Thrym would be lying if he said that he understands the small, quiet Loki, who drifts as soon as he hears the word 'yesterday', and laughs out loud when you dare to say 'tomorrow'.
Thrym has nothing ahead of him, and far too much behind him, and so he smiles and offers today, and it's enough.
They drift for many moons, the cold dull stars of Jotunheim slowly shifting in the skies. Loki is strange, for he is Jotun, and yet he is not. He wanders, like a child, or perhaps a bird. He wants to taste the ice, brittle and burning like fire between his teeth, or sit in the wind and complain of the cold.
They speak of everything, but if you ask Thrym what he has learned of his companion, all he has is, "He's strange and fey and he likes the taste of blue ice, snapped from the ground late in the year, when all is nearly in ruin".
Even they, the endless wanderers, have to turn their steps to shelter at year's end. They are high in the mountains, vast tumbling slopes of black ice-stained rock, when they find the town. Thrym ignores his flighty companion, who wants to kick the gates shut and find somewhere that knows only the footsteps of birds, and they settle in an abandoned home, carved out of the dark stone as all of the houses here are.
It's cold and dark and on the first night they find a box filled with old letters in a script that neither of them recognise. Thrym puts the box back, and they never speak of it again, but they both wonder who came there and read unending letters, words that might speak of love or duty or care or anything at all, and then left them all for a stranger.
Loki is one of the small folk, the idrauhos, who with their magic can tear down mountains and raise up seas and crack open the great ice-fields like a child splitting open a ripe Asgardian fruit until it spills over their hands, but the very tallest of them barely reaches Thrym's shoulder, and they cannot hold the heat in their bones. Loki would wander and wander and find every star, and then his heart would shudder and his flesh would tremble and he would become another cold still shape in the ice.
If Thrym allowed him.
Not that Thrym has any delusions of authority or mastery over Loki. His companion is not cruel, though sometimes in the wrong light and the wrong place, one could easily see how cruelty could be wrenched from under his bones. But still. There's a kind of detachment there, in the way that Loki will shrug and almost-smile and stare up at Thrym with eyes the red of cold tart summer berries. Thrym can ask and beg and persuade, but never command.
Once, Thrym had command over the armies of Jotunheim. He could snap his fingers and summon a dozen captains, or change the outcome of a war with the flicker of his gaze. He much prefers having a single companion who will smile at the hint of an order, then think better of it and laugh out loud.