6. Felicity
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Thor supposed it would have been asking a great deal to expect Loki to resist the opportunity.
He had, after all, not seen his brother in so long that the edges of his memory had become polished with handling, his habitual sly smile slightly bright and lacking focus in Thor's mind. That would never have prevented him from knowing it at once, of course, but Loki had anticipated this.
His choice of greeting upon coming home from the Elves was to dress himself in the same yellow-gold armour Thor's swordmaster Aðalbrandr was seldom seen without and to lie in wait until he could catch Thor stealing from the armoury larder. Aðalbrandr alone could produce the singularly succulent honey apples that he shared with his pupils only one at a time and once in a great while as a reward for being the best and most attentive student in the ring.
Thor had received this honour very seldom indeed, and felt himself ill used enough that theft was justified. He was, as was his habit on the rare days when he knew the apples had been prepared, soon to be found creeping his way toward the cupboard where they were kept and lifting one silently to his lips.
"And what might you be doing, O great princeling Odinson? Wise enough to overturn the judgement of your elders and your teachers so soon? Perhaps I should inform your father the king that you think yourself ready to take his throne from him!"
Whirling toward the source of the shouting, Thor tried to swallow half an apple without choking and smile innocently at the same moment. His heavy brows lowered in confusion as he wondered how his teacher could have outflanked him. Surely he had left him on the other side of the exercise yard?
A flawless mimic of old and now equipped with something nearer a man's range of vocal pitch rather than a boy's, Loki's tirade fooled Thor for the twenty seconds or so it took to spot the familiar armoured silhouette in the dim of the unlit room and to sense that something was slightly amiss with it. He had drawn breath to ask Aðalbrandr to show himself, his hand straying toward a staff leaning against the table behind him, when his confusion was resolved by Loki's insuppressible amusement.
No matter his disguise, Loki could never be anyone but himself when he laughed. He laughed from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair, bending back like a bow and then falling forward to stamp and clutch his sides.
"Brother?" Thor was half convinced the apples had been drugged.
"Did not you miss me, not to know me, you great oaf!" Loki's eyes, no mistaking, sparkling like mountain water as he stepped into the sunlight.
Thor could not contain the smile, nor the roar of greeting, nor the bone-shattering embrace this sudden appearance provoked. Clasping Loki at the shoulders as he'd used to do to steady his slight frame during practise with the heavy wooden broadswords, he fully appreciated that his little brother now stood almost his equal in height and the muscle beneath his hands felt haler and more hearty than it had ever portended to being in childhood. How wonderful it was! He'd begun to fear as a boy that Loki would forever be sickly, destined to the half-life of an invalid.
"So you come scampering back in disguise, finally so bored by all that magic and learning that you could do nothing but escape." He pounded Loki's shoulder in his enthusiasm. "I knew the day would come!"
Slightly staggered by the blows and giving Thor a look of fond exasperation, Loki threaded a guiding arm around his brother's back and turned their steps toward the palace gardens. "It would bode better for the good of Asgard if it were occasionally I who had escaped my schoolroom. Sadly, you have all that sort of adventure taken for yourself."
"And the lies begin," Thor crowed, "or have you forgotten that you became a genius of diversion and retreat but no statesman in old Egill's lectures on statecraft?"
"I deny everything except my genius."
Laughing in pleasure, Thor squeezed the shoulder where his hand still rested. "I missed you every day, brother."
"I have no doubt that you did," Loki said, "you must have found it dreadfully difficult doing your own sums and filching Mother's pastries without an accomplice."
"I employed the direct approach, as a warrior ought; I took them in a single glorious charge and was prepared to face my doom if caught."
Loki snorted. "And it works most excellently until the day one's doom isn't begging an indulgent parent for forgiveness. The art of subtlety is frightfully useful, I would have you know. One day, Thor, you will wish you had listened more to me."
"There is listening and there is heeding," Thor reminded, enjoying the well-trodden debate. His brother's novel notions had not yet ceased to amuse him. "A prince must take his own counsel."
"I, too, am a prince: I can bear the burden of forethought and choice-making for you and leave your first-born's time free to pursue more important matters. Like ill-gotten honey apples and being startled like a young gazelle."
Thor tried to elbow him and they swayed as Loki bent inward to protect his ribs, both chuckling.
"I shouldn't like to see you tax yourself overmuch with troubling thought," Loki said, all exaggerated concern. It was strange for Thor, hearing the impish tones and familiar cadences of Loki's conversation- the music of which he knew as dearly as his own cradle song- in a young man's voice rather than the childish soprano he so well remembered. He imagined Loki must feel the same oddness; although, with Thor being older and quicker-growing, the changes in himself since their parting were less pronounced.
"Have you no love for your elder brother at all?" Thor teased with mock tragedy. Change the superficial though time might, nothing important had been altered. Could be altered.
Loki's lips curled up coyly. "I have every love and no pity."
"How truly you speak. For once." Thor twinkled at his brother, needling him in the side.
"Close your great maw or I'll turn you into a frog."
"Bringing me down to your own natural state?"
Loki glared at him for that one, pulling the borrowed helm from his brow and shaking out his hair. He tossed the helmet behind him, knowing a gardener would discover it afore long. "I still fail to see how she thinks that epithet applies. I ought to have filled her bath with the creatures."
"I am shocked to learn you never did." Thor pulled away from their companionable walk to stretch his arms out and turn his face up to the bright sun of the afternoon. "I was certain I had only failed to hear of it because the threat of Sif's wrath ensured a dearth of gossip."
"The thought occurred," Loki admitted, looking somewhat wistful. "I could manage it easily now, my skill is so expanded by my studies that to conjure thousands of wriggling things even from the aether would be a mere trifle. You cannot imagine it, Thor!"
Even in his glee to see his brother, Thor's interest flagged upon the turn of the subject to magical study. "Indeed?"
Loki shot him a look, knowing him well. "You recall I was always best with knives and bow? Now I can conjure ammunition as quick as I can throw it. I need carry no belts of daggers and no quiver. I should not think it will be long until I need no bow."
"Truly?" Thor's excitement returned somewhat. Ranged combat was the least glorious engagement in battle, but he had been proud to see his brother best all others at any kind of weaponry. With this advantage, Loki would remain forever unsurpassed.
Loki smiled wryly. "Have I ever lied to you, brother?"
"A question I feel certain you do not wish me to answer."
A well-placed kick to the back of his knee nearly succeeded in tripping Thor, and he roared a battle cry as he leapt to tackle Loki to the ground in retaliation. Just as his arms were about to close around Loki's torso and pull him into the attack's momentum, his brother was abruptly no longer there. With nothing to grab but thin air, Thor fell so awkwardly that he was barely able to roll up into a crouch. Casting about him in utter shock, he caught sight of Loki standing a small distance off: laughing again.
"Brother! What in the Nine Realms-?" He jogged over and grabbed at Loki's flailing arm, trying to shake him out of his mirth. "Loki!"
Struggling to breathe, Loki couldn't seem to look at Thor without bursting into guffaws, so he turned away. "You should have seen your face, brother! You looked so outraged!" He hiccuped and failed to swallow a fit of giggles.
His patience thinning as his astonishment gave way to irritated confusion, Thor just growled.
"It is a simple illusion, Thor," Loki finally managed, wiping his eyes and grinning unrepentantly, "I make myself not where I was when my presence was last confirmed by the subject and project an insubstantial image where I want my position presumed to be. It's essentially no more than a sleight of hand, a trick of the light."
Sifting the unnecessarily convoluted wording of that explanation, Thor shook his head. "You mustn't do that to me again, brother. I found it most unnerving."
Loki waved his hand dismissively. "It is nothing to unnerve you."
"Nevertheless, you must not practise it on me. Save it for Sif and the others," Thor commanded grumpily. He opted to magnanimously ignore Loki's poorly concealed delight in his discomfort.
"Unblessed as I am, Thor, would you not agree that I need every advantage my little gifts can give me?"
Suspecting some unsavoury undercurrent in that and loath to so soon reopen their frequently infuriating discussion about what were honourable tactics in battle, Thor just eyed Loki's guileless expression mildly. A small silence passed.
Suddenly, Loki laughed and slapped his back. "You are too serious, brother. Let us go and see what can be pilfered from the kitchen that is clearly meant for other mouths. It's been a giant's age since I had any amusement not at your expense."
Frowning to show more lingering disapproval of Loki's latest little joke than he could truly feel in such a moment of felicity as this reunion, Thor followed.
They climbed the winding stone steps which zigzagged across the terraces at the rear of the palace, the walkways carefully cut through the landscape to avoid spoiling the vistas of the smooth geometric patterns formed by the gardens and practise fields that filled the highest habitable cliffs in Asgard. The innermost courtyards were cobbled, and their boots rang pleasantly as they neared the stables. The familiar sound made Thor wonder what comforts other worlds lacked.
"Are Elves very strange to live with, brother?"
"Oh, very."
"Did you have no companions to make sport with, then?"
"Elves frown on sport."
Thor grinned. "Is that so?"
Loki grinned back, a devious light in his eyes. "So very much. I had to be quite cautious so as not to perturb them unduly."
"You are terribly conscientious of such things, brother."
"Of course I am," Loki said self-importantly, "everyone knows I am the last bastion of good breeding in this family."
"I shall remind Father of it so you may be rewarded for your example."
"So cruel you are to me."
"What wages a man earns, he cannot call unjust payment."
Loki slung an arm around Thor's neck, whispering conspiratorially, "Then you concede that you are owed every perturbation I can conceive of for you. For surely, you recall the slant of the tally when we parted ways? You joined forces with the Lady Disdain, do not think that I have forgotten it, and it was a most foul treason to your own blood."
"Brother, I fear not the worst rain of your vengeance upon me, so absolute is my confidence in your tiresome inclination to unwarranted temperance."
"Such valour."
Thor just grinned again, challengingly. It was so good to have his brother back.