[Loki and Thor] Take two

[st_ratagem]

Twenty minutes had proved to be more than enough time to raid the café's bar area, taking several (eight? ten? Loki didn't count) bottles of various liquors. The God of Mischief was generally an occasional drinker or social drinker at best, but Thor was another matter. His brother had prodigious tolerance even for an Asgardian.

He wasn't used to a cryptic, secretive Thor, or a Thor with a bizarre tendency to follow him around like a puppy, or a Thor that wept on him for no apparent reason. It was strange, it was worrying, it had to stop. The solution had to be somewhere in what had happened between Loki's 'now' and Thor's, and if Thor needed to be drunk to give him those facts, his brother was more than happy to take that request seriously.

The acquired bottles went into the little nook under the stairs - not to stay there long, almost certainly. After due consideration, Loki also hauled the trash can out of the bathroom and placed it by the large bed on the lower level, for empties. It was the only decent place to sit that wasn't in the upper-level area that was for sleeping or the outdoor balcony.

At that point, all there was to do was wait.

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[st_ratagem]

Loki took another drink... well, another three or four... because there was a lot to consider there.

For one, Odin had apparently been free for who knows how long, and he'd... let Loki stay where he was. Conceded the victory. Why? To sit by the sea in Norway? (It had been Norway in Thor's part-answers before, yes? Ah, who cared.) And... yes, Frigga would have been proud of his skill, but Loki knew very well that the Queen of Asgard would have been disappointed by his purpose at the same time.

Why comment on the pride and not the disappointment? What did that mean?

He drank again, then forced himself to stop, because nearly half the bottle not even five minutes in was far over his usual pace. But a suspicion had occurred, because his question had been 'how did our sister escape hell' and Thor was talking about Odin. "Continue."

[st_ormbreaker]

"I tell him that we've failed him, that we can make this right," Thor says, as the scene continues to play out in his head. "He tells me that he's failed us."

Thor unknowingly matches his brother drop-for-drop and downs half the bottle. The whole failed you thing was something that Thor didn't realize until after his father died.

"He told us that Hela was coming. The Goddess of Death. His firstborn." Thor says that last part with the same sort of edge he had the last time he'd tried to broach this topic with Loki. "Her violent appetites grew out of control," he says, quoting his father for verbatim. "So he imprisoned her and locked her away. He said that his life was all what held her back."

Thor looks over at Loki. He's sure that if he wasn't aware of it until now, he certainly was now. He'd already said almost everything except he died, but he might as well have.

"Then he told us he loved us. He called us both of us his sons. And then he dissolved into Odinforce."

[st_ratagem]

Odin's life had held her back, so his death had released her. That was how things went.

And yes, Odin had been old. Old even when Thor was born, old when he decided to pick up discarded trash on Jotunheim and take it back to Asgard with him. But it was possible, or perhaps probable, that the time and energy spent on breaking Loki's spells had left him with too little even for the Odinsleep.

Loki had imagined, many times in the last decade, that he'd be happy to see or hear of the Allfather's death. Instead, it hurt. Not as much as hearing that...

That his father hadn't denied him, at the end, the way he'd denied Odin.

Loki, very purposefully, drained the vodka and deposited the empty bottle in the little trash can he'd arranged for the purpose. One was enough to start blurring the edges, for him, and he needed the edges to be more than blurred. "And thus Hela. I see."

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor is still watching Loki very closely, even as he follows suit and drains his own bottle. He sets the empty bottle back down on the bed and breaks open another one.

"Thus Hela," Thor says.

And for a few long moments, he doesn't say anything.

"Are you okay?" he asks, finally.

[st_ratagem]

Maybe it was the blurred edges, maybe the unexpected hit of grief and pain, maybe it was the knowledge that he still had all of that to see for himself in the future (maybe), but rather than answer right away, Loki cracked open a second bottle of something (didn't even matter what) and drank until he had to stop to breathe.

Then he answered. "Not especially."

[st_ormbreaker]

Loki had a few weeks to process their father's death that Thor didn't; Thor didn't know how Loki handled his father's death because he wasn't there. But now he was there. And he should do something. But what could he really do?

Thor finishes the drink and sets it aside, then crawls along the bed and settles down right next to his brother. He pushes an arm back behind his brother's back and pulls Loki towards him in a squeeze that doesn't quite make it all the way to a hug.

"It's okay," he says, and even Thor's not sure if he's saying that things are all right or that it's okay for Loki not to be. Somehow, though, it feels like the right thing to say.

At the least, it was something to say.

[st_ratagem]

Loki immediately (well, almost immediately) jerked away, overestimating the force required and almost pitching himself off the bed. A slightly undignified scramble kept him balanced, which was fine. Better. Something.

If he let himself be touched or heavens forbid held, he'd have to weep, or something equally as bad. Loki (Odinson) was ice, spite, and sharp edges. Tears had no place. "It will be," he managed despite tear ducts that didn't seem to understand about ice, spite, and sharp edges, "if you give me a minute."

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor reaches for another one of the bottles and idle examines the label. He's not really looking at it so much as he's looking through it. And once a minute or two seems to have passed, he looks up from it and over at Loki.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I should have been the one to tell you about mother."

[st_ratagem]

That... did not help. Loki glared at his brother. "Don't bother."

Instead of some nameless guard informing him, being acknowledged, and mercifully - kindly even - walking away, to have Thor there? Standing uncaged and free, hectoring him for not showing 'proper' grief? No thank you. "I'm glad it wasn't."

[st_ormbreaker]

"I still wish it had been," he says, opening another bottle. He'd finally hit buzzed, but he wanted to be more than that. Especially now. "I'd been so obsessed with myself and my feelings then that I wasn't concerned at all for yours."

[st_ratagem]

"You're still not," Loki observed, then finished his second bottle and dropped the empty to join his first. There was some definite padding between feelings and mind, a little relief from the new pain and the old that Thor had so nicely dredged up again. "Because I told you my feelings which were I'm glad you fucked off to wherever you were and let me have some privacy."

[st_ormbreaker]

"Is that what you want now?" Thor asks, gesturing at his brother with the bottle.

[st_ratagem]

"You're already here now. I'll manage." No, he didn't want to be alone. He didn't necessarily want touch or comfort, had no idea what to do with it as previously displayed, but he definitely didn't want to be left with just himself for company.

That was how he ended up with cut feet because he couldn't be bothered to tidy away glass shards, for one thing.

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor drinks for a long moment.

"I'll move out of the way, so come reclaim your place."

Thor shoves off to where he was sitting before and idly taps the mouth of the bottle with a soft, but audible clicking sound.

"Father was always keeping so many things secret from us," he says, looking at the wall. "We never talked about anything. Everything about you, everything about me -- it only came out when it was convenient for him."

He takes a breath, and he's suddenly relieved Loki can't see his face.

"I want us to be able to talk about things," he says, feeling suddenly vulnerable. "I'm trying to talk to you about things, but I have no idea what I'm doing."

Thor shakes his head, but doesn't go on any further.

[st_ratagem]

"I was never convenient for him." Despite how much it hurt that Odin was gone, and everything attendant on that, Loki thought he might never stop being angry about the whole thing. He did, however, move back to his more comfortable place on the bed. "He told me nothing. I figured it out and demanded."

It used to only come out in extreme cold - Jotunheim, the Casket - but Loki was a shapeshifter. He'd figured out how to change from the shape his father had given him as an infant to the blue of a frost giant almost as soon as he'd learned it was there. Loki held up a hand and changed. Blue skin, red eyes, the same black hair... too small and too skinny, but a frost giant's face.

So Thor would see. Had he ever? "On Jotunheim, one of them touched me, and this happened. After Father exiled you, I snuck into his vault and touched the casket. It happened again." He clenched his fist and let the blue go. Back to 'normal'. "He'd never have told me if I hadn't forced him. I'd have just stayed as I was. Ignorant, out of place, a caged monster not even permitted to see the cage. Forever."

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor hadn't ever seen him like this. He knew what frost giants looked like, and on some level, his mind had created what he thought Loki might look like in that form. Somehow, his mental image was divorced from reality, but still Thor wasn't able to pinpoint what was off.

"He told me he told you," he says. "He said that you hadn't taken it well."

By the time Thor found out, they had both thought Loki was dead. It wasn't as if he'd ever be able to confirm the details.

Thor looks down at the bottle and chuckles to himself. "We had a pretty crummy father sometimes."

[st_ratagem]

Regardless of who had told what, he hadn't taken it well. Loki retrieved another bottle from the now-somewhat-smaller pile, opened it, and poured some down his throat. Partly out of a sense of having fallen behind, yes, but also because it seemed that 'bad idea' was coming to be the theme of this very depressing party.

"That's putting it extremely mildly. Crummy!" Where Thor was slurred, Loki just relaxed - as tells went, it meant he was well on his way to legitimately drunk. "D'you know, up until this actual conversation I sort of thought he'd picked me up out of some Father-y need to control his own death. You know? Pick up a monster nobody's using, train it just right, then unleash it when convenient. Sell tickets ahead of time or something. Except he'd already done that long before either of us was even born. So it turns out I'm very pointless." That was the kind of funny thought that probably wouldn't be, later.

[st_ormbreaker]

It's finally starting to hit Thor. At least a little. Between the two of them, they've probably cleared out a significant part of the bar's stores already, and while there was a significant chunk of it still laying on the bed, there was a decent enough amount inside of Thor's stomach for him to stumble right out of the tipsy category and straight into the slightly drunk category.

"No, no, no, no, no," Thor insists. "You're great. Hela's the terrible one. I'd take like --" Thor pauses for a second, trying to conjure up a number. "-- six dozen of you over one Hela."

Probably more than six dozen, but that's the first number that came to mind.

"She's the worst," Thor proclaims, finishing the bottle.

And she the worst because their father shaped her that way.

[st_ratagem]

"Seventy-two of me? No! I barely want one of me some days and I'm me." Loki would also have to be a lot drunker to screw up basic arithmetic, thankfully.

Though they were probably heading there. "Also I definitely don't want the competition."

Number three was on its way to being killed, but someone other than Loki being the worst caught his attention. "Look. Brother. You paper-yelled that she had the same," vague gesture, "thing as me. Do you think he was trying to replace her? That's weird. I'm not a fan."

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor shakes his head, and directs his gaze away from his brother and to the wall. He drains the bottle, throws it back onto the bed and reaches for another. He can't remember the last time he drank this much. He probably would have at his coronation, had he not bungled everything up and was cast out to Midgard.

"I got the feeling he was probably afraid of us turning out like her," he says. "It would explain a great deal."

He cracks open that next bottle.

[st_ratagem]

"It would, wouldn't it." Loki honestly hadn't expected Thor to get banished to Midgard, then. He'd taken it the opportunity with both hands, despite his I have apparently been literally blue this whole time concerns, but it hadn't been his plan. "I really didn't think he'd exile you, brother. For a little stupid defiance regarding a war that was really just on pause? It made no sense." But it did now, maybe, if Odin had been worried that Thor's desire to kill frost giants would become more general.

[st_ormbreaker]

Thor doesn't say anything to that, but he doesn't down half the drink in one go, either. Instead, he takes a swig, mulls over the revelation that his banishment wasn't actually some elaborate part of Loki's machinations like he always thought it was, then brushes the back of his hand over his lips to dry them.

"He took over the Nine Realms with Hela," he says. "Conquered them. Then covered it up when it was done and over and Hela was dealt with."

He takes another swig of the bottle.

"I don't want to ever pretend I haven't made mistakes," Thor says. "I want to acknowledge them."

And as he says that, Thor realizes his earlier comment about Frigga and what he wish he had done differently was part of that.

[st_ratagem]

"You'll be acknowledging for a very long time." They both would, if Loki didn't prefer his own style of simply owning whatever he did. "But I grow less sad over Father by the minute, so that's something." A lie, but having less to really regret was making it easier to carry.

[st_ormbreaker]

Another silence, and then:

"I do think he loved us," he says. "I just don't know if he knew how."

Thor looks back over at Loki, still gripping the bottle in his hand. For a second, it looks like he might say something, but in the end, he just ends up drinking instead.

[st_ratagem]

"He certainly loved you." Loki finished number three, then dropped it. Probably it joined the others. If not, it could be dealt with later. "Me, that's more complicated." And not just for the last decade. "I know I'm... difficult." Verging on impossible, he meant but didn't say.