Brorskap, Chapter Six
Disclaimers: Sex. Whether or not you consider Thor and Loki to be brothers, be warned that there's intimacy between the two of them in this chapter. If you don't like that, please don't read it. Also, these are not my characters.
Thank You: From the bottom of my heart. I love your reviews, follows and favourites. I write this because I love them so much.
CHAPTER SIX
"Have you done this before?"
Thor shook his head, suddenly less sure of himself. The water was high and rough, and Odin had cautioned them more than once against crossing here on foot at this time of year. But somehow, after promising Loki a feast of as many berries as his belly could hold, after tormenting himself with the daydream of their sweetness, Thor couldn't bring himself to turn back now.
"No, but it will be alright."
"The current will tear us apart." Loki looked up at Thor, a head and shoulders height difference between them. The cool air had coloured his cheeks and his long hair was doing a fluid ance on the wind. "It's that strong."
"Nothing is that strong, Loki." Thor moved to the very edge of the riverbank, where the grassy slope became a steep rocky drop into the deep water. "I can stand it. Climb up onto me."
Loki's chest was warm against Thor's back, bare skin making a hushed rushing noise where it met in the darkness. A heavy cloud cover had snuffed the blue moonlight, so the preparatory fumbling was all blind haste and hints – a brush of knuckles here, a whispered oath there. The sound of Loki spitting into his palm made Thor's belly flip where it was pressed to the blanket, the unfamiliar thrill of nervousness seeping through his limbs, and he smiled softly into the bedding at the audible hitch in the other man's breathing. What was Loki feeling? He knew better than to ask, but it didn't stop him from wanting to. Was he excited? Sorrowful? Happy? Anxious?
A muscle in Thor's shoulder flinched as a cool droplet of water struck it, a second finding the nape of his neck, a third and a fourth each striking the back of his thigh. Soon the music of island rainfall was deafening, the holes in the ceiling of their sanctuary allowing some in to find them, to freckle their naked flesh.
"We should stop and turn back!" Loki drew up short, reaching for Thor's hand to stop him, as well. The fragrant mountain forest rose up around their narrow path on all sides, and they'd been exploring for hours, two favourite handmaidens in tow. What had begun as a mizzle was now a proper downpour, Loki's emerald cloak sodden and heavy. The crown of flowers Sygny had woven for him drooped now onto his pale forehead, and his lips were flushed, as though he'd just been kissing.
"It's only water, you fool. Have some more wine, and you'll be warm enough." Thor smiled and reached out to hold him by the nape of the neck, as he sometimes did. He was merrily drunk, happy to amble without aim in the summer forest. The two girls were some fifty paces behind and around a bend, but their sweet voices carried well enough to the brothers; they were link-armed and singing, pleasantly inebriated.
"Brother, you have had enough wine for the both of us. I have my schoolbooks. They'll be ruined, and we won't make the supper table in time if we don't turn back."
"We can find shelter." Thor's voice was warm and promising as he drew Loki near by that familiar grip, his lips a finger's breadth from his supple adolescent brother's. Loki's irritation was real but waning in the newfound proximity, and in the evening's newfound potential. "We can build a fire and stay the night. You can take that maid. It's past time you did that, anyway. I know she'll have you. And if she won't, I will."
"You're a liar. But alright."
Save his own, there were no two hands in all nine realms more familiar to Thor than Loki's. He had held them, whirling in circles and shrieking with laughter as babes, and bandaged them when they were both bloodied in battle, and taught them to do a great many things ranging from giving a woman pleasure to causing a man pain. And so now, as those slender fingers he knew so well explored him, learned him intimately, sought the entrance to his body (previously untouched but for the tongues of handmaidens and one daring squire), Thor kept still in the gentle rain and allowed the joining moment to come.
It burned when Loki took him. It burned like a driving fire that pressed deeper, further, more insistently than he wanted it to, tendrils of pain licking through low in his belly where nothing and no one had ever touched him before. He became acutely aware, in that very instant, just what he had invited Loki to do to him. For years, since Thor's early adolescence and first awakenings as a sexual being, since learning for the first time that a part of them could ever, in the right moment, become a part of someone else, they had shared murmurings and temptations of doing this deliciously forbidden thing together. But always teasing and tormenting of Thor inside of Loki's body, whisperings of what it might be like for Thor to be in Loki's mouth, atop him, ridden by him, wearing his slender legs for a necklace. Never any intimation or imaginings of a moment such as this. He was completely unprepared for the idea and reality of doing this, taking this.
A foreign sound left Thor's throat when Loki's hips pressed firm to the round of his buttocks, and Thor sensed hesitation in his brother, killer, lover when smaller fingers found and tangled with his. Loki, it seemed, was unprepared for the doing of this, too. But Thor wanted him to have it. Perhaps it could mend them both.
"Go on," he managed, squeezing those hands. The reassuring weight of Loki's forehead came to his own temple, jets of warm breath beating down his jawline, and Loki stroked the sides of Thor's hands with his thumbs. The touch was barely there, almost negligible in its simplicity as compared with where and how else they were touching, but its meaning was clear. And in it, Thor found words spoken by Loki not so very long ago, words he still believed to be true in spite of all.
"Never doubt that I love you."
It was a soothing act of such crushing tenderness in this moment of physical surrender and discomfort that Thor's chest ached and tears came. And then Loki began to move, and there was no tenderness in that at all.
It stole his breath at first, took his lax body by surprise, and chased a hoarse cry from his lips, the ferocity of the first proper thrust shoving him forward on their bed. But Thor was ready for the second, arching into the onslaught invitingly once he'd learned the way of it. He knew the dance and knew it well; it was the spending of harboured fury, the release of festering frustration, a physical manifestation of emotional torment, and Loki was using Thor's body exactly as Thor had hoped he might. The rhythmic collision of their damp flesh was louder than the drumming rainfall, the cave's acoustics sending their escaped groans and gasps back to them, distorted and amplified. When Thor moved to pull his hand free of Loki's grip, wanting to stroke out his own release, he was denied the privilege; Loki held it fast and drilled harder, thrusts shortening and quickening until Thor's hips ached and Loki fell slack atop him at last to tremble through his climax.
Feeling raw and open, Thor resisted nothing as Loki knelt beside him after and rolled him onto his back. He swallowed hard past the stricture in his throat and struggled to see his lover in the dark, through the rain, through the veil of his tears. He was shaking and still hard, and though his hands had now been freed, he made no attempt to use them without permission. After a pregnant silence that yawned on for ages, Loki bent to kiss him, their mouths meeting with an almost painful softness.
He cradled Loki's wet cheek against his palm while the tentative tugging of Loki's hand gave a merciful end to his own wanting, bringing him off gently while they tasted one another's tongues and wept, each for his own wrongdoings.
"Come in beneath my blankets, Loki," said Thor, the raven-haired boy standing at his bedside not so long past toddlerhood, just barely a boy and into school.
"Can I stay all night with you?" Loki reached for his older brother's hand when it was offered, scrambling up and onto a bed much bigger than his own.
"Of course." Thor smiled and drew back his blanket, welcoming the smaller body against his, both clad in soft sleeping clothes. Loki lay perfectly against his chest and beneath his arm, the two fitting as snugly as jigsaw puzzle pieces, as though one had been created for the sole purpose of tucking in against the other. "What's the matter?"
"I thought I heard something in my room," Loki confessed, as Thor lifted a storybook he'd been reading.
"What sort of something?"
Loki's delicate fingers were tracing the scrollwork of Nordic embroidery on the chest of Thor's red pyjamas as he gave his answer: "Maybe a monster. Maybe a Frost Giant."
"There are no Frost Giants in Asgard."
"Ever?" Loki looked doubtful.
"Never." Thor kissed his forehead, the way he'd seen their mother do when one of them was upset. "Go to sleep. Nothing will take you while I'm near." Brow smooth at last, Loki's thumb found its place in his mouth. There were no more words that needed speaking.
He drifted away with his ear over the steady thump of Thor's heart.
He came to life slowly and painfully, as on a morning that follows a night of shameless debauchery. The blackness was absolute, and he could feel the after-effects of their coupling through intimate parts of himself and the backs of his thighs. It brought him a drowsy smile and a ticklish thrill in his gut, and he lay still in the lazy limbo between waking and sleeping for another long moment, drawing unhurried lungfuls of the scent of Loki's sweat and sex on his skin, tasting the other man's mouth on his own.
Minutes passed before he was awake enough to realise that Loki's body was no longer tucked against his own.
'At the sea?' Thor wondered, stirring at long last, stretching his legs. But he couldn't move those legs independently; they were bound at the knees and ankles. A shard of panic pierced him, and he opened his eyes, wanting to investigate the cause for the situation. Opening his eyes, though, did nothing for him. The world was just as black with them open as it had been with them closed, and the suction of a sharp intake of breath pulled a thick black fabric up to his nose and mouth. He was wearing a hood, or perhaps wrapped entirely in some dark material. His first impulse was to reach for the fabric, pull it away from his face, but his wrists were bound behind his back.
His pulse accelerated, throbbing helter-skelter at the base of his throat, chest heaving as he fought to draw a clean breath. What he got was his own recycled air, not much fresh making it through the thick cloak containing him.
"Loki!" He shouted the other man's name, but the organic echo of the cave didn't bring it back to him. Instead, there was a metallic resonance. He could not hear the wind. He could not hear the waves. Loki did not answer. Trembling, fighting for balance, Thor managed to get his feet under himself and rose to unsteady legs, and fear rose in his throat like a sickness.
"I'm painfully bored." Thor scrubbed at his face with both hands, sitting on the edge of his brother's bed in the blinding midday light. His golden body was mountainously muscular, but he was still boy enough to be punished by Odin for his transgressions; a week grounded to a single wing, banned from the outdoors and adventuring.
"You ought to behave, then." Loki cocked an eyebrow and folded his arms over his chest, standing before Thor and looking down on him.
"That's only slightly less boring than grounding." Taking Loki's hips into his hands, he tugged him near and rolled his forehead against the other boy's sternum, fractious as a caged animal. "Find me something to do."
Loki reached for a clean, folded bed sheet and shook it open, then stepped back out of his brother's grip, draping it over Thor and giving him the appearance of a bivouac tent. "There."
"There, what? I can't see!"
"Of course you can't. Try to find me" Loki laughed, the sound of it silvery, its mirth contagious. Thor grinned, willing enough to play along. Drowning in the sheet, he rose from the bed with his hands out in front of himself, wanting to keep himself from colliding with anything face-first.
"Where are you?" he laughed.
"Here." Thor followed the sound of his younger brother's voice, out of his chambers and into the grand hallway. The sunlight filtered through the stained glass in a muted golden glow. Stumbling sightlessly, picking up speed, he drifted down the corridor in the direction of Loki's laughter. At the end of the great hall was a staircase, and when Thor drew perilously near to it, Loki saved him from catastrophe by throwing skinny arms about his middle and wrestling him to the ground. Through the cool, clean fabric, Loki found the warmth of his mouth and kissed him.
Tied the way he was, walking was not a possibility. Beneath his feet was steel, cold and unforgiving. He made the realization that he had been removed entirely from the cave just a breath before sustaining a decimating blow to the centre of his forehead and crumpling bonelessly to a heap on the ground.