A/N: Written for a prompt of norsekink.
Summary: Both of them thought the fight would be eternal between them. Then after a realization everything changes for good.
This is goodbye, brother
Loki was standing opposite him, always, always opposite and never beside for so long time now that he couldn't recall how it had been before, and Thor realized he outlasted what he had only ever considered eternal.
o-o-o
Everything became customary, accompanied by naught but fatigue, and he went ahead, unmindful of its wicked nature. Eating, drinking, sleeping, fixing Mjölnir to his belt every morning, touching its handle as if searching for reassurance. They went without thinking.
Fighting Loki was the same. A recurring activity Thor could squeeze in his daily schedules. It made up his life on Midgard, the small routines.
It gave a disgraceful picture that sometimes, when Thor stopped and thought of it, tossed him into shame.
He found it disillusioning and dismal that many years of practice and continuous predicament could one day turn into something so habitual in its repetition that he slowly accustomed himself to it. To fighting his brother.
Every encounter was different on the surface, and still the same underneath.
The scenes would change, and the characters would change, too, Thor's teammates grew old, some of them died, and a few of them because of Loki, and new Avengers came, new comrades. Even the slowly aging good Captain was more oft away than not, bound by weariness and slowly seeping strength. The villains Loki sided with were rarely the same, bar in their despicableness.
Thor had always thought only they would be the same forever, two brothers on the ends of the awful tether of belonging: twined of the threads of closeness and separation, of pain that could sprout from naught but love festered.
Even before it began, Thor could always tell how it all would go. He knew the words to be said, the moves to be done, the punches to be inflicted, the steps that would betray and the ones that would bring closure (not victory, he would never call a fight against his brother a victory, regardless its ending).
He knew all of these in advance. They had reenacted it far too many times to a point where he didn't know why they were still doing it.
But more than anything, he knew the undying hope that shimmered in him and kept him going even after Loki failed him again and again, even after the numberless attempts against his life, the infinite slashes -far deadlier than any physical blows- Loki's poisoned words had left on him in places Thor could not reach to heal. A hope that was borne by a thousand years of brotherhood. No one understood him, and there were times even he couldn't grasp why he was deliberately blind to the horrible reverse life they had now. Only a fool would have believed in changing Loki and finding the brother behind this wrecked shell. He was a fool, though, as Loki had so many times pointed it out.
They were frozen into this horrible crystalline moment of eternal duel, and Thor thought he found a sort of twisted solace in it.
How ironic that eventually it wasn't Loki who changed.
It was the fool.
o-o-o
Sometimes Loki would manage to escape, like a wicked spirit, he would laugh at them from a distance, tangled in his schemes and his own warped mind.
Sometimes they would catch him, and it always made Thor think they succeeded only because Loki wanted to be captured. Maybe out of boredom and for his own amusement, maybe as part of a bigger plot, maybe to taunt Thor because he knew Thor would always try to talk to him through the walls of his cage. Thor suspected it entertained Loki that he would always come, always with the same words because that was also part of the script.
It entertained Loki that he would always fail.
And sometimes, just like this last time, they could imprison him only because one of his own allies betrayed him. That wasn't anything unusual, either.
o-o-o
By the third day, Loki had disappeared from his cells.
It was to be expected, too, and Thor felt naught but a sense of déjà vu. One could not leash a soul that could live but free for far too long.
o-o-o
It was only a day later that Thor realized he hadn't even visited Loki in his cell this time.
It was a disturbing thought. It was something that was not the same, that was not in the script he found certainty and routine in. It was like taking a different route than what the Nornir sewed in their Fate.
There was a feeling sitting in his guts, cold and hard like a block of ice. He could not name it but he knew it was responsible for the usual step he failed to make. It was a painful feeling that made his stomach sink.
o-o-o
He found the name eventually.
When later he tried to look at it, Thor realized he had no inkling when it happened but it had to be gradual.
One day he was standing on the shambles of a military base, facing someone who had once been his brother, and the recognition froze him to the bones like only diving into the icy waters under Jötunheim's vast snowy lands would. Loki was standing opposite him, always, always opposite and never beside for so long time now that he couldn't recall how it had been before, and Thor realized he outlasted what he had only ever considered eternal: he outlasted his love for him.
It was a terrifying realization, one that made him feel irreparably lonely.
Maybe there was only so much pain one could bear. The heart was but a muscle – straining its strings would only break it in the end.
He couldn't believe how the absence of something managed to leave an ache so great.
He had loved Loki for a thousand years, and Thor always thought with a certainty that was so natural he never even stopped to question it that he would still love him for another thousand. They had known each other for a lifetime, known each other better than anyone in the world, and it broke Thor's heart to realize they could build nothing but ruins of it. He had thought there would be nothing in the Nine Realms that could come between them to snap the ugly tether that was their lifeline, the only belonging they had. He had never suspected it would be his own heart.
He had always imagined their history would end in cataclysm. He never counted with Loki slowly fading in his heart.
Maybe their most heinous crime was not pulling Midgard and each other apart but wasting this love and crushing it.
o-o-o
There was a memory resurfacing as Thor tried to pinpoint the moment that eventually lead up to this. To utter, painful estrangement, to the meticulous process of hollowing his own chest with a dull spoon – it felt so, the torn tissue where a part of his heart under layers of hurt and love too complicated for someone so simple as he was pumped the ancient misery through his veins; that part of the foolish heart had been Loki's from the moment Thor was old enough to understand what the most sacred word 'brother' meant. Now he found naught but rime and lichen there. Loki's, he mused, unfolding an old belief, was embracing a pool of black poison.
They were young by Asgardian measures and on a careless day a white snake bit Loki with its dreadful fangs. Looking back at it, Thor found it intriguing how Loki developed such a curious interest in snakes later; even one of his shape-shifter forms was a snake. Maybe he grew immune to them, or maybe a part of him was forever possessed by them. There was still a patch of skin on his ankle that never healed properly, a raised, ragged surface where the white snake had bit him.
Loki healed a few horrible sweat-soaked, frenzied days later that left Thor half-crazed with worry, but later, many years -full of fissures cracking open between them and words that hurt more than intended- later Thor pondered that perhaps the poison had successfully stolen into Loki's heart and clung there with its barbed fibers.
o-o-o
He didn't have the heart in these fights. Then again, he had probably never had – routine could go without it.
Their new clashes wore him out and scared him.
He would look at Loki and he would no more see the brother he once had been. This man, flaunting in his brother's features, was unknown to him.
There was a moment when he met Loki on Midgard for the first time after his brother's fall: he had glanced at Loki, and it was the faintest sense of disconnection stirring up in him. He had guarded an intact picture in his head of the brother he thought he had lost and whom he had mourned, and he couldn't reconcile it with the one standing before him. Loki looked the same, and still, looked fundamentally different, and it had nothing to do with the unhealthy, disheveled appearance of his usually meticulously clean, vain and decent brother. It was but a moment, a reeling, out-of-body sensation, but it left its imprint in his head.
It would come back from time to time, the torturous struggle to ground the moment in reality when they met again an again; it would come back every time Loki stretched and tore the edges of the intact image in Thor's mind, but in the end, the feeling would always dissipate.
Until now. Thor was standing there and realized the disconnection was a permanent noise in his head.
He couldn't remember anymore the adventures they once shared, the little childish bickering they had engaged in. All he remembered was the new fights, gruesome and wicked, the words that no more were things off their trajectory but crafted to hurt, always and forever hurt. When he looked at Loki, he saw how they tore apart everything around them, and Thor wanted to finish this before looking upon a man who was no longer a brother to him would one day turn into seeing an enemy.
o-o-o
Thor stayed beyond the periphery of the destruction, watching from the roof of a building nearby the newest wave of Loki's madness, and waited while his teammates struggled. It was the most painful of stillness he had ever forced himself into. He knew Loki would come, he always sought him out in their fights, though Thor had never been someone to be searched for and dragged into the field before.
In a flash of green and gold Loki appeared before him, in every fiber the arrogance and sarcasm Thor grew to dislike so much.
"You have grown lax lately, Thor." Loki taunted him. The smirk cracking his face was a confident one, and Thor knew he would wipe it away all too easily with the simple truth. There was still a depth he knew his brother to. "Are you tired of fighting?"
"Yes."
There was a moment of standstill, and the confusion on Loki's face was too powerful even for him to hide it.
Loki fidgeted, his feet shuffled against the concrete roof, and a horrible feeling started to dawn on him. For a second he didn't know what to do, how to go on when something he deemed eternal came to a sudden halt. For long heartbeats the thought that it might be victory didn't occur to him. His mind started to pull out scenarios, calculated consequences and prepared dozens of outcomes that would ensure he came out only gaining from it, but something in his chest was a frozen mass of shock, unable to keep up with the swiftness of his mind. There was something on Thor's face he could not identify.
He huffed, his voice derisive but hollow. "The pathetic life you live among your Avengers on their short leash could eventually drain a god as mighty as you?"
"Maybe I don't care anymore." Thor watched him solemnly, with a hint of pity that made Loki lurch into twisted anger. "Maybe I only wanted to save someone I cared about."
A cold bark of laughter scratched against Loki's throat, and it was an ugly sound. "And? You realized you failed?"
Thor's answer was a crumpled lump in his throat. He didn't wish to reply. Saying it loudly would have made it official. How could he tell Loki that they could destroy but one thing all these inglorious years, and it was the tender bonds they still kept somewhere deep within. There was nothing left for him to stay for. He didn't have a brother anymore because if he did, he should have loved him. His love had been infinite, and they were still able to chisel it with disgraceful pointless fights, they grated it until naught was left. His heart was a mournful place for he lost Loki for the second time, and it was for good.
There was a flicker of uncertainty in the depth of his green eyes before Loki masked it with a gibe. "Come on, Thor. Tell me something sentimental again. I miss it so much."
Thor's smile was a hollow one on his face, as every sentimental thought left in him was but an echo.
"Once I loved you." He couldn't look at Loki. "I wish you have…" he trailed off. Believed it? Cared about it? Valued it? Maybe neither did matter after all.
It was one of those occasions Thor acted out of the frame Loki drew around him with keen precision so Thor would never catch him off-guard. One tiny word, and the ironic snicker stacked and carefully prepared in Loki's mind fell away in the echoing sound of that one trifling word: once.
The realization rendered him speechless. A whole fake world collapsed on him, certainties and securities he wasn't even conscious he had built were falling apart around the seams. He had believed in something and he had let himself be fooled by it. He had thought that while he was stuck in between realms, in between lives, uprooted and unwanted, Thor was levitating with him, and they would go around each other on this orbital course of destruction till the end of times. Even if they would forever be enemies, he was not alone in this, he managed to bind Thor into this pitiful mockery of life, tearing Asgard's future king from his home and his throne. He thought it was a curse he could cast upon Thor, a sort of punishment that Thor had to share with him, and it was an achievement that soothed his heart.
It never occurred to him that Thor would break out of this vicious cycle. It never occurred to him that Thor would just move on and forget him.
But I don't need you, he thought but it had a foreign ringing to it.
An idea whisked across his mind, and he smirked to himself. Thor could move on as he wished but their ways would cross each other's from time to time, and Loki could give his own hearty welcome as a good old nemesis would do.
In the next moment, though, Thor ripped even that pitiful fun away from him.
"I'm going back to Asgard, Loki. I don't mean to return here."
A flare of hot anger blinded Loki for a moment before incredulity twitched in the corners of his lips and pulled them upwards into a terrible clown-smirk. "And you will sit on Hliðskjálf and watch from your High Seat, doing nothing while I tear your beloved realm apart?"
"Yes, Loki."
And Loki believed him for Thor had never been one for lying. He believed him because the detachment on his face was something Loki could recognize.
Asgard. It was a place he could not follow Thor to.
Asgard. The only place he could ever call home.
But he had no home anymore. Midgard was but a means, the only one he knew. It was no home to him so he took shelter in their fights with Thor, and his home was the orbital course, the ever-demolition.
"This is goodbye, brother," Thor said, but that was a lie for brother he had no more.
There was a memory coming unbidden in his mind, from a past full of lies and hurt: Loki's visit when their father banished him to Midgard, in a life that seemed to be a thousand years ago. It was ironic how it was Loki now who was locked out of Asgard.
"I'm so sorry," he added. And he really was.
Loki watched silently as Thor turned his back and walked to the exit from the roof. He waited for him to look back, he waited for it with a disdainful expression, with a haughty smirk that was fabricated to show how he didn't mind anything. He pulled on the smile, sewn of anger and hatred, and maybe of threads of dread and isolation he couldn't crunch – he wanted to send Thor away with the memory of it, but Thor never turned back, never looked at him again.
He felt more rootless than ever before. It was Thor's fault for giving him the false delusion of not being alone all these years despite of him renouncing his whole past and denying Thor in each and every step of his. But this was how it always had been, the sun moved on its own path, unmindful of anything else, and the shadow had no other choice but to follow. But even that he could no more do.
For a second disbelief paralyzed him that Thor could just so simply walk out of his life, leaving a thousand years of history behind like it had never meant anything, like they really were no brothers, like Loki was no more than a trinket Thor wanted to acquire in his tantrum all these years before he grew bored of it – and the awful smirk that had frozen onto his face shattered into million pieces as Loki laughed because suddenly he sounded like his pathetic brother in his own head. He laughed, and it hurt as if the splinters cut him for real.
He would still be standing there long after Thor had left, his passing word -Farewell- torn apart by the wind maybe even before it could reach Loki. Maybe he only imagined it was uttered.
He would be standing there, and the wind tore a word from his lips, too.
"Goodbye."
Or maybe he never even said it.