st_ratagem | Not a stalker

Entry tags:

loki,
thor

Not a stalker

It wasn't the most subtle thing in the world, but it probably also wasn't the least subtle. (Probably._ Just, since Loki's trip into his own future (Thor's past), the god of mischief just tended to be around, wherever Thor happened to be. He didn't obviously follow. He didn't always speak. Often he didn't even acknowledge Thor's presence.

But, as much as possible, he was around. Even in Thor's room, on and off, albeit as a kitten keeping Stark company and creating tiny claw marks on the man's hands. (He insisted on wiggling fingers! He deserved what he got!)

There were, of course, times when it was impossible to be subtle. Such as this time, when Thor was working in the garden and Loki had opted to take up space on a nearby bench and read, occasionally glancing up to make sure Thor was still there.

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‘Not important’ wouldn’t be an acceptable answer, and neither would ‘none if you business’. If either of those were true, he wouldn’t be stalking and lurking. And yet.. there was nothing Thor could actually do, nothing (almost nothing) he didn’t already know. And the things he didn’t know, the things Loki was thinking about, weren’t things he’d actually be willing to have a conversation about.

He’d go dead, or make demands, or both. “I don’t think that’s a conversation I can have with you.”

"Why not?"

“Because I don’t think you’re actually capable of having it with me. You’d stop listening about ten seconds in and start trying to issue orders, or to convince me of whatever, or otherwise crawl up your own ass such that I have to try and caretake you, which I am intensely bad at, and all when I’m already not exactly doing great.” It was a balder answer than he’d have usually given, but there didn’t seem to be any better options.

Thor has to bite back the urge to huff at Loki's answer. Instead of saying anything to convince his brother otherwise, he just says:

"Alright."

He turns back towards the path and keeps on moving. He glanced behind his shoulder to make sure Loki is still following, same as when they were children.

He was, of course, though measurably more tense and watchful than before, and he didn’t uncross his arms. It was a little surprising that Thor dropped the topic so readily. Whether he actually agreed with the premise or just wasn’t interested in pushed no was unclear, but it didn’t matter that much. He hadn’t told Loki to stop following him yet.

"Promise me you'll talk to someone about it."

The grass crunches audibly beneath his feet as Thor turns off-path. He had been working on cutting a shortcut through this section of the wood, but he hasn't tread it nearly enough times for it to be a proper path to anywhere.

“I have no one.” Stark or Valkyrie, either one, would just report to Thor. Most of the others with anything like context were children or relative unknowns Loki trusted even less than he did his brother or his... whatever Valkyrie actually was. Bo was maybe a maybe, but she lacked context and that wasn’t really how their relationship worked. “So I’ll deal with my own problems.”

"You don't have anyone?"

Thor has a hard time believing that -- in part because his brother thought he had no one when they were younger. Sure, the Warriors Three and Sif were more his friends than they were Loki's, but even if Loki thought he didn't have anybody, he always had Thor.

Except... Thor wasn't exactly someone he could talk to for whatever reason.

"I suggest you find someone," Thor says, and he goes back to plowing right ahead, just like he always does. "You don't exactly have a history of handling your own problems well."

"I'm aware of that." Who would be more aware than Loki of exactly how badly he'd handled problems? But he'd learned, a little, and was doing better with this one already. He thought so, anyway. He wasn't the one under room arrest for whatever reason. He hadn't so much as raised his voice, let alone lashed out. "But I'm all I've got, so we'd both best hope I've learned."

"What if I promised to listen for more than ten seconds?" Thor asks.

That had been part of the problem, hadn't it?

"You'd probably have to last longer than eleven seconds, as well." Eleven seconds was longer than ten, and Loki wouldn't put it past his brother to just count down from ten and then consider himself free to overbear. But it wasn't a no.

"Who's been knocking on your door ever since you asked them to?"

"That's different." No less surprising, but... different. Thor wasn't as emotional about the concept of respecting a door. "And I seem to recall having to put a knife to your throat to get you to accept the concept of privacy in the first place."

"If you wanted to hold a knife to me now, I'd allow it," he says. He can make out the entrance to the inn on the far end of the horizon now.

Thor stops and turns to face Loki.

"If there's ever something troubling you, I want to know about it."

"You're going to regret saying that." Almost certainly, and fairly soon. "Mother took me to see your Statesman. By way of a brief stop in what I think is your future."

Thor doesn't say anything to that, though he has things he wants to say and things he wants to ask. He just wants to prove to Loki that he can listen, even when he'd rather be talking.

That hadn’t been a test, but it was slightly reassuring nonetheless. “The glimpse of your future was simple enough. You sitting on a bench, staring into nothing, doing nothing.” Loki paused there, trying to work out how to convey the exact level of horror and pain in those few moments.

There was no way, so he settled for simple. “You were... empty, I suppose. There was no you I’d point out as ‘that’s my idiot brother’ even though it was clearly you. It was... upsetting. Which was when and why Mother took me to watch your ship explode.”

Thor keeping his promise to listen would be easiest if he was given very few openings to explode in, so Loki didn’t pause. “Your little book left out a few details, but I understand that.” Leaving out the Power Stone torture has been to spare Loki’s feelings, leaving out you really are the worst was to spare Thor’s since they’d ended up the last thing Thor would say to him. “As you might expect, watching myself didn’t disturb me. Watching you was... hard. I never actually believed you before when you talked about grieving for me. I mean, why would you? And so on. But it’s difficult at best to deny that proof.”

For a few long moments after Loki's done speaking, Thor stands there in stunned silence. The act might seem like a courtesy: Thor'd promised to be better at listening and to not charge in with his own thoughts and opinions, but it hadn't been deliberate. It doesn't even occur to him until his mind registers the silence on a delay that he feels a need to fill it.

"That must have been rough," he says in the same tone of voice someone might use when someone else complained to them that they'd lost their keys, wound up stuck in traffic, and were late to work. Loki's explanation at least explained his brother's clinginess. "I'm sorry you had to see it."

It took a lot of what Loki had not to roll his eyes at the polite nothings, though he waved one hand, not quite dismissively, before giving in to the urge to twist his hands together. Thor didn’t understand, but that was fine. Inner death wasn’t the same as outer death, it wasn’t as obvious or immediate... and there was every chance that Thor was just used to it, in himself.

And on the subject of outer death, the part that would cause a Thor explosion. “You said that you thought I was improvising. That things happened I didn’t expect, my plan fell apart, and I was winging it. I didn’t see that at all. I saw points thee and four, maybe, of a fifteen to twenty point plan. That being the case, I think it’s very likely I’m going to make sure I do everything the same.”

The Thor explosion doesn't come.

Thor swallows back the urge to ask why because the answer is there in the explanation: he saw the makings of a plan. Thor doesn't ask what the plan was because he says he only saw points three and four of a considerably longer plan. He doesn't get angry because Loki knows how upset Thor was after his death -- enough to spend the past few days tailing him -- and has still chosen to do it.

"Okay."

Okay? Was that it? The whole reaction? The last time Loki had expressed the possibility that he wouldn’t change things, or offered any plan that ended in the possibility of death, Thor had exploded. Now, he looked... upset, maybe? But not like he was choking on rage or anything along those lines.

Loki took two steps closer to his brother. “I don’t think it’s my plan, mind, I’m not handling enough of it, for one thing. I doubt it’s your plan, either. You wouldn’t accept a plan where step four includes my death. But if I’m right, Thor, and there is a plan?” He looked Thor dead in the eyes and quoted himself. “‘I assure you, brother, the sun will shine on us again.’ That tells me that the way out is through. And since I’m still dead when you’re from, you’re not at the end of the plan either.”

Thor attempts a smile -- he truly does -- because he knows that if he doesn't try to smile he's going to end up crying and maybe that's the appropriate emotional response when your brother repeats some of his last words to you, but it's not the emotional state Thor wants to be in right now.

"I want to believe that," he says. "But I'm not sure that I can." If he goes home with that hope and nothing comes of it, it will be worse than if he had no hope at all.

“Point three: get Hulk sent to Earth, to issue a warning and ensure this two Stones are the last to be collected. Point four: hand over the Space Stone. Point five, maybe, ensure you live. And so on.” Another step or two closer. “Think about it, brother. I wouldn’t agree to a plan I didn’t think could work. I don’t play games I can’t win. But I agreed to this.”

It occurs to Thor that there's a possibility that Loki's plan -- the one he thought could work -- might have been contingent on his survival and the belief that Thor would kill Thanos the second time they met.

Thor has to do everything he can to block that possibility from his mind.

"I know you did," he says. "I know, but I still wish you hadn't."

“It will work. Put the stones in the Titan’s hands, let him do what he wants, then take everything when he’s not looking anymore. That’s how I’d do it.” Why else would his part be ‘collect and hand over the Tesseract’?

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