I'm less thrilled with this than the last section, but that could just be because I like writing Loki's dialogue so much! This is part sequel/part epilogue. Warnings for some bad language.

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Thor did the only thing he could think to do: call his mother. He knew it was a few hours shy of sunrise, but he also knew Frigga would forgive him when he told her why he was calling.

She did.

She cried in a way Thor had never heard before, in a way no child should ever hear their parent cry. It was quiet, but heart-wrenching and spoke of a bone-deep agony. Even through the poor connection it echoed off Thor's empty walls. His apartment had never seemed smaller than it did in that moment.

"Oh, my poor baby," she whispered over and over again. Thor didn't know if she meant him or Loki or both.

They stayed that way, two sorrowful souls crying alone together at four in the morning, for almost twenty minutes.

When the first traces of anger slipped into his blood, Thor welcomed them like old friends. Pain this raw was never meant to be felt, he was sure, and when that first hint of anger knocked on his gates, he threw them open and let it flood him.

It was anger the likes of which he hadn't seen in years. Anger at Loki for causing all of this, for flying into his life once more only to wreck everything and vanish once more into the night. Anger at his parents for lying to them both. Anger at strangers he'd never met, at Laufey, at a mugger, at the world for fucking them over time and time again.

But mostly, anger at himself. For caring too much. For not caring enough. For not stopping it all. For letting Loki in enough to make it hurt and for letting Loki get away. How could he simultaneously want so badly for his brother to have never existed and to have never left?

"Mom," he croaked because he was slipping down fast.

"Do you want to come over?" she eventually asked, because she was the sort of mother who was willing to get up and comfort him at this hour without a second of hesitation. She was the best sort of mother.

"Can you put Dad on the phone for a moment?" he asked instead, needing to ask a few prime questions before he could face the man in person. Just tell me why. Why all the lies?

"He can't come to the phone right now, sweetie." Of course not, Thor thought viciously, of course Odin was the sort of father who couldn't be bothered to get out of bed when one son was on the verge of a meltdown and the other had just been seen for the first time in years. But Frigga continued hesitantly, "He's staying at a motel tonight."

"What? Why?" It was enough to freeze his thoughts in place.

Did Loki stop over there first? What if there was no mugger and instead it was a family argument that got out of hand? Had he been played yet again, everyone sitting around waiting for his call?

"We had an argument. It's nothing serious, darling, we're just taking a little break right now." Her voice was soft, trying to comfort him without lying. This is my burden to bear, that voice said.

Perhaps Loki wasn't involved. Perhaps he'd told the truth for once.

But that meant his perfect family was falling apart in yet another way. Through all the crap they'd weathered with Loki's adoption, Thor had never once doubted his parent's devotion to one another. But even that, even that love which Thor had held as the most genuine feeling two people could feel, even that was a sham. How long had Thor been the fool?

Perhaps Loki was more right than Thor had ever thought possible.

"Thor, it's just a little break, really. It's nothing serious, okay? You don't need to worry about it."

"Okay, Mom," he finally offered, disheartened. From where he was sitting, at the base of the kitchen wall under the mounted phone set, he pulled his knees up and let his chin drop onto them. The cold from the floor was climbing up his legs, but he couldn't move, not when the world was so big and unfamiliar a place.

She went on, gentle and cheerful as always. "Are you coming over, then? You know your room is always ready if you want it."

"No that's alright," he said, thinking of his large childhood house devoid of half of the people who made it home. "Thanks, though. Good-night."

"Thor…" Her tone was worried in a way that normally urged Thor to reassure her, but his chest hurt and his mind was too overwhelmed.

"Good-night, Mom," he offered before hanging up, well aware he sounded just shy of dead.

There was simply nothing left, Thor concluded as he wearily forced his legs up the stairs, but to go to bed.

He remained in bed until well past noon, but it was Sunday so no one needed to know. His thoughts continuously returned to Loki. The small winces and hisses of pain, they aroused such a level of familiar protectiveness and an urge to make it better that Thor almost felt like a kid again. All the childhood promises of protection against bullies and monsters and bad things. Loki had made it clear shortly into his teens that such thoughts were no longer wanted and would be met with only the sharpest of rebuttals. But it'd been so long since Thor had felt that way about anyone.

He hated to admit it, but it felt nice to feel needed. To know that someone was depending on him for help, even if it was begrudging.

But Loki's troubles clearly ran deeper than Thor had ever expected. And rather than having found freedom in running away, Loki had apparently allowing himself to dig deeper into the depravity of humanity.

He never was good at letting go.

Thor had never much believed in fate, but if ever there was someone destined for chaos in life, surely it was a child borne out of such violence. He couldn't even begin to fathom what had gone through Loki's mind when he went in search of his real family, perhaps hoping for a loving middle-class family that be overjoyed at his return, only to find a dead woman who'd rued his existence and a cold monster. But why had he gone after Laufey? 'For her' he'd said, but why? She was a virtual stranger. Did he see himself in the woman? Did he see Laufey as the cause of all wrong in his life?

But then why, Thor suddenly realized, did he let Laufey live? Breaking and entering had been the charges. Not assault. Not attempted murder.

Maybe it wasn't revenge that drove Loki there, even if he'd convinced himself that it was so. Maybe it was the same reason Thor wanted to speak to his own father: to understand.

It took very little research to find a name.

Farbauti.

Loki's birth mother. Raped at twenty-three, dead by her own hand a year later, shortly after delivering. A refusal to testify against Laufey resulted in the man serving only ninety days.

Thor tried to picture himself as Loki, recently severed from his own family, feeling betrayed and alone, reading this very same information. How would he feel? How would he act?

It made his head spin. There was nothing, nothing Thor wouldn't give to go back a few years and take back that stupid "so what". To handle it differently, to change it all.

But, he thought as he stared up at the golden 7 placed in the center of the door, there was no going back, only going forward.

The man that opened the door was an inch or two shorter than Thor. He was portly and the eyes that stared out of his bald head showed their age. He had a tattoo, some swirling, Celtic style pattern that swirled around his neck and along the sides of his head. More ink, a deep black color, peeked out from under the collar and sleeves of his stained grey t-shirt. He was wearing blue flannel pants as only the down and out did at three in the afternoon.

It had taken less work than he'd anticipated to track down Laufey. The newspaper article about the home invasion from three years ago, still buried in the bottom of Thor's desk drawer, had a picture of Laufey standing in front of his door, the golden 7 gleaming just behind his head. The town listed in the article wasn't far away and it only took twenty minutes of driving around to find a building that matched the picture.

"Erm, hello, sir. Sorry to bother you, but I'm…" The brother of the man who broke into your house? Your son's brother? A random nobody?

The man's untrimmed eyebrow jumped up in impatience. "I think you have the wrong address," he said, showing off two rows of chalky yellow teeth. His bulk began to disappear into the darkness behind him.

"No!" Thor shouted as the door started to close. "Please, I need to talk to you!" Laufey peered out at him from the two inch crack left in the door.

"Why?"

"It's about…about your son? Loki?"

It was by some miracle of the gods that Thor managed to talk his way onto the man's admittedly shifty couch because it certainly wasn't any gift with words of Thor's. He tried to hold still as each shift of his weight caused a painful sounding creak from the plastic couch covering that did nothing for the garish yellow floral pattern underneath.

"Did he say why he was here?" Thor asked gently. Laufey had settled himself in a recliner opposite him, beer – which was not offered to Thor – in hand, and feet propped up.

"Whadaya think? Stark raving lunatic, breaking in here in the middle of fucking night, screaming about some bitch." He took a sip from the white can, with just a bit of blue ribbon showing for Thor to know what sort of cheap drainage fluid the man was using to poison himself.

A lot of revelations had shaken Thor's world in the last twenty-four hours, but he was confident that he knew Loki's behavior, if not always his motivations. And that description sounded like some cockeyed bullshit made up for the media.

"But that's not how it really was, sir, was it?"

Mind games and manipulation, that was Loki's game. Thor preferred his words straightforward and reflective of the truth. No ulterior motives, just the truth. But he'd seen Loki's notoriously sharp wit and verbal eviscerations enough times to know a thing or two. He kept his stare level, but not so intimidating that the man forced him to leave. He met the man's squinty eyes and forced himself not to squirm because this was Loki they were talking about and Thor needed someone to tell him the damn truth.

"That's how it was if that's how I say it was," he garbled out, aiming for a sneer and pulling off something between first colonoscopy and virginal backroom lap dances.

"What did he want to know?"

The man shoved himself to his feet and let his index finger wag about in agitation. "Now who the hell are you to come here, 'cusing me of things, and asking all these damned questions?"

"I'm from the parole board, I told you. I'm just here to find out what really happened that night. Lo-Mr. Odinson has proved to be rather close-lipped about the matter."

The man, trying so hard to be anything but weak, glared at Thor's open face for a moment or two more before dropping back into his chair as if his strings had been cut. "Nah, it wasn't like that. I come downstairs and the fuckers sitting on my couch, drinking a glass of water like it's his fucking castle. I tell him to get out or I'll call the cops and he just makes some comment about the goddamn couch, like he broke in to talk some fucking interior decorating."

"A bad comment about…about this couch?" Thor asked as neutrally as he could while gesturing vaguely at the yellow abomination beneath him. The squinty eyes turned to near slits as Laufey glared harder. "Then what?" Thor asked after clearing his throat, "I mean, what did he say exactly?"

"It was stupid stuff mostly. Why'd I do that to his mother – like I know who the hell he's talking about – and why'd I walk away from him. Hell, I didn't even know I had a damn son until he broke into my fucking house."

To picture Loki's face, the utter devastation, after running from the only family he'd ever known in desperate hope for something better and finding…this? The hollowed out agony in having your last wretched hope crushed like a spider under a shoe, remorseless and uncaring.

But you were never in need of a family, Thor cried out as he thought about the lost little boy his brother had become, too prideful to go back but too hurt to go forward.

"He started waving some old newspaper clipping at me. Apparently the woman, his mother I guess, killed herself afterwards. But I didn't know. I was young, you know? Stupid and drunk. It was a mistake, I'll give you that. But I'll tell you the same thing I told that whack job: What happened afterwards, that wasn't my fault. I'm sorry the bitch offed herself and left him for dead, but it ain't my fault."

"Is…is that all? That Loki did?"

Laufey peered at him curiously.

"That's just what he said. 'Is that all?' He just kept screaming it over and over, waving around this dinky little knife. I don't know what the kid was looking for, but I didn't have it." The bald head dropped into his hands and he rubbed at the skin for a moment before looking up. "By the end, he was…you know, crying and stuff. And I said 'Boy, this is my last warning. You get out of this house right now or I'm calling the cops. And he sorta just stood there. I knew he wasn't going to stick me or nothing, but a man has his pride, you know? I hadda call them."

Thor couldn't remember the exact words his father had used when he called Thor that night all those years ago, but things like 'gone off the deep end', 'smashed his way in', and 'some poor elderly man's house' had been tossed around. This was not at all what Thor had imagined. As much as his mind raged against it, he could think of no other reason for the misleading other than to turn him against his brother.

Perhaps Odin had thought it best that Thor distance himself from Loki's influence. Perhaps he thought, foolishly and egregiously, that Thor would give up if he thought Loki's crime was sufficiently heinous.

But Thor hadn't given up. Not on Loki, not ever. And that had brought him here, to the completed puzzle picture. It had brought him to a pathetic old man, alone and insufficient and aware of it. Maybe that wasn't so far from Odin himself, trying to preserve the integrity of his well-to-do family by filtering their exposures, shaping their lives like playthings.

Carefully, but not without making a good deal of plastic creak, Thor extracted himself from the couch. "Thank you for your time," he mumbled softly, not too far gone to remember his manners. Laufey, head in hands once more, nodded without looking up. "Okay then," Thor whispered to himself. His hands felt big and awkward and he wished he had brought something to carry. An empty clipboard even, anything.

He shuffled to the door, full of warring emotions. The handle felt greasy under his hand, but he paid it little mind until the man spoke up behind him, forcing him to freeze and let the feeling sink in.

"If it helps…I told 'em, you know, that he was my son and stuff. That his mother died. That he was just a confused kid. I tried to help him get off easy as he could."

"Yeah," Thor lied numbly, as he pulled the door all the way open and stepped into the unfitting sunlight, "that helps."

He sat in his car and, in the brutally cheerfully sunlight of a blue sky, cried at the bitter agonies unfolding around him. How could he not even know his own family? Not even a little? Even Frigga's comfort felt too far away to help. He didn't know anymore who knew what or said what, but his life had changed most significantly in the last twenty four hours.

It took Thor much, much longer than it should to notice. Life limped on, as it was prone to doing. He went to the office, chatting with friends, flirted with the new secretary, but it all felt so hollow.

To come home at night and face his empty house and his empty kitchen that for one night had held life and pain and love and now was full of nothing – it was a hard burden to bear.

Odin moved back in with Frigga, so Thor changed their plans and had Frigga come to his place for their monthly meals instead. Those nights his kitchen was filled with laughter and love and oregano and it felt good, even if it was temporary and maybe not what it used to be.

It was close enough.

Eventually he was bound to notice. He lived alone so it certainly wasn't some passive aggressive roommate eating his favorite cereal and stealing Band-Aids. It wasn't much and it was hard to notice a missing bowl or two of cereal.

Then Thor dropped a plate and needed a Band-Aid and they were under the sink where they were supposed to be, but there was only two left and he knew he wasn't imagining it.

Disturbing implications about his home security aside, Thor learned two things.

One: No matter what he said, Loki was human and as such, was a creature of habit. And even when he wasn't trying to, Thor was offering all the comfort and protection big brothers were supposed to in bowls of cereal, Band-Aids, and a little temporary safety. He wished Loki felt more comfortable staying there permanently – Thor didn't know if he even had a proper place to stay – but he would take what he could. He knew a peace offering when he saw one, even if it was passive aggressive and a tad bit illegal.

Two: Self-applied Band-Aids and cereal from your childhood only go so far in treating wounds. If Loki was capable of getting in and out without being seen or disturbing Thor, then he had to have wanted to be seen that night with the mugging. Maybe it was too much for him to handle on his own, but maybe, maybe he need a little patching up of the emotional kind.

All in all, it was good news.

On the way home from work the next day, Thor took a little detour and made one stop and purchased one item. That evening, Thor left his little present out, a prepaid cellphone loaded up with sixty minutes and his phone number, topped with a sticky note that said 'Call Me'.

It stayed there, on the counter, next to the displayed cereal box, for quite a while and Thor began to think he really was imagining it all along. Wishful thinking and all that.

But one day, he came home from work and the phone was gone.

And then one day, nearly seven months later, Thor got a call.


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