21.
On his mother's adamant insistence that he not rush off and potentially make anything worse by his hasty intervention Thor did nothing but keep inside and fret for the entirety of the evening. He paced the rooms, fists clenched until the muscles screamed, while his parents glared at one another in icy silence. He watched the day turn to dark outside the window and felt that dark terrorize his heart. He thought only of how Loki never looked where he was going when he was driving in the daylight – what chance did he ever have angry and at night? As if to mock his horrible gut wrenching sense of foreboding the rain began, hammering right on the edge of his fear and making it only always a hundred times worse.
In all of this it never once occurred to him to wonder if anything between them had changed in light of this ill-timed, ill-delivered announcement. He wanted Loki back more than ever because he knew they would have to talk about it, not wanting to repeat his mother's mistake of assuming that because it made no change to him or to her it would be the same for Loki. He simply and only wanted to see his brother safe and beside him and to do all he could to make it better.
As the night wore on and Loki still did not reappear, Thor's concerns that he was not alright turned into frantic burning certainties. At midnight he screamed at his father like the teenager he had never quite been at the time, when Odin told him to stop worrying and go to bed.
And then, for lack of knowing what else to do, he went to his room after all. Sleep was impossible, of course. He paced the room like a restless tiger, his heart horribly half expecting the relief of green light illuminating the window at any moment and his brain angrily stomping down upon that painful hope.
Nevertheless, he left the window open and was glad that he had when, at almost two in the morning a rock fell on the carpet with the scribbled note attached –
Outside. Come down by the window.
Loki's handwriting. He almost fell down the wall in his hurry, remembering with a jolt how Loki had always goaded him to try this and his implications that he would not manage.
His eyes searched the dark and he was sure that, even in the rain, anyone for miles around could have picked him out by his heartbeat. Then he saw it; a gentle green glow in the woods to the side of the lawn. He hurried through the shadows like a thief.
When he finally made Loki's shape out amongst the other shadows his relief was so immense that at first he did not see the look on his face; the wide staring shock in his eyes, did not notice until he crushed him into his arms and felt him as stiff and motionless as a rock.
"Loki?" he whispered, not sure why he was whispering, why indeed all the secrecy but whispering by instinct all the same – "Loki what is it? What's wrong?" Now, in the faint lights that penetrated down from the mansions into the woods he could make out the more than usual whiteness of Loki's face, the faraway look in his eyes.
"Thor –" Loki said slowly, as though he was coming out of a dream, looking up to him with a slowly connecting stare – "Thor I didn't mean to – it was an accident I swear – she ran out in front of me –"
"Loki –" Thor shook his head – "What are you talking about?"
Loki's eyes reached for Thor, lights in this darkness in which he seemed so much to be drowning;
"I have killed someone –" having said it he quite startlingly laughed – "You always said I would –"
"What? Loki I don't care – it was only you I worried for, nobody else –"
"I suspect the police will see it differently. Thor I didn't even stop. I'd gone on too far before I even knew what happened, she just ran out into the street, Wilson's wife – she –"
He took a deep breath, talking very fast –
"I dumped the car, on the other side of the ash heaps, and I buried it, I was walking back when I heard them talking – everyone was down in the valley – the police – and I saw Wilson on his own, he was muttering that he'd seen the car, that he only knew one person had a car like that. I followed him back to the garage, saw him taking out the gun and I – he was so easy to kill, I never guessed it would be so easy – I –" the frantic whisper bit off, Loki stared down at his hands that shook so even Thor could see. Thor crushed down any shook that he felt at what Loki ad told him and took the trembling hands in his own to still them.
"Loki – Loki it's alright, it will be alright – if he was going to kill you –"
Loki gave a short bark of a laugh –
"Kill me? Do you think it would have been so easy to do it to save myself? Thor he was going to kill you. It's your car – or it was – " he frowned – "I'm sorry –"
Thor snorted in disbelief –
"You're sorry about the car? Loki I don't give a damn about it, I've told you. Just tell me what I can do."
Loki nodded, he had thought this through the whole walk home in the rain –
"They'll still come here, even with Wilson gone – well they won't ever trace that – only a matter of time before the drunk fell down his own ladder and broke his neck – but they'll find the car and come here and when they do I can't be here. You'll be fine – your father –" Thor winced at how bitterly Loki said those two words – "Will waste no time telling them it was me, and by then I'll be gone – I think – I think I could be good at not being found."
"Gone?" Thor echoed – "Gone where? For how long, what will you do?" Loki shook his head –
"I don't know yet, I don't – and it's best you don't either. Perhaps – perhaps this is even for the best."
"For the best? Loki what will you do? And what will I do every day, wondering where you are?"
"It's not your concern –"
"Not my concern? Loki you're my brother and –"
"I'm not your brother –" Loki spat, hissing, and though Thor had known he would say it, it hurt so much more than he had prepared himself for – "I'm not your anything –"
"Loki, you're my everything." Loki looked at him dully, eyes narrowed somewhere between cruel and dead –
"Get a new everything," he hissed, flatly – "I mean it, Thor. I spent my whole life afraid I was nothing- how many people get it proven to them that they really are?"
"Loki no – please –"
"Thor for god's sake, don't cry. Do you think I'd kill for you just so you could waste your life over me? You can have better, you always could."
"I don't want better Loki, I just – let me come with you, I cannot just sit here and wait –"
"Then don't wait. Because I won't be coming back. Here –" Loki pushed something into Thor's hand – "So you don't spend every night watching the window."
Thor looked down, saw Loki's torch in his hand, the torch that he had had since Thor could remember. His heart tasted foul in his mouth and he shoved it into the pocket of the bag Loki carried with him when Loki would not take it back.
"If I do not have that hope –" he floundered, unaware even of who he would be without it.
"Fine" Loki sighed, almost snapped – "Much good may it do you." He blinked furiously, so that even Thor could see what he was trying to do, trying to convince himself, trying to truly feel – "I have to go now."
Thor reached out his arms but Loki backed away so intently that all he could do was curl a fierce hand around his neck, where he felt the imprint of his fingers must be burned in from years of stroking at that same spot.
"You are my brother Loki, always, nothing even you can say will change that." Loki sighed but he turned his face into Thor's palm with the ghost of a kiss on his lips before he pulled himself away with a wrench.
He looked over his shoulder just once before Thor lost him to the shadow of the trees, and that look and that not quite kiss would have to be enough, Thor decided, to keep him going for as long as they had to.
-x-
Poor Myrtle Wilson! Destined to do little more than run out in the road in front of a big yellow car in every possible universe! And now Loki's gone forever….is he? Would there really be another chapter if he was? :-)