Yesterday my laptop died on me. Like, completely died, without any warning. I have to use a different laptop right now, and I don't have any of my stuff (though it should be recoverable) so currently I can't write on my existing fics.

So have a new one-shot while I continue to somewhat comically mourn the temporary loss of my digital stuff X3

This is basically about the whole warring brother deal Thor and Loki have got going. I'm not quite sure whose POV it is - I think of it more as a mutual, tacit understanding of their situation, and sort of a combination of Loki's complex, convoluted metaphors, and Thor's raw simplicity of sentiment.

We'd built ourselves a castle with a high stone wall. But this once infinite steeple is now so very small, and we can hang our helmets upon it, leave behind our silver and our gold.

The neat rows of peaceful garden became wild with just a little neglect, the perfectly trimmed flora amassing to form a tangled barrier, their feral branches reaching towards us, mocking, as we run with dead ends at the tips of our toes, each one dashing away another seed of hope.

They told us winning mattered most—and we believed what we were told—framed our faces, white and black, night and day, light and shadow.

Now though their words ring false and hollow, because to win is for the other to lose and when one of us falls we drag the other down; so we sift our fingers through the sod at our feet, searching for something we're sure we've left behind somewhere concealed in the reverberations of our footfalls. But all we cull from the dirt are fallen stars, and we use them as torches in our darkened wars.

Yet a single breath of illumination and we know ourselves incapable of the act of elimination.

So we dance around the world's gnarled, gnawed bones, dance in ruination, behind gossamer veils of moonlight as we leave black dripping along the sand.

Our feet don't rest, our hearts protest, but still our minds thrash in the knowing a myth of redemption, red on our hands and it turns to purple, to black, flowers falling from behind our ears where they lay tucked against our tresses like a reminder of love, a word we hold and cast away like a creature vile.

But still it bites our legs and we drag it along all the while, and fail to kick it off. No end, our swords clash and cry, no end is nigh.

We stand warring eternal, and claim the battlefield as our home, where each blade hum and each battle cry echoes of a mother's lullaby, and each drop we make the other bleed is a sign of our creed, our ravening greed, that flutters about our faces on onyx wings and beats in our ears till we can't hear the other scream.

Red is revenge and red is passion, flashing from apathetic blue, that separates us and halves a whole, leaves each of us with a fractured soul. Our mangled fate won't heal, this festering sore we pick open keeps oozing down our arms, coating our grips in pus that falters our blows, the fragility or our holds adding all the more desperate power.

This love it rends, rends evermore.

Evermore, our blades sing, evermore weary, rest you cold. The ground claims hearts fallen bold, and falling we still, we quiet.

The pain of mending but too scared to try it; a second chance but too weary to buy it.

Blades drive through the flesh between fingers, and clenching our hands the stinging lingers, each second leading up to this moment, bitter and acrid like ash. We know we blew it.

The fire waits, and the fire roars, the fire devours, burns the color from our scorched skin till once black and fleshless we can finally claim to be the same.

Shattered glass rains on us, powders our hair and lashes like snow, and the blood glistening on our teeth shows that we'll never again be whole.

And yet inexplicably we never can bring ourselves to let it go; like a mother who hugs her dead child to her breast, rocking and singing softly, too much in love and denial to realize he's already at rest.

Thank you for reading ^.^ Please leave a review and let me know what you think?