Chapter 4: I am hiding in your skin
Father was drinking. Mother was reconciled. Asgard was in uproar. Thor was conflicted.
It was all coming together nicely.
Few things were as viscerally stimulating as plans that came together nicely.
Loki let his hand fall down into his lap, and idly sought out the button on his trousers. He sighed as fresh air touched his cock, and gently teased the tip with his forefinger for a moment. As always, pride in his own capacity for restraint made him harder, and within minutes he was gasping, cock red and swollen, still suffering only the tender mercies of his forefinger.
When he judged he'd denied himself long enough, he gave himself into the warmth of his hand with a shudder, quickly establishing a rhythm to his strokes. The world at the edges of his vision turned pink and melted away.
Probing beneath his scrotum, he fingered the wet slit that had developed in recent weeks. Once or twice before he had speculated as to what wonders he might achieve if he could only contort his body sufficiently to allow him to fuck himself. The thought made him shiver; to be impregnated by his own seed, to bring forth a child free of all contamination but that with which he gifted it. How pure such a child would be. How infinitely wicked.
He allowed himself to imagine that he had made such a child, with his face and his tongue, and maybe once that child reached maturity they would copulate, and there would be another child, this one even purer than the last, and so it might go on forever, or until such time as Loki's line was entirely purged of anything but Loki.
He bit his tongue as he came, letting the taste of his own saltless blood flood his mouth, and used the brief magical surge ejaculation brought with it to see beneath the flesh of his stomach.
Matters appeared to be progressing nicely on that front.
"You will let me name the child," he purred to himself, and, removing his hand from his pants, snickered at length.
"Gormless halfwit."
0
Thor's dream were uncommon violent, orbiting bleak and frightening themes.
He dreamed he walked through Hel, carrying a bucket of milk.
He dreamed he came upon his brother seated on a throne of dead men's toenails, wearing a crown of mistletoe and clasping a something wrapped in a blanket of spiderwebs to his chest.
He dreamed he stood upon the palace balcony, the whole of Asgard assembled beneath him. He held his child aloft before them, but when he brought the babe back down it dissolved into a dozen green serpents.
Shortly after midnight he stormed out of bed, stormed down Bifrost, glared at a bemused Heimdal until he stood aside and then stormed down to Earth, where he spent many hours drinking Jane's coffee, eating everything in Jane's fridge and expounding at length upon his brother's many, many character flaws.
Jane, who had elected the moment she had opened the door not to tell Thor that he had, yet again, forgotten to put pants on before visiting her house, nodded in sympathy, and took discrete photographs with her cellphone.
0
Despite it all, Loki's talent for slithering about unnoticed and blending into the background had never been so keen. Possibly he simply wished to avoid being accosted by Fandral again, who had been determinedly stalking the palace for several weeks now with gifts of good luck charms and supposedly magical roots which an imp he had bedded had told him would make a child musically inclined if ingested three weeks prior to his or her birth. Thor had tried gently to dissuade him, but had not had much success, until Hogun had rolled his eyes, and thrown the roots into the royal pond.
He had not, however, succeeded in foreseeing or forestalling Volstagg's intervention.
"Did we not swear, Hogun," said Volstagg, gesticulating wildly with a mostly empty jug of dwarf rum, "when Lord Thor was named heir to the throne, that we would defend to the death his person and his line, that we would fight beside the royal family at each and every new Ragnarok, and that we would honour and obey his progeny until such time as Hel came to claim us?"
Volstagg had in him a certain terrible propensity for logic unfettered by personal feelings or basic common sense. Fandral looked smug while Hogun made growling sounds about the letter versus the spirit of their oath, while the oldest of the Warriors Three slung his scabbard across his back and departed.
Another of Volstagg's many unsuspected talents- and perhaps his greatest- was his ability to notice what others overlooked. Which was why he was able to pluck Loki from the shadows in Idunn's orchard so quickly. Which was why, on that day, thirty court ladies and their attendant servants, were treated to the uncommon sight of Odin's adopted son gaping like a dead fish as Volstagg the Valiant dropped to his knees before him and offered up his sword.
"I… you…" said eloquent Loki Liesmith, his head snapping frantically this way and that, as if searching for an escape route, or a murder weapon.
"I solemnly swear," said Volstagg, loudly, a quiver of his moustache suggesting that he was deriving no small measure of enjoyment form this, "to defend at all costs and offer aide to the… erm… parent of Lord Thor's firstborn…"
"Go away!" Loki squawked, reeling back. "You… ALL of you, just GO AWAY!"
Volstagg broke off from the recitation of his oath and gave Loki a look of deepest and most utterly contrived concern. "Your highness, ye should not holler so. It's bad for the youngling's constitution. Fandral told me."
Hissing and spitting like a cat dropped in water, Loki stalked off. Congratulating himself, Volstagg dusted off his knees.
0
Thor had almost finished his morning meal- porridge, buttered bread, eight large slabs of ham, smoked fish, an apple and a mug of cold ale- when he realised that Loki was sitting opposite him.
They rarely shared meals these days, especially when they were alone. Occasionally Loki would appear at a feast, sliding in amidst the ebb and flow of conversation as though his presence at the table wasn't the exception more than it was the rule. But today Thor, feeling pensive, ate in his room, seated on the window sill, having had his personal attendant bring approximately one metric ton of food to his table.
On instinct now, Thor's eyes flicked to Loki's waistline.
"You should know that I find that rude," his brother murmured, taking an apple for himself.
Tony had embarked on a private campaign to enlighten Thor and, by extension, all of Asgard, to the ways of Midgardian culture. On one occasion, he had produced for Thor's perusal a series of etchings, which Thor had found to be pretty nothings until his brain had caught up with his eyes.
"Escher," Tony had called the artist, and, upon Thor's request, had given Thor several to hang in his private quarters. Thor liked to contemplate them at length. He found that, if one looked carefully enough, one could discern the point at which possibility slid into impossibility, smoothly as a watersnake sliding beneath the surface of a lake. Look here, and you would see the exact point at which the triangles resolved themselves into birds. Look here, and you would see the exact point at which the ascending staircase connected to the descending staircase, the point at which the background buildings became the foreground buildings and one's field of vision failed one.
It was Escher that his brother called to mind, at the end of his third month.
His shoulders had not narrowed, his features had not softened. He had… admit it, Thor told himself, there's no way of getting around it… breasts, but they were clearly a woman's breasts on a man's body. Thor eyes wanted to interpret it as an optical illusion, and kept roving over his body, looking for the giveaway. The part he might focus on and say, 'Ah-hah, now here, this is clearly impossible.' There was none.
"I think," said Loki suddenly, "that all manner of difficulties could have been avoided had we not been brothers."
"In truth?" said Thor, whose mind was occupied trying to measure the length and breadth of Loki's abdomen. According to Frigga, Thor had been an unusually large baby. If the child really was his, and did take after him, the cut would have to be wide enough to all but cleave Loki's body in two.
"Think how much easier this would be were we not related, even by the bonds of adoption," Loki said, spinning the apple on his fingertip. "So much less inconvenient."
"What would you be to me, then, if not my brother?" Thor asked, playing along. "My friend? My follower?"
"Neither."
"My enemy, or my…" Thor thought. "My teacher?"
"That's closer to the mark," Loki said, contemplatively, "but still you miss."
"My bedmate, then?" Thor asked, leaning back against the window ledge.
Loki was momentarily silent, then said, "I believe you have been studying Jotunn culture with Odin. Know this, then; there is a word for what I would be to you, but it is a Jotunn word, and has no match in your language."
"Then we are at an impasse," Thor said, folding his arms. "For I do not speak the Jotunn tongue and I do not trust you to teach it to me."
"Well said, thunder god."
Loki moved like water, crossing from his end of the window sill to Thor's, his shape temporarily blocking out the sunlight.
The kiss he pressed upon the corner of Thor's mouth was not chaste. Thor had not been expecting it to be.
Thor allowed it for the count of three, then swatted him away. He would give Loki his all, eventually, he knew it like he knew changes in atmospheric pressure, like he knew when it would rain. Wicked as it was, he knew it as though he had ALWAYS known it even though he hadn't-
(but, of course, they were gods)
- but a kiss was enough for one day. A soul was a weighty thing, after all; it should be sold off in slivers, not large chunks.
Loki shared the rest of his breakfast in silence, and slunk away without further comment.
