Title: Laughing As I Pray
Rating: PG-13

Summary: Thor gets a crash course on the nature of the apology.

"Thor?" Jane called from the next room, where she was rifling through a large box of miscellanea. "Do you know what last name Loki might be going by on Earth? Odinson, or what?"

Thor grimaced. "I fear I do not," he said. Back on Asgard, before his fall, Loki had called himself a Son of Odin when he shot Laufey down with Gungnir. On Midgard, during his invasion Loki had eschewed any name at all, calling himself only "Loki of Asgard," a title usually reserved only for the houseless. (And this was so unlike him, if Thor had been paying any attention, he should have taken that as an indication that all was not right.) And after…

During that terrible row between Loki and the Warriors 3 during the siege of Asgard, Sif had thrown "son of Laufey" at Loki like a poisoned spear. And indeed, on Svartalfheim when he had feigned to betray Thor to Malekith, he had called himself Laufeyson. Yet that had been part of the pretense, had it not? Surely, even if Loki had cast off his father's name, he would not be driven so far as to claim affiliation with that -

He felt his mind shape the word monster and took hold of it firmly, steering it in other directions. Not the name of the wretch who had abandoned him to die hundreds of years ago, whose death Loki himself had engineered. Surely not.

"It could be either," he said to Jane, "or neither, some other name entirely. I know not."

Through the doorway, he saw Jane nod in disappointment and turn back to her search. The quiet forest house had turned into a busy hive of activity in the last hour, as the two mortals embarked on a diligent search for some way to contact Loki. Thor felt touched by their effort on his behalf, even to locate a man they had no reason to care about, but he also felt somewhat useless and out of place on this search for knowledge. Every now and then either Jane or Darcy would ask him for some information about his brother, and more often than not Thor was forced to admit that he did not know. There was more that he had never known about his brother, he was realizing, than he had ever thought.

"Thor, what's Loki's birthday?" Darcy asked from the end of the dining room table.

"Er..." Thor floundered. Loki's nameday was the forty-fourth day of Haustmánuður, during the Rising Hunting Moon, but Thor wasn't sure offhand how to convert that into Midgardian timekeeping. "Why do you ask?"

"If you know someone's first name, birthday, and general geographic region, you can usually narrow them down to six possible social media profiles out of a hundred thousand," Darcy informed him seriously, tapping away at her small computer so quickly that her fingers were almost a blur. "The concept of online privacy's a joke."

"Oh," Thor said.

"Nothing much is coming up on Google... 'cept some really old historical stuff that I don't think applies," Darcy said. She lifted her gaze from the computer long enough to give him a raised eyebrow. "Your family is weird, did you know that?"

Thor was not quite sure how to respond to that, but fortunately, as with many of Darcy's comments no response seemed to be required. "Nothing matches on Facebook... or LinkedIn," she mused, going back to her searching. "Ooh, here's a Tumblr with his name on it... no, this is just somebody's RP account."

Thor sighed. "Darcy, I know not what any of these things are. Why do you think Loki would?"

Darcy shrugged. "Maybe you don't, but your brother's spent the last year hanging out with a bunch of millennials," she said. "I guarantee he's at least heard of Twitter by now."

Thor had to admit Darcy had a point. Loki had ever been better at adapting to fit his circumstances than Thor. Less than a day after coming to any strange new locale in any of the other Realms, and Loki would be dressing and acting and talking like a native. At the time, Thor had never thought much of it, except perhaps to be annoyed at how much it made Thor feel out-of-place by contrast; but he always knew the tables would turn once they were back home in Asgard.

In retrospect, Thor finally admitted to himself how strange it was, how Loki had always been able to fit in everywhere but in Asgard.

"Hmm... Nothing here... or here…" Darcy muttered, still absorbed in her search. "Maybe Ello? Somehow he strikes me as an Ello type of guy..."

With both of his companions thus occupied, there was little left for Thor to do. And so he found himself at an unaccustomed loose end, with nothing better to do than sit and think.

Truth be told, there was much for Thor to think about. Darcy's words from earlier that day kept nagging at him, refusing to leave him in peace. Thor was not entirely sure why. At the time, her accusation - the attack on Jotunheim was an act of Asgard - had seemed absurd, and he had dismissed it with barely a thought. Of course it was not. Loki had been working alone, had brought no one in on his mad plan, and surely no one else would have stood for it if he had tried.

Except…

In the quiet honesty of his own head, Thor was not absolutely sure that was true. Certainly Loki's unconditional, ruthless brutality appalled him - and, if Darcy was any indication, was equally appalling to the humans of Midgard - and yet Thor was not at all sure that the idea of wiping out the Jotnar in such a final manner would not appeal to his fellow Asgardians. Certainly, if the possibility had been put to Thor himself, but two years prior, his only objection would have been that Loki's plan afforded no chances of personal glory.

But to the average Asgardian man-on-the-street, the rank and file soldier who had seen the brutality of battle enough to sate their hunger for it, the idea of such a clean, final kill might have been quite appealing indeed. Truth be told, Thor did not know that the people of Asgard, had they known, would not have approved of Loki's plan whole-heartedly.

And yet… something in Thor's heart still said no. Why, if the Asgardians would approve of the plan, and if Loki-who-was-King supported this plan, did Thor still think that Asgard would not approve of such a plan?

Because, Thor thought with certainty, Odin would never have approved of such an atrocity. And to Thor's mind and heart, Odin was still the first, the last, and all that encompassed the will of Asgard.

Odin was not only Thor's father, he was his king, and had been for all of Thor's life. Thor had never known an Asgard without Odin, had never truly been able to conceive of it. Even now, having known the brutal shock of believing his father dead, even with Odin comatose in an unsurpassed period of the Sleep, Thor could not really imagine Asgard without Odin. Could not really imagine there could be an Asgard without Odin.

But that was not really true, was it? Thor had read his histories, albeit more reluctantly than Loki ever had; he knew that Odin had not always been king in Asgard. Before Odin there had been Borr; before Borr, there had been Buri. Even if the history texts had all not-so-subtly suggested that such times had been darker, less enlightened times, and that they were fortunate to have been led into the golden age in which Asgard now prospered -

Still, the heart of the matter yet stood: Asgard had stood before Odin was ever born, and would continue to stand long after Odin had passed on. Asgard was more than Odin alone, and Odin's word was not the first, the last of the only to define the borders of that realm.

And Thor had to wonder: how many times, when he had thought that Asgard would not approve of Loki, when he thought that Asgard would not accept these things from Loki, had he been truly thinking: Odin will not accept this?

It was his brother's ways that Thor knew best, standing always as a contrast against the right and proper way - the Asgardian way - of doing things. Yet even Thor knew, at least in the abstract, that there were others in Asgard who did not always agree with Odin's rule, with Odin's ways of thinking and doing. Now that Odin was in his long sleep, was there not the possibility that they might… disagree more? Was there not the possibility that Asgard might change?

Perhaps if -

Thor's thoughts were interrupted by a loud groan of frustration from Darcy. "Damn it," she said aloud, slouching back into her chair with a huff. "I've got nothing. I was hoping I could find out more about him from his students' account, but XSGY has a really draconian privacy policy. Total cone of silence stuff. Apparently hackers like to make it a game to get past their firewall, but none have managed yet - there's a rumor that they have some sort of cyber-ninja mutant on the staff. It's a real black hole for communications..."

She trailed off, meeting Thor's eyes, her own gaze brimming with unhappy disappointment. "I'm sorry, Thor, I don't think we'll be able to find him."

"I understand," Thor said; even if he didn't completely follow the roadblocks Darcy had encountered, it was clear that her search had been futile. And if Darcy, who was so knowledgeable about the ways of Midgard, could not find Loki, then what chance did Thor have? "Thank you for trying, all the same."

Unexpectedly, Jane's voice spoke up from beyond the doorway into the next room. "Yes, hello?" she said, and Thor had to repress an impulse to respond to her. She was standing with a phone pressed to her ear, turning towards the window. "This is Doctor Jane Foster. I was hoping to speak with Professor Loki?"

Thor stared. Darcy outright goggled. "Is that - is that them?" she sputtered. "Where did you get that number? Who are you talking to?"

"Yes, certainly, thanks." Jane put the phone under her chin long enough to address them. "It's the front desk for Xavier's School for Gifted Youth," she explained in an undertone. "It's on the MOMA pamphlets under 'Emergency Resources.' I got one at a convention a while ago."

"You called reception?" Darcy looked thunderstruck. "You called reception?"

"So you are speaking with someone at this school, right now?" Thor asked, wanting to make sure he understood.

Jane nodded, smiling. "And if Loki has an extension on the campus, they can put us through to him."

"Wow!" Darcy exclaimed. "That's so... retro! I totally never thought of that."

Jane's smile widened to a grin. "Sometimes there are advantages to academia being twenty years behind the rest of the world," she said. Then a tinny voice spoke from the phone, and she hastily put it back to her ear again. "Hello? No problem at all. Uh huh. That's great. Oh, um… It's not me who wants to speak with him, exactly. It's…"

"Tell him his brother wishes to speak with him," Thor interrupted, pitching his voice loud enough to carry over the device. "Thor, son of Odin, Prince-Regent of Asgard."

Jane looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, then punched a button that broadcast the reply loud enough for all of them to hear. "And what may I say is the nature of the call?" a tiny, female voice on the other end of the line was saying.

"Tell him I wish to offer an apology," Thor said firmly.

There was a wait, while the woman on the other end of the line located his brother - or perhaps while Loki decided whether or not to accept the call. Thor, now with the phone in hand, fretted and paced in tight circles around the couch. Jane attempted to discreetly withdraw and give Thor his privacy for the coming conversation, but was thwarted when Darcy resisted her tugging and hissed whispers and refused to be budged from her front-row seat.

At last the speaker crackled, and Thor's heart leapt as he recognized his brother's familiar voice. "Thor," Loki said, and he sounded… no longer angry, at least, not the screaming rage of their last meeting. That boded well, did it not? "I must admit, I did not expect to receive a telephone call from you of all people. It is rather unlike you not to simply come storming back up to the scene of your last defeat and demand a repeat performance. Not, mind you, that I am complaining."

Thor winced at the reminder. "It is good to hear you again," he said. "Loki, I have been thinking much… and… talking much with my friends here on Earth, and… I wanted to apologize."

There was silence, broken by static, from the phone. Thor cursed the limitations of the device, which did not allow him to see his brother's face and make out his expression; even his voice, when he spoke again, was flat and tinny, stripped by the primitive speaker of most of its inflection. "Apologize. You? You wish to apologize?"

"Yes, I do," Thor forged onwards. "I wished to apologize for… for whatever has made you so angry with me."

Again there was silence, although this time it seemed to ring out louder than anything Loki could have said. On the other side of the room, Jane had given up trying to drag Darcy out of the room, and they were both staring at Thor with alarmed expressions.

"I see," Loki said, and Thor didn't think it was only the phone's speaker that made his voice sound so flat. "May I ask exactly what you think you are apologizing for?"

That caught Thor somewhat off guard, and he sputtered for a moment before coming up with a response. "Everything," he said firmly. Surely that covered all the bases, didn't it? "Everything that has gone wrong between us as brothers. Loki, I know we have had our differences, and often been at odds, but I want you to know that -"

There was a sharp burst of static, and then the speaker let out a long, droning musical tone. Thor frowned at it. "Loki?" he tried, but got no response. "Brother, are you there? Can you hear me?"

Still no response, nothing but the continuing drone. Thor turned towards his mortal friends with a frown. "Jane, I think your device has failed," he said.

Darcy was starting at him with wide eyes. "Noooo," she said. "I don't think it's the phone that failed just now."

Jane removed her hands from her mouth, folding them on her chest instead, and cleared her throat. "That's, um, that's the dial tone," she said, coming forward to take it out of his hand. "It means that Loki hung up on you. Uh, ended the call."

"He did?" Thor gave the phone in his hand a betrayed look. "But why?"

"Honestly, I can't really blame him," Darcy commented. "Not with that epic fauxpology you had going on there."

Even with the All-speak, the word Darcy used did not translate; Thor suspected it was not a real word. "I do not understand," he said, frustration creeping into his voice.

"A fauxpology. A fake apology. It's a slither-out-of-consequences apology, not a real apology," Darcy explained. "It's like when politicians get caught at some scandal and they have to go out in public and apologize, but everyone knows they don't really mean it. They aren't sorry they did it, they're just sorry they got caught."

"That is not true at all!" Thor protested. "I meant what I said. My apology to Loki was sincere."

"Seriously?" Darcy gave him an incredulous look. "He even told you what you needed to do, when he asked you to say what you were apologizing for, and you didn't. If you say you're sorry for 'everything,' that's the same as not being sorry for anything. When you say you're sorry for 'whatever' you're saying you don't know what you're apologizing for, you're just saying whatever you think will make him stop being mad."

"But I do want him to stop being mad," Thor said, bewildered. Was that not the entire point of this exercise?

"Even if he has good reason to be mad?" Jane raised her hands, raking one through her hair in a gesture of frustration. "Thor, that's not love, that's just emotional control! If he's upset because of something you did, then you have to figure out what upset him and why, and figure out how you're going to deal with it going forward. Without that, an apology's no good, because he knows you're just going to do it again."

"...I... I see," Thor said, feeling crushed. This whole 'apology' business was turning out to be much more complicated than he had originally anticipated; Jane had made it sound like he only had to make a gesture, something to show he was serious about wanting to reconcile and that he would heartfeltedly consider Loki's feelings going forward.

Thor put his head into his hands, trying to think. The task was impossibly daunting. In their youth together, though he and Loki had often clashed, it had been easily mended by Thor inviting (all right, dragging) Loki out on another adventure to raid a troll's lair or slay a dragon. "There is just too much," he said, frustrated. "Loki and I have known each other for hundreds of years. If I must guess what, out of all that time, he is thinking now… I cannot possibly… I do not even know where to start."

Jane sat beside him, and took hold of his hand with a comforting pat. "You know, normally we say to start at the beginning and go forward," she said. "But maybe in this case we should actually start at the end, and go back a bit. From what you told me of the fight at the school the other day, you and Loki were actually talking pretty calmly at first. That means Loki is willing to talk with you, until something happened to set him off. Maybe try starting with figuring out whatever that was, and apologizing for just that, and then you can go from there?"

Thor considered that for a long moment, then nodded.

Thor tried again. "Brother, I am sorry you were offended by my words," he said into the received.

Loki did not sound terribly appeased. "Are you sorry for your words or sorry that I was offended?"

"Um..." Thor stumbled briefly. "What's the difference?"

Once again, the click and drone of the dial tone was his only answer.

Over by the table, Darcy groaned and thunked her head against the wood surface. Jane sighed. "Thor, you can't apologize for Loki getting upset or getting offended," she said. "You can't apologize for his reactions, only for your own actions. If you don't acknowledge your own mistakes, you aren't really apologizing."

Thor muttered under his breath, careful not to let his companions hear. He was beginning to think it would be simpler just to go slay another dragon.

A third try, and the woman at the front desk was starting to sound distinctly annoyed to hear his voice again. Still, Thor forged onwards. "Brother, I am sorry for my ignorant and hurtful words," Thor said firmly into the receiver.

"Oh? Are you really?" Loki still sounded sarcastic, but then that tended to be how Loki sounded at the best of times. "Which words?"

Thor had had time to think this through, to review his headlong series of mistakes from the moment he had set foot on Earth to the moment the mutant girl had transported him so hastily away, and he thought he had pinpointed where he went wrong. "For the insult to your friends and comrades," he replied. "I understand I was wrong to judge mutants so hastily. I should not have let myself be deceived by the words of hateful men, nor bring wrath upon those who have done nothing to incur it."

There was a moment of silence from the other end. "And?"

Thor frowned. "And what?" he repeated back.

"And what else are you sorry for?" If anything, he sounded even more sarcastic and angry than before. Why wasn't this working?

Darcy and Jane still hovered in the background; Darcy was making frantic hand motions at him, while Jane mouthed silent words that Thor could not decipher. The combination bewildered him, threw him off the script. "What else is there?"

This time, Thor heard the loud click that terminated the phone call, before the annoying drone of the dial tone returned to plague him once more.

"He hung it again!" Thor exclaimed. "Why? I do not understand!"

Jane winced. "That's kind of the problem, Thor," she said.

Thor sighed. Jane had been more than patient with him, again and again offering her wisdom and support as Thor floundered his way through a matter that should have been simple, mending ways with a man that Jane had no reason to love. "Tell me," he said, quelling the frustrated anger from his voice. "What have I done wrong this time?"

Jane bit her lip. "You apologized to him for ways you've wronged everyone else," she said. "Not for anything you said or did to him. You basically apologized to everybody else but him, even when talking directly to his face - do you see what kind of message that sends? That even when you are willing to admit fault, that his feelings, that his relationship with you, is so low on your list of priorities that it gets mentioned last, as an afterthought - or not at all?"

"Oh," Thor said, very quiet and abashed.

Darcy clearly felt neither of these things. "You are terrible at this," she exclaimed. "Have you ever actually had to apologize to anyone before you came to Earth?"

That stung, and Thor straightened up and frowned indignantly at Darcy. "I know quite well how apologies work!" he defended himself.

That did not seem too convincing to his audience, who both paused for a moment to look at him consideringly, then exchange glances with each other. " ...That wasn't a 'yes,' "Jane muttered.

Thor scowled. He was a Prince, who had spent all his life at court and had been raised in courtly manners - of course he knew the proper forms to make. As if any son of Frigga could escape the tutelage of the avatar of hospitality herself without such knowledge.

Just because he couldn't actually remember the last time he had put that knowledge to use - that didn't mean anything. He didn't remember every meal he'd ever eaten, either, but that had not meant he'd starved. Just because he, as the crown prince, would automatically be due deference from every lesser member of the court save the King and Queen themselves, and Thor would not actually be obliged to apologize to any of them. Just because, for the very same reason, they would be required to graciously accept his apologies no matter how ill-formed, no matter the truth of their feelings…

That didn't mean anything either.

"Okay, sit down, Prince Charming," Darcy said, and patted her hand on the empty space at the head of the table. "Time to intervene before you embarrass yourself any further."

She tugged one of Jane's notebooks free from the stack and flipped to a blank page, clicking open a pen to write with. Jane dove to intercept the notebook and wrestled it free from Darcy with a scowl, substituting a clean pad of paper in its wake. Darcy grinned, and handed both pad and pen to Thor. "Let's work out exactly what you're going to say."

For his next and final try, Thor thought he could do without the audience; yet it seemed too ungracious to turn his Midgardian friends out of the room of their own house. Instead he took a walk in the cool woods behind the house, taking the phone with him.

Thor half-feared that Loki would refuse any more phone calls; that he accepted it omened well, since it implied that Loki would be willing to listen if the right words were spoken. If only Thor could find the right words to speak. The phone hummed, and then clicked as the call engaged. "Yes?" Loki said, uninvitingly.

Thor licked his lips briefly before taking the plunge. "Brother, I am sorry for my hurtful words about your companions," Thor said.

"And?" Loki said, his voice emotionless.

"And I am also sorry that I insulted you by believing you had gone to evil," Thor continued, "and saying such, even when I had no evidence to think that to be so."

"Good," Loki said. "And?"

" And... er…" Thor glanced nervously at the crumpled sheet of paper in his hands. "And for not listening to you when you tried to explain my mistake. And for thinking it my place to correct you, when you had done no harm to anyone. And for trying to force you to leave a place which has done you good and brought you peace, and making you go back to Asgard which would only harm you."

For a moment there was silence on the other end of the line, except for the sound of a low, drawn-out exhale. For a moment, Thor feared he had fumbled yet again, that the next sound he would hear would be that damnable droning dial tone -

"Very good, Thor," came Loki's voice - not from the device. Thor whirled around to see that Loki had appeared in the clearing with him, manifesting silently out of the shadows. He had a phone like Thor's in one hand, hanging limp and forgotten, and his eyes were only for Thor. "There might be hope for you yet."

~to be continued...

Author's notes: So Thor and Loki come face to face at last. Hopefully, this conversation will involve fewer hurricanes and fireballs than the last one.

Haustmánuður is one of the month names from the Old Norse calendar; they actually have the same number of days as our calendar, but I saw no reason why Asgard would have the same month length seeing as they don't have the same lunar cycle. And yes, before you take the trouble of firing up google, I made Loki a Scorpio.