's fitting and just so and Loki drops his arms. As life flees his worn body he's suddenly grateful that it's Thor giving him this chance to die on the battlefield, letting him fall among warriors, not dragged before an Aesir court alive and shamed and broken. The feeling rushes out of his limbs and Loki sags down and Thor reaches for him.
"Brother–"
"We're not brothers," Loki tells him. "We were never brothers, and you have known nothing but insults and pain in the court of ice. When they take you back, you shall not fear that–"
"Don't," Thor says.
He looks up at Thor. What once would have made him avert his eyes now only makes him sigh. Where he's headed, he has no need for surprise, or pity, or sorrow.
"You're going home now," he says. "I won't see you off, but don't cry."
"They won't see me cry," Thor says.
Loki smiles faintly. "I want to sleep for a bit," he says. Beneath the evergreen boughs of the tree of life, the ancient roots drinking deep. Thor nods. Loki's ears fill with the wind weaving through the shining leaves adorned with eyes and teeth, the shudders as Jotunheim falls.
"On the last day," Thor says. His fingers brush across his forehead, and Loki realizes Thor means to close his eyes. Thor fades away until only his touch is left. The hand on his face doesn't burn. Winter embraces him and draws him down to where the water is still, and cold, and pure.
"On the last day," Loki promises.
• • • • •
End
• • • • •
I.
The vast chamber behind the throne hall is pitch dark when he enters, but Loki doesn't need light to find the heart of Jotunheim resting on the dais. The casket glows faintly when he nears as though it were greeting his approach. Loki doesn't need a sign to know that it knows him, thrums with the same slow beat that courses through his blood and the blood of everyone else on Jotunheim save one.
He kneels before the casket and lays his left hand across the deep crack that runs down to its very core, soothing, coaxing. The blue light slowly spreads, and now there's enough of it to make out the faint runes etched across the floor and the walls, but the outermost reaches of the chamber remain dark. Once upon a time, the entire planet would have shone with but a single word. The little dome of cold light Loki manages to produce grows smaller year after year.
While he's chanting, Laufey stomps in and sits down heavily on the shallow steps that lead to the dais. They exchange no greetings, no pleasantries. The impossible weighs more heavily on the king than his heir, but Loki knows well that the task before him is merely delaying the inevitable. The casket still has enough power to keep their enemies at bay, but for as long as he's known, the thing that gives their world light, and life, shines ever dim.
Loki murmurs old spells and older rhymes while Laufey listens and occasionally corrects. The set of his shoulders tells of a war of pride and bone-deep fatigue. Loki's task would be the purview of the king, but the wounds in his body run as deep as the wound in the casket for all that Laufey remains the strongest of the Jotun. It's a testament to how bad things are that in reality even Laufey is just hanging on. Loki is not as physically powerful as the others, but his magic is the best on the planet, and it's a faint comfort that he has life necessary for his small body, not like his towering cousins who always hunger and can never be cold enough. He's the youngest of the Jotun and has been the youngest for a long time. Time still unwinds for him, slowly and steadily from the hands of fate, and if sometimes Loki is thankful, most of the time he's tired, too.
Laufey starts to mutter about the treachery of the Aesir as the casket's light seeps into his brittle bones. One day he would cut their hearts and entrails out, drown them in their own bile, build everlasting continents out of their flesh and bones, sink unfathomable oceans out of their blood. The casket hums in agreement, and Loki thinks the light should hold for now. He bows as he leaves, but Laufey doesn't look down.
Loki dodges a shower of ice and dust as he makes his way out of the throne room. He looks up at the arches, half rotted through from wind. There's probably something they can do to try to speed up the growth of the protective ice but Loki doesn't know what. The few books they have in the otherwise empty vaults below the palace have interesting things to say about faraway things he's never seen, never even heard of, but they don't tell him how he might restore their people, save their planet. Loki climbs up out of the tumbledown entrance to the throne hall and tries to see what the king might have seen in his youth. In place of white spires piercing the sky he finds ruins and dingy pits, and even if they had the resources Loki doubts anyone remembers how to make those vast mosaics Laufey recalls with such fondness.
He can go more places because more places can bear his weight, but there's nothing much to see anymore on their world. A flash of gold down in one of the abandoned courtyards catches Loki's eyes as he crosses the bridge from the throne room to the lower palace, and he amends the thought.
Not for the first time Loki wonders why Laufey brought the Aesir prince to Jotunheim. Thor makes for a useless hostage; not once have the Aesir tried to take him back by either force or ransom. Having failed at destroying Jotunheim, slunk off to some infernal corner of the universe to lick their wounds, Loki thinks with contempt. They probably don't miss him. The king would never miss him, and that's as far as Loki's conjectures go. His sire is too often possessed of incomprehensible moods and laughs at inexplicable jokes, and Loki fails to find meaning in any of the patterns before him. What stayed Laufey's hand when he discovered that his long-awaited heir would be, at best, a magician, for example. Not a warrior, not even a bloodthirsty beast.
A real heir would have torn out Laufey's throat and claimed the throne a long time ago, but Loki doesn't really want to be the king of a realm condemned to a slow death, nor a people who look upon him with regret.
Loki finds Thor crouched near a crumbling wall, a sharp flat stone in his hand. Loki sits next to him and watches Thor patiently scrape lichen from the stones and stuff his face, chewing each bite for as long as he can. He's always looking for something to eat. He eats so often that Loki would call him a glutton, and yet Thor always looks hollow and wanting, and Loki thinks, we know how to keep famine on the inside, not wear it so shamelessly out for all to see.
Thor moves on to a fresh part of the wall. He straightens to kick the ice off the dark gray stone, all skinny angles obscured by grimy leather and fur. Loki scoots out of the way of the ice chips. A piece of ice flies across Thor's funny smooth skin, leaving a pink mark, but Thor doesn't stop until the ice is lying in cracked sheets at his feet. He looks savagely pleased. In all of Jotunheim there's nothing else in the shade of Thor.
"It's not as cold as it used to be," Loki says. Thor grunts and crouches back down to scrape at the exposed lichen.
They've become allies of a sort, two princes no one expected to survive to childhood. Laufey ignores Thor to about the same degree as he does Loki, and the court has a hard time deciding which of them is more repellent, the pigheaded son of their greatest enemy, or the smart-mouthed weakling with a single saving grace. Loki doesn't feel like much of a prince, but Thor is effortlessly haughty and contemptuous, and if he were among his own people, Loki is sure that Thor would be the biggest bully around. He can't imagine that anyone would challenge Thor's right to be a king.
A sound catches his attention, and Loki turns and rises to his feet to see a pair of courtiers emerge out of the shadows. They stop when they see the two of them near the wall. The taller courtier makes an ugly comment as his companion snickers. Thor's shoulders tighten and he rushes to his feet, right hand clenched tightly around a ball of moss and lichen. Loki steps in front of him in a well-practiced move.
"You presume much, my lords," Loki says, facing the courtiers. His tone makes them shift. They look nervous, but that's not good enough; it would be better if they were cowering in fear. Loki goes through the litanies at his disposal, lingering where he should linger. He doesn't want to waste anything. The first courtier makes a lewd gesture and Thor shoves past him to throw the stone at his head. Loki sighs a little and pulls Thor out of an incoming ice-crusted punch and calls.
The circle of energy he summons spins out into smoke and nothingness as the courtier's arm goes through, but the skin on his hand and forearm is already cracking open, oozing steam. The courtier hisses with pain and goes down on one knee. Loki keeps an iron grip on Thor's arm and shoves him behind him. He just wants to make a point, not do lasting damage; he needs to keep his magic near full reserve if he's to avoid the king sneering at him tomorrow. Loki pushes Thor towards the courtyard gate and levels a glare at the courtiers behind his shoulder. They grumble, but don't try to fight, or follow.
"If I were king—" one of them yells, and Loki speeds up.
When they're a good distance away, Loki drops his hand from Thor's shoulder. Thor is still stiff with anger, and is never more boring than when he's this stupidly angry. They're just words, and Loki knows Thor has heard worse. He turns to go.
"Can you teach me?"
Loki looks Thor up and down. "I think," he says, "we are meant for different paths."
Thor flinches and looks at his feet. His torn hands fist in his matted fur cloak.
"It's not a matter of being strong enough," Loki adds. He doesn't know why he's offering this; the lessons he learned were never so easy, and never free. But Thor raises his eyes to his and demands, "Then what!"
"Magic takes. Sometimes you can't pay."
"You mean I have nothing worth giving," Thor says bitterly.
"Or gifts are best poured into the right vessel. For some people, magic is a bottomless urn," Loki says. "It would not serve you well."
"Then my gifts?" Thor asks, sarcastic.
"Breaking your knuckles on the faces of bumptious courtiers? Humiliating the sentries until they cry?" Loki says. "But you do that so well already."
Thor's lips twitch. He presses them together, hard, and his face returns to its normal sullen state.
"They always start it."
"It's really disturbing to see them sniveling, you know."
"So you will not teach me."
"I think you should remain as you are," Loki says, turning away. He can feel the casket flickering in the room where Laufey mutters and sits, and Thor's eyes on his back, steady.
• • • • •
II.
Thor keeps pestering him whenever he's not rooting around for something to eat; in the end, Loki gives in, and has the satisfaction of seeing Thor green-faced and shuddering, head down and wedged between his knees, scarred palms rubbing the shells of his ears. Loki doesn't say, I told you so, but goes to sit next to him.
"I was sure that I could," Thor says after a while, his head still down.
Loki feels sorry for him, a little. "Perhaps you could. But even I have trouble nowadays. And ice isn't very forgiving." Loki studies Thor's fingers, wrapped around the back of his head and tangled in his golden hair. He looks down at his hands, and grows a tiny forest of ice in his cupped palms before banishing it into mist and blowing it away. His hands are fine; Thor's hands are still tinged with blue and shaking.
"There are other kinds of magic, you could be good at those," Loki ventures. The books mention such things, unbelievable, brilliant, fantastic things. "But I don't know them."
"I suppose I'll just keep being good at hitting people," Thor says, sitting up and shaking out his hands with false cheer. "Want to spar?"
"No," Loki says, then sighs and lets Thor pull him up. Thor with cold hands is nice, even if cold for Thor means that he's feeling sick. They go raid the armory, where no one's around anyway, and Loki spells the broken metal bar Thor pulls out from behind a stack of decomposing armor so that it won't bite his hands. He reluctantly grows out an ice spear and lets Thor smack and chase him around a deserted training hall before Thor cries for a break and goes down for a lie, an arm draped around his eyes and his throat spasming from nausea.
"What about you, then?" Thor asks after a while, his breathing evening out. He has a headache. Loki can hear his blood thumping and rushing, so much faster than it ought to flow. Loud, like everything about him, nothing like silent, empty Jotunheim.
"What about me?"
"Magic."
Loki pauses. "A great house, and the doors and windows open. Or a fine ship, and I can go— I can go anywhere I want."
"How fair."
"Sometimes," Loki says. Sometimes the difference in the price he's willing to pay and the price he has to pay wakes him up in the middle of the night and burns him from the inside even on the coldest of days. Whatever the price, he never fails to pay, and that's how he knows the arcane arts suit him. He glances at Thor, wonders where he would draw the line if he were asked.
The casket stutters and groans, several levels above, and Loki gets up to leave. Thor lifts his arm at looks at him.
"Do you think you can repair it?"
Loki knows the answer, but instead he says, "The day we are whole, the Aesir will die."
Thor sits up and rests his weight on his elbows. "If you had all the power of Jotunheim."
"Not much power at all," Loki says lightly.
"But if you did. You could do whatever you wanted."
Loki shrugs, and waves as he makes his way out. "I already do."
When he's done temporarily stabilizing the casket, Loki follows Laufey out to the throne hall where the king spends the afternoon adjudicating a feud (both sides: idiots), receiving reports of recent cave-ins and collapses (too many), and yelling at the incompetent general who is in charge of the clean-up (until the moment his broken corpse hits the far wall) and then appointing a new one in his place.
Loki respectfully stands to the right of the throne until Laufey dismisses the entire court in a foul mood. Loki trades a few courtesy barbs with the ministers before ducking out to find Thor loitering. They traumatize the guards for a little bit before heading down to the frozen lake under the palace. Loki cuts out a hole in the thick ice so that they can fish for sleepers in the dark water. They can't stay long, and in spite of Loki's precautions the chill is too much for Thor, who spends days shivering under all the furs that Loki can manage to scrounge up. Loki doesn't like to see him hurt, but the delight he remembers on Thor's face when they catch the rare plump fish is more than ample salve for the guilt that he feels.
Miraculously, bafflingly, Thor's starting to get taller than him, which would irk were he not so busy. The more Laufey slides closer to death, the more he gives in to rage. The already sparse population of their court dwindles, and the realm shakes from fear more devastating than earthquakes. In the room behind the throne Loki sits with the broken device that gives their world its light, and life, and does his best now that Laufey refuses to come near it. The king is bound to the heart of Jotunheim, and can't help but draw from the energy that they all so desperately need; Laufey spends more and more time away, but it's not much of a reprieve.
Thor has never stepped foot in the room behind the throne, lest the cold burrow into his soul, but Loki always sees him in the now-deserted hall outside the throne room when he staggers out. Waiting. They don't talk much, now. Loki's head flows over with eulogies; Thor looks up at the sky, and waits.
An old dream revisits him. He's a little boy again. Laufey is unbent and scornful and cruel, the entire world is on its knees before the king, and Loki stands beside him. He's a child, and Laufey is telling him how there's a wolf with wide-open jaws for every star that twinkles in the sky. Jotunheim shivers and despairs, and when he wakes up Loki goes to the room behind the throne, and sits, and the verses that fall from his lips are the immortal paeans of the end of time and the dawn of time.
• • • • •
III.
The world ends in fire.
The casket fails for the last time, and the moment it shatters Loki's knees buckle, and his vision goes white, then dark. When his eyes swim back to the front of his face everything is in chaos. He runs out into the throne room where angry shouts and screams ring in the air. Loki calls forth a blade and steps into the battle raging through what remains of the palace. The walls are crashing around him and heat blossoms everywhere the Aesir strike for the love of their prince, cry vengeance for his stolen life.
Loki almost goes unnoticed in the fray, and he's killed half a dozen Aesir warriors before the maces and swords seek to split his skull in two. They don't seem to know that he's the prince, or Laufey's son. They know of no prince but the one they've been seeking, all this time. Loki leaves the warriors battling a mirror of himself and searches for the king as bodies crack and disintegrate all around him.
The voices of the invaders rise in triumph as the Jotun start to falter, and Loki barely has time to roll behind a pillar as a terrifying beam of fire scours the earth of ice. The Aesir cheer the Destroyer as it burns and pummels its way through the ruined palace and its defenses. It's simple and sleek, brighter than the sunlight breaking through the clouds for the first time in millennia. All it knows is destruction and it's beautiful. He could have built something like that. But the truth is all he knows is Jotunheim, and as the war unfolds around him Loki knows what true silence is. Exhaustion claws at his legs but he has to keep moving, dodging, killing.
Loki sights the king atop a pile of Aesir torsos and limbs, raising his ax to cut down a bloodied, defenseless Thor. Loki runs towards them, shouting things that make no sense, that could never move either one even were time to bless him, just this once.
He's too far away when a hammer shrieks down from the heavens and flies through Laufey's heart into Thor's palms, has taken only two more steps when Thor smashes Laufey into ice and ash. The air is wet and heavy and electric, and a roar goes up from the Aesir as Loki goes to Thor for the last time. His hands grip ice and he aims at Thor's heart, because the king is dead and he's the king now, the defender of doomed Jotunheim, because he's Laufey's son, whether anyone lives to remember or not, because they've grown up side by side, and in all the realms the laws that govern honor and murder are the same for bastards and princes alike.
His birthright glitters in his hand and he's been found and so he should be happy, but Thor's face twists when he brings the hammer up, parries and shakes off the blood Loki draws on a second swing, reminds Loki that gravity is the principle. Loki can't move fast enough. He's so tired, and it's almost a relief when Thor's struck the last blow, and his hands around Mjolnir do not tremble. It's fitting and just so and Loki drops his arms. As life flees his worn body he's suddenly grateful that it's Thor giving him this chance to die on the battlefield, letting him fall among warriors, not dragged before an Aesir court alive and shamed and broken. The feeling rushes out of his limbs and Loki sags down and Thor reaches for him.
"Brother–"
"We're not brothers," Loki tells him. "We were never brothers, and you have known nothing but insults and pain in the court of ice. When they take you back, you shall not fear that–"
"Don't," Thor says.
He looks up at Thor. What once would have made him avert his eyes now only makes him sigh. Where he's headed, he has no need for surprise, or pity, or sorrow.
"You're going home now," he says. "I won't see you off, but don't cry."
"They won't see me cry," Thor says.
Loki smiles faintly. "I want to sleep for a bit," he says. Beneath the evergreen boughs of the tree of life, the ancient roots drinking deep. Thor nods. Loki's ears fill with the wind weaving through the shining leaves adorned with eyes and teeth, the shudders as Jotunheim falls.
"On the last day," Thor says. His fingers brush across his forehead, and Loki realizes Thor means to close his eyes. Thor fades away until only his touch is left. The hand on his face doesn't burn. Winter embraces him and draws him down to where the water is still, and cold, and pure.
"On the last day," Loki promises.
• • • • •
End