A/N: As always, thank you so much for your comments.
iv. winter
Thor cannot really recall how they ended up here but eventually it comes down to this: they are shouting at each other with such fervor neither understands, and Loki is packing in frenzy. There is nothing stoic or collected in the way he does it, and Thor watches in numb shock how he pulls apart their life shirt by shirt, item by item. He doesn't understand how everything can be packed up in a leather bag, everything they shared, everything he holds onto, everything that forms the framework of his days. How this can be just taken away from him.
He shoves a shirt into his bag and Thor doesn't dare to point it out that it's actually his. With feverish, bloodshot eyes, Loki glares at him.
"Do you remember that night when I was away?" Thor replies with apprehensive silence because he recognizes the dagger-sharp words Loki has been piling inside him for so long now. It was only the question of time when he would throw them at him with lethal precision. "I was with someone. I let him fuck me."
He knew it, somewhere deep inside Thor thinks he all along knew it but it doesn't make it any easier. Something crumples, shrinks inside him, leaving a raw bleeding wound behind, like a layer of tissue he scratches off gradually until it cannot heal without a scar.
"Why?!"
"Because I wanted to." And it's like a half-finished sentence, like everything Loki says.
"Why?" Thor repeats because it is all he seems to be able to do.
Loki's laughter snaps like an overstretched rubber band. The flesh of his mouth flashes at Thor as he sneers with rabid venom.
To see if I have a way out. If there is anyone else— Loki wants to choke on the truth whirling on his tongue but it bogs down before it could spill, and gives way to another kind of truth, no less poisonous.
"Thor, open your eyes. We are brothers, for fuck's sake! You said it yourself. What would you tell to Odin? That you fuck your new brother? Then we will be a happy little family? This is no reality, Thor!"
He grabs his bag and moves across the apartment as if there haven't been months between his first route in and his last out.
"I let you go because this is what you need," Loki tells him sharply, with heavy, cold accusation, and for a moment Thor doesn't even realize it's not true. Loki's truths are always wrapped up in lies and warped to an extent that they sound like different truths. "Thanks for the couch. I should have never moved from there."
Thor only stares after him, stares at the closed door, and he cannot understand how two people can fight and wound with so many words unsaid.
. .
By the evening everything is covered with a thick blanket of snow, and as he is watching the trails of footprints crisscrossing it, Thor wonders if any of them is Loki's. Provided he found and followed it, would it lead him to Loki?
The street is quiet and blank and white, and all he can see is that the snow has buried everything he knows underneath.
. .
He cannot reach Loki's phone anymore. He figures it out already the next day, sitting among the crumpled sheets that smell of straining effort at sleep, and sex that's stale and gone – he thinks so is their love. The SIM card is probably in the dumpster in front of the house, but it doesn't stop him from trying to call it from time to time.
A part of him doesn't want to call Loki ever again, the part that wants to go berserk at the thought of Loki running to someone else and letting them touch him the way only Thor touched Loki, the part that is scared that Loki might find someone to replace him, someone who gives him what Thor has been unable to. Because there must be something Loki was lacking, something that drove him into another person's arms. The gnawing certainty that he needs Loki more than how Loki has ever needed him eats him away by the minute.
He learns it from his father that Loki has never showed up at home, and it's good that they are talking over the phone because Thor can pretend that he has to hang up before Odin has the chance to ask him what has transpired between them.
He considers talking to Farbauti, but in the last second he always changes his mind. How could he tell her that he somehow managed to chase her son away?
. .
His clothes are everywhere on the floor, hanging off the shelves as if the closet has coughed up its content. He doesn't touch anything, keeps it in the state Loki left them. He cannot bring himself to tide up because that would mean he attempts to go back to how it had been before, but it's impossible.
For the first time ever since they started their relationship, he realizes how they risked everything on that gone spring night when they first tasted each other. He didn't comprehend back then that whatever the future would bring for them, they could never go back to being brothers, not after this. And now he lost everything in one go, he lost the brother along the lover.
. .
There is something disillusioning in how the body can function when the mind is so addled and faraway. Thor wonders if Loki knows the rusty feeling of disconnection, the lingering glances he casts around aimlessly that leave no imprints in his memory, words he doesn't remember saying and other words people tell him without him registering them. He wonders if the empty space in the bed makes Loki feel drowning, too. If the sheets wound around his limbs are only cold replacements of a warm body pressing against him, and it doesn't let him sleep at night. He doesn't want to think that Loki might share his bed with someone at the moment – he needs that single illusion to keep him together.
Thor realizes the abyss under the floor still holds him captive, the abyss they fell into that long gone spring night, the faded traces of domestication that keep lingering in every object and every wall of the apartment, on the second mug that waits untouched on the plate rack above the sink, on the unused toothbrush in the bathroom, the cinnamon flakes he still keeps buying though he himself has never liked them.
He doesn't understand how he could fall in love without realizing it.
. .
"You should take a day off, or two," Sif says one time after they close up for the night. They are about to head for their cars but Thor halts there, right at the edge of the light of the streetlamp. It has started to snow again, and every car is white lining the street.
"I'm all right," he says, but he thinks, as he looks at Sif and watches the snowflakes dot her dark hair, as he looks at her and sees someone else's dark lashes and curving brows, tiny frozen crystals stealing white glints in green eyes, that nothing is all right anymore.
. .
The nights turn so cold that Thor needs to crank up the heat in the apartment. The insulation of the windows is so poor that each morning he finds a new intricate design of window frost on the glass when he pulls the curtain apart. They remind him of the delicate veins on the inner side of Loki's wrists, pale blue arabesque under the creamy skin, a steady pulsation against his lips as he kissed them, following their route up his arm to Loki's heart.
Each morning he claws his nails into the frost and scrapes them off until they run in cold droplets off his fingertips.
. .
Sif decorated the windows of the café with long garlands of Christmas lights, and they hardly sell anything that has no cinnamon or cloves or cardamom in it. Loki has always scoffed at the whole concept of Christmas but he loves the taste of it, baked apples and mulled wine and roasted chestnut, and it makes Thor's stomach roll every time he has to take an order that includes these.
The blinking lights glide off the countertop in green, red, yellow waves, and he remembers how they coated Loki's cheeks in colorful tones, outlining the curve of his neck and the angle of his jaw as he reclined on the couch at their parents' house just the last year. He remembers how Loki caught him staring, how he stretched under his scrutiny, making the lights shift over the dips and hollows of his body. He remembers Loki sitting up and leaning so close that their legs almost entangled. He stole a sip from his glögg then, and licked his lips, and Thor now knows that he probably was clearly aware of what kind of fantasy he triggered with it in Thor's mind. Loki planned this thing between them, but Thor sometimes wonders if he planned the separation, too. If he ever thought of their relationship as something temporary, nicked and imperfect. Something he would leave behind one day.
. .
He doesn't even deny that the reason he is anxious about visiting his father for the Christmas holidays is the meek hope that Loki would come, too. Somewhere deep inside he knows he is deluding himself. Loki has never been known for giving grand gestures or caring for traditions.
He helps around the kitchen, cuts the Yule ham in neat slices while the rye bread is baking in the oven. He takes the sausage, the herring, the cabbage from the fridge, and he wonders whether Farbauti remembers she has to cook only for three. It's only the two of them. Odin is in his workshop, trying to carve the pine tree into its stand.
There are a couple of postcards Thor hasn't seen before pinned to the fridge door with magnets they have collected over the years from their holidays, most of them from the times his parents were still together. He reads the names of distant locations written on the cards, his thumbs running along their edges.
"Loki sends them," Farbauti says from beside the stove, and something constricts in his heart. He hasn't heard Loki's name for weeks, he hasn't uttered it either, at least not to someone else, only in the solitude of his apartment.
"He is in contact with you?" he blurts, but he doesn't understand why he is surprised to begin with. But maybe, it's not even surprise what he feels, rather a kind of twisted, writhing jealousy.
"He sends the postcards. He even calls sometimes."
Thor reads the names of cities now more carefully, trying to figure out the order of them, drawing a map of Loki's journey. The cobwebs of his route wrap around Thor's heart in a wiry net, it projects a permanent constellation on the wall of his consciousness, brighter than any stars can ever be.
"Where is he headed to?"
"No, Thor. What is he running from?" Farbauti smiles faintly. She puts the lid on the pot, cutting the puffs of steam curling from it. There is a grave, heavy edge in her gaze Thor rarely sees on her. "He has been like this ever since Laufey left us. Now Loki rather leaves before others leave him."
A piercing ache unfurls in Thor's guts, sickening fear that claws at him and rips him to shreds.
"Will he come back?" he forces out.
"Maybe, one day. When he is no longer in search."
Thor doesn't ask what he is in search for. There is no answer for that.
He pulls the postcard from under the small version of the Eiffel-tower. It shakes in his hand. He is tempted to collect all of them and retreat to his old room where nobody can see him, and stay there with these treasures that show nothing but the distance that separates him from Loki. He turns the postcard and reads the few lines with Loki's neat handwriting, the curve of the capital T and the roundness of O, and he imagines how his own name would look in Loki's script. I'm okay. You would like this place. It's calm here. The weather is bad. I hope you're fine. From any other people this would be cold and distant but Loki is different. There is not much more he lets on.
Thor sticks the postcard back to its place. He doesn't dare to turn the others because he thinks the absence of his own name from the messages would destroy him just a little more.
"What happened?" Farbauti asks quietly, and Thor tries not to fidget under her scrutiny. He doesn't want to lie, he's never been good at it anyway.
"I don't know," he admits, and it's true. "We had a fight… but it couldn't be it… there was something deeper."
"Don't beat yourself up over it. It's not your fault, not even his."
"I just miss him," he mumbles lamely. Farbauti pats his shoulder with a reassuring smile he cannot find the strength in him to return.
"He was happy there, I know it. But happiness has the risk of dwindling with time. Loki is the type who rather gives it up before it starts to fade."
He glances over at the postcards, and doubts he could ever comprehend Loki. For him, happiness is something he would fight only harder for if it starts to fade.
. .
The landscape beyond the glass is washed white. He doesn't even know where the bus goes but it matters little. It can never arrive for someone who doesn't have a destination.
Loki wipes the condensation off the glass. Slow drops edge their way down and disappear at the seam, drawing parallel stripes like the iron bars of a cage. It's an unsettling idea. He thought he was running free.
He has done it sometimes, in shorter distances, after work at the sex shop. He would sit on a bus, any bus, and imagine that it took him somewhere he wouldn't find his way back from. It scared him sometimes. Other times what scared him was the fact that he didn't go far enough.
He has never told Thor about it. Thor sometimes didn't know how to keep him without binding him, and every touch was a rope he wound around him.
. .
Thor thinks sometimes that they didn't just fall apart: they have never really been together.
For Loki is a wild, free thing.
For Thor might be not unlike him.
For they speak a different language sometimes. He isn't sure if there is a dictionary to any of them at all.
. .
The chai latte is the wrong thing. In every café it is so. Too sweet, too bland, too strong. He tries it in every city, and the routine gives a certain sense of security. He doesn't know what he is hoping for, if he is hoping for anything at all. What would happen if he found the perfect chai latte – the second perfect? Maybe he would settle down, Loki plays with the thought with the freedom of someone who craves for something beyond reach. But the chai latte is always the wrong thing everywhere.
As is the barista the wrong person in each café.
He doesn't know if he wants to prove something with this.
He walks up to the counter and asks the barista to break a bill. The coins he gets are heavy like lead in his hand. There is a payphone on the other side of the street. These days one has to make extra effort to find a payphone, so this is how he ended up in the café in the first place. The chai latte is only his incentive.
He leans against the glass wall of the booth. The traffic beyond the cage is muted to a low buzz. It has started to snow again, and he has the feeling he will be stuck in this city as well with meters of snow on the roads. All he wishes for is a cigarette, and maybe a whole night long sleep.
The phone number is hardcoded into his mind, even though he doesn't have his cell phone anymore. It should be easy: picking up the receiver, inserting the coin into the slot, dialing the number and waiting for the other person to pick up. A sequence of simple tasks but he never gets beyond putting the coin into the slot. The receiver curls coldly against his palm.
His bag is full of postcards. In each city he buys an extra one. He superscribes them, sticks there the stamp, he writes down a message, and he never slips them into the mailbox. He doesn't know what these are, these unsent, unsaid confessions but they make him feel like an idiot. Maybe this is his way of carrying his past with him. Sometimes he thinks they chase him further away, like clanking tin cans tied to the tail of a dog out of cruelty, scaring and driving it off.
Sometimes they seem to be the only things keeping him sane.
The coin falls in the phone with a clink. He waits, as if he could hear the beeps of a line he never dialed connecting, and maybe he does, maybe it's only his heartbeats.
. .
One day he finds half a pair of Loki's gloves. Loki, in his haste, must have packed only the other half. Something about it saddens Thor. It is a pitiful concept. He wants to think they are like this pair of gloves. A perfect whole together, useless apart.
. .
Loki catches the man staring at him from the other end of the counter. It goes on for several minutes, and he considers walking up to him. He has no patience for these useless social civilities. The guy would approach him in a few minutes to buy him a drink, and then they both know how it would end, so why to pretend it can be anything more. The only question is where but maybe the restroom stall will make it. He has done it in worse places. At least this one is tall and handsome, and doesn't look like someone who has already drunk one too many shots.
Afterwards from the hostel lobby, he calls his mother. It's pretty late but the taste of semen is nasty on his tongue and he is tempted to upchuck what he has swallowed down and now whirls in his stomach, and he fancies a familiar voice would pull him back to reality.
"Don't worry, I'm fine, Mum. Just wanted to hear your voice," he soothes his mother after the first urgent questions.
It feels good, even the short silences between them, it's an anchor he hesitates to acknowledge that he needs. His mother never asks when he would come back, and he knows it's not because she doesn't care.
"Thor was here during the holidays," she says, and Loki hears what she doesn't say, too.
He clutches the receiver and the goo in his stomach rolls like molten bitumen. Thor. The name unties a knot in him, a knot of lies and self-deceptions he hasn't been aware he was carrying around, and a wave of an unnamable sensation pours over him, so painful that it leaves him breathless. He feels tricked, though he is the trickster in this.
"I have to go," he forces out, though he has nowhere to go and they both know it.
He cannot shake off the intrusive, uncomfortable feeling that the taste in his mouth and the smell on his skin are not the right ones. There is a void stretching his chest, cold and aching, and it feels like free fall, and for the first time ever since he embarked on this journey, he doesn't find comfort in it.
. .
Thor opts for walking home instead of catching a cab. The night is crisp, and the pavement is coated with thin sheen of ice but he doesn't live that far, and he had too much beer in too short time so it might help to clear his head a bit. Sif insisted on a night out with a couple of friends, and they chatted and he laughed with them, and for a few brief minutes he could believe nothing was awry.
The moon is like a poorly painted orange circle above the houses, a hole cut in the canvas of the sky. It reminds Thor of things that have gone missing and can never be replaced.