"How did you escape?" Thor demands.
Loki is stretched out on his back, in the captain's chamber, shoulder to ankle pressed against the glass rim of a bay window. He is watching stars.
"Does it matter?"
"No," Thor says. "Or…yes, but I doubt that you will tell me."
Loki curls a fragment of memory around the Tesseract, and says, "Can you not be happy, brother? Must it always be an eye for an eye?" He grimaces demonstratively. "Too soon?"
Thor did not even say he was in pain. Thor has not yet grieved for the marring of his face. Thor's one good eye moves over Loki, and Loki knows that look, that long steady review…and is it wrong to be comforted by Thor's pain, if Thor's pain brings the safest part of Odin back again?
"The ravens will follow you now," Loki says softly. "They will recognize their half-blind master again."
"I care not for the ravens," Thor says, a little sharply, but he sits down, hands on his knees.
Sometimes Loki thinks he is a raven.
A smile creases Thor's face. "It hurts," he says.
"What hurts?"
"When Banner does the smashing thing."
Loki's own smile curves up. "What do they say on your beloved Midgard? It hurts 'like a bitch.'" He wonders how Thor even knew that that happened to Loki, but then he remembers, ah, yes. The Avengers. They all share secrets. And Tony Stark has those devilish devices—cameras—everywhere.
"So, did you enjoy it?" Thor's voice is quiet. "Being king?"
Can he really be asking? Was it not an hour or two ago that Loki descended from this very ship, proffering salvation?
Was it not less time still that he—
But never mind. The fragment of memory draws tighter, tight as a noose.
"They were made to be ruled," he says, with a ghost of his old grin. "But the throne is yours, brother. Perhaps, after all, I have not the patience for it."
"Well, I've never been called patient." Thor lifts an eyebrow, the one above his good eye. "And I am still angry at you, Loki. Or I should be."
Loki lays still.
"But," Thor adds, "You ruled them peaceably. Not wisely—really, brother? Theater?—but peaceably. You did not slay them all."
No, he did not. Maybe he diverged from that path a long time ago. "They thought I was Father," he says, as mildly as if there never was a time when the word Father would not rest on his lips. "So, there was no need."
"Still. You were a puppet-master. Not a tyrant. I am almost impressed." Thor gets up, claps his hands together. "Banner has been rationing food. Are you hungry?"
Always. "No."
"I am the king." Thor scratches his head, bristling up his stubbled hair. "I should eat with the people."
"And if the Valkyrie is there…an added bonus?"
"I can, and will, kill you," Thor says over his shoulder, amiably enough.
Left alone, Loki's smile fades. These are curious stars. He does not know them all. They are far, far from home.
He could have listened to Thor, he supposes. He could have remained on Sakaar. He could have styled himself a king there, perhaps, after the Grandmaster was overcome by revolution.
It is not what he would have wanted. And there is a tangle of life's thread—is it what Thor thinks Loki wanted, or what Thor himself wanted?—that he cannot quite unsnare.
Does it matter?
His heart says it does, and the cold blue fire of his stolen prize says that it does not.