iamanartichoke:

maneth985:

veliseraptor:

I think a lot about Thor avoiding Loki after The Avengers. 

he doesn’t go to Loki’s cell. doesn’t talk to him. spends as much time as possible away from Asgard. I think part of it is anger – the betrayal, the sense of how could he do this, a desire to punish Loki by ignoring him (because more than anything else, Loki has always hated being ignored). 

but I think part of it is also fear and confusion: Thor doesn’t get why things have changed so much, and he’s afraid of confronting Loki about it, because on some level Thor doesn’t want all his worst impressions to be realized. he hopes there’s some kind of explanation, some kind of reason, maybe even some kind of excuse. but he’s afraid that there just…isn’t, and doesn’t want to face the possibility that the Loki he knew growing up is just…gone forever. 

so rather than deal with that, he avoids it, and avoids Loki, because as long as he doesn’t see Loki he doesn’t have to deal with him, and on some level Thor really doesn’t want to. 

with Frigga’s murder, the anger overcomes that fear, but he still retains this closed off, hard-hearted facade, because he’s determined, even then, not to deal with the implicit vulnerability of asking why.

because he’s afraid of the answer.

And afraid of being manipulated by Loki, of being called on shit by him. And because Odin forbade any visitors, and Thor wants to be the Good Son, so he kept himself busy cleaning up messes that supposedly Loki inspired.

I too think a lot about this period in their relationships and I love this meta. 

I actually wrote it this way in a fic where they finally talk about shit (and also have sex, naturally):

“Why did you not come to see me for a year after I was imprisoned?”

It became clear to Thor that talk of the ‘pang’ of guilt was not merely metaphorical, because he felt it as a sudden ache in his stomach. “I was angry,” he said simply. “And hurt, and confused. But I was too cowardly to ask the questions that ate at me, because I feared what the answers might be. It was… easier to nurse my anger at a distance. To tell myself that I had given you up for lost, when in truth I kept myself in just enough ignorance to keep a spark of hope alive.”

Loki laughed, with far less bitterness than Thor might have expected. “Do you know, that reminds me of this strange theory Midgardians have about ‘subatomic particles’—very small components of matter. They say that the position of these particles is not only unknown but indeterminate until a measurement is taken. A skeptic of this view devised a thought experiment that he took to be a reductio ad absurdum: suppose a cat is put in a box with a flask of poison, and a certain motion of one of these particles will trigger a mechanism to break the flask. If the position of the particle is truly indeterminate until measured, then until we open the box, the cat is both alive and dead—but that cannot be. Just so, it seems, you thought that I was at once lost to you and not, in reach of salvation and not, so long as you never spoke to me to find out which it was.”

Thor frowned. “And yet it is not so strange to think that the state of a person’s mind is unfixed until asked after as to think that a cat may be both alive and dead until seen to be one or the other. I feared that if, in anger, I spoke the wrong words to you, I would ensure that I had lost you forever.”

“But you did not fear that you might ensure it by waiting too long to ask?” Loki said, more gently than the words might have warranted.

Thor pressed his fingers to his closed eyelids and sighed. “I did. I did, but I was a coward. I kept telling myself that it had not been too long yet; that if you were still my brother, a few months would not be enough to change that.  I could not bear to let go of either my anger or my hope.”

Loki laughed again, slightly taunting, but still remarkably benign. “If only I had recorded it for the ages—the mighty Thor admitting to cowardice!”