So I just managed to finish this post-Ragnarok story that I now hate because of how much editing it needed but that I'm also obligated to love, because, well, I'm posting it.

I was undecided at first if it would have been better to post it as a multi-chapter or as a monstrously long one-shot that all the other one-shots bully for being just too damn big. So here's evidence that I'd be an okay parent.

Just quickly: Thank you, again, to the people who've been reading, reviewing, Favouriting or Following my other stories, and to a friend here whose reply to my review for her story I've still yet to reply to! All these correspondences mean a great deal to me, no matter how little or lengthy.

(By the way, for a good multi-chapter with a young Loki and Thor, check out the incredibly written story What The Woods Did Bring, by GoodForBad)

It was unnerving to let life pass whilst on a ship in black space. Despite seeing the heavens outside the windows passing by – looming, marbled planets and shattered galaxies like botched experiments of bigger gods – everything was too still. In space, it felt like life was not passing by at all.

But if Thor stopped to dwell upon it, he knew this was just an illusion. Like one of Loki's, lulling them all into a false sense of security while something lurked and worked backstage – life was still passing them as hastily as ever. They were all still decaying, drifting like the ship towards an end. Thor tried not to dwell upon it too regularly.

But often he could not help it. In the new, awful stillness and coldly gleaming walls, it was impossible to not notice the absence of a crisp breeze once in a while. Of clouds rolling overhead, or a new but familiar sunrise every time he woke. Of the time when Asgard had also been a place, not a flock of adrift people that Thor was, secretly, deeply terrified of leading to another doom. Just a slower, stealthier doom than the one they had recently escaped.

He also longed for the time he would fall asleep to dreams other than watching his tangible home disintegrate at the hands of Surtur. Dreams of Ragnarok. He would wake to more of that artificial stillness, his assigned bedchamber and its strange walls, still seeing flames so savage they seemed to gain life as Asgard died.

He knew it was childish, but he would feel a pang whenever he thought of their belongings – Odin's armour, Loki's books, Frigga's gardens, his old bedchamber, old playthings – being utterly abolished by the fires. Traces of their family's old life, solid but very, very fragile. He knew it was childish. But those were the stuff of his childhood.

Even in his dreams, Thor felt the absence of his right eye but he still saw the devastation of Ragnarok too clearly.

"I would suggest you take a holiday to remedy these bouts of distraction of yours... if we weren't already about as far away from home as we can get."

The voice, rather than the words, cracked open the glassy bubble that encased Thor. Although, if he had read the words as mute ink on paper he would have had little trouble guessing who spoke them.

Thor had been facing the cabinet tabletop. He sighed before turning around.

"That's the spirit." Loki rolled his eyes to the ceiling. Thor speculated briefly if his own halved ability to duplicate the action would convey more or less disdain.

"What were you saying, Brother?" Thor raised his eyebrows lightly as he asked; he could still do that, at least. But even that simple twitch sent a faint tugging sensation into the socket of where his eye used to be.

Loki stood in the shadow-filled doorway of Thor's bedchamber, like a shadow himself. The chamber was almost as dusky, lit by only a few flickering red lamps reflected in the ornate mirror. The lamps had been much brighter hours before; Thor supposed it was in weak mimicry of the passing of day and night. At the very least, it helped everyone sleep routinely. If anyone was able to really sleep, yet.

Loki hovered at the threshold as if invisibly barred from entering. Fleetingly, Thor remembered how the two of them once could have flowed in, out and between each other's old bedrooms in Asgard as easily as two different bloods in the same body. Or as easily as two brothers in the same household. Loki used to claim to hate Thor's constant unauthorised breach of his bedroom, declaring that at least a polite knock or snarky comment before entering would suffice. Snarky comments had grown to become Loki's preferred entry announcements.

Loki began again, "I was saying that – "

Thor realised, even through the simulated nighttime darkness, he was noticing every blink of Loki's eyes. Quick flashes of pale eyelids. Perhaps he had been noticing so with everyone else too, but Thor had been subject to Loki's company much more than anyone else's lately, except for maybe Brunnhilde and Banner. And Heimdall never seemed to blink.

He could still feel it, in his mind – the sensation of his eye being torn out. The sudden, meaty rip of the connecting nerve. It had been brief but lingering, like experiencing a burn or any battle injury – Hela's jagged blade had been disturbingly fast – but there was something so especially wrong with the feeling of a crucial physical part being completely separated from the rest of him. Thor had wondered if Odin's loss of his eye had felt the same. If it had scared him as much as it had secretly scared Thor.

" – And maybe once we've finished that, perhaps you could host an orgy in this very bedroom to cheer everyone up. Grandmaster-style, seeing as I incidentally discovered that his accompanying music is also stored in this ship's electronic memory. Heimdall and Banner were particularly irritated at me when that happened, which was unfair seeing as I was the one right beside the loudspeakers taking the acoustic brunt of the heinous lyrics – "

"Wait, what?" Thor snapped his head up.

"Oh good, you're listening. Of course you shouldn't host an orgy. But the Grandmaster's songs are actually available on this ship," Loki pursed his lips, appearing to repress a noxious memory. "Just don't touch any of the dials on that purple panel patterned with little gold stars. Let's have Heimdall keep watch to ensure no one comes within twelve yards of them."

Thor ignored the tangent. "Sorry, Brother. You were speaking of how we might assign jobs to our people here to give a sense of continuity?"

As Loki's voice traipsed on again, Thor let himself mindlessly stack the block-like crystalline bottles of liquor, like bricks, making tiny clinks as he did. They had been delivered to his new chamber by one of the palace servants he recognised from home, alongside the message they were of the few luxuries found in the ship storerooms, and that it was most proper for the king to have them.

Loki seemed to materialise from thin air beside him, abruptly crossing whatever barrier that had obstructed him from the room.

"I know you've had a lot on your mind lately, Thor." Their reflections stood in the mirror almost shoulder to shoulder. It reminded Thor of when they, as almost-teenagers, used to quarrel over who was taller until Frigga or Odin came over to settle the debate. "But what in particular were you thinking about the past twenty something minutes while I've been reporting to you as per your instructions?" Loki began disassembling the little tower of bottles absently as he spoke, undoing Thor's work out of pure habit.

"Just then?" Thor could notice the rims of his eye patch digging faintly against his cheekbone and brow bone whenever he held still enough. "Only my eye."

"Ah."

Clink, plink

Thor looked at him. "That's all?" Centuries later, he still could not decide who was truly taller; Loki's head was bowing over the crystal decanters, or tilting as he peered at Thor.

"Essentially. After my initial exclamation you're missing an eye, I've said all I have to say about it."

Thor thought back, frowning. "Which was…?"

Loki shrugged. "It looks good on you."

Thor began re-stacking the decanters but looked up to smile softly at him. "Thank you."

Loki placed the last glassy shape atop the pile before saying, "Sorry, but are you blinking or winking at me right now? I know you and Jane 'mutually dumped' each other, but I still hope it's not the latter."

Thor steered him firmly back over the threshold out of his room, shutting the door on Loki's innocent expression.

Nonetheless, he had honestly expected many more eye-related jokes from Loki than had been doled out thus far. Perhaps something about Nick Fury. But his brother had been delivering more jabs about his brutally shorn hair than his eye.

(His brother still met his gaze as if spearing Gungnir into his mind, past his eye sockets)

Maybe even Loki felt the subject too raw to poke too much fun of just yet. Other Asgardians seemed determined to compliment Thor by likening his appearance to Odin's. An older woman with a gentle smile, while passing him grainy bread one dinnertime, had said at least Odin's image now lived on through him.

Thor did not want to look like the Allfather, though. He just wanted his father back.

(Maybe that was why Loki usually avoided the subject of his eye)

After a moment, Thor knocked over the little tower of bottles, sending them rocking and clinking across the table.