Chapter 1 - Last Meal
"I know you haven't been eating," Thor told his brother. "Is there a reason for this state of affairs?" Thor knew that Loki was only pretending not to hear him, just as he was pretending to read the book that lay open in his lap.
According to the report he had received from one of the kitchen maids, Loki had eaten nothing in the week since they had returned from Midgard. At the time, Thor had told himself that his brother simply needed time to adjust to his new circumstances. Two weeks later, the same maid confirmed that Loki's meals were still being returned to the kitchen untouched.
He now felt justified in going to check up on Loki in his cell, despite not-so subtle hints from Odin that it was not necessary for him to worry over a prisoner, and that he would prefer it if Thor stop gossiping with the kitchen maids. Loki might be a prisoner, but he was still Thor's brother, and he could not help but be concerned if Loki were determined to starve himself.
Loki seemed not to care for his concern. Thor watched as his brother continued to pretend to read. He was proud of himself for noticing how his brother's eyes did not scan the page as they should; it meant he was getting better at recognizing his brother's deceptions. "Is there nothing you will eat?" Thor tried. "Tell me what you want, and I shall get it for you, so long as you promise to eat it."
Loki's eyes finally lifted from the pages of his book, and he stared blandly at Thor as if he were some anomaly that ought not to be there, but not one he particularly cared about. Then his mouth moved, but alarmingly, no sound came out, and Thor worried that his brother, after only three weeks of isolation, had forgotten how to speak.
Even more strangely, a moment later, he heard his brother's voice, but the words did not match up to the movements of his mouth. "Fine—I want a chocolate eclair," it said.
Thor's head snapped towards the other end of the cell as the illusion that he had been attempting to speak to for the past twenty minutes dissipated. The real Loki sat perched on the edge of his bed, looking at Thor with a mixture of disdain and pity, an expression he usually reserved for people he found egregiously, hopelessly stupid.
"A chocolate eclair," Loki repeated. "Get me one, and I'll eat it."
"A what?" Thor asked. He did not know what an eclair was, but it sounded like something with too much sugar in it. Asgardian warriors were not supposed to enjoy such things, but he knew his brother to have a sweet tooth to rival that of a small child, or an elf. Perhaps an eclair was some sort of Elvish treat?
"It is a pastry they have on Midgard," Loki explained, rolling his eyes. "You know, Midgard—that realm you like so much now, where that woman lives."
It took a few seconds for his brother's words to make sense, but when they did, Thor bit his own tongue to keep from spitting every obscenity in his vocabulary at his brother, who, for all he knew, was suffering from some strange malady.
When entering the cell, he had looked for signs of weakness or illness in Loki, and had been reassured by what he had seen, but of course now, he realized he had been assessing the wellbeing of an illusion. That illusion might not have acknowledged his presence, but there was nothing odd about that. The way in which it had not deigned look up from its book, even when Thor spoke to him in greeting, felt almost like a tableau from Thor and Loki's youth. It had seemed hale enough. A little pale, and the overly bright lights of the prison cell had done no favors, but that was Loki's natural coloring. (It isn't, a small voice whispered in the back of his mind, but Thor ignored it as pointedly as Illusion Loki had ignored him earlier.)
Thor now found himself faced with the real Loki, and noticed a hollowness to brother's cheeks that had not been there before. Loki had always been thin, but he had never looked so gaunt as he did now. Seeing the dark circles under his brother's eyes, he wondered if Loki had eaten with any consistency at all in the past year. He did not like to think about it, but no one knew where he had been for most of that time.
His brother seemed small and broken to him, and he had to forgive him for hiding behind an illusion—Thor was certain he would have wanted to hide as well if he looked like that. He decided that he would do almost anything to fix Loki's brokenness, and see him looking like himself again. But what Loki had asked for was impossible, and unless his brother had lost all his reason, he knew that. "You want me to go to Midgard to get you a pastry, when the Bifrost is still in disrepair?"
"And whose fault is that?" asked Loki.
Thor felt the muscles in his neck and shoulders tense at the accusation. True, Thor had been the one to destroy the Bifrost, but Loki's actions had forced his hand, and surely he understood that. Why did Loki always have to make everything so difficult?
Thor knew why, of course. Everything between them always had to be a competition, and as Sif had once put it, usually the competition was to see which one of them could be the biggest braying ass.
Thor did not wish to compete with his brother anymore, but he could not back down, the stakes being what they were. He doubled down on his conviction to fix his brother whether his brother wanted to be fixed or not. Perhaps Loki's request was not impossible after all. There was one way, at least, to get to Midgard without the Bifrost. "I will get you your eclair," Thor decided, "but I want you to eat more than that. You can have your pastry for dessert. What else do you want?"
Loki tilted his head to the side and considered Thor as he might a three headed calf. Then he grinned the way he did when he thought he was about to be clever. "Alright, then," he said airily. "I'll have bluefin tuna, asparagus with white truffle sauce, oysters Rockefeller, black beluga caviar, and a Yubari melon. Maybe throw in a couple of lobsters."
"And these are all foods found on Midgard?" Thor narrowed his eyes at his little brother, as if that could compel him to admit he meant to send him on a fool's errand.
"Yes, of course." Loki's eyes widened in a parody of youthful innocence, which only reminded Thor of how his brother's time away had seemed to age him, and not in a way that could be considered an improvement. "I wouldn't want you to have to scour the entirety of the nine realms for my supper."
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Thor nodded towards the guards as he strolled casually into Odin's treasure room. The guards nodded back but otherwise did not acknowledge him. He hoped they would not question later why he had been wearing his traveling cloak.
If he was discovered, Odin would not simply banish him to Midgard for a few days this time. Either Thor would be struck dead, or he would be sharing his brother's cell. He could just see Loki drawing a line down the middle of the floor, telling him he had better not cross it unless he wished to be a frog, as he had when they were children sharing a nursery.
Thor took the cylindrical device used to harness the Tesseract's power from below his cloak and scooped the Tesseract into it, knowing he could not hold it in his hand long without ill effects. He doubled back to the entrance of the vault, trying again to exude "casualness." "Everything looks fine here, definitely nothing missing," he told the guards as he passed, giving them a thumbs up. "Good job, guys."
Once out of the guards' line of vision, he scurried towards his own quarters. Perhaps he should not have spoken to the guards at all. Thor had never been talented at the art of deception. In their youth, Loki had done the talking for them whenever they had gotten into mischief, and he had never been forced to learn.
When he got to his quarters, he locked the door behind him, and took a deep breath to steady himself. He needed to run this errand as quickly as possible and return the Tesseract before it was missed.
Traveling via Tesseract felt a bit like being pulled inside out, dropped off the side of a cliff, and subsequently tossed around by a pack of mountain trolls as the rock in a game of "toss the rock around." He could not recall it having been so bad when Loki had been with him. If his brother had not been chained and muzzled at the time, which should have prevented him from accessing his magic, he would have wondered if he had cast a spell to prevent them from becoming ill.
Thor landed and pitched forward onto his hands and knees, onto a surface made of the rough, stone-like material Midgardians made the majority of their structures of. When the fluid in his ears finally stopped sloshing about, he stood, wiping the gravel from his scraped palms with his cloak, and looked up into dusky gray twilight—or perhaps it was dawn, Thor could not be certain, because he could not remember whether the Midgardian sun set in the East or the West, and did not know which direction was which anyway. He recognized the park he and Loki had departed from not so long ago, but failed to recall the route they had taken from Stark's tower to get there.
Luckily, the tower was the tallest building visible from the park, and all he had to do was walk towards it once he had spotted the remaining Roman letter "A" on the side of the building. If Loki had been with him, he could have counted on him to cast a glamor that would allow them to blend in. Thor could not work such magic, so he had to settle for pulling the hood of his cloak over his head. Hopefully it would be enough for him to avoid detection until he arrived at the tower. Even if he were not recognized as one of the heroes who had saved New York from the Chitauri, he feared his Asgardian clothing would draw attention.
To his surprise, no one bothered him. Perhaps his cloak obscured him well enough, but then again, it seemed to be the way of the citizens of the city of New York to ignore anything that ought to have seemed out of place. A man wandered through the middle of the street in nothing but a skintight loincloth and a wide brimmed hat, playing a stringed instrument. No one seemed to notice him, nor did they pay any heed to the artists who had set their canvases out in the street in hopes of selling them, or to the musicians playing at street corners, or to a large furry red creature with giant and dead looking eyes perched atop its head. Thor's first instinct was to throw Mjolnir at the thing, but being more cautious now than he had been in his impetuous youth, he took note of how the humans gave it a wide berth but did not run from it in terror. When he passed closer to it, he realized it was only a mortal in some sort of strange ceremonial dress.
Thor cheered inwardly as he recognized the doors leading to the lobby of Stark's tower and ran the last few feet to push his way through them. Then he stood, at a loss as to what to do. No servants or guards greeted him, as he might expect in the home of a prominent Asgardian. The door had been unlocked, but the lobby of the building was empty, perhaps because it was too late, too early, or the wrong day for Stark's workers to be present. He had no idea if Stark would even be at home, or if the man would be able to receive him—being a prince of sorts in his own realm, he might be too busy. He had told Thor to "drop by" if he were ever in New York again, but the man reminded him of his brother, in that it was difficult to tell when his words were sincere.
"Good evening, Mister Odinson," said a voice from above. Thor jumped before he remembered that the voice belonged to JARVIS. JARVIS was one of Stark's machines, and something like an invisible servant.
"JARVIS," Thor greeted, his eyes shifting from point to point in the room, not sure where he ought to look when speaking to someone invisible. "Is your master at home?"
"Mister Stark and the rest of the Avengers are currently gathered in the common room on residential floor one," said JARVIS. "I will inform them you are on your way up, and if you'll step into the elevator, I will gladly convey you to them." A narrow set of double doors slid open, revealing the small chamber that conveyed one between different floors of the building.
Thor scowled at the elevator, a sense of claustrophobia already setting in. He thought about going back outside, where he could use Mjolnir to hoist himself up to the landing pad, but that might cause him to be seen, or Stark might become annoyed with him. Midgardians were funny when it came to things like entering a building from the door you were expected to enter from, and not from a rooftop or a window.
The elevator felt just as cramped as he remembered, even though he was the only one on it this time, and it seemed to take even longer going up than it had going down. But as soon as he stepped out from it, he saw his Midgardian shield brothers and sister gathered around Stark's bar, and they saw him.
"Thor!" Stark, Romanoff, and Barton cried in unison. Stark began to snicker at what he must have perceived as a fantastic jest. The other two leaned into one another. Romanoff gestured towards Stark with both hands, pointed to her forehead, and ended the gesture by smacking her palm into her hand. Thor could not guess her meaning, but her partner answered her with a small shrug and a quirk of his lips. Thor would have thought the two able to communicate telepathically, were mortals capable of such magic.
The giddy behavior of the three who had greeted him suggested they were well into their cups. Banner and Rogers sat at the other end of the bar, but either they had not had as much to drink as the others, or else the drink had not affected them as much. Neither had drunk much at the impromptu "victory party" Stark had thrown after their battle, Thor recalled.
"Take off your poncho, stay a while," said Stark as he refilled his own glass from the bottle in front of him. "Just had the bar remodeled, so now we're christening it. Had to have someone in to fix the window and that dent in my floor your brother made, so I thought, why not redo the entire penthouse and the floors below it, invite all my cool new super-friends to live with me, rent free. Pep was kinda skeptical at first, but she came around when she realized that more people in the tower meant she didn't have to babysit me herself all the time. You've got a room here too, you ever want to stay. I mean, you're probably busy with the whole space Viking royalty thing, it's cool—hey, you want a drink? We've been drinking whiskey, because that's what's trendy, or so says the hipster crowd. But if you want a beer, there should be some in the mini fridge under the bar, unless Clint drank them all." Tony's babbling made him think of his brother as a small child, whenever some hapless nursemaid had made the mistake of allowing him too many sweets.
He did not remove his traveling cloak, but he did take the vacant seat at the bar between Stark and Romanoff. "I have returned to Midgard for a purpose, my friend. I thought perhaps you could help." Thor took out the parchment on which he had written Loki's full request so that he would not forget it, and handed it to Stark. "Loki told me that these things could be found in your realm."
Stark brought the paper up to his face and narrowed his eyes, as if the print were too small for him, or as if the drink blurred his vision. A moment later, his eyebrows crept upward. "What, no Wagyu beef?"
Romanoff leaned across Thor and grabbed the list from Stark. She read it, and then rolled her eyes. "Please tell me this is for his last meal."
"Last meal?" asked Thor.
"Yeah, you know, before he's executed?" Barton sounded almost hopeful, and Thor had to remind himself that the man had good reason to wish his brother ill. "Usually that's the only time prisoners on Earth are allowed to request anything special." He leaned across Romanoff to get a look at the list himself. "Even then they wouldn't get a meal like the one your brother's requested, though."
"Loki has not eaten since he was admitted to the palace prison," Thor told his friends, hoping they would understand. "That is why I promised him that if he would eat, I would bring him whatever he wished."
"But it's been three months," Banner objected from the other end of the bar. "How could he not eat for three months, and still be alive? A human can only go two or three weeks without food."
"An immortal body can survive for longer without food than a mortal body can, but time also passes differently on Asgard than on Midgard," Thor explained. "For us it has been a bit more than three weeks."
"Wait, seriously?" The glass nearly slipped from Stark's hands, but he caught it. "How does that work, exactly? I'm going to need details."
Thor shook his head. "The principals that govern the passage time in Asgard are quite complicated. While I am far from uneducated, I never devoted myself to scholarly pursuits beyond what Father and my tutors required." Loki would have been able to explain it, of course, were he there.
"I always kind of wondered, but what is Oysters Rockefeller?" Barton asked, before Stark could ask anything more.
Romanoff pulled a slender device from her pocket, and after a series of taps to its screen, she answered Barton's query. "Says here it's baked or broiled oysters, with an herb and breadcrumb topping." She shrugged. "Personally, I like my oysters raw."
"Aren't you only supposed to eat oysters in months ending in 'R?'" asked Barton. "Definitely not in August."
"I feared what he asked for would be difficult to obtain," Thor admitted. In truth, it would not surprise him if every item on the list was impossible to obtain. It would be just like his brother to set him to such a task, for Thor's humiliation and his own amusement.
"Nah." Stark waved off his concern with a lazy sweep of his hand. "Oysters are actually safe to eat all year round now, what with modern oyster farming techniques, the modern supply chain, and whatnot. We can get you everything on that list right here in the city, no problem. Other than that melon. Might take a day or two to get one of those here. Of course, we could just get him a cantaloupe from the convenience store down the street and tell him it's Yubari. Somehow I doubt he'd be able to tell the difference."
At the other end of the bar, the Captain cleared his throat disapprovingly. "Tony, you can't be serious. Loki threw you out of a window. You're really going to help put together some crazy gourmet meal he's requested, just because he's gone on a hunger strike? There have to be other ways of dealing with that. This is clearly just a game to him, if not something more sinister."
"Exactly!" Stark clapped his hands and began rubbing them together in the manner of an archetypal villain one might see in the hackneyed dramas put on for the common folk of Asgard. "It's a game that I'm going to help Thorston here win. Clearly the kid meant to send his brother on a wild goose chase. It's kind of cute, really—I'd love to see Reindeer Game's face when he actually comes back with everything and he has to eat it."
(*^◇^)_旦
Loki stared at the tray his brother had set in front of him. "What is this?" he asked.
"Everything you asked for, except for the eclair, which I have in this bag." Thor held the white paper bag up so his brother could see it. "You may have it when you finish the rest, as we discussed."
Loki glared at him for a while. Then he stared again at the tray, twisted his fingers through hair that was becoming long and unkempt, and began to pull. "What is wrong with you? Why do you care so much whether or not I eat?" Loki screwed his eyes shut, but a moment later, he opened them and poked at a small dish containing a pile of glistening orange cubes. "Is this really Yubari melon? I could have sworn it the wrong season for it, and for the oysters."
"It is my understanding that oysters can be eaten all year round now, due to recent improvements in Midgardian agricultural technology. But you nearly bested me, asking for the melon," said Thor. "Another month and I would not have been able to obtain one. Stark had to have an employee from one of his Japanese 'branch offices' take a bullet train to Hokkaido to pick it up. It then had to be flown to New York on one of Stark's private jets, so as to avoid a 'massive amount of paperwork' and having to deal with something called 'customs.' Stark suggested that we give you a common cantaloupe instead, as he doubted you would know the difference. But you know that I could never cheat you, Brother."
"No, you are disgustingly honest," Loki agreed. "You even just admitted to a crime. What you and Stark did is called 'smuggling,' if you weren't aware." He poked another piece of melon before lifting it hesitantly to his lips as one might a draught of bitter medicine.
Thor watched for any indication that his brother enjoyed the flavor, but he had never been good at reading his brother's expressions. "Is it good?" he asked.
"It's alright, I suppose." Loki's tongue darted out to lick the juice from his fingers, which disturbed Thor a little, as his brother had always been fastidious when it came to manners.
"It ought to be on par with Idunn's apples for how much it cost." Not that Thor had paid for it himself. Stark had refused Thor's gold, claiming that exchanging it for Midgardian money would be a hassle. Still, he understood that what Loki had asked for had not been cheap. He had little understanding of the value of "dollars and cents," but when the Captain had seen the receipt for the melon, he had started babbling about how before the war, a cantaloupe had cost a nickel. Stark had then said that in Cap's day, you probably could have bought a melon farm for the amount he had paid for one piece of fruit, but he did not mind spending money when it was for a good cause. For Stark, "screwing with Thor's brother" was a good cause.
"How do you eat this?" Loki asked, picking up one of the lobsters by its fan-like tail.
"How should I know? You're the one who asked for it." The creature stared back at them with bead-like black eyes that made it seem still alive. It was one of the strangest creatures Thor had encountered in any of the realms, and he had to admire the boldness of mortals, who at some point in their past had first seen the insectoid and judged it to be edible. "Perhaps you ought to try peeling it," Thor suggested.
Loki banged the lobster on the table a couple of times. A crack appeared in its bright red armor, and Loki tore at it with his fingers, then pulled out a small piece of meat, and nibbled it daintily. "This tastes good," Loki said, "but it's an awful lot of trouble."
"Give it to me." Thor wrapped the lobster in a clean napkin, which he placed on the floor. He took Mjolnir from his belt and used it to tap the bundle gently. When he unwrapped the lobster, cracks ran like veins throughout the shell, making it easy to peel back the pieces and obtain the delicate white meat.
"That's a nice trick," said Loki, as his eyebrows crept upward.
Thor shrugged. "I use her to crack chestnuts all the time. She is a hammer, after all."
"Still, I wonder what Fa—Odin would think of you using your birthright that way."
Not wanting to ruin the almost amiable mood, Thor decided he had better not point out Loki's almost-slip of the tongue. He contented himself with watching his brother eat instead, and felt intensely pleased when it became clear that Loki was enjoying the lobster.
"Thor, this is one of the best things I have ever eaten," Loki told him. "Do you want the other one?"
"No, you eat both of them. You promised you would eat it all."
"Yes, but I think you need to try it."
"I can try it the next time I'm in Midgard." While he delighted that his brother was feeling charitable towards him, he wanted Loki to eat as much as possible.
"Suit yourself," said Loki. He gobbled up the rest of the meat from the lobster's tail in a few bites. "Do I have to eat the green part?" he asked, peering into the torso. "I'm not sure if it's meant to be eaten or not."
Thor peered as well into the lobster's chest cavity, and decided that the green goo Loki had referred to didn't look too appetizing. "I believe those are its entrails. You don't have to eat them." Briefly, Thor had considered saying yes, but his primary objective was to get his dangerously thin brother to eat, not to punish him for losing a bet.
He watched his brother pick up a piece of thinly sliced raw tuna and hold it up to see the light shine through the delicate pink meat. "You didn't specify whether you wanted tuna steak or sashimi," Thor explained, "so Stark sent out for both."
"I must thank Stark for this excellent meal someday," Loki quipped. His words carried an undertone of mocking, which was hardly alarming, given his perpetual bad mood and the bitterness that colored everything he said of late. "Did you tell him this was all for me?"
"He thought you meant to send me on a 'wild goose chase,' and that you would be offended if I actually came back with it."
"He thought I just wanted to give you trouble?"
Thor could not help but snort at that. Loki's main goal in life, for the past century at least, seemed to be to give him as much trouble as possible. "You didn't?"
"Perhaps, but these were all things I wanted to try, so I thought I would win either way."
"Ah, but I win as well, because you're eating."
Loki picked up his spoon and prodded one of the oysters with it, as if testing to see if it would snap at him. "Again, I don't understand why you're so concerned. I won't be alive long enough to starve to death."
Thor felt something in his chest contract at his brother's emotionless resignation to what he saw as his likely fate. He put his hands on Loki's shoulders. "Look at me, Little Brother. This is not your 'last meal.' Father will not execute you. Neither Mother nor I would allow it."
Loki stared at him until Thor removed his hands, and then returned to his meal, which he ate in silence, eyes trained on his food. Thor understood he was being ignored again, but so long as his brother ate, he would not push him to talk. When Loki had eaten his last bite of caviar (which had turned out just to be fish eggs, a very strange "delicacy," Thor thought), he put out his hand. "My dessert. Give it here."
Thor handed over the bag with the eclair in it. "I was surprised. Everything else you asked for proved lavish by Midgardian standards, but this is a common treat."
"I know, but I like them."
"So you've eaten them before?"
"I had to eat while I was on Midgard, did I not? I quite enjoyed pizza as well—have you eaten it?"
Thor felt a little relief to hear that Loki had eaten while on Midgard, and that this was not his first meal since his fall from the Bifrost. "No, but I have eaten 'shawarma,'" he said, perhaps because he could not let his little brother think he was the more worldly of them. "If I brought you this pizza, would you eat it?"
Loki took a bite of his eclair and took his time chewing it before answering. "Yes, alright. If you are willing to go all the way to Midgard to get pizza, I will eat it, but get enough so that we can share. I don't actually like eating alone."
╮ (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) ╭
Author's Note:
This story is also being posted on Ao3, under the same account name (Jackaloki).
I got back into reading and writing fanfics over a year ago, but this is the first story I've actually published since then. The first draft is complete, so I'll just be rewriting/editing as I post. I don't want to drag things out too much, so I'm hoping to publish at least a couple of chapters every week until it's complete. At the moment I have 28 chapters, but that could change if I add material or decide that it makes sense to break some of the longer chapters up.
This story begins with the premise that, post-Avengers, Thor would use the Tesseract to go to Midgard to buy his imprisoned younger brother a chocolate eclair. I am well aware that this is is an utterly ridiculous way to begin a story. The first two chapters actually grew out of a deleted scene from another fanfic I had been trying to write. The scene had ended up being, I felt, too silly and didn't fit the tone of the story I was writing.
After struggling to finish the fanfic I had cut the scene from, I decided that as a side project, I would post the deleted scene as a one-shot, mostly because in a year of writing fanfics I had managed to post nothing and it was time for me to post something.
Despite my best intentions, rewriting and editing that one scene devolved into writing another 90,000 words, and it became the first draft of a different novel-length fic. I decided to not take it too seriously, let the story go where it wanted to, and that made all the difference, at least when it came to finishing. I also wrote the entire thing in order and didn't backtrack unless the story started going completely off the rails, which is different from my normal writing process. I wasn't expecting much from it, but I think I actually like what I ended up writing. I had fun, anyway. Probably too much.
Should anyone actually read this story, I would love to get some constructive feedback, because I have been actively trying to improve my writing—but personally, I'm always reluctant to leave criticism even when it's asked for, in case my idea of "constructive criticism" is different from that of the person who asked. I doubt I'm alone in this.
That in mind, I thought that it might be a good idea to ask specific questions in the end notes to each chapter. So to start: Given the opening of this story, what are your expectations for the rest of it? (Where do you think I'm going with this? Where do you want it go? Is there something the story could do, or not do, that would disappoint you?)