A/N: thank you guys for your comments, they warm my heart3
iii. fall
Thor's muscles are aching from sitting motionless for what has to be a long time, judging by the playlist on his laptop turning on repeat for the second time. Loki uses steel blues and emerald greens with a lot of yellow from what Thor can see. The smell of egg tempera sits heavily in the air. Loki insisted on painting a portrait of Thor, and Thor agreed because it has its own benefits: he can watch Loki work without making him snap at him for doing so.
"Is that a snake where my left eye should be?" he jests when Loki is finally done.
"You have no artistic vein, Thor," Loki snatches back his painting with a smirk, smudging the edges with his fingertips.
Thor pulls him closer by his ankle and blows a kiss on the rough patch of skin on his knee. "I think you're a masterpiece. Isn't that enough artistic taste?"
"Silly," Loki bats him away with a hollow laugh.
Thor doesn't understand why he looks suddenly so frightened.
. .
The window is open, and the breeze brings in the scent of autumn. It's his favorite part of the year, the few days of Indian summer when silver gossamer stretches among the twigs of bushes in the park, and the rays of the sun are like lulling fingers stroking his face when he steps out of the shadows. It's an in-between state, and Loki is drawn to it for he has only ever lived caught between steps and desires and fears, always in transit.
Thor is leaning against the windowsill, the steam from his coffee mug envelops his face, and Loki fancies it seeps into his skin and stays there forever. He is worried he would never be able to drink coffee without thinking of Thor, without remembering how it feels when his nose scrunches up against Thor's cheek and he can catch the whiff of black and smooth and bittersweet. How he can taste it on his tongue, too. How it is like what they have.
The light drops patches of golden gleam on Thor's left cheek as he smiles, strokes of golden and ginger that make him look young and carefree, his hair is a wild untamed cascade of molten jewel, gold and bronze and copper and pristine ivory. Loki is unable to look away. He watches the shadows stuck under Thor's eyebrows and nose, how dark they appear placed next to the blots of light, and wonders whether the contrast is just as striking between the two of them, too.
"Come here," Thor says, and Loki obeys.
Thor's hand curls lightly around his hipbone, and Loki ruminates upon how willingly one can walk into a trap that would never let them go again. He wonders how long a moth can circle around the candlelight before it consumes it.
"Loki," Thor says softly, and Loki knows it's a confession. In the light, Thor's eyelashes are washed white above the watery color of his eyes, and there is a dimple in his smile that makes Loki's stomach convulse, and he doesn't know if the sensation prickling it is excitement or it is dread.
The curl of Thor's other hand around the back of his neck is a familiar shackle, and now he feels this collar suffocate him. He leans closer though, he kisses Thor, and thinks how the silver gossamer can be stretched only to a certain point before it snaps.
. .
When the knock sounds, Thor doesn't give any thought to who might be on the other side of the door. He has a towel wrapped around his waist and another one around his neck as he trudges across the living room, leaving wet footprints across the floor. His limbs are heavy with post-coital satiety, mouth full of Loki's taste he is unwilling to get rid of. There is nothing quite like morning sex, he smirks to himself as he cracks the door open and peers out, using it to keep him decent.
"Hi, Thor."
The petite form of Jane Foster feels like a giant slap, trying to wake him from a dream he clings onto. He opens the door wider without thinking. Suddenly the water drops running from his hair down his back are like several icy beads, stark cold against his heated skin, marring into him something he doesn't want to understand.
"Jane," he tries to smile. There is something unfair in how he has to force it, unfair to her. "Sorry."
He pulls the towel tighter as an afterthought, and wants to kick himself when Jane laughs.
"It's not like this is the first time I see you like this," she remarks but she blushes anyway. He still finds it cute when she does so. "Sif said you have the morning off today."
"Yeah, yeah…" he steals a glance at the bedroom door standing ajar. Just a few minutes ago Loki was still reclining on the bed, flushed and covered in cum, slowly putting himself together after coming undone. It always takes him time, and Thor loves watching him glow in this blissful state he knows he was responsible for tossing Loki into. "Come in. And give me a second."
He doesn't wait for her to step in. In the bedroom, Loki watches him with hooded eyes, lying naked and motionless on the top of the sheets, and there is something frightful in his gaze, but something heavy and accusatory, too.
"It's Jane," Thor whispers while he pulls on a shirt and sweatpants, not bothering to towel off.
"And now you want to ask me to stay in the room?" Loki asks with a smirk but it's so sharp that Thor winces at the sight of it.
"I don't know what she wants." It's not an answer. He can skirt topics, too; it's a means he's never resorted to before. "I try to shake her off quickly," he adds, and it sounds like an apology for a slight he has never made.
Jane is sitting on the couch like she has never belonged there before, and for a long moment Thor cannot believe that she actually has. He cannot understand how he could ever find something so different from what he has now with Loki real.
"I don't want to disturb for too long. I only came for my books, if you still have them," she says, but the way she locks her knees and folds her hands around them tells him otherwise.
They share a few pleasantries, and nothing is like in old times. Thor wonders how two people can drift apart so easily as if they have never shared intimacy. The thought frightens him, it claws at his insides with its dozen talons because could this at a point happen to them, to Loki and him, too? The possibility sickens him like a fall from the edge of a cliff, being boundless but not free, and inevitably broken in the end.
He senses how Jane is trying to get an answer to a question she doesn't ask. It exhausts him to no end, and keeps him on tenterhooks. He eyes the books beside her, and thinks how he should have returned them earlier. There is something menacing in the silences between their questions and answers, menacing in the closed door behind his back, locking up secrets he can never share.
"And are you seeing someone?" Jane asks finally.
The hesitation is loaded, and though Thor has been anticipating the question, the words jumble in his head. It's as if on cue that he hears the bedroom door open.
Loki strides toward the bathroom in Thor's pajama shorts that hang low on his hips, and it's on purpose like everything is with Loki. At least he has wiped off the dried semen from his chest.
"Oh, sorry," Loki says in mock surprise, and everything about it is so obscenely fake that a muscle starts to twitch in Thor's eyelid. "Don't mind me," Loki adds lightly but the glare he directs at them is sharp and cutting.
"He—" Thor trails off because there is no right ending to that line. "We share the apartment," Thor finishes, and he cannot comprehend why Loki has to do this.
"Every part of it," Loki adds with a sneer, and disappears in the bathroom, leaving nothing but wreckage behind.
From then on, it is a blur of words he cannot concentrate on while a part of his mind is wrapped around the fact that the water hasn't started to run in the bathroom.
"I think I should leave," Jane stands, and Thor doesn't have it in him to save face, so he lets her go with relief.
He finds the bathroom door unlocked. Loki is sitting on the closed toilet lid. His eyes are feverish as he looks up at Thor, and never before has he looked so dreaded and defiant at the same time. Thor wants to be angry at him, wants to accuse, to scold, to yell but the severed shards of Loki's haunted gaze pierce him to the core. He kneels before him, his hand winding into inky hair.
"Oh, Loki."
"Maybe I owe you an apology," Loki says, and it sounds like a question. He doesn't say sorry, though, he doesn't have the words for it. Those minutes behind the bedroom door warped something within him into a shapeless, monstrous heap. Through the closed door, all he could hear was the low rumble of Thor's voice. It shook his guts apart.
"You should have a little faith in me," Thor whispers, and Loki hates the sad tone in his eyes. He lets Thor pull him closer, and it is only convenient because Thor cannot see how taut his smile is.
No, I should have faith in myself, he thinks as an afterthought.
. .
When he arrives to the café for his afternoon shift, Jane is there with Sif. The look they give him makes his stomach convulse with fear. Jane stays sitting at the counter, sipping wordlessly from her cup while he busies himself with an order but it seems to be a quiet day with not many things to do. Thor can feel her gaze on him, the words she is trying to put together like a calculation for her constellations.
"That was your brother," she says eventually.
"Loki," Thor says, and he doesn't understand why it comes out as a correction.
Jane twirls the mug slowly between her fingers. Americano with cream and caramel syrup, he still remembers her favorite. There shouldn't be too much left of it, he thinks vaguely. He just wants her to leave and never come back, so he can maintain a secret greedily, maintain something that feels more and more unreal.
"Are you an… item, Thor?"
"I've never said that," he snaps. It's not an answer, he knows. That's something he learnt from Loki, but Jane is smart enough to realize it.
"But is it true?" Jane's hands are tiny fists now on the counter, so small that he could envelop them in one hand. On some points in the past, he has.
"He's my brother." And it's not an answer either, and suddenly it feels like he cannot speak in any other way these days.
"Only step-brother."
"Semantics," and he almost barks it. He is saved by a new group of customers, and by the time he brews two cups of latte macchiato and a cappuccino, Jane is already gone.
What he feels, though, is not relief. The fact that he denied their relationship hangs off him like a wet coat, and something tells him it marks the end of their Halcyon days.
. .
It's Sif's birthday that day. They are about to leave for their usual pub where they have been planning to throw a small party for her, Hogun and some other friends lingering in the doorway, and Thor deletes the last few words of the text for the third time. He hates himself for it, for this small yet grave thing coming between him and Loki. Never before has he been forced to choose the right words. The fourth attempt is simple, and he opts for it. It's Sif's birthday party today. Wanna join?
The answer comes only when they are already at the pub, and Thor's hands are clammy from trepidation.
The answer is simple, too, and it sends a mixture of self-disgust and relief through him. I'll pass. And Thor wonders if it took just as long for Loki to compose his own reply.
. .
He learns that Loki has no real friends during an argument. It marks their first fight that's not over some triviality, and every fact stated sounds like an accusation.
Thor knows Loki sees through him, through the clumsy attempts at meeting his friends without hurting Loki. Without him to know it. He doesn't want to admit but inviting Loki makes him awkward and unreasonably concerned after what happened with Jane, and Thor wonders if his two worlds can ever be reconciled because he is too selfish to give up any of them.
"You can meet your friends without my permission, Thor," Loki snaps.
But it doesn't sound reassuring at all.
"You cannot cage me in." Thor says it already through the locked bathroom door, and doesn't understand how Loki is able to place the blame on him so effortlessly. His forehead touches the door, and he imagines Loki leaning against it on the other side, and Thor wonders when things have come so palpably between them. "If I meet my friends, it doesn't mean I need you less. Love is not something that runs out. I can share it, and still there is just enough left."
Crouched on the bathroom floor, Loki bends his head between his knees. What he interprets is: You have other people to care for. I have only you.
How could he ever explain to someone like Thor that he does not know the concept of sharing?
. .
"Some things cannot be blended," Loki says.
There is a dark smudge on the heel of his palm, and another blur under his left eyebrow, making his gaze loaded and beclouded. He rubs the pads of his thumb and forefinger together, smearing the black stain the charcoal left on them. He has been huddled in the corner of the couch all morning, drawing in a sort of trance he descends into lately. Trance that excludes everything, as well as Thor, and he hates when Loki shuts himself away where Thor cannot reach him.
Loki looks at him over his knees pulled up to his chest. "Like light and shadow."
His smile is a twisting thing like the steam curling from his mug as he looks at Thor. His words dissipate in the mint-scent, and Thor thinks his kiss would be bitter and sharp now. He wonders if there is anything Loki wants to tell him with this, with the cloud of fume whirling around his head and entwining with syllables that are maybe intended to convey something beyond their meaning.
It feels like a test he hasn't prepared for properly.
"It's an eternal chase but never a blend," Loki adds.
When Loki stands and rinses his cup, it feels like a test Thor has just failed.
. .
They are watching a rather dull movie when Thor's mobile goes off. Loki is leaning against his shoulder, distant and tense with a hint of uncertainty. It's often like that these days, and Thor doesn't know how to change it. He draws a bit farther when he sees the caller ID, a strange jerk running down his torso, but Thor holds the cell phone to the ear closer to Loki so he can hear what he talks about with his father.
He deems it a good decision just a minute later when Odin tells him Loki skipped this semester. For a second, he forgets to answer. Loki watches him with a closed expression, and Thor suddenly realizes how they have gone back to the very beginning, with Loki hiding from him and Thor chasing him. He wonders what else has been kept a secret between them.
"Did you know?" Odin asks him curtly; his questions have always sounded authoritative and interrogatory.
Thor thinks he should have. Loki is away every day, and it's Thor's problem if he assumed he leaves for school. Now he realizes Loki must have kept the job at the sex shop instead but he never cared to ask. As Loki has never cared to share it with him. It hurts, this simple truth wedged between them but he doesn't let it show, and he doesn't even realize how it is yet another thing they keep from the other.
Thor pinches his nose bridge. He has never been good at lying. "It matters not. If he didn't tell me, he had a reason for it."
He catches Loki's gaze, sees the bright and overwrought edge in his eyes. He looks stranded and derailed as he is watching him intently, studying his expression as if attempting to figure out Thor's next steps. He is like a cornered animal now, and Thor cannot comprehend why he feels so.
"What is he still doing there then?" Odin asks sharply. "He should come home. There is no reason for him to stay in the city now."
Loki moves farther against the armrest of the couch. The cutting smirk on his lips casts an askew reflection in his eyes. There is an unnamed challenge there, stone-hard, cold. This Loki is unfamiliar to him, this wild thing with foam at his mouth and red in his eyes, this desperate, unpredictable creature ready to jump and dive into its own death scares Thor. The ripple of intent to fight under his skin is like crud, oozing black and sticky and wicked.
He stays there until Thor ends his call, and for a second Thor has to think how to deal with this stranger.
"You know you can stay here as long as you want, Loki."
He draws closer and Loki lets him, anticipation flickering in his eyes like he is waiting for a question, for accusations, for grudge. They are there, sitting heavily in Thor's chest but he hesitates to release them. He touches the slender neck, and watches how the tension is still ever present in Loki's shoulders. There is a thought being born in Thor's mind, a fear he has kept pushing back, a simple truth.
"Please don't leave," he says. He thinks nothing matters, the lies, the secrets, the half-truths. He thinks resentment kept hidden, words unsaid, will not fester.
But when Thor kisses him, his tongue rasps against Loki's lips like an admonishment he cannot voice.
. .
"My useless father called the other day," Loki says. He doesn't look at Thor, his gaze is stone-hard stillness as he stares ahead. The streetlights kiss his cheeks with reds and greens and neon yellows. Thor watches him from the corner of his eyes as the smoke unfurls around his head like a gossamer halo. Loki is sitting beside him like an odd object someone has left on the passenger seat, all sharp angles and foreignness under the wrapping. As he draws on his cigarette, his cheeks hollow, and Thor forces his gaze away. He flicks the windshield wiper on, though it isn't raining anymore but there is a fallen leaf stuck to the glass he wants to wipe off with a despair that must belong to something else.
"What did he want?"
Loki snorts. He pulls the window down and blows the smoke against the biting wind, watching as it's being ripped to shreds. The draught seems to tear the words from his lips. "Money. What else?"
Thor regards him as he takes one last drag, thin lips curling around the butt. He would taste tar on them if he kissed Loki but he doesn't dare now.
"What did you say?"
Loki shrugs. He bats his hand to dissipate the smoke and flicks the stub out the window. The ash blinks like tiny imp fires over a moor. "That he could suck it."
Later, when the gaps in his life are like holes on a grater and the days fall through them without trace, Thor thinks this is where everything took a final painful turn.
. .
He can't sleep. The rain is spluttering against the glass and the tin roof of the shop downstairs. It should be comforting but it isn't.
Thor isn't sleeping either; Loki can feel it in the arm looped around him. They don't talk, and the silence feels like they have a hole in the ceiling, and the rain falls through it and now pools around them, cold and uncomfortable, a slowly rising flow. He wants to believe the arm holding him close is something permanent and resolute but all he can think of is how things always end. Maybe it has already started with them lying motionless side by side, pretending sleep, pretending they were not listening to the rain and trying to see if there is a future, a secret message for them hidden in its Morse codes.
. .
Loki doesn't pick it up even the fifth time Thor calls him. In his mind he can hear the long guitar riff Loki uses as his ringtone play endlessly while in his ear the monotone beeps are far too calm for his thundering heart rate. The gaps between the beeps feel like something they have punctured into their life together, broken lines and missing parts.
Later the day he listens to the mechanical voice informing him that the phone is switched off, and he is tempted to go home and check if Loki is there. He left for work in the morning without Loki showing up or trying to contact him, and it sickens him to an extent that is unhealthy and somehow possessive.
"Where were you all night?" It's the first thing he asks in the afternoon as he rushes into the bedroom. "Did it occur to you I could be worried about you?"
Loki sits up on the bed, clothes crumpled and hair tousled. His voice is still muddy with sleep but he scoops to the edge with a smirk.
"Oh, don't be so worked up, I'm all right," he says flippantly as he unbuttons Thor's jeans and rubs him expertly through his briefs. "I swapped my shift at the shop."
"All night?" Thor wants to bat him away but the relief that Loki is safe and sound weakens his resolve.
"Mmh," Loki mouths his cock through the cotton.
"I called you," he doesn't mean to sound accusatory but it comes out terribly loaded.
"It was on mute. Then the battery went off." The glint in Loki's eyes is playful but suddenly Thor cannot decide if it has anything to do with how he blows a breathy kiss against Thor's cock. "Hm, I missed you."
"You were with someone?" Thor asks, and the words cut his tongue and slip back in his throat, strangling him.
Loki's lips twist into a frown. "Someone? No."
It occurs to Thor only when Loki's mouth is already full that maybe he phrased the question in the wrong way but the idea gets lost in a string of curses and moans. He doesn't know where the idea comes from but he believes there is something desperate and vicious in the way Loki's tongue runs up his cock.
. .
It's drizzling when they leave the art gallery, and Thor thinks it couldn't be more fitting. He agreed to accompany Loki even though he has no interest in abstract blots others call art. He planned to spend more time with Loki because he can sense in every minute how they are drifting apart slowly, how something unnamable is wedging between them.
The umbrella opens with a snap in Loki's hand. It's red and has the emblem of one of the local football teams Thor has been supporting since childhood. He still goes twice a month to kick the ball around with his friends but it's mostly more about chatting and drinking beer afterwards.
They just missed the bus. They draw farther from the road lest the bypassing cars cover them in mud as they dash across the puddles.
"Why didn't we come by car?" Loki hisses, and Thor knows he is trying to pick a fight again, over trifle, insignificant things as if barking at each other would rather drive them closer than chase them apart. He planned the evening differently but he has no courage to bring it up now, so he leaves the accusation unanswered.
He lets Loki hunch under the umbrella. Maybe it would be big enough for both of them, but the rigid way Loki clutches the handle to his chest tells too much. There is a feral glint in his eyes, and Thor isn't sure it's only from the red shade of the umbrella.
A leaf is stuck to Loki's left shoe and Thor is watching how it leaves a muddy blot on the fabric. Their reflection on the wet pavement is a smudged, undefined blur, and he wonders when this thing between them became so obscured. When did the silence slip in between them like a thick blanket of fog? There are now silences so loaded that leave them suffocating. How they can hide so many things between touches and endearments, between the main meal and the dessert, between one moan and the other, is beyond Thor.
He remembers the day Loki walked back into his life and he wonders if he would one day walk out of it just so easily on a day similar to that.
. .
The fog is dripping off the streetlamps and ghosting among the buildings. Outside it's milky white and strange, a world Thor hardly recognizes.
"I'm going for a walk," Loki says, taking his coat.
"Please, don't," Thor chokes out. He cannot tell why but the fog scares him. It can swallow Loki and he will never find his way home again. It is a ridiculous concept but he cannot help it.
. .
When Loki kisses him, Thor thinks he would love him forever.
. .
When Loki leaves him one day, Thor fears he would love him forever.