"Can you remember what the sun looked like, brother?"

"Yes, sometimes."

The grey would fill their heads like dulled silver, molten into slurry that trickled slowly from their ears. The light wouldn't even bounce from it.

"What was it like?"

"I'm not sure…"

The brothers were young, too young. A stealing of their sun made for a harbinger of their ripened innocence forcefully taken, picked like bright and round apples in summer. Thor wasn't sure if he could remember those either. Every day saw the same drifts of grey and the same blankets of ash quilting asphalt and mute chrome like aged snow and sleet, and Thor wasn't sure if he could remember it any differently. He wasn't sure if he could remember anything but war and the distant cries and gunfire beyond the thick walls of their comforting tomb. Loki had never seen sunlight. He wondered if it ever existed at all.

"So you don't remember what the sun looked like?"

Thor sighed.

"No, I do not."

Daybreak reared the brothers' heads through a sleepy haze marred with the nuclear burn of fire ebbing just on the horizon beyond the partly cracked blinds over the windows. Thin slats of unsaturated orange light cut against their walls like cold blades offering up about as much warmth as their absent sun did. Some days, Loki would lie there in the safe confines of his bed running his hand through the light, casting small shadows, watching how it streamed through his pale fingers. Would that he could, he'd draw with it, paint their mute walls with something more tangible than aging magnolia and wash over the minor stains and the cracks where his brother had left them. Their nights brought violence to rival the clusters of bombs echoing many miles away, and Thor would scratch his frustration into the paintwork like unspoken scripture. It's new-fangled and makes little sense, but no word of God would suit them any better.

Together, they made for lonely hearts in the narrow eye of a maelstrom neither of them could truly understand. They didn't need to understand, only know that it was there and it wouldn't be leaving them. Their childhood was as grey as their lightless skies, and they dared not glow brighter. On the good days, Thor supposed that it could have been much worse. Had their father not been as powerful as he was, they would both be dead by now, perhaps skewered and charred on some makeshift rotisserie in a derelict old camp out on the highway. By day, they overheard such grisly things, of theft, of murder and of cannibalism in a desperate world, bereft and forlorn in the face of nuclear fire and radiation.

'Humans are apes,' Loki thought, 'how hard could it be to avoid this havoc?' A poor, naïve mind like his could never know, and in that negative space lay an arcane beauty. He'll never know, he'll never want to know.

In the morning, they'd both eat with their parents and silently suffocate under their palpable need to remain optimistic.

"Your father has faith the army is doing well," their mother would say. "We're gaining more ground every day; this will all be over soon, I promise." The scepticism was sharp, however, like the wan rasping of rain against the roof. You could taste it; metallic humidity, the silt, the ash. Doubt.

Odin was grim. He was an old and mottled tyrant, a corporate giant to make the Monopoly Man blush, a tycoon and warmonger. Before Loki's birth, he was in the running to head a new Global Parliament. An absolute power over the world in its entirety. Loki arrived. The world had different ideas. War bloomed across the world, like the ugliest rose you've ever seen, tattered and frail. Its stem had given away underneath a toppling fulcrum of every sense of nobility humanity once tenuously held. By day the broken remnants of the scaffolds were reflected upon the faces of those miserable men whom kicked the supports down in the first place. You could see the broken wood, the rust of the poles, solder that had since degraded into the weary lines charting age and decay around their eyes. Thor could see it in Odin. They all could, and it scared them.

Sometimes it kept Thor awake at night. In silence he would sit with his knees pulled tight to his chest, those sunless blue eyes brimming with tears. He knew not what for, only that he felt something. Perhaps it was pity. Perhaps it was just human desperation burning his cheeks and stinging the corners of his eyes, sleepless. Those nights, he would crawl by his little brother's side and simply watch him. Was it really pity? Little Loki… skin so pale and fair, it was untouched and untarnished. He was pure and unbroken. In the bleary dark that built Thor's waning daylight, Loki was the only sun he knew, and Loki didn't even know it. Could you ever do it? Could you truly break that perfect circle of innocence and make him imbibe the painful sobriety of your broken fortitude? Would you ever hold him to the harsh surface of reality and drag, watch his skin stretch and break over his back and his arms?

"I'll never do that," he insisted unto himself, "never. I'll keep you safe, I promise."

Sometimes, Thor would quietly cradle his sleeping little brother to his chest, trace his fingers across fine black hair and mentally chart all the ways he would keep his brother from harm. Although, sometimes he didn't. Sometimes he thought of all the ways he couldn't keep this fragile beacon unmarred.

The young boy held tighter, and silently he wept.

Their childhood was like a map, nameless and tattered here and there. They didn't know where they were going. Part of Thor didn't want to know where they were going. In his hand he'd hold his little brother's and they'd march through each day together as though they danced before a firing line and dodged each bullet with their childish acrobatics, the light of their hearts still flickering wildly in the dark mimicking the happiness once held in a pre-war world. In their picturesque naivety they painted hope with their fingers, a small candle between one another to light the dark nights and keep them going. It was their internal comfort; insular of them. It was foolish.

The days soon darkened around them, and perilously so. The gunfire grew louder and louder, night by night, and sleep became a rarity. Loki was a wiry young boy, growing upwards but never quite sideways. The nights were cold and bitter. Thor never stopped worrying. Neither did Loki. They took to sleeping in the same room during the dark months, never quite drifting off and never quite looking away from one another. Some nights, the noise would wrack their heads and shake them to their core. So close, so painfully close. Hell and thunder right outside of their dark prison, and it was coming for them. Battling silence between them, they held their hands tight and fierce. Loki would shut his pale eyes tight, but Thor wouldn't dare. Through tears or otherwise, he would keep his eyes fixed upon his little brother.

You promised you'd protect him.

'I don't think I can.'

Years passed them by like a mute blur of wildfire glow and falling debris. The brothers were never apart. They clung to each other like lifelines. Should one fall, so the other should too. Loki would not wake without his brother, and neither would Thor. It was insanity, a tenuous light in the face of something much bigger and much more overpowering than themselves. They ignored war and humanity's degradation in favour of their own company. They danced together in the dark with their fanciful notions of surviving this, of maybe seeing the sun one distant day and feeling true warmth. Thor promised that he would not let Loki die until he had seen it, until he had smelled spring and until he had seen life as it should have been. He deserved that much. He deserved to exist outside of this mortal cocoon, to tread the streets free of ash and bodies at his feet. He deserved light other than that of his brother. Somehow, Thor wasn't quite sure if Loki would ever get any of that, any of those simple things that made their pre-war world so beautiful.

His memories were scant at best.

He remembered how the pure rain smelled, maybe.

He remembered all of the promises he made Loki that he'll never know if he can truly keep.

"'tis getting desperate out there on the front lines."

The bleak dawn of their adulthood brought bad news in spades, disappointments and the continual demoralisation through the media, albeit skewed and just as hopeless as they were. Another breakfast, another round, another shot to the temple and another pool of gore and defragmented hope to mop up. Thor swallowed awkwardly and scratched at his stubbled chin.

"Numbers are waning."

Soundless, Thor nodded. Suddenly the intricacies of the table's woodwork became extremely interesting to Loki.

There was no telling lies about it. The time for white lies and protecting your young out of sentiment had long since passed for the old warmonger. It was with dire intonation that he murmured towards his eldest son, his iron brow raised and slightly furrowed. Deep down, they knew that it would come to this; they knew that Thor was far too vast and strong not to put to use. Odin was right, things were desperate, theywere desperate. However unspoken, they all knew it well. Thor didn't ask, he didn't need to.

"I'm not leaving Loki," he said firmly.

"I'll go with you," Loki chimed in, looking up unsteadily from the woodwork. Odin scowled, seeming flabbergasted.

"Absolutely not, boy, you'd sooner snap in the wind," he said. A tinge of desperation marred his oaken voice. "Thor, you know I would not bring this up were it not absolutely necessary—"

"With all due respect, father, I don't think the circumstances are of consequence, I am not leaving Loki here alone."

And then here was silence. Frigga looked betwixt her sons hopelessly and Odin cast his tired eyes downward. On Loki's face, there was the slightest flicker of guilt, of burden. He almost wished he could be okay with his brother leaving, that he could be unselfish this once, but he could not. No matter his will or his morals, he could not. In his lap, he idly fidgeted between his slender hands soon interrupted by that of his brother's much larger, much warmer grip. He squeezed gently. That was the only warmth Loki knew, that either of them knew. They could not possibly march through this desolate world alone and cold, they absolutely could not. The absence would be their ruin entire. To wake to the bleak mornings alone and soundless was to live a lonely nightmare repeating daily. There was no dark creature or horrid fate that would be worse to them than their hearts merely absent.

Waiting through it was impossible. Co-dependency tore them to pieces.

They were lost together, somewhere in the dark away from the fires of war. In the mornings, Loki would watch the opaque slats of light line Thor's sleeping figure, each curve and contour, each little breath he took. In short time, Loki had memorised his topography down to the minor slopes and the soft shadows on his skin. He remembered the way that Thor's arms enveloped his lithe frame, held him tight against his roughhewn chest and the scent the crook of Thor's neck carried. Thor remembered just how Loki melted into him, how he was so small in his hold. Fragile. Beautiful and fragile.

"What if it's like this forever?"

"The war?"

"Yes."

"I don't know."

"All right."

"Would you be sad if we never got to leave here?"

Loki paused, thinking.

"I'm not sure."

"You're not sure?"

"I'm not sure."

Quiet settled between them like a soft buffer between abrasive thought and that which would be deemed conventionally comforting. Loki looked up at Thor briefly and then away again.

"I don't think I'd be that bothered."

"Why?"

Loki shrugged.

"I don't know, I just don't think I'd care all that much."

Thor frowned. Query: how far gone must one bright young man be to deny the thought of sunlight again? How far gone must he be to abdicate care in favour of resounding apathy? The thought scared Thor entire. Oh the broken fairytale of their lives, so scattered with flecks of hope and light, of their idle daydreams of a world without fire and blood, and then… then nothing. Then avolition.

"But what if you never got to just… just get out of here, and feel the world around you? Other people, other things. You'd never have any of that."

"I don't think I need it."

Loki looked up at his brother. His faces spelled nothing for Thor, not a word and not even an inkling. But those tired green eyes said something, maybe just a whisper for the essence between them, but it was something, and it was something that hurt him deeply. It was a warm, stabbing sensation, but somehow Thor understood. He understood everything. Guilt and happiness cut him in equal measure.

"I have you, don't I?" Loki spoke and raised his eyebrows. "I don't need anything else. Nothing else would mean anything were it not for you."

And then silence. Silence and grief, and joy, and a connection unrivalled by any being alive or dead.

Somewhere in the dark away from the fires of war, they fell so hopelessly into one another. It was unspoken, but they were so tightly entwined and so inconceivably lost that no one would ever have a hope of finding them again. They fell in love, and that was all there was to it. They found one another inescapable, each a beacon in a dark, muggy storm for lonely ships lost at sea. They saved each other from madness, from loneliness. They wondered, was it out of desperation or the abiding adoration hard coded between them? Between fleeting touches, the long, ardent stares and the silent, chaste kisses, the answer got lost. It was a bleary mess of a bond gone haywire and over-amorous. They were such needy souls, such needy, irreparable souls, but they had each other. They always had each other, always would.

More lies, more promises you can't possibly keep.

You are both selfish and you will both drown in each other.

"Never go anywhere, brother."

If ever you tempted fate, Loki, if ever you tempted fate.

A mute dawn fell upon him, grey and bleak as it always did. Soundless and cold, nary a snatch of birdsong to be heard, not even the distant crackle of fire and decay. That morning struck him as bizarre, as empty. He sat up and looked around, his thin, frail arms wrapped around his sides and shivering slightly. Thor wasn't there.

He should have seen this coming.

He awoke to the mute dawn like an old friend, sober and pained and watching the unending infinity of his problems play out before him.

Thor was gone, and he was alone.