Final steps

[st_ratagem]

Loki had spent the last hour or two before sunset preparing, and the first hour afterward. He’d taken ruthless advantage of the fact that the Inn staff was desperate to give people towels and had carefully interwoven the. On the floor such that there was no chance of getting at the actual carpet below without effort. He’d selected a dagger from his collection - a very old one that he hadn’t actively used since childhood, one of a pair given to him by his mother - and sharpened it to an almost perfect edge. He’d opened up the balcony door to let the early-winter night chill in. He’d even out together a little aid kit (disinfectant, pads, bandages, needle and thread) for afterward.

In many ways, the hardest part was settling on the towels with the in-etched staff resting in front of him and forcing Odin’s enchantment away, knowing that he wouldn’t be allowing himself to go back to normal possibly for hours. And that, as soon as Thor arrived with a bowl and his hands, it would all have a witness.

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[st_ratagem]

“Then losing isn’t the same as failure. If it was, you wouldn’t keep insisting that - no, I’m tired of this fight.” Loki stood up, forcing Odin’s enchantment away as he did, and called the staff to his hand. (At the very least, it was more responsive to his will than the plain stick had been, that was something. “Come on. You can have your ‘ridiculous’ blue freak show, I hope it entertains you.”

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor starts to open his mouth and for not the first time tonight, closes it. Instead, he stands, brushing off the front of his slacks and follows after his brother.

[st_ratagem]

After a moment of consideration, Loki walked out onto his balcony and from there to the roof. Going out into the desert would have been better generally, but on foot would have been annoying since Thor couldn’t shapeshift into a faster runner and Loki couldn’t fly under his own power.

Once there, he started to concentrate, trying to feel out the amount of water in the air, whether it would even be possible to get ice instead of vague chill.

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor follows after him and sits down on the roof. He doesn't say anything when his brother begins to focus; he doesn't want to risk breaking his concentration.

[st_ratagem]

The air was dry, because of course it was. Apart from being inconvenient, this was a desert. “Damn.”

All the same, Loki tried dropping the nearby temperature as far down as he could, through the staff and everything he’d invested in its creation. Just to test. Just to see. Even if there was nothing to freeze, cold could be proof of concept of sorts.

The temperature did drop, but not by much - noticeably chilly but still above freezing. He’d managed that much on his own before, but it was different. This time it felt like simple resistance, more like a fishing line caught on something instead of hitting a wall. “...huh.”

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor can feel it too, as if several hours in the night had passed almost all at once and the temperature had fallen with it.

Thor's lips tug up into a smile.

"I think that's a pretty good first attempt, right?"

[st_ratagem]

“Nothing I can’t do anytime on my own. If all I wanted was to be able to force people to consider going to get a light jacket, you’d be right.” But it wasn’t and Thor wasn’t, so Loki tightened his grip on the staff slightly and moved it as if tugging on a line tied to its head. Physically miming his mental yank at the resistance keeping the temperature above freezing.

Magic was shaped partly by belief, and foci allowed belief to shift. Once, Mjolnir let Thor believe that it had control for him while in reality he’d developed his own. The staff - which would probably need a name at some point - had been tended to be similar, a sort of stand-in to throw ice where Loki couldn’t. Instead, it was apparently a crowbar of sorts: a lever to force locked doors open or move heavy things out of the way.

No surprise, really. It had been the oldest and ugliest limb of a tree sacred to the man Loki hated almost as much as he hated silence, carved at night by a blade given to him by the mother whose death he’d set in motion, finished with his own blood during an argument with the only being in the universe he loved. Of course it was a bleak, stubborn, angry thing.

And, eventually, it worked. After pouring effort into it, the resistance snapped. The runes on the staff flared blue-white (like the Casket of Ancient Winter rather than Loki’s usual green) and the temperature around the brothers plunged well below freezing. It was a strain, but it worked, and better? Loki understood why it worked.

Which meant he could also believe it would work again. “This is a good first effort.”

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor snaps up to his feet, his grin broadening.

"It's a better second effort," Thor says, clapping his hand against Loki's shoulder a few times in brotherly pride. He's not willing to concede that there was no first effort or that it wasn't good in its own right. "And the runes!"

Thor points at them excitedly, as if the light on them isn't abundantly obvious.

"It's great!"

[st_ratagem]

“I could wish for a little more subtlety, but that may be part of the point.” Elemental force was force. It could be made smaller and subtler, but naturally it was... well, Thor. Intensely straightforward. Which was probably one reason (likely among others) that Loki had needed a focus: he wasn’t very good at straightforward. It wasn’t how his mind worked.

It increased the strain on what now seemed to be severely atrophied magical muscles, but Loki applied a little more force and concentration to the little water in the air. A few seconds later, the runes pulsed and a few small ice crystals swirled in the air. Another good start, but then Loki had to let it go, let the temperature return and the ice melt. Too much at once would only set him back. “I believe I should apologize, brother. Did you know there are two ways to start an avalanche?”

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor's face brightens even more at the sight of the few crystalline snowflakes his brother has created; he holds out a hand to catch them in his palm and finds they melt before they hit the surface.

No matter. Thor's slightly-damp hand is back on his brother's back. He gives his brother's shoulder an encouraging squeeze.

"What do you mean?"

[st_ratagem]

“You can start an avalanche by blowing up one side of the mountain or finding exactly the right place to drop a snowflake. I’ve been trying to one-snowflake this, and it was never going to work that way.” Asgardian magic often did, at least the parts he was good at. “This is more like a set of muscles, not a set of rules.” Which and eperfect sense, but somehow he’d never thought of it that way.

[st_ormbreaker]

"You're right." Thor gives Loki's shoulder one final pat-pat, then withdraws his hand. "Finesse isn't a word in my dictionary." Not, at least, when his powers were involved.

[st_ratagem]

“Yes. And I’m not good at brute force.” Loki sighed. “At least I have a framework now.”

[st_ormbreaker]

"You did it once. No reason to believe you can't do it again."

Thor's grin softens into a smile as he looks over at Loki.

"I'm proud of you, you know."

[st_ratagem]

“What?” Now that sounded ridiculous. “Why?”

[st_ormbreaker]

"You found something that didn't come easy to you and tried to do it anyway," Thor answers, as if it were the most logical answer in the world.

[st_ratagem]

“Oh.” Loki shook his head. “That’s not why, you know.”

[st_ormbreaker]

"The why doesn't matter," Thor says. "What matters is that you tried."

[st_ratagem]

“The why matters to me.” Loki held up his bandage dhand - still blue like the rest of him - and looked at it. “I hate this, you know.”

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor looks down at Loki's hand, then up to Loki's face and frowns. "Being frost giant?"

[st_ratagem]

Loki nodded, closing and repening a fist as if watching it fascinated him. “The nightmare Asgardian mothers frighten their children with. The monster you wanted to destroy for most of our lives. And yet I have to be one. A defective one, at that.”

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor watches as Loki opens and closes his fist.

"For the record, my stance on Frost Giants has since changed," Thor says. He is still ashamed of his previous position. He was even before Loki called him out directly; he'd just never talked about it."My opinion here probably doesn't matter, but I never saw you as defective. Different, maybe, but not defective."

[st_ratagem]

“It’s not a question of opinion. It’s a fact. I was thrown away for being defective. Too small, not particularly strong. Probably other reasons about which I know nothing.” He shrugged, “I’m not anything, really, which is appropriate for me, and maybe if I have some minimum level of competence it will bother me less.”

[st_ormbreaker]

"How much do you know about the Christmas stories Midgardians tell their children?"

The question probably seems to come out of nowhere given the current topic of conversation, but Thor is going to use it to drive a point.

[st_ratagem]

“Very little. It’s nothing I’ve had cause to learn.” Thor thought it was relevant somehow, so Loki was willing to play along.