Boltedfruit Archive

   There are many different ways to love. Someone told him that once as a child.

It was his mother. She had pillowed his head upon her lap as he reached up to play with her golden curls. They were soft, he remembers. The color of the setting sun over the fields that fed their kingdom.

She tells him there are many different ways to be loved, too, and he remembers that as well.

They are all separate, she had told him. They are all the same, she had said.

He remembers that when he dies most of all.

   He knows that love is Thor.

He remembers that first.

That love is Sif when she kisses him for the first time. And then it’s the hatred he feels course wild under his skin when Thor says Sif kissed him a year later.

Love is Amora, with her nails against his skin, painful but what he’ll bear through. Loving Amora means indulging the chaos of their nature together across the realm, and suffering the consequences when his mischief bleeds too much into her chaos, lost. Always pushing too far, that girl. He learns from her. Hers is to endure.

Sif’s is to forget, with a touch of denial. Because it is too painful. And unfixable after the fiasco with her hair. Her scorn towards him is a burden too difficult to shoulder, so he slinks away when he finds her near. Only with Thor between them can he ever tolerate it. Hers it to pretend it never happened, and no one but them is the wiser.

Thor’s is to persist.

For Thor is his brother. And Loki’s love is the wrong kind of love.

And Thor does not know, must not know. It would kill him to face Thor’s rejection. It would kill him too to pretend he did not feel how he does, as he once tried. His is to persist silently.

So he keeps it packed away with the rest of all the terrible, not-quiteright things he has in the back of his mind, safe at the top of his spine and hidden beneath the slope of his collar, and the spill of his hair. He wears it longer each year, a private thrill at knowing it’s the only visual confession of his heart’s depths Thor will ever have from him.

So yes, Loki knows persistence well. He knows endurance. He knows denial.

He remembers his mother, whispering assurances of all sorts of love that live within one person. He remembers thinking her lucky in her wisdom, to have experienced it all.

   There are many kinds of ways to receive love.

He’s not sure how to catalogue those.

   His love is not the correct kind of love.

For Thor is his blood.

And he is Thor’s blood.

They came into life at the same time, arms wound so tight about one another that the healers had to pry them apart. Frigga oft lamented the pains they plagued her with when they were being particularly troublesome growing up.

He loves wrongly. Incorrectly. Terribly and wholly.

To look upon Thor is to gaze into the heart of a new star. Loki rather thinks he is like looking upon a dying star—fine until one day its squeezed too tight, explodes, and then begins slowly wilting through the millennia, his light becoming cooler and less bright, dimmer and lesser until he is nothing at all, a hard crystal floating among an abyss. The brighter, stronger star will overtake him. Songs will be sung, myths made, legends told throughout all time of the brighter star. It is its destiny to be worshipped. His brother, the sun.

It is the dying star, the dead star’s destiny to be forgotten.

It scares him.

   His love is the wrong love.

He’s told himself this for a thousand years.

His knife is deep between Thor’s groin and thigh, an inescapable thing. And though it is not the first time they have drawn blood from the other, it is the first time Thor looks upon Loki with betrayal.

You will suffer as I have, Loki tells his brother, and means it.

   He thinks Thor died until the end days. He thought for some reason Thor would miss all this bloodshed.

The gold latticework holding his brother’s leg on he can spy through the dust in the air is Frigga’s work. She knows what he did. Why wouldn’t she?

Their father is swallowed in the middle of the war, and Thor sobs his vengeance in the form of a storm more deadly than Loki has ever seen in any world.

Thor finds him not long before the end. The realm is on fire. The air is thick with the ash of their friends.

“But I love you,” Loki tells him.

Loki wishes he was pinned beneath his brother, held by the throat, anything to make it easier to claim he fought back. Any other way to say he did deny his own death. But he stands there and waits, the distance between them feeling like miles when perhaps not three yards was all that separated them.

Loki takes a step forward. Thor takes a step back.

Thor will not touch him.

It hurts worse than any other time he’s had to withstand the affectionate touches, the murmured praise, even the painful clinging the last time they’d ever fought and Loki thought he’d finally killed him.

Loki laughs when Thor brings up Mjolnir.

Their love is a regrettable love.

   He is dead and then he is alive.

He always thought Odin was lying about this part.

The Norns are here.

They whisper and shift, an ebb and flow of three bodies against one another, a shimmer in a pool.

He hears them speak in his mind, and shivers with it.

You failed, they say.

How, he asks.

A hand delves forth to plummet through his brow. He cannot see. He is gone.

You will try again until you get it right, they tell him.