From his position at the open door, as Asgardians flooded past him into the stolen gardenship, Loki saw Thor. He was on the Bifrost, crackling with blue lightning. Had he been able to do that before? Loki couldn’t remember. Thor turned, and for just a moment Loki thought Thor was looking back at him. Then another knot of Hela’s undead warriors crowded at Thor’s flank, Thor spun away to fight them, and Loki was relieved of the pressure of that gaze.
Gamora’s hand settled on Loki’s shoulder. “That’s your brother?”
The word was ancient, unfamiliar. “Yes.”
“What are we standing around for?” Nebula demanded, stalking past them down the gangplank. Asgardians parted like curtains to let her through. “Rescuing these idiots was your idea!” she called back.
Gamora met Loki’s eye and gave his shoulder a squeeze. Then she drew her blasters and stepped into the fray, and at last, ignoring all the curious Asgardian eyes on him, Loki brought out his blades and followed.
They were going to crown Thor king. A crowded yet pitiful swell of bodies pressed towards the ship’s largest chamber, a space where ever-vigilant Floran gardeners had kept the twining vines of the shipswood at bay—work that Asgardians would do now, if they didn’t want to be suffocated by the walls of their own ship.
Loki was halfway to the other end of the vessel—away, away, pressed by his thoughts as surely as those Asgardians pressed in to see their king—when Nebula stepped into the corridor. An ambush. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere else,” he said. If their positions were reversed, he’d have a comment. Or the Loki that Thor had known would. That Loki would have had a smart remark.
Nebula had none. She fell in step beside him to walk along corridors wound through shipswood, silver and gleaming ebony by turns; up a spiraling staircase, every step a branch etched with symbols so old the wood had nearly healed of them now. At the top of the staircase was a curtain of vines, and through the curtain there was a room, just one, circular, with windows on all hands.
Loki rotated slowly all the way around, watching, wishing he had Heimdall’s eyes. For how many years had he wished those eyes might find him, before he gave up at last? Forty? A hundred? Time bent strangely on Sanctuary. Now, looking with his own, Loki saw only blackness. He felt a touch on his shoulder: Nebula, peering at him with eyes as inky-black as the abyss. Gamora would appear soon enough to ask about his feelings—Norns help him—but Nebula rarely had much use for words. She gave him a long look, and then she took his face in both hands and pressed her mouth to his in a fierce, uncompromising kiss.
Loki shuddered in relief. Finally he had somewhere to put all this useless, leftover energy. He worked Nebula’s catches loose, unsnapped hidden snaps—he’d thought her leathers were meant as a puzzle, the first time he’d tried to take them off her, until she’d gotten impatient and shown him how—and he kept on kissing her, open mouthed. She growled when his fingers finally brushed bare skin.
He wanted to get lost. He wanted to forget that look in Thor’s eye that he’d been too far away to even properly see. He wanted to forget and the glances of the refugees and Nebula’s own piercing stare. “Allow me,” he said, dropping to his knees.
Nebula kept her grip in his hair, balancing herself against him as he nosed between her legs and into the curious cleft there, not deep enough for a cunt but tangy with a flavor he’d never encountered elsewhere, and so exquisitely sensitive. Nebula shuddered as he licked her just right. She squeezed his head a little between her thighs, and the rest of the world faded from thought.
It could not last. Loki's pulse was still slowing after the orgasm Nebula had wrung from him when Gamora pushed through the curtain of vines. Nebula hunched a little deeper against Loki, as if caught. For the first time it occurred to him that perhaps she was hiding as much as he was. From what?
“He wants to see you,” Gamora said.
“We could leave,” Nebula said abruptly. Loki and Gamora turned to stare at her, and she scowled at them both. “These people don’t need assassins. We’re wasting time. We can take the skipper ship and go.” She stared at Loki with an intensity that should have told him something, but his mind was a blank, nothing left in it but a pleasant afterglow and the searing memory of Thor looking at him.
Loki was afraid, he realized. He hadn’t been afraid of any person but one in a very, very long time. He reached for his discarded clothing and pushed to his feet. “I needn’t be long.”
He meant to go alone, yet somehow he brought two deadly escorts with him on the long walk back to the bridge, a murderous sister on each hand. One or two of the faces he saw peeking out of corridors on the way seemed familiar, like perhaps he’d known them once. Did they know him, though he wore his hair bound up in a knot now and dressed in close-fitting blacks and silvers? He met the gazes of people clustered in the corridors, and every one of them broke their eyes away first.
Thor was not on the bridge. Loki searched the dispersing crowd, then twice to be sure: Thor was not there. “This way,” Gamora said, her voice soft in his ear, and together the three of them peeled away to a door hung with leafy vines, as every entry and exit was on this ship. Loki paused before it. He took a harsh breath, and then he felt the press of Gamora’s fingers in his.
“Go on,” Nebula growled.
And so Loki pushed through the foliage into an alcove—a resting chamber, perhaps, for there were low mossy benches for lounging on and branches hung with fruit. On the other side of it was his brother, standing at a window, looking to the stars.
The first words Loki tried caught in his throat, but the sound was enough to make Thor turn.
He looked different. He was missing a hand, for one thing, freshly bandaged. He looked older, for another—not so old as Loki felt, but weathered with it, as though time had worn grooves in his face. As Loki looked him over, Thor did the same, and suddenly Loki was self-conscious of the scarring on his face, the lines of a Jotun cruelly carved in Aesir flesh to remind Loki of how many different families he’d lost. They were long-healed; Loki didn’t even think of them most days, but now he saw them again in Thor’s eyes and wished he’d thought to conceal them.
“It’s you?” Thor said at last. “Loki?”
Loki cleared his throat. “Yes.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“Close enough,” Loki said. It seemed that was the wrong thing, from the way Thor flinched. Loki hadn’t even meant it to hurt, and he wasn’t in the habit of hurting people by accident. By way of amends, he added, “I was—rescued from the Void, before it could kill me.”
“Rescued,” Thor echoed.
Loki shrugged. Again, he said, “Close enough.”
Thor stared at him. When Loki said no more, Thor said, “But you knew we were in trouble. You brought the ship.” He looked around the little alcove, its gently curving walls of wood and its lush greenery. “You saved the people of Asgard, Loki. Thank you.”
Hadn’t Loki wanted to hear something like that once? He’d forgotten why. He wanted to shift awkwardly, shy away from the spotlight of Thor’s regard, and so instead he held himself very still. “I was passing through.”
Thor seemed to find this very dubious. Perhaps it was, now that Loki thought of it, even though it was very nearly the truth. “And you brought friends, they tell me? Heimdall says they were a great help in the battle.”
“My sisters,” Loki said, before he could think better of it.
Thor’s eyebrows rose to his hairline, but then he laughed. “That’s something we have in common, then. New siblings popping up all over the place. She was one, you know.” He thumbed behind him, towards the window—towards the fragmented ruins of Asgard, Loki supposed. “Hela. She was our sister. Or—or perhaps just mine. Loki—” he began, and the sound of his own name felt like the first press of a blade against his skin, as though the next words Thor spoke would draw first blood. “May I hug you?”
And there it was, the cut so clean Loki barely felt the pain of it. “All right.”
Thor still smelled of ozone, though stronger now than in Loki’s memory. He was very warm, and he held Loki very carefully. Loki shuddered, or perhaps Thor did, and then they were clinging tightly to one another, Thor with his one hand and Loki with two. Loki felt as though he might be engulfed at any moment and perhaps would not even mind, and that was more alarming than anything else that had happened today. After a moment he let Thor go, and Thor released him a beat later. Thor’s eyes were shining, but he was smiling anyway. “I’m so glad to see you again, brother.”
Brother. The word was too heavy to catch or hold onto, and so Loki let it sink between them.
Thor cleared his throat. “Are you coming with us, then?”
“With you?”
“We’re a people without a home, you know. We’ve got to go somewhere. Earth, I think.”
“Earth,” Loki repeated, incredulous. He laughed, and it felt strange and yet so very familiar. In the past he’d laughed at Thor a lot, he thought. “Whatever for?”
“I like it there,” Thor said, as if that were reason enough. “Will you come?”
“I have other matters to attend to,” Loki said. Thor’s face fell, and Loki added, “You’ll be safer away from us.”
Thor inspected him closely. “Are you in trouble?”
“We have it in hand,” Loki said airily. “But we should be leaving now.”
He half-expected an argument over that, protests, pleas, but Thor said, “If you ever wish to visit us on Earth, you’re always welcome. I hope you will visit, sometime. I hope I will see you again.”
“If I can manage it,” Loki said, which was far nearer a promise than he’d intended. Then he was swept up in another hug, brief but fierce, and when Thor let him go, Loki found his own eyes were wet. How odd. He’d given up crying a very long time ago.
“Safe travels, brother,” Thor said.
“Safe travels to you,” Loki said, and found he meant it with all his heart.
After the moist, organic funk of the garden ship, the corridors that doused all sound, the great many people—after all that, the little skipper ship was a relief, even when Nebula wedged herself in the hold and commenced loudly taking apart something mechanical. Hopefully it wasn’t anything the ship was currently using to function. In the cockpit, Gamora steered the ship through the first of several jumps that would put a safe distance between Asgard and themselves, and Loki took a seat in the tiny commons area just ten feet behind her and called up a schematic he already knew every seam and angle of by heart: a heavy silver collar with settings for six gems. Loki touched an empty setting and filled it with blue, next to the purple stone and the yellow.
“You got it, then,” Gamora said, settling next to Loki on the low bench.
“Of course.”
“We still don’t know how to get the soul stone,” Nebula said, appearing out of nowhere. She crouched on the other side of the transparent schematic, staring into its depths—or straight through it; one could never tell with Nebula.
“We’ll come up with something,” Loki said comfortably. Halfway there, and that one additional gem seemed to tip their scheme from desperate to possible. Even probable, perhaps, though hubris served no one. Not yet.
“You didn’t want to stay with him?” Nebula asked.
“Hmm?” Loki asked, mind still caught up in plans. Should they try for the reality stone next or save it for last, since they knew both where it was and how little security it boasted? He and Gamora differed, and as of yet Nebula had refused to cast a deciding vote.
“Your brother,” Nebula said, impatient.
“My—stay with him?” Loki repeated blankly.
Gamora shrugged against his shoulder. “You’re the only one of Father’s children whose family is still alive. We thought you might want to.”
Yes, Loki was odd that way; Thanos generally killed the families of his new adoptees. Of course Thanos tended to adopt his children younger than Loki had been, too. He tended to pluck them from their homes, not from the Void like a fish from a pond. “We’re not finished yet,” Loki said, gesturing to the torc one last time before waving the diagram away. He didn’t point out the ways they were brutally, excruciatingly fucked if Thanos caught up with them before they’d gotten all the pieces of their plan in place; they already knew.
Nebula was still staring at him. Searching. Loki said, “I think I’d like to see Thor again, but I—I don’t remember how to be his brother.” Only yours, he’d have added, except that was much too honest to say aloud.
Gamora didn’t press. She kissed his cheek and said, “Come to bed.”
The one and only cabin was a dozen steps away, but the journey took a long time. First Nebula must reassemble whatever she’d been dismantling, and Loki wanted a few moments in the chemical shower, and then, when they all shed their fighting leathers and were clustered in the ship’s one bunk, Loki brought out a few wisps of magic and healed the others’ scrapes and bruises, even though Nebula scoffed at it, as always.
At last they turned the lights low. Gamora tucked herself against Loki’s chest, and Nebula spooned up behind her. The ship creaked around them, for it was old and fragile of frame. Loki fell asleep to that now-familiar sound and to the steady rhythm and counter-rhythm of his sisters’ breaths, one a little faster and the other a little slower than his own.
[end]