It was evening. Thor was making his way to Loki's room. His brother had finally graduated from the healing quarters. Loki remained under constant supervision, and as part of his reorientation treatment, his family and old friends kept him company as much as possible. Progress had slowed, however, and Eir had had to revise her initial assessment of Loki's sanity. Loki spoke more easily, stood and walked when asked to, and ate normally if reminded now, but he remained lost to his inner world much of the time, only rarely and randomly taking much of an interest in what was said to him. When he did initiate a conversation, it was very confusing because he tended to jumble up bits of memory with the here-and-now as well as hallucinations and hypothetical scenarios which were frequently bizarre.

Loki had also recently rediscovered his magic, which was proving a dangerous distraction to all concerned and was one of the main reasons Eir decided he had to move away from other patients. Loki had set his bed on fire twice before the move and twice since, presumably accidentally. He performed other spells randomly and at odd times, seemingly whenever he remembered them. Beyond that, there was no knowing when an illusion might pop up, and while many of these merely caused the viewer vertigo and nausea with the symphony of patterns and sounds, some of them were outright terrifying. More recently, he had started using illusions in an apparent effort to get his point across in their confusing conversations, to help others to see the world the way he did, and it made things far worse. The first time was after Thor had spilled hot tea on his hand. Loki had spent the next hour trying to explain why he thought it dangerous to pour near-boiling tea out of a pot and into a cup under any circumstances. (Apparently, there might be defects in the cup invisible to the eye, or else the cup didn't exist even if the tea did, Thor wasn't actually sure). Odin tried to reassure him by pouring the tea over and over again, dumping it back into the pot several times in order to redemonstrate. Loki remained unconvinced however and contended he now didn't think Odin was real either, as evidenced by the fact he had poured tea so many times and remained undamaged, unlike Thor. Thor pointed out that the tea was doubtless cold by now anyways. When Loki swiveled around to stare at it, he declared that was unlikely, as he could clearly see the steam, and moreover, the whole table was on fire. Odin pointed out that since not everyone could see what Loki did, and Loki could not control the agency of others, he could safely conclude that independent persons did in fact exist, that the tea had gotten cold, and that it was safe to pour and even drink. Loki immediately countered the argument by unconsciously setting an illusion of steaming tea and a burning table. When Odin said illusions didn't override the truth, the table actually caught fire, and the teapot indeed exploded, showering everyone with hot tea and broken glass. Unfortunately, Loki viewed this as supporting evidence for his interpretation, rather than the other way around.

When Thor arrived today, it was to a vision of ten different Lokis of various ages talking to ten different versions of Thor. It was chattering chaos. Two childlike illusions of the brothers ran about the room, screaming enthusiastically. They ran straight through the real Thor, a tingle of magic momentarily numbing his legs and waist. Thor looked around the room and finally located Fandral clutching onto one oblivious Loki in the corner, with his eyes squeezed shut. Poor Fandral had never been fond of magic and had only agreed to be one of Loki's solo minders today for old time's sake. Thor moved towards them, wading through the many illusions which paid him no mind and continued in their cacophony.

To Thor's surprise, he found one of his doppelgangers was actually already trying to convince Loki to drop the illusions. "Brother, as I said, your magic is causing much consternation for Fandral."

"What magic? I'm not doing anything. At least, I don't think I am." Thor paused. The situation seemed even odder than anticipated.

"You are. These are illusions."

"Listen to it," Fandral begged with a groan.

"Illusions?" Without warning, a nest of serpents appeared at their feet and vanished, quickly replaced by another Loki and Thor pair: Loki, who appeared no older than eight, was attempting to stab Thor with a tiny dagger, and both were laughing uncontrollably. Loki watched them go with a smile. "These are memories."

"Yes, but you're making them visible to others."

"Or else there are others in my head where they aren't supposed to be. Or else there aren't any others. If they are illusions, you might be an illusion too."

"That is an illusion, Loki," Fandral moaned. "They all are. I'm the only one here besides you that isn't."

Thor figured at that point he really did have to step in and try to correct the situation. "Actually, Fandral, I'm real too. I just got here."

"Fjandinn. Another one."

"No, really, it's me."

Fandral looked up at him then, his expression a mixture of hope, confusion, and frustrated despair. He giggled. "He's making me go crazy too. I just can't tell anymore. Maybe it's real, maybe it's not. Lokiiii," he whined, "stop making more Thors."

"I'm not," Loki said irritably as one of the Thors wandered over and started talking to him about what kind of presents they might expect for their upcoming Nameday celebrations. Loki was instantly distracted by this, unfortunately.

"Fandral, how did this get started?" Thor asked, sitting down across from then.

"It doesn't matter how it started. Just stop it!" Fandral exploded. "Norns, I can't even go get help, because I'd never figure out which one was you again."

"Fandral, I am the real Thor," he said soothingly. "Help has arrived."

"Wait, really?" Fandral looked at him again with wide eyes.

"Yes."

"Oh, thank the Allfather. This has been a nightmare."

"Loki, you have to stop the illusions," the other Thor implored again from the side. "Look, the real Thor is here to help now."

"What?" Loki asked.

"Loki, I'm your brother. I'm real. The rest of these are illusions."

Loki studied him. "That's a pretty bold assertion."

"Can't you tell what is your magic and what is not?"

"Not really. Half of them look like illusions, but half of them look real."

"Really? That's odd. How about this one?" He gestured to the Thor next to him that had been trying to help Fandral.

"That one looks like an illusion. It keeps telling me to stop the magic, but then that one keeps arguing with it." He pointed to the empty space between him and the real Thor. As Thor stared, another illusion of Loki popped into existence, evidently mid-sentence in arguing that everything that was divined through the senses was pure deceit.

"Ah. I think that explains it, at least in part. Loki, try dissipating all the illusions you see."

Loki shrugged. All the illusory brothers suddenly vanished. Fandral breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed his death-grip on Loki's arm. Loki looked around, then back at Thor. "It didn't work."

"Yes, it did. If you're still seeing some of them, they're just in your mind now. Fandral and I can't see them anymore."

Loki cocked his head to one side. "How about you?"

"How about me what?"

"You said you're real. How can I tell? That one says he's real too."

Without thinking, Thor looked around to see where he was pointing, and an angry version of himself suddenly appeared, shouting at Loki to acknowledge him.

"That's how it got started," Fandral informed him. "I was trying to figure out who he was talking to and what he was talking about, and rather than explain it, he started making his hallucinations visible."

"Oh. Loki, let go of your magic. That one is imaginary, and now an illusion. You can turn it off, and you can even make it stop talking if you imagine it." The illusory Thor did indeed stop shouting, suddenly freezing in space before winking out.

Loki shuddered. "It's really hard, Thor. There's a lot of them, and there's nothing that gives it away..." His head jerked to the side. "Yes, thank you, I have considered that but it didn't work. Please stop talking if you don't have anything more helpful."

Thor offered a hand, and Loki took it after a brief hesitation. "I'm the real one, Loki. Your one and only Thor. You can't turn me off, and you can't stop me from trying to help you just by wishing for it."

Loki stared at him for an uncomfortably long time before smiling broadly and shrugging. "Very well, I agree you are real. The others aren't."

Fandral looked at him in astonishment. "Really? Just like that?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I was trying to, in his words, 'turn him off.' It didn't work. Now, that still does not amount to definitive proof that he is in fact Thor, my worldly brother and not the creation of some ulterior thought, but... It does seem to cause a lot of distress to you all when I openly question you, and I would rather not spend the evening watching you trying to keep from weeping, Thor. Even if you are not real, it appears beyond my power to disperse your existence, and I see no reason to keep trying. You are a pleasant fantasy to keep. In fact, you can be my lodestone, my measure of reality. What you can see and feel/ I will take to be real." He sang the last part, then immediately started humming variations of the melody to himself while picking at the embroidery on Thor's sleeve.

Thor was speechless for a moment. On the one hand, it was disheartening that Loki had only agreed to believe in him as part of a logical wager. On the other, this was the first time since Loki's return that he had expressed any kind of affection for his family.

"Alright, I think that's my cue to leave," Fandral said, climbing to his feet with a groan of stiffness. "You two hug it out." He walked from the room.

Loki looked at Thor. "Don't hug me."

"I won't. I know you don't like other people manhandling you. But... you could hug me?"

Loki's head cocked to the side. "Why do you ask for it? I do not understand your desire for physical affection." He sounded genuinely curious.

"I, well, people just like feeling close to the ones they love," Thor explained uncomfortably. "You used to like hugs, at least I thought you did."

Loki pursed his lips. "You may be right. I think I have many memories which would support that."

"What don't you like about them now?"

Loki grinned, but his smile was less jubilant than helplessly amused, as if the answer should be obvious to anyone. "It's just... terribly invasive. My form is mine. It is subservient to my thought... I do not mind touch. The senses are after all simply the way my form interacts with space, and touch is an important part of that interaction. I no more mind touching you than seeing you, for instance. More than a touch though..." He shuddered. "More than a touch is a force that steals my form from my thought and moves it to a will other than mine."

"Oh..." So much of Loki's earlier behavior suddenly made a kind of warped sense. "That's actually kind of the point." Loki's mouth fell open in surprise. "Physically interacting with other people can show closeness much more effectively than words. A hug does put you at the mercy of the other person, so you have to like and trust the person you're hugging to enjoy it. It's a mutual encounter, though. You are being moved, but you are also moving the other person. It's meant as a meeting, not an invasion."

"Interesting perspective," Loki said after a time. Another few seconds passed, then he leaned over and gingerly wrapped his arms around Thor. He flinched only a little when Thor looseley returned his embrace. The hug was awkward and short, but Thor loved it.

The silence was rather uncomfortable when they were separated.

"So... how is it you can make all those illusions and not even realize you're doing it?" Thor asked to change the subject.

Loki shrugged. "I just do. That's not new, as far as I know. I can see the magic, but I can't always tell whose it is. And at least for now, I haven't figured out how to reliably distinguish real from imaginary, as you saw. My imagination is very convincing. And it seems all the more real when others can see it too."

"Loki has always been a master of unconscious illusions," Frigga's voice carried over to them from the doorway. She walked over to them, kissed Loki's raven hair, then took a seat in one of the soft green armchairs next to them. "He started crafting them as an infant, one of his many extraordinary magical talents," the Allmother finished smugly.

Thor was very confused then. "If that's so, why didn't I know that? Why haven't I seen it before?"

"You've seen it every day you've known me, Thor," Loki said with some amusement. Without warning, the pale skin of his face darkened into a glacial blue color with thin white lines tracing elegant designs around his suddenly crimson eyes. It was the terrifying face of a Jotun. The vision was gone almost as soon as it came.

Thor felt a pounding in his chest and sweat on his palms, and realized with a shock that he was unnerved by, even afraid of his brother's true form. He had just never thought about it, not really. Had never stopped in all this time to reconsider his opinion of the race he had known for two years was his brother's heritage...

"Loki?" Both brothers turned towards the door to see their parents both standing at the entrance to the chamber, eyes wide and staring at them.

Thor looked between the Frigga at the door and the Frigga sitting serenely in the chair and started giggling. He nudged Loki. "That's the real one," he said, pointing to the door. "That's an illusion. Please turn it off." Loki smiled, and the image of Frigga vanished from the chair.

"Hello, mother, Allfather," Loki said calmly. Frigga kissed her sons just as the illusion had before settling easily into the vacated chair. Odin slowly made his way over to them, nodding to them both before settling uncomfortably into the other chair.

"Loki. How are you today, my son?" Odin rumbled.

"Fair."

"So..." Thor ventured after a breath, "I guess you do remember finding out about... that."

"That I am adopted from Jotunheim? Yes, of course I remember it. It was not so long ago, judging by your looks. You certainly haven't aged much since then."

"No... It was right before you... fell."

Loki was quiet for a moment, then, "I remember."

"Are you still angry, brother?"

"About what?"

"About... ahhh... I don't actually know, everything, I guess. We never had the chance really to talk about it, before. But you were so, so angry"

Loki shrugged. "I have memories of being very angry at all of you, for many reasons. From the time I learned my true identity, but also from other times which must be centuries apart, judging by your height and hair over the ages. I have many, many more memories of feeling love and respect for you, though. I think the latter outweigh the former."

"I would have expected you to be angry as well, Loki," Odin said with some concern. "Even as you are now. In a way, you should be angry. Although we love and care for you, you have been wronged, and we have done nothing to address it since you have returned, because of your serious injury."

"Do you want me to be angry?"

Odin smiled. "A little. It would be normal, and more than anything I want you to be well enough to go back to a normal life, well enough to be angry when you should, though I wouldn't want you to be angry with me forever, obviously."

Loki closed his eyes, brow furrowed. "I do not know if I can explain this, but I will try. I remember fighting on Jotunheim and the feeling of shock of not freezing when a Frost Giant touched me." His voice gained a poetic cadence as he spoke, before he actually started softly singing,

"I remember dark surprise speaking to you

in the Vault that felt like a sepulchre.

I remember castigating Jotunheim

to blot away my ne'er desired ancestor,

and I remember Thor stopping me.

I remember feeling that I was the inverse of myself,

and I remember falling into the abyss

with that thought chiefly in my mind.

I remember wishing to talk of this

so that you could tell me it didn't matter.

I remember both blessing and cursing

the Odinsleep that prevented any dialogue.

I remember feeling betrayed, untrusting, and unworthy of trusting.

I remember being hurt."

He reverted to normal conversation, "On the other hand, from what I can recall, all of that occurred in a matter of days. I recall a thousand thousand days in which I was loved and trusted by you, Mother, and Thor. A thousand thousand days in which I was not betrayed by my family and friends. I recall all these days with equal weight. I also recall a point when the only intelligible thought I had, Father, was that I exist. I did not even have the words to articulate that thought, and yet that thought still feels momentous, with more portent than any other logic or any mere shadow-memory I have. All these other concerns you bring to me right now...they are small in comparison."

Slowly, Odin nodded, watching him. "I think I understand. For us, the wound of losing you is raw and now reopened by your return. Your mother and I are filled with a need to redress the hurt we have done you. For you, though, this has been swallowed by everything else that has happened, which none of us understand as yet. There is no comparison, and you have a new context and different perspective now than you did then." He smiled then. "Your needs come first, Loki. I will certainly not push you to fixate on what bothers me. I think at some point, with luck, we will have another conversation about this when you are more healed. For now, though, I will content myself with showering you with love. Now, what did you boys do today?"

Loki winked at Thor. "We hugged."

Odin beamed at them. Frigga almost looked that she might cry.

Author's note: Yay! A two-fer! See, I care... and I expect double the reviews in return, lol.

Anyways, I read an interesting article in the Scientific American last year about the spectrum of sensation and hallucination. The signals the brain receives from the eyes, ears, and skin are raw data points, and incomplete because they are discrete signals generated to reflect a nondiscrete reality. The brain's interpretation of this information is a game of averages and guesswork, filling in the missing data with pattern matching. Thus to a degree, everything you think you observe with the senses is at least a little bit hallucinatory. The best known example of this is the natural blind spot: there's a point in both eyes with no photoreceptors, because that's where the optic nerve itself enters the back of the eyeball. You never notice it with both eyes open, because the eyes are oriented in such a degree that the one will compensate the blind spot of the other. You only notice it with one eye closed, however, when using one of the tools so popular in books about optical illusions, where you can "make" a pattern or a spot that stands in contrast with the background "disappear" simply holding the image at different distances from your face: once the break in the pattern falls fully within the blind spot, the brain just fills in the background pattern instead to complete what it cannot see. This is just the one, obvious example though. There are a lot of steps the brain must take in order to interpret what it detects. There is sensory summation in space (where?) and also in kind (what?). Damage to the parts of the brain responsible for this tertiary association will leave people unable to comprehend certain aspects of the world and can famously produce bizarre visual distortions like "Alice in Wonderland" syndrome where things appear too big or too small, or "Capgras syndrome" where people labor under the delusion that their loved ones have been replaced by identical imposters. Failures of association are hypothesized to underlie both disorders of some sensory disorders (like "visual snow syndrome," possibly due to noticing the incompleteness too much, like a glitch in the matrix) and the hallucinations and delusions in psychosis as well, with emotional/imaginary information being associated incorrectly along with real sensory data. For Loki, the issue is that his imagined/internal world has become too robust and therefore competitive with the real world when it comes to interpretation. It's doubly difficult because with his magic, he can in fact make his hallucinations seem real to the senses as well. The laws of the mind and the laws of spacetime have collided, and logic is failing to sort them out.

Which brings us to the acceptance, "on faith" if you will, that the real Thor is, in fact, real. This is a variation of Pascal's wager. The original wager argues that you might as well believe in God because if he doesn't exist, the consequences and benefits of belief or disbelief are essentially nil, while if he does exist, and you don't believe, then the consequences are essentially infinite (eternal torment), and likewise infinite are the benefits of believing (eternal paradise). Thus, it's actually stupidly risky not to believe in God. Loki's wager is not quite so dire, but follows a similar logic. The benefits of believing Thor is real are considerable (having a brother), while the consequences of arguing with a real life Thor are quite disagreeable (Thor blubbering and generally being a bother). If it's all an illusion, then it doesn't matter if he at leasts pretends to believe... As a side note, the Christian theologians generally agree that while it is possible to logic-up reasons to believe in God, these don't actually equate to true faith, which is only granted by the mystical grace of God. ;)