(Reply to The Neck Thing) I get why you would see it that way, that the gesture scared him because it threatened the mission. I always interpreted the longing look in his eyes to mean that the nostalgia of the touch made him consider taking up Thor’s offer: to stop everything and come home. That little laugh and head shake he does afterward always made me think that he was pushing the thought from his mind because he feels he can’t stop, because he feared Thanos or whatever reason he had.

Oh, absolutely. As I’m sure you know, because I talk about it a lot on my blog (it’s easier for me to point people to it than rewrite it on Tumblr as meta, but people usually aren’t interested…), I have written a fic, The Abyss Gazes Also, speculating about how exactly Thanos got Loki to the point where he was willing to go to Earth to fetch the Tesseract for him. It’s now reached the events of The Avengers, which I’m telling from Loki’s POV, and the most recent chapter deals with that conversation with Thor, including Loki’s conflicted feelings about Thor trying The Neck Thing on him (twice!).