Written to: The Great Escape - Boys Like Girls, crosspost from AO3
Carriwitchet: a pun or a paradox; a riddling question.
"Loki, a Midgardian child has told me the most amusing of riddles," Thor says as he walks into their bed chambers after a long day of show and tell, during which he had been coerced (and threatened, although he was not quite sure) into taking several Midgardian school children on flights with Mjolnir.
"What was it?" Loki asks, not looking up from his spellbook. Knowing Thor, he was sure it would be some completely silly question.
"Why did the chicken cross the road?" Thor repeats, settling himself on the bed beside Loki and squinting at the spell book, which is filled with runes and characters that he can never hope to decipher but which Loki seems to be able to read with ease.
Loki sighs, shoots Thor a long-suffering glance. "Why?" he asks, if only to indulge Thor.
"To get to your house."
Loki quirks an eyebrow at him, rolls his eyes and proceeds to turn back to the spellbook, but Thor touches his arm.
"The riddle is not yet finished, love," he says. "I believe it is two parts. Knock knock."
Loki groans, rubbing his temples. "Who's there?" he mutters.
"The chicken!" Thor bursts out into a huge fit of laughter, great barks of merriment that make the mattress shake underneath Loki. Loki just stares at Thor in disbelief, and shakes his head at his husband's simplemindedness.
"That is not a riddle, you fool," Loki says, and Thor props himself up on one elbow, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, and asks Loki to put a question to him.
Loki taps his fingers against his chin, thinking.
"Alright. Assume you have a bag of grain, a chicken, and a fox, and you want to cross a river."
"I can fly across the river," Thor says, looking at him in confusion. Loki sighs.
"You have to use a boat to get across this particular river," he clarifies. "Now stop interrupting and let me finish. Your boat is only large enough to take you and one other thing across the river at a time."
Thor mutters something along the lines of "inefficiency," and "how I would never build a boat that small."
"You cannot have the chicken and the grain on the same side of the river unattended, because the chicken will eat the grain. The fox and the chicken cannot be on the same side of the river unattended, because the fox will eat the chicken. So how would you propose to get all three things across the river?"
Loki can almost hear the wheels in Thor's head clicking around slowly as he mulls over this information, can see the frustrated squint of his husband's eyes as he strokes at his beard and thinks. Loki, satisfied that he may have a few more minutes of peace, goes back to reading.
He is rudely interrupted a few moments later, when Thor taps at his knee and asks him if he himself can eat the chicken. Loki only sighs in exasperation, and swats Thor over the head lightly with the back of his book.