Thank you so much for all of your messages and reviews. They truly are what makes me want to continue with this story. I apologise for the time it's taken me to write this chapter! I've got the next one already finished, so it won't be so long a wait again, I promise.

Same warnings as ever; Thor & Loki are a bit less than kin and more than kind.

CHAPTER FIVE

Loki stood with his hands on his hips, winded and damp with perspiration. His chest rose and fall with the drawing of heavy breaths and he wore soft trousers bought by Thor in the rustic marketplace two islands away.

"Are you tired?" Thor asked, smiling and giving one of Loki's thighs a gentle tap with Mjolnir. "Do you yield?"

Loki blew out a sigh and stooped to retrieve the staff he had been given to do battle with. It was no scepter, no great tool possessing of any ancient power or dark deceptive magic. It was merely a hard-carved stick, sharp on one end and weighted on the other, but Thor had forced him to spend such lengths of time sparring with it in recent weeks that Loki now moved as though the object were an extension of his own body.

Gone were the protrusions of bone, the vulgar lines of emaciation softened. Loki was still slender, especially standing alongside Thor, but the beads of his vertebrae no longer jutted from the valley of his spine. His ribs were visible through his skin when he lifted his arms, but the ribcage no longer bore the frightening, hollow prominence of a man near death by starvation. Thor had made certain he ate well and rested well, and it showed in the healthy pink glow across his cheeks, the supple new muscle in his arms and thighs, and the keenness in his eyes.

"Soon," came the answer to Thor's question, and Loki smiled as he lifted his weapon, ready to spar another round. "Not yet."

They moved as though dancing in the late afternoon light, Loki striking and Thor deflecting his attacks, sand flying outward from their bare feet. The God of Thunder was strong, but his darker counterpart was swift and cunning, even trapped in the cage of his weak and mortal body. When the staff landed across Thor's knuckles or caught him in the gut, he laughed heartily and shook it off; his pupil's capability to strike and hurt him was pleasing.

In the innumerable hours spent training Loki, Thor had shown him how to do battle at close range, schooling him in hand-to-hand combat and making obvious just how reliant Loki had become upon his magic in a fight. The magic was no more, possibly nevermore, so Thor had shown him to use his hands, the weight of his body, the sharp angles of his elbows and knees, even the battering force of his own forehead. Thor made Loki run. He made him climb trees. He made him jump over logs and boulders, and made him punch and kick at his own meaty palms. He made him eat until he was overfull and holding his belly, unable to do anything but fall into a hard-won sleep.

At first, as with everything where Loki was concerned, getting him to participate had been a battle in itself. But pride and determination had turned the tide, and somewhere along the line, the whining had stopped and been replaced by a steely resolve to do this well. Isolated and unbothered by the rest of Asgard, Thor could only assume that the privacy they were being granted was tantamount to Odin's own blessing.

Loki was not above complaining, expressing his boredom, taking out his frustration on his older companion, falling into surly silences and refusing cooperation at times. But it had not escaped Thor's notice that his captive never asked to leave the island. In moments when Loki's face became a haunted mask, eyes filled with unspoken darkness, Thor knew without being told that this man was not one ready for life among the masses. The task of healing Loki's mind and spirit from the horrors of the towers presented itself as a far more daunting hurdle for Thor to clear than the job of healing his body. While the two were intertwined, to an extent, Thor had much less control over the inner workings of his once-brother's mind. Indeed, before he had even the slightest inkling that Loki was involved in traitorous liaisons with outlying races, Frost Giants had stormed the weapons vault. It was an unsettling reminder of Loki's unpredictability, of his longstanding brokenness. Thor was determined to fix him, or die trying.

"I'm finished!" said Loki, shaking Thor from the thoughts of his own would-be coronation. He blinked to clear his head, and realized in that moment that he had segued naturally and without intent into the implement of flawless battle he'd always been. He was holding both Mjolnir and Loki's staff, one in each hand, wholly on the offensive while his brother stood with both hands raised in startled surrender. Breaking his posture, Thor smiled and extended his arm with the staff once more, his heart giving a single guilty clutch at the glimpse of fear in the other man's green eyes, a memory overtaking him.

Loki dropped to his knees in the dust, hands lifted in surrender, their palms pink from the wielding of a heavier sword than he was accustomed to.

"I yield," he said, and the squire appointed to attend him could be heard making ready their horses. He looked as though he might cry, but Thor only laughed, tossing aside his own sword so they were equally unarmed.

"No, not yet." Reaching for Loki's wrist, Thor hauled the smaller boy to his feet. Shirtless in the afternoon, the golden down growing on Thor's chest caught the light. He was proud of it, and Loki had none; the three years between them, at this particular stage in their lives, may as well have been an eternity. "Now we'll fight without weapons."

"Why should we?" Loki asked, his brow furrowing and cheeks flushing. He looked tired, resigned to his loss, but a quiet fury smouldered in green eyes. "So you can beat me again? You've won. I forfeit whatever secondary battle it is you would now have me lose, too."

"Fight me, you coward," Thor laughed.

"Boys," said Odin, calling across the dry meadow to them both from his vantage point. With one word, they knew they were finished for the day. The word addressed them both, but as Thor looked to his father, shielding his eyes from the sun, the irritation in Odin's tone and expression told Thor that it had been meant only for him, and carried a reprimand. Though he knew many regarded him as the favourite, the chosen one, many times Thor could not help but feel he could do nothing right, as though the very nature Odin had cultivated in him was a constant source of shame, as well. Thor was always crossing an invisible line, always missing a moving target, slaving to be what Odin wanted of him without ever truly hitting the mark. It was infuriating.

Loki dropped his hands, and for no other reason than because he was standing nearest, Thor struck him and knocked him back into the dirt. He was flooded with remorse as soon as he did it, his brother's eyes full of betrayal as he touched his bleeding mouth with a shaking hand.

"I am sorry," said Thor, but Loki was scrambling to his feet, turning away from the hand Thor offered him. He ran the opposite way, swallowed presently by the cool shade and solace of the forest, vanishing from view just as Odin's hand closed on the nape of Thor's neck.

Loki ate silently, freshly bathed and smelling of the sea. Even here and now, after everything, he ate neatly over his plate, pulling the flesh from the bones of a bird Thor had brought down with an arrow with careful teeth and chewing with his mouth closed. Thor had long since finished his meat, slicing and munching down cubes of white coconut on the other side of the cave, watching the other man eat. In the wake of the day's last sparring match, the darker Odinson had kept very quiet, and Thor wondered now whether the interaction had called the very same memory to his companion. He considered bringing it up, considered speaking an apology aloud, but now, over dinner, that moment under their father's gaze felt like light years away. If Loki wasn't thinking of it, Thor didn't want to give him cause to. Still, the wordless expanse was stretching well beyond the norm, and he wanted to break it.

"Your hair is long," he said, allowing blue eyes to follow the languid path of wet black waves where they clung to Loki's shoulders and upper arms.

"The sky is blue." Loki's dry response came without eye contact or any hint of humour, and although he knew he was being mocked, Thor smiled.

"You haven't spoken in hours."

"I didn't realise conversation was one of the conditions of your hospitality." Loki stood with the bones of his dinner and carried them down the cave's tunnel, toward the orange ellipse of its mouth; beyond it, Thor knew a spectacular sunset must be taking place. Wiping his blade on his trousers, he stretched out on his back and blinked up into the gathering dark, listening to the solid thumping of his own heart and awaiting the other's return.

His thoughts turned to Jane, and he shut his eyes so he could see her face more clearly, hear the sound of her voice, recall the bow of her smile and the shape of her body. With small hands and a warm heart and a brilliant and open mind, the fondness for her had come easily, resurfacing now with the same simplicity. Could he take Loki to her on Midgard? Could he trust her with that knowledge, and could he trust Loki not to harm her? Was it just, in any way, to even consider reentering her life after everything? Even without magic, Loki could lie and coerce and steal and raise all manner of mayhem, and Thor knew his brother's jealous and angry heart.

"Not yet," he whispered aloud, beginning to feel drowsy. And after a long while alone, Thor lost himself to the warm draw of sleep, fingers still curled loosely around the handle of his knife.

He woke to a cooler set of hands touching his fingers, and he stirred just a bit without really surfacing. The hands were prying at his fingers, trying to loosen his grip, and when the pulling grew stronger, it brought Thor clear of the clutch of sleep all at once. He closed his hand instinctively to grip his knife, but his fingers met only his own empty palm. Jolting awake, it took Thor's eyes a moment to adjust to the night. When they did, he saw that Loki was crouched beside him, squatting at bedside in the dim glow of moonlight with the knife in hand. The image sent a rolling chill through him, adrenaline seeping silvery through his veins and kicking his pulse into immediate acceleration as he lifted his gaze to meet the other man's eyes.

The crux of the situation was not lost on Thor, even seconds from sleep. The painful truth was that Loki was just as likely to be taking the knife to slit Thor's throat as he was to be taking it just to set it aside, out of their bed. To wrongly accuse Loki now would set them back immeasurably. To underestimate the severity of the moment could mean his own death some other night. The quiet was deafening, so rife with tension that Thor's muscles ached from it, and though only a handful of seconds passed while he awaited some movement, some explanation from Loki, it felt like an eternity.

Desperate to break the moment's chokehold, Thor spoke with convincing nonchalance, "Are you going to kill me or come to bed?"

Loki dropped the knife to the floor of the cave then, the visible stiffness in his hands telling Thor that the bloody thought had, at the very least, crossed his mind. He didn't immediately climb into the bed, seating himself next to it on the smooth stone and hugging his knees to his chest. Thor watched him, fighting to regulate his heartbeat and his breathing, to maintain an image of unaffected normalcy. After a long pause, the younger man's voice came softly through the blue dark.

"I wasn't going to kill you."

"Weren't you?"

"I should."

"Because I was cruel to you when we were children?" Thor's brow furrowed, speaking his guilt aloud. In the early days of Loki's madness, he had been so perplexed, so unable to understand why his brother would hate him. Now, given so much time to reflect, he could have listed a thousand reasons.

"Because you have shown me my weakness, all my life. And even now, when I am as strong as this body can ever be, I am weaker than I was as a boy." The anguish was thick in his voice. "And here you are, resplendent in your godliness, a constant reminder of what I've never been and shall never be."

"You're powerful in other ways," said Thor, brow furrowing in the face of the other man's pain.

"I am powerless! In all ways!" Loki swiped angrily at his tears, devastated by his own crippling futility, and Thor could only watch with an aching heart.

"Your mind is still as sharp as it ever was, Loki. And you may yet regain your magic. Our father-"

"Your father had me hung by my hands for months on end. Burned, beaten, stripped and humiliated, without magic, without any way to defend myself. Starved until I could no longer walk, flogged, filthy. He would have executed me had you not begged him to be merciful. You're a fool if you think he'll ever trust me again with magic."

"I don't know if he ever will. But killing me won't better your chances."

Loki shook his head, and for a time, he said nothing. Born to be a king, bred to rule, Thor knew Loki was no better suited to life as a mortal than he'd been, himself. He remembered all too well the excruciating despair of trying to lift Mjolnir from the stone and being unable to do so. Though some of it was well deserved, Loki's suffering had been and continued to be far worse.

"What do you want me to do?" Thor asked at last, reaching for the other man's hand. It was cool, damp from Loki's tears, but the former God of Mischief didn't pull it away.

"I want you to be the weak one. I want to be more powerful than you."

Green eyes boring into his soul, Thor was still and quiet in the wake of those words. He could feel the truth in them, could remember so clearly a maddened Loki expressing his desire for them to be equals. It was beyond Thor's capacity to find or restore Loki's magic. Even if he could grant him that godly power, he didn't know whether he would, for the good of any realm. But if he, himself, was the problem... If Thor was the constant reminder of Loki's pain and helplessness... If his companion needed to feel stronger, more powerful than Thor... That much, he could provide.

He could lay down his alpha warrior masculinity and give himself to Loki the way so many men and women had done for him. He could be the weak one. He could let Loki overpower him, could let the younger man feel the heady rush of lust and domination. Loki could rut away his pain and frustration, then lose himself in the weary peace of satiation afterwards. This in mind, Thor pulled Loki slowly toward him by the hand he held, a nervous hitch presenting itself in his breath.

"Take me, then," he whispered. "I'll be the weak one. I'll surrender myself beneath you."