The things between us
Silence was the first.
It always starts with silence. (It will be the last, too, as it always is.)
The simple fact was this: Thor didn't want a brother.
. .
Later, –many centuries and wounds given and taken– later he thought sometimes that those early days of ignorance crawled under Loki's skin and never really left him. That however Thor's heart embraced everything Loki was, whatever he did later to patch that hole, the damage was done forever.
. .
The shared (almost intimate) fellowship in mischiefs they committed together forged their brotherhood more than anything had ever managed to before. Not even the punishments Loki would always miraculously escape could ever destroy that. In hindsight, he was never happier, never felt as whole as in this period of his life.
. .
Tales. Ghost stories, stories of monsters. Thor loved them. He swore with the passion of a child, with the abhorrence of the ignorant that he would hunt down all sorts of monsters. He swore all the more seeing the unfathomable glint lighting up Loki's eyes.
The tales bore a strange kind of apprehension in Loki, distant and cautious, and he didn't like to listen to those stories. Thor never understood why. He was sure Loki didn't, either.
Not until much later.
. .
They were different in so many things, small and great things, simple and complex ones. They made Thor excited and annoyed at the same time, made him cherish his brother just the more because Loki was a constant riddle, nothing like other Asgardians. Because Loki could seep into his heart like no one else could. These things made him happy.
He never understood why they made Loki bitter and estranged. Why he seemed like they broke him asunder, each of them, gradually, one by one.
. .
He still remembered the looks (he forever would), the type of looks only siblings know. The one that is alliance on its own, a shared history, secret without words that has the power to draw laughter out of the other at the most inappropriate moment if shot at the right time. The look Loki would send him over the dining table during seemingly endless speeches. The face he made behind the back of particularly boring or obtuse people. Just one blink of his eyes, and something all-powerful would start to tickle Thor from inside, something irresistible.
Something only Loki could evoke in him.
. .
Like weed sprouting between cobblestones and seedlings so sprang the lies between their words, between glances. Later, decades or centuries later, he wasn't even sure when, they started to sprout between their hearts, too.
But they weren't there at the beginning.
. .
It started with secrets, he figured. Lies were blooming only from them, in that fertile loam. It started innocently, maybe out of reservation and defense. He still couldn't grasp how simple things could fester.
Thor always hated secrets, his honest heart could not contain them. Loki never understood it. He thought it was stupidity.
Thor didn't know what Loki never said: that he deemed it a strange, enviable kind of bravery, too.
. .
Later, much later came things Thor didn't like and didn't understand: the plots, the constant fight, the venom of a cornered animal. Betrayal. He couldn't decide whether Loki was stray or rather found his true course eventually. He never stopped loving Loki, though.
And ironically, these were the things Loki grew attached to (the plots, the wrath, the pain), touching them with great delicacy and care and a kind of strange, foul pride.
. .
In hindsight, sometimes Thor would muse when Loki's smiles started to be drawn by hurt like a tightly pulled bow. Maybe when his own words started to be laced by the conventional shame of a society where excellent fighting skills and brash courage were above all – and his brother didn't deem those qualities even secondary.
. .
Once their tutor asked them for an essay on the greatest power, something they considered the most important requirement for a future king. Thor wrote about courage and strength, all and everything they contained, faith and loyalty and selfishness. He thought his brother would write about magic but he was wrong.
Loki wrote about words.
. .
Others. Friends, courtiers, strangers.
Thor thought that, before anything else, this was the biggest slip – where the fundament started to crack around the edges. That he had everyone.
And Loki had and wanted to have no one but Thor.
. .
He found it ironic how Loki didn't see that now, belatedly, Thor wanted none but him.
. .
Times when Loki would refuse his invitations to join him, Thor failed to see the reason behind it. He couldn't see the double-bladed edge of each word. He didn't see that Loki's main purpose wasn't to hurt Thor for the simple fact of hurting him – he wanted pain to shadow Thor's features because of what it awakened in him: how the seeds of remorse he implanted in Thor evoked a kind of satisfaction that made Loki feel wanted.
He also didn't see how it squeezed Loki's guts that he deprived himself of the chance of joining Thor, of being by his side (but in his shadow). That however Loki tried to hurt Thor, he couldn't do it without, in some other way, doing damage to himself.
The truth was: Thor didn't understand the workings of a heart that felt extraneous.
. .
No, Loki.
Loki, no!
Between the two (simple lines of the same words; only the order, such a wee thing, was different), Thor's heart beat once, then never again in the same way.
No. Loki. No.
Simple lines. They changed everything.
. .
He knew their father loved them both. Maybe differently, maybe in his own way but loved them all the same. This difference, like all the others, stood between them for all their lives, slowly destroying everything in its decay.
. .
A glass wall.
Behind it he couldn't recognize the man who once was his brother. He wondered if the Void seeped into Loki's mind.
He wondered if into his heart, too.
. .
The concrete was steaming in the heat, the horizon shimmering, and Loki said humans, in their haste to condense everything into their ephemeral lives, forgot to live.
Thor viewed it differently. The way he saw it, humans valued things gods had long forgotten to cherish. He envied them for it. Loki called them pathetic – as if by putting them down as inferior would raise him higher once more.
He didn't see he had sunk only in his own eyes.
. .
Today I don't love you, Loki said once.
Simple sentences like this coiled into themselves like the tendrils of a plant in Thor's mind, and he could never grasp how it was possible to love someone one day and not love them anymore just to love them later again. For him love was a constant thing. It was a simple thing his heart did never juggle around.
Love, Loki stated, is not as pure as you might think.
That time, Thor paid no mind to it. It wasn't really that he didn't believe Loki, rather he didn't understand him. He liked to deem it the skewed angle Loki would watch every single thing in his life.
Now, decades later he finally saw it for what it was. Love wasn't a simple term, a clean-cut frame he could squeeze everything into: the whole turmoil of feelings only the heart could reconcile.
Today I don't love you either.
. .
A glass wall, again. Another time, another place.
He didn't visit Loki this time. He thought it was out of fear that, just like before, behind another glass wall, he wouldn't find the brother he searched for.
There was one moment when another thought stole its way into his mind: that maybe he feared he would, in fact, find the brother he once knew. He wasn't sure how he would cope with that.
. .
Thor was unsure about the slights, when exactly they started to emerge if they did at all. If they were truly the makings of Loki's mind, imaginary. There is a feeling, though, like a nagging idea in the back of his mind, that at times he wasn't as good a brother as he should have been. That there were people who required constant care like some of the plants in their mother's garden, rare and special.
. .
Their mother. Their wise and loving mother.
Their brave, warrior mother.
Their mother who had seen and known Loki even before he became her son. Their mother who had already seen into Thor's heart even when he was no more but a mere thought.
He wonders sometimes if she had seen all those things coming between them in her weavings. The lies, the slights, the ebb and flow of love.
Her loss fell between them like an unyielding stone they couldn't remove. It only occurred to Thor, not Loki, never to Loki, that they could at least try to go around it.
. .
He saw it now: they had always been the two halves of the same thing. Head and tail of a coin, complementary colors on a palette, the duality of nature. Opposites. Never touching, briefly meeting but unable to part. There were times when Thor made himself believe it could be otherwise – that the differences had a common point.
It was only ironic that the only common point lay in their heart – the Nornir used the cruelest thread when they wove their Fates for it was cutting deep, and it was beautiful.
. .
I didn't do it for him.
This time the void was only inside, wedged between the strings of his heart.
In this world Thor straightened up and walked away from his brother. In this world, he left him lying forever under this strange, ashen sky.
He wasn't sure if he would ever be able to reconcile with this reality.
. .
It struck him only rarely that –opposed to all things on Midgard, dramatic but fleeting in their occurrence– their slow-burning emotions in Asgard was more persistent, like stone against ice, enduring.
So was their mourning.
Their loss was not an ephemeral thing. It lasted for centuries on until the twilight of gods. He felt it in every minute, the magnitude of any change in their unchanging lives. He didn't know how to accommodate.
. .
The silence was unfamiliar and unwelcome.
The simple fact was this: Thor didn't know anymore, didn't want to know how to live without a brother.