Summary: Centuries of coexistence cannot be labeled only with one term. They are each other's ally and enemy, and everything in between, and all that at the same time. Two brothers linked beyond love and feud, envy and denial for eternity.

A/N: I decided to overwrite the previous version, and make a somewhat longer fic out of it.
[Edit]: I realized my scene separators were lost, so I reuploaded the chapter.

Forever…

Forever brothers

Maybe it's the absence of the motley stretch of the Bifröst on the skyline but Asgard, this afternoon, just like earlier this morning, dawn and night, appears dull to Thor's eyes. The towers, normally golden needles piercing the canvas of the skies, gleam with coppery matt. He believes it's in his heart, though: the lack of luster. With relentless clear-sight, he knows it wouldn't go away for a very long time, if ever.

There is a weight on his shoulder that doesn't let him breathe, and he crumbles under it, and around the bruise on his soul and memories, too. The latter hurts the most, the bruise he cannot reach and cure. The real bruises, cuts and wounds, they don't matter but he doesn't like to even look at them because when he looks, he remembers. And when he does, the weight gets even heavier.

But he remembers nonetheless because, in all brutal honesty, this is all he has.

It is sad that one would reach out for things only when they are drifting away; that we take someone's presence for granted, and appreciate it only when they aren't beside us anymore.

At the thought, Thor grimaces. He is not the sharpest mind around, he knows it, so he has to settle with unoriginal realizations but sounding cliché doesn't make it any less true. Words, in fact, are Loki's territory.

Were.

His mind reels back, and he corrects himself again, are, words are, and it's forced, he is aware of that, like he could make it true just by sheer will.

He frowns. Again, a reminder. Like the tiniest particles that build up the whole universe, found in every object and every creature – this is how Thor sees him everywhere, in everything. In secluded places where they used to hide when they were kids and wanted to challenge Heimdall and his all-seeing eyes. He sees him on the main courtyard of the Asgard royal palace where he never got tired of attempting to train his brother to be a better warrior, a warrior of strength and stamina, skills and styles, not one of magic, wile and tricks – ironically, just a day ago, Loki gave him a very good sample of what he's learnt. He was devastating like a rolling earthquake, driven by venom and rage Thor has never seen before, never thought his brother possessed.

Loki has always been the master of disguise, and that also meant the disguise of his true emotions. Thor has never once seen him truly upset, and it's made him muse many times if it is him who got all the temper in their bloodline. Sometimes he envied his brother for being so composed, so level-headed and cool even in hard situations, never once wavering when a clear-sighted decision had to be made. Thor himself tends to go headfirst against obstacles, sometimes literally so, and if it wasn't for Loki, he would have broken his skull more than once. Loki was his other half, and they formed a whole and invincible team: Loki is everything Thor isn't, and vice versa, and he always prided himself on being the only one who could sense if something bothered his younger brother.

Until now.

Maybe he only imagined he did. Or he could sense it when the matter was of little significance.

Or rather, most probably, when Loki let him.

Thor wonders if he's ever known him, ever really seen him. If over the course of all these numberless years, Loki has shut him out completely. It hurts. He always considered them good brothers. He has always been secretly very proud that they were so close, many times, half-drunk on mead, he boosted about it like a content father, driving his friends inane.

Yesterday was different. It was uncharacteristic of Loki to unleash such madness he did then. It is more than obvious there is something deeply wrong in the whole picture but he doesn't know what triggered it suddenly.

His gaze swims at the glimmering stripe of the damaged Bifröst, many ghosts of hateful reminiscences laced in its shine, and they dull it for him, the colors and glow – he fears maybe forever. He leans against the railing of the dining hall balcony, and closes his eyes with the phantom pain burning behind them for many restless hours, but he can't shut the words out of his mind that wounded him more than any of the physical blows Loki could ever land on him. He remembers his eyes, filled with fury and madness. But he saw his tears, too.

"Son."

Thor starts. On the stairs leading up to the balcony, there stands his father. He hasn't heard him coming; a trait, Thor has believed so far, only Loki possessed in the family: he was like smoke, he could appear and vanish as he liked, and it made him somehow unearthly, intangible. His magic was always beyond Thor's comprehension, and thus, he felt a bit ashamed of it in hindsight, even beyond his valuation.

"Father."

There is no invitation in his tone but Odin doesn't pick up on it. Thor longs to be left alone with the mingled threads of memories until he is able to unravel them. There is something, words, hateful words, hurts exchanged, that he is rolling around in his head, chewing on them from every side till they get almost mangled and distorted; things he wants to understand and decipher but doesn't see clearly but maybe because some of the pieces are kept from him – or he is simply reluctant to accept what they might imply. He needs peace and solitude. Other people call it grief but that hasn't arrived with its full impact yet. It is like losing a limb: first it is numbness and shock, and after it wears off comes the unbearable pain. He knows it will come for him, too.

"There is something beyond sorrow that bothers you," Odin remarks. Thor almost smiles. No wonder Odin is the Allfather.

He clears his throat. His iron fingers tighten around the marble railing as he stares ahead, pain-inflicted memories exploding behind his forehead with rainbow colors, with ice-cold golden scepter-sweeps. He sees them fight like he is only an outsider because that cannot be them, they couldn't be going against each other with intention to really hurt. He inhales, and by far not out of plucking up courage but more of suppressing what eventually spills out of him like bile he cannot swallow any longer.

"He told me he isn't my brother. That he never was. Why would he-" he swallows. It's an open wound on his heart.

He feels betrayed, robbed of all the fond memories he keeps about their childhood, their youth, about all their lives together, as if he is able to figure out only now that they weren't fond for Loki. That he regards those years otherwise.

"I don't understand what got into him."

From the corner of his eye, he looks at his father, now standing beside him. Odin seems older now, much older than he's ever seen him be. It is no wonder, though: he just watched his younger son fall into nothingness the day before. Maybe, in a way, Thor thinks darkly, he even made him to.

"What happened while I was away?"

The silence is short but heavy. The golden eyepatch glints against the setting sunlight. "He learnt the truth of his origin. You are not blood brothers."

Suddenly, Thor feels light-headed. He understands every single word but together they don't make any sense. Not. Blood. Brothers.

"What do you mean?"

Odin announces, like it is that simple, like it isn't changing something fundamental in his life: "He's the son of Laufey."

"Laufey? Loki is…" his incredulousness is stuck in his throat. "My brother is Jötun?"

He was just told they weren't blood related but calling Loki his brother is his way of protest. It hooks him and the moment to reality and sanity because otherwise it sounds like a twisted joke. Sounds like something he could trip on and hit his head so hard his skull would split.

"After the battle against Laufey, I found his son. He was newborn and barely alive. He was a runt, and thus, abandoned and left to his fate. I'll be honest with you, Thor: I had no love for the infant but I took pity on him. Due to the respect I felt for his father, I took the son."

Thor holds his breath in the ensuing contemplating silence. There is insinuation in his stance, and rage he isn't really sure where it is coming from.

"Yes, I had other intentions as well, intentions as the king of Asgard. I had a hope that when Loki grows up, he can take over the throne of Jötunheim and we would have peace. He was born to be a king, just like you. Only not the king of Asgard, but the king of Jötunheim."

Thor doesn't want to say it: the king of a world Loki grew up hating, fearing. Son of a man who took the eye of their father. They grew up on the same tales, the stories their father told them about the creatures living in ice and rock fortresses and being strong as an earthquake. How many times they played and fought the imaginary army of frost giants. And much later the not so imaginary ones. Now Loki must have thought he has been the enemy within all along. Thor can only imagine how such knowledge can split someone's mind.

Oh Loki, he thinks bitterly. I wish I was here with you.

Never before has he hated his father's forethought, how he reduced Loki's whole existence to strategic steps drawn on parchment.

"So he was just a mean, leverage to secure some tactical movement? You took him so you would have your long wished treaty? You told him that, too?"

"Yes."

The silence is suffocating like a too tight chain mail that cuts in his skin, drawing blood, leaving marks. He believes this moment would leave its mark just the same way forever.

For the first time, Odin turns fully toward him, giving an unwavering glance with his only eye. "But you have to realize that over these years I grew to love him as my own. He failed to see it."

"Maybe you failed to show it, father," Thor remarks sharply. He doesn't look at Odin. Doesn't want to see if it hurt or he really nailed the truth.

Odin has never been a flawless father. He is more of a warrior, and whereas it was perfectly efficient for Thor, he can see where it did damage to Loki. Odin had no ability to deal with the sensitive, multilayered personality of his other son. Loki had a clockwork-delicacy to him – one piece breaks, one tiny thin golden cogwheel, and everything else stops too. Odin's mistreatment of his younger son, now Thor can see it clearly, led up to this tragedy.

There is a nagging feeling, though, deep in his guts, and he cannot hide it, cannot avoid it, and it tells him it wasn't only their father's mistreatment. It tells him he was just as much guilty. He and his father: they are carved of the same material, war-hardened with chivalry-veining, and in the same things both of them failed Loki.

Disturbed, Thor suddenly remembers what his mother told him, how Loki saved their father from the assassination Laufey planned. He knows his brother that much, with the new knowledge he easily unravels the events – it was all Loki's doing, silver-tongued, cunning Loki's doing: he set up the frost giants to finally turn against them.

He killed his own father.

He launched a plan of genocide against his own race.

Was he trying to wipe them off the earth so he could forget they ever existed? So everyone else as well would forget such beings every existed? Like it could annul the fact that his ancestry lies with them. Like it could turn the wheel of events back and make him be an Asgardian.

His frown deepens with a sudden onslaught of mortification. Make him be an Asgardian?

It is distressing how a part of his mind could so easily wrap around the new facts. It is unfair to Loki. Being a frost giant in origin doesn't make him cease being an Asgardian. Shouldn't make him cease being Thor's brother. And on a level he is ashamed of, this is how it feels. A brother who isn't really a brother. He despises himself for the idea. He wants to blame it on Odin because it is easier. His father's words attempt to overwrite his memories and feelings, make him reevaluate what they had, and suddenly he doesn't know what bracket he should put them anymore, and he feels confused and cheated.

"Maybe I did," Odin says suddenly, it is more of a murmur like he is too embarrassed to say it louder. "I should have considered he was different."

Thor's gaze darkens because he wouldn't be able to tell if by difference Odin means Loki's personality or his Jötun origin, and suddenly he recognizes how everything he has always considered their stabile family life with its merry and gloomy moments but never with doubts and betrayals is corroded for good.

-o-

The old trouble with sleep, after so many undisturbed centuries, comes back again with full force.

When they were children, they shared the same bedchamber (oh those holy days, and they never really argued over anything as Loki was never interested in his wooden weapons and clay knights, just as he didn't care about the strange books Loki preferred over anything), and for him Loki's almost silent snoring belonged just as much to the room as the toys or the gauze curtains around their respective canopy beds that they always kept open to be able to see and hear each other better: it fought away the menace of monsters under the bed. Even when years later they moved in their separate quarters, he missed the soothing sound of his brother's breathing and had trouble to fall asleep for a surprisingly long time.

There was one time Loki fell so ill he had to be moved to Eir's chambers for many days. They were still children, too young to understand the hushed whispers between his parents and Eir, and Thor recalls how frightened he was, how pale Loki looked, how fragile. Thor threw a tantrum, he wailed, he cried, he vowed, he begged until they would let him in or commanded him to leave, but he would eventually sneak in the infirmary anyway and lie beside his brother throughout the night, curled up against him like Freya's cats under the autumn sun. He was so used to the soft respiration that he didn't find rest without it. He had the strangest impression that if he wouldn't be there to hear and invigilate his breathing, Loki would pale into the soft pillows by morning, and Thor would never be able to find him again.

And now he feels the same dread he felt back then: the helplessness and guilt oozing in his limbs like slow poison because he has again the unsettling notion that if he had looked close enough, had watched Loki earnest enough, he wouldn't have slipped away, wouldn't have faded so Thor might never be able to see him again.

This nagging blame he cannot seem to shake is what keeps him awake at night. Listing all his possible missteps that led up to this situation, and the more he thinks about it, the less he understands anything.

Sometimes he falls into shallow slumber but then it is always the same nightmare: always losing Loki in the most creative ways his mind can come up with, and when he wakes in sweat and horror, even with his eyes snapped open, he still can see him falling. He can still feel the lurch of the sudden phantom lightness in his arm as Loki's weight dropped from the end of Gungnir as he let go.

On many occasions he wants to ask his father, other men who are wiser than Thor, what could be on the other end of the abyss, if Loki could fall and eventually land somewhere they could find him, if there has ever been someone who made the same fall and came back, if they have the slightest of chance for Loki to survive such fall, but he dreads the answer and keeps his questions locked in his heart.

As days go by, he loses hope. There is no news from Loki, and he believes if he was alive, he would find a way to contact them. He wants to believe so. Thor doesn't want to line up the other possibilities: the possibility that he might be so severely injured that he is not able to make such efforts; the possibility that he doesn't wish to contact them – that with his fall, he tore all bonds that tied him to Asgard.

In utter despair, in the darkest hour of the night when fatigue reaches its peak and overwrites his pervious hesitation that roots in the belief that he wouldn't be able to handle the emotional burden just yet, Thor stumbles down the shadow-filled hallway toward Loki's quarters, the short walk never before so heavy in his legs.

He thought he was prepared for every type of reaction the sight of his brother's chamber would raise in him but when he opens the door and the torches spring into life along the walls, the shock binds him to the spot.

His brother's room, his neat, overly fastidious brother's room is a mess, and somehow it hits him more severely than the usual state of the chamber would have. The scattered parchments, capes and breeches left draped around the back of armchairs, books and short knives lying in a strange heap, boots thrown in the corner in a careless manner seem to indicate the chaos Loki might have had in his head those days.

Thor stares at the upturned world, and the guilt sinks in him into impossible depths to bring him down. Loki went through all this alone.

He struggles to put the recent events in the appropriate recess of his mind but in Loki's room, in the chaos, he finds solace.

The scent is the same there, if somewhat more bitter. Thor doesn't dare to touch anything, doesn't there to lie on the bed and disturb the only untouched and neat object in the room: Loki's sheets, and it makes Thor wonder if Loki even slept at all during the Ragnarök of his last days on Asgard.

He lies on the thick fur carpet at the foot of the bed, and in the familiar scent, among the familiar tones and shapes of Loki's room, sleep finally finds him.

-o-

"I still see her."

His eyebrows lower as Thor, somewhat abashed, steals a glance at the Gatekeeper. "Thank you."

He feels a pang of guilt that he didn't have Jane on his mind. Not this time.

Like Heimdall, he stares ahead, over the splinter-like ruins of the Bifröst bridge, through the cold drizzle rising from the waterfall beneath. It has been a long time he set his feet on the bridge, he cannot tell if days, weeks or months, but it feels like a decade without Loki around him, and sometimes he hardly remembers all those centuries spent in brotherhood before the incident.

"What is there, good Heimdall? Beyond the rainbow bridge. Beyond Midgard, beyond the Nine Realms."

"Other worlds, other creatures even the Allfather doesn't know, even he hasn't met them."

Neither of them says anything for a very long time. Thor watches the stars smeared on the skies around them, watches them blink and waver, and he tries to assess if he was ready. Not to ask, but to hear the answer. That is always the harder part. The Gatekeeper stands patiently, and Thor simply knows for certain that he is waiting for the question he can foresee coming.

"Can you see him?"

Heimdall doesn't stir. For a moment, he wonders if Thor is aware how his voice always softens when he mentions his brother. The mighty, chesty Thor who seemingly feels no fear has always had only one great weakness, and ever since he is able to talk, it betrays him. Heimdall is unable to comprehend how Loki could ever miss that, how he could doubt it.

His eyes, unblinking, turns unseeing for Asgard, for the Bifröst under their boots, maybe even for the Nine Worlds. A frown laces his forehead, and the old sour taste in his mouth feels familiar: Loki has always been able to hide from him, even in this very realm, right under his nose. He has never been too fond of the younger prince.

"No, I cannot."

He ponders if Thor really shrank a few inches, collapsed into himself like a mine. It looks so.

Thor wants to ask so many things, such knowledge has never been in his interest, it has always been Loki to dive in subjects beyond what eyes can perceive. He thinks of the ever growing pain in his chest. They are demi-gods, basically immortals, and it makes him wonder if the pain stays with them for eternity, too. If the sensation of loss is immortal, too.

"If we die, is there a way back from Helheim?" he asks instead.

Heimdall doesn't reply. This is a question that could shake Asgard, shake the stars, a thought so outrageous and against all rules that Heimdall is puzzled how Thor could even think of it. He cannot decide if Thor really needs the answer or if he is talking rather to himself because he doesn't egg him on to reply.

Fine wind rises, million cold water drops sprinkle against their faces. Heimdall isn't sure if he wants to give solace because the words he has on his lips aren't delivering too much consolation. But they are true, and now this is the only thing he can offer to Thor.

"I don't see him now. But I saw him falling. I saw his pain, his disappointment. I saw how lonely he was, how damaged." His voice involuntarily darkens. "And I saw his anger, his hatred."

Eagerly, Thor demands. "Did you see him land?"

"He had nothing but his magic to save him." It is not an answer but that is all he can tell.

"Is he alive?"

The look is troubled on his face as Heimdall announces, "I cannot know for sure." He hesitates, and Thor tenses beside him with anticipation bordering on fear and hope. There is a hidden warning in Heimdall's voice when he adds, "Maybe he is. But even then, do not forget, he might be a different man, someone you don't know anymore. Maybe your brother never landed when Loki did."

Thor doesn't reply for a long time, only gazes at the dotted canvas of the world beyond the bridge, beyond Asgard as if he could see his brother if he stares hard enough. And then, suddenly everything falls back in their right place, everything that his father's words stirred up with spilling the truth. Whatever he questioned back then is crystal-clear now and obvious.

Heimdall watches him closely, watches as new strength blossoms within Thor, and as he stands there, he seems giant and fearless once again

"He will always be my brother, no matter what. I do not know if he is alive or not but I will not rest until I find a way out of Asgard, and search for his body in every corner of the worlds until I have my answer. And if he is alive, I will bring him home."

Heimdall follows him with his all-seeing eyes even when Thor has long left the bridge behind, and the Gatekeeper wonders, troubled, how Thor cannot see the real tragedy in his own words, a looming fate that clings to his feet and pulls him down like weed in the depth of a lake.

-o-

It is his funeral ceremony. There is no body to cover in heavy drapes and adorn with jewels and shining armors before laying it in a boat to burn. He cannot sit on the shore of the lake and watch the flames until they are no more than embers in the distance, torn away by the wind and scattered like myriads of stars fallen on the surface of water. So he holds the remembrance the only way he can.

It is a meticulous activity but he takes great care in every little detail with humbleness and devotion. The blacksmith offered him his help, puzzled as to why Thor would need a pair of plain, unadorned vambraces. This is something he has to do and no one else: it is how he pays respect, how he keeps his brother's memory with him.

So he takes the graver and a hammer, and etches each line of his brother's insignia into the undecorated surface of the braces: the symbol of Loki's helmet he has so many times made fun of, two curves of horns, graceful, royal.

He works on it slowly, wrapped in his own thoughts, in silence. With every stroke of the graver come the memories of happier times, their childhood, their youth: each memory, merriment and triumph, his brother's cunning, mischievous nature, his wonderfully shrewd mind, the smile Thor loved on his face when he let it loose, the brotherhood he misses so much – all engraved into the planes of the braces as they are engraved forever in his heart, representing something that Thor shared with him, something that would bind him to Loki well beyond death. It is his way to commemorate a lost brother.

And the grief that has been so far only lurking beyond the edges of his mind comes now with each stroke, gradually unfolding with every line he chisels into the metal, and still, somehow his heart is at peace now.