Author's Note: A story set after Loki's fall from the Bifrost, told in second-person from Thor's POV. It's more of a wishful thinking kind of story, rather than what Thor would have actually experienced… :(
I hope you enjoy it :)
Your deep breath shudders into the softness of the early morning. The silver door handle of his bedroom brings back buried remembrances of how he would threaten to magically make it shrink your hand until it occurred to you to knock. But mostly how he never did. The little reminiscence of him doesn't make you smile. If anything, it makes your heart wrench even more deeply.
No point in knocking now…
You push the door open, quietly, more gently than you ever used to, despite how you wish he were waiting for you behind it more fiercely than you ever had. He had always been waiting, despite that it was you who needed to wait for him.
Should have waited, really…
And there's his room, clean, tidy and deceptively bare (he would magically hide and keep on hand a number of mixt objects), yet with a tone hinting at having housed many memories, masked along with his forgotten past.
Gentle dawn light streams into soft patches all over the floor, illuminating the shadowy corners again. A cool breeze lilts around as different parts of the now vacant room tug at your attention like an anxious child tugging on the sleeve of their older friend.
His shelves of assorted books, of magic and other subjects you had never wondered about, still not tall enough to house all of them. His bare bed with its unruffled covers, the colours of spring grass. A shallow gash in the sun-dappled sky of bedroom wall just above it.
The shelves of many-paged, different-hued books that you and your friends had always scoffed at. You had laughed that only those too weak to hold a weapon would choose to hold a book in their lap. Each one of them would always occupy at least his entire lap, usually hanging over the sides of his slender legs while his dark head would be bowed over it. A lump begins to form in your throat.
His empty bed, with its crisp, green sheets that had always looked like he had never slept on them when the morning came. Half the time because he hadn't. When the night brought his nightmares along with it, you would be woken in the darkness by a trembling younger brother tentatively prodding your shoulder.
The nightmares had terrified him so much, and those emerald eyes would lose their impish sharpness and be deeper with fear than anything else, though horror and sadness flickered there too. You had promised to always be there, so he had always come.
The other half of the time, because the two of you inevitably grew up and you told him that he ought to not be frightened by something as childish as bad dreams anymore, he still hadn't opted to stay in alone in that room, choosing to search for some other escape in the night. You realize that you had never bothered to find out what that other escape had been, or if he did even manage to find one.
The terrible, broken hollowness of grief in your chest swells deeper as the memory of his eyes from your childhood nights won't leave you alone. They had been wide and dark with fear, but with a trusting light when he saw you, and the prickling of tears burn even more behind your own.
The slight gouge in one of his walls, just above his bed. You remember the time when you accused him of stealing your favourite practice hammer from when you were both still not quite teenagers, fresh from your first lessons of battle training.
He had denied it, of course, until you grew so frustrated that you tossed one of his indestructible spell books at the wall. The corner had struck, and he had looked at you with his eyebrows pulled together in disguised hurt, though you had reminded him that he could simply use his magic tricks to repair the damage.
A fresh wave of regret and shame floods you, not only because of the actions of your younger self, but also because it came as surprise that he had decided to keep that little monument on the wall.
As you continue looking around the unbearably empty room, you remember the two of you from when you were much, much younger, and innocently happy in a world that you had still shared, sitting side by side on the bed. It was sometimes his, sometimes yours, huge to you both at the time.
Together you would talk and laugh into the night, and your mother would find the two of you in the morning, sound asleep with your heads together, gold against black, until she began checking in before midnight to find the two of you drifting off, blue and green eyes struggling to hold on to the night for a while more.
Now you wonder even more why you had stopped helping him fight the horror of his nightmares when you could have made the sweetness of that memory live a little longer.
You can see the two of you, a little older, but still blessedly childlike, in different positions around the room. You would often occupy the space in the center of his room in a flurry of mock battle, swinging one of his boots in place of a weapon as you enthusiastically demonstrated how to incapacitate foes.
He would always be perched somewhere more unusual around the room, sometimes on one of those bookshelves, with a massive tome open in his lap but attention on you, pointing out unnecessary flourishes in your footwork and form, though you had kept them in.
You remember the two of you growing into your adolescent years. You, broader and golden, while he still narrow and willowy. The recollection of your teenaged self is again in the middle of his room, but with a practice hammer instead of his boot, once again in mock fighting. Your footwork and form had become stronger and fiercer, with more extravagant flourishes than before.
The memory of his adolescent self is also still perched on the shelf, occasionally bringing his long legs up to avoid a particularly ostentatious swipe of your weapon, or waving his hand to magically seal a crack your hammer had inadvertently made on a possession of his.
Once, after mending several breaks in the space of two minutes, he had transformed it into one of his boots like before, laughing at the look on your face when you finally realized what you were holding. At the time, you had jokingly threatened to steal all of his boots in ransom for your hammer back. Now you wish you had just continued using his boot.
You can see him as a young adult, tall and slender, his skin pale moonlight against his night-coloured hair. And this time alone. He's standing by the arched window of his room, looking out with an expression of unruffled calm concealing unhappy loneliness. You realize only now that his window overlooks the path threading through the gleaming gold gates leaving the city to the Bifrost. The path that you and your friends would always take riding proudly on your horses, as you left on another one of your journeys.
You can't believe how that wistful look on his face when watching you leave would be so easily replaced with a smile when you had returned, and your throat catches again.
You notice a chair in the corner by the window, tall and graceful like him and made of a dark polished wood. The two of you used to be able to fit on it side by side, and had once accidentally broken a piece off one of the arms, and you now don't even register the gouge still there, still unrepaired like the one in the wall, because all you can see is that it's empty, like the rest of his room.
With that last image, the tears burning behind your eyes spill over down your face as sobs rip through you, the desolation inside you ripping you further still.
He's gone, he's gone, he's gone, he's gone…
Your little brother is the one who left you this time, and you wish even harder that you hadn't been so casually contented to do so for all those years.
More memories assail you.
"Brother!"
You turn around and see Loki, his eyes still two clear, green moons of childish youth, running after you, his dusk-dark hair hiding his forehead. You shuffle impatiently as he catches up to you.
"What is it, Brother? I'm going somewhere with my friends."
He looks at you with eyes that faintly cloud with disappointment. "You promised you would spend today with me."
"Not today, Loki. I can't miss my first lesson of weaponry training, and you're too young to come."
You smile in reassurance and continue hurrying on to meet your friends, not looking back.
"That's cheating, Loki!"
You exclaim from the ground, half laughing at your younger brother's indifference to the concept of honour in conflict as his illusion fades from sight.
"You can't use your magic tricks when fighting, Brother!" You roll your eyes as you pick up your practice hammer again.
You try to impress upon him the rules of bravery and valiance, and don't notice him give a little eye-roll of his own.
"Why must you always lie so much, Loki?"
Your father glares down in disappointment and disapproval at your younger brother beside you as he begins to explain, though your father cuts across him each time he tries.
He leaves the two of you standing there with the promise of a punishment for him, and looking back on all those times now, remembering how his eyes had lowered and how his eyebrows had pulled together in disappointment, whether at himself or otherwise, you want to yell at your earlier self for letting that look come onto his face.
The peacefully merry morning, with its clement breeze and cheerful speckles of soft sunlight, doesn't feel right. It seems far too happy to match what's raging inside you. Far too happy without your little brother.
Through a blur of tears, you notice a folded rectangle of paper on the windowsill, sitting in a quiet ray of sunlight. It's covered in a thin layer of dust, but doesn't appear to have been waiting there for too long, yet. You open it with hands still shaking with sorrow, and the devastating storm of longing, remorse and unhappiness streams down your face as you read his clear, graceful script.
Never doubt that I love you
Author's Note: Please let me know what you think about it, and how I could improve ^-^