Crosspost from AO3.
Written to: Sloom - Of Monsters and Men
Thor takes Loki to a psychiatrist the following weekend. His brother insists he come into the examination room with him, and he agrees readily, presses a steadying hand against his brother's back.
Loki's fingers curl into his palms as he talks to the doctor. Thor tries to pay attention to the questions and the answers, but it sounds absurd, what Loki is describing. It is hard to equate Loki's responses to the young man sitting beside him, even harder to relate it to the little boy Loki still reminds him of sometimes.
"They shout often," Loki says, his hands twisting around in his lap. His voice drops to a whisper as he adds, "They ask me to bleed."
The psychiatrist leans forward, examining Loki carefully over his laced fingers.
"And do you bleed?" he asks.
"No," Loki murmurs, shooting a sideways glance at Thor, who can only nod encouragingly at him to continue.
"No? Not once?"
Loki hesitates before saying, "Well, sometimes a man comes in from the outside."
"What does this man do?"
Loki swallows roughly. "Sometimes nothing. Sometimes he just sits down in the corner of my room and watches me. But other times, he gets angry with me."
"And what happens then?"
Thor watches Loki's brows contort, his mouth twist into a frown. He wants to ask the psychiatrist to stop, wants to tell him that he is hurting his brother and he can't handle that. Loki's right hand reaches out and wraps itself around his own, and he grasps those thin fingers lightly, gently, reassuringly.
"When he's angry he grabs me and just sort of runs his fingers over my skin. He tells me that those places are where I should cut."
The tears in Loki's eyes flow down his cheeks in soft trickles, and Thor reaches out with a tissue to dab them away. Loki's fingers curl in his hand, and Thor can't help but be reminded of how as a toddler Loki would stick his fat fingers unhesitatingly into Thor's larger palm, trusting him not to let go, not to let him get hurt.
He watches Loki's fingers twitching in his own, and bitterly regrets that he cannot protect his brother from himself.
Weeks of psychiatric appointments pass and December has given way to March before the doctor presses a prescription for Risperdal into Thor's hands and tells him to make sure Loki takes the medicine every day. He rattles off a list of side effects, but all Thor can focus on is Loki's hands curled tightly into the back of his coat.
It is not until eight days of taking the medicine that Loki refuses it.
"You must take it, Loki," Thor insists, pressing the green pill against his brother's mouth. "It will make you better."
"It will not," Loki mutters from the corner of his mouth. "It makes me feel sick and I don't want it anymore."
Thor taps the pill against his brother's tightly closed lips. "It will make me feel better if you take it."
Loki narrows his eyes at him. "That is cruel of you," he says, but he opens his mouth and accepts the pill without further refusal. Thor watches him take a swallow of water to wash it down with before pressing a soft kiss to his brother's mouth.
Thor is up late one night, preparing a presentation for his business class the next morning when he hears Loki scream.
He rushes into Loki's room, banging the door against the wall and hastily flicking on the lights. Loki writhes underneath his covers as if in pain, his eyes wide open and terrified, and he doesn't seem to register that Thor's entered the room.
Thor hurries over to his brother, climbs onto his bed, and wraps Loki, comforters and all, into his arms.
"Loki," he says as he struggles to contain his brother's wriggling form. "Loki, stop."
"No!" Loki's voice is high pitched and strung out and terrified. "Get off get off get off get off me!"
One of Loki's pale, delicate hands wriggle out from under the comforter and rake its way down Thor's face, leaving red scratches in its wake. Thor pulls back, pain stinging down his cheek. He draws away from his brother, presses fingers to his face and draws them back, smears of blood staining his fingertips.
Loki gasps and shudders underneath him, and Thor is harshly reminded of another time when Loki gasped and shuddered underneath him and how this is nothing like that. How this man in the bed is nothing like his dear, sweet brother.
When Thor stands up the next day to present his paper on the Russian economy, his classmates ask him what happened to his face.
"An animalistic lover?" Sif asks him with a cheeky grin. He brushes her away.
"Someone I don't know," he mutters, and that is all he says on the matter.
Loki wakes him up one night, asks him if he can sleep with him from now on.
"The shadows in my room are too dark," he says, holding his pillow to his chest and looking at Thor as he stands in the doorway of Thor's bedroom.
"And the shadows here are not as dark?" Thor asks, rubbing a hand over his face as he squints at his brother, illuminated in the soft glow of the bedside lamp.
"No," Loki agrees as he walks over and plops his pillow down next to his brother's, sliding easily under the covers. "You make the shadows brighter so the people that hide in the corners of my room cannot step in."
Thor asks his brother one night if he can draw them.
"Draw who?" Loki asks, pushing his glasses farther up the bridge of his nose and bookmarking the page in a biology textbook.
"The man that you see," Thor clarifies.
Loki is silent for a long moment before he sets the textbook aside on the bed and pads off to his room. When he returns, he presses a small, creased square of paper into Thor's hand. Thor unfolds it to find a page of penciled sketches, the strokes black and desperate and pressed deeply into the page as if to ground them.
The man in question is not particularly remarkable, but Thor turns to Loki, reaches for his hands, and presses kisses to his palms, up his arms.
"What are you doing?" Loki asks him.
"Let me erase his touch," Thor murmurs against Loki's milky skin as he kisses away imaginary touches.
He stands up, takes off Loki's glasses and sets them gently on the bedside table as he kisses Loki's forehead, his eyebrows, eyelids. "Let me remove the shadows from your eyes."
He presses kisses to Loki's ears, tugging lightly at the pale, slender earlobes. "Let me take away the voices."
He presses kisses into the hollow of Loki's throat and silently wills his brother to think of nothing but him.
Thor is undeniably grateful as he presses into Loki, the milky skin of his chest and thighs bathed in the soft pinks and golds of early morning, soft and wet and melting under Thor's hands.
His brother is still waking, his body arching up reflexively into Thor's touch, soft whimpers spilling from his mouth.
"Thor," he whispers. "Please..."
One of Loki's hands curls and clutches at his pillow desperately in an effort to ground himself, the other reaching out and resting lightly against Thor's chest. But he is not pushing him away, and Thor lifts one of his hands from Loki's narrow hips to hold his hand there.
It doesn't take long at all for Loki to shudder and gasp underneath him, his cock weeping and striping come over his stomach, his insides contracting insistently. As Thor comes, he feels Loki raking four sharp scratches against his chest, and he cannot help but think how this man in the bed can be nothing but his dear, sweet brother.