Prince of Darkness, Fourth and Final Part

Two months after I got the prompt, I finally finished @shine-of-asgard‘s fic from my 666-follower giveaway. Jeezy Chreezy.

Part I, Part II, Part III

Thor
and his companions made camp on the glacier. They ate from the travel rations
they had packed because there was no hunting or forage to speak of. The sun
scarcely seemed to dip below the horizon for an hour, and it never truly grew
dark. Thor’s friends seemed to be able to sleep, shielded from the unrelenting
light by the thick fabric of their tent, but Thor could not.

He
left Volstagg’s snoring and Sif’s quiet nonsensical muttering and sat alone on
a fur blanket on the snow-covered ice, watching the sky slowly change from light
blue tinged with pink at the horizon to a deepening lilac. As the sky darkened,
a ribbon of acid-green light became visible, like a great serpent wrapped
around the Earth. Thor remembered this from his visits to Midgard in his youth:
the Northern Lights. He remembered asking Loki if he had cast some sort of
illusion, and Loki had shaken his head, his mouth slightly open in awe, and
said, “No, it’s just the sky.”

The
sun was well above the horizon again when his friends emerged from the tent and
began busying themselves with rebuilding the fire. None of them asked Thor
whether he had slept at all, for which he was grateful. After a light
breakfast of toasted waybread and slices of cured meat, they quenched the fire
with snow and headed toward the cluster of black tents where Coulson’s
comrades—the “agents of Shield,” he had called them—had made camp.

They
met Coulson and a few of his black-clad agents partway between their two camps.
“Loki has agreed to meet with you,” Coulson said. “I’ll escort you to the Jötun
encampment.”

“Just
‘Loki’?” Volstagg asked, sarcastic. “Not ‘King Loki’? ‘Emperor Loki’?”

Coulson
frowned at him. “He didn’t specify a title. He did specify that he wanted to
talk to Thor only, without his… ‘lackeys’ was the word he used.”

“Do
you think we’re stupid enough to leave our prince alone with that snake?” Sif
demanded.

Coulson
raised his eyebrows. “They won’t be alone. I have two of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s best
agents monitoring the Jötnar constantly, and I’ll stay nearby, along with
Agents Triplett and Mackenzie.” He gestured to the imposing men who flanked
him. The larger one nodded in greeting; the slimmer one smiled and gave a
little wave.

“I’ll
be fine, Sif,” Thor said. “Loki will not harm me.” He wished he believed that,
aside from the presence of the human warriors. Not that they could truly stop
Loki and his Jötun soldiers if he wanted to hurt Thor; but Loki was playing
some longer game, and would not wish to endanger his truce with the humans.

Thor
followed Coulson and his agents toward the coast, where the glacier seemed to
pour between gray stone cliffs, stopping just short of the sea. The Jötnar had
made crude shelters of ice—though perhaps they did not need much in the way of
shelter—and laid down furs in the lees they formed from the wind. Some had been
sitting on these furs, talking or perhaps playing games with rune-stones, but
stood when they saw Thor approaching with Coulson.

Loki
was impossible to miss. He was flanked by two giants of normal height, but
stood between them as proudly is if he were half again their height rather than
scarcely half of it. Thor’s fear that he would be unable to recognize Loki by
anything but his height turned out not to be entirely justified: though his
features were hard to make out when carved from lapis rather than marble, Thor
recognized his posture and the cut of his hair, which he had not shaved in the
custom of his Jötun compatriots, but had adorned with a simple circlet of the
pale jade that the Jötnar favored for jewelry and armor. Nor did he, who in
Asgard had always covered himself from neck to wrist, wear the loincloth
customary among Frost Giants; instead he wore a tunic of soft gray hide that
came to his knees, with a collar high on his chest and a belt around his waist
ornately carved of the same jade.

“Prince
Thor of Asgard,” Loki greeted him, very formally; then, turning to his escort,
“Agent Coulson.” His careful, correct tone never changed, nor did his
calculating scarlet gaze.

“Prince
Loki,” Coulson replied, just as polite. “How have you been getting along with
Agents Romanoff and Barton?” At that, a red-haired Midgardian woman in black
looked up from where she was sitting, playing at rune-stones with one of the
Jötnar, and waved.

“They
have been fine guests,” Loki said. “Agent Romanoff has quite taken to our games
of strategy. Barton is less proficient, but has been learning to throw blades
made of ice.”

Thor,
finding this ritual small talk maddening, bulled his way through it. “Loki, brother,
why have you done this?”

Loki
turned that cold gaze back on him, and did something flicker beneath the ice,
or was it only contempt? “Done what, precisely?”

“All
of it!”

Loki’s
eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared, and Thor could see his moody,
condescending brother beneath the veneer of diplomatic calm. “All of it? Well,
I took the Casket from Odin because he had no right to it; I returned it to
Jötunheim because the realm was dying without it. I killed Laufey because he
tried to kill me and showed no remorse. I waged war against Asgard because it
has waged unjust war against all of the realms in its dominion. I came here
because… because Jötunheim still has no place for those like me. I will make a home
here for those who have no place in Jötunheim—those born small; those
dispossessed by the war, or left homeless by the latest attack from Asgard. Our attack.” He stopped; his voice had
been rising, his breath quickening, and he needed to collect himself. Loki
could never let himself be seen losing control of his emotions.

“Your
home is in Asgard, not here—not this frozen wasteland, in this backward realm.”

Loki
flicked his eyes over to Coulson, who had backed away to stand at a polite
distance, and murmured, “Don’t let our good host hear you. And yes, it is all
that, but… a little corner of it can be mine, to shape and cultivate as I wish.
There is nothing for me in Asgard.”

“That
is not true, Loki. You have a family that loves you.”

Loki
raised his eyebrows in a show of cool skepticism; Thor was unsure whether the
disgusted twist of his mouth was voluntary. “Yes, I’m sure Odin All-Father’s
demand to ‘turn over the traitor Loki Laufeyson’ was only so that he could show
me how much he loves me, name change notwithstanding.”

Thor
flinched, but refused to be put off so easily. “He is very angry with you, but
that does not mean he no longer loves you.”

“No,
indeed. ‘No longer’ presupposes that he once loved me.”

“Of
course he did, and does,” Thor protested, but Odin’s brittle voice echoed in
his head: “Blood will out. The boy was always
a liar and a sneak.” “He was angry enough to cast me out—you saw it—but he
has welcomed me back.”

“Yes,
because he needed his true son to vanquish the false one… and because you
suddenly seemed a model of loyal obedience once he saw what real rebellion was.”

Thor
shook his head; this was going nowhere. “Loki, please, come home. Mother has
not been herself…”

“Then
perhaps she should have come to treat with me, as invited. But instead Odin
sent you—I think not as a peace envoy.”

“No,
but… Loki, I do not wish to fight. You are my brother; nothing can change that.
I want my brother at my side again.”

“Ah,
there we are. After all the deflection—‘Mother’ this, ‘Father’ that—at last you
speak for yourself.”

Thor’s
anger flared at that—but part of what fueled his anger was the knowledge that
Loki was right. So he quashed it and said, “I speak only for myself when I say:
you have a brother who loves you.”

At
last a hint of softness came into those strange yet wholly familiar red eyes.
But they quickly hardened again and Loki said with a bitter laugh, “Of course
you’d only get around to showing it when you saw there was a real chance you
wouldn’t have me at your back anymore. That’s quite the improvement from ‘Some
do battle, others just do tricks’ and ‘Know your place, brother.’”

Shame
burned in Thor’s gut to hear his own words thrown back at him. “I’m no longer
the reckless, arrogant boy who took all his blessings for granted. I’ve
changed.”

Loki laughed again, ironic and pitying. “And so have
I. I’ve learned a great deal about myself, not least of which is this: I’d
rather rule in Hel than serve in Valhalla.”

Prince of Darkness, Part I

foundlingmother:

philosopherking1887:

I still haven’t finished writing @shine-of-asgard‘s fic for my Satan-themed 666-follower giveaway… I shouldn’t even do fic giveaways, I can’t keep myself to a schedule or a word limit. Oy. I have written what I think is the majority of it, though, and I got to a good cliffhanger-y chapter break (and a little past), so I’m going to post it in two parts so that you don’t have to keep waiting.

Here was the prompt: “Loki/Lucifer and Odin/God. Variation of the ‘Lightbringer’ theme where Loki rebels against Odin and tries to steal the Casket of Winters to give it back to the Jotnar. It can follow the ‘biblical’ version with Odin striking Loki down and Loki falling from Asgard or you can spin it any other the way you want. Bonus points for the appearance of Thor as a conflicted good archangel who loves his brother but won’t go against God for him.”

I did it as a fairly straightfoward canon-divergent AU… well, you’ll see.

After Odin fell into the Sleep, Loki kept going back to the
Vault every few hours to stand before the plinth where the Casket of Ancient
Winters lay. Like a guilty man returning
to the scene of the crime. But what was the crime, he wondered, and whose?
Loki’s driving his father past the brink of exhaustion by confronting him with
the truth? Or Odin’s abandoning his son when he most needed his father’s
guidance? Or was it earlier: the lie he had told Loki for his whole life only
to reveal the truth in the wrong way, at the wrong moment, and then escape
taking responsibility for the aftermath? Couldn’t
he have thought of another lie? Any story, any explanation other than the
truth that Loki had already guessed?

The Casket wasn’t the
only thing you took from Jötunheim that day.

Loki felt a strange kinship with the Casket—like it was a
long-lost brother. Perhaps that was what kept drawing him back to it. We don’t belong here, either of us. Perhaps
that had been the true crime: those twin thefts more than a thousand years ago.

He saved my life, Loki
reminded himself; I would have died if he
hadn’t taken me. But was that even true? Could he believe Odin’s word about
anything, now? Was he a rescued castoff or a hostage? I hoped we could unite our kingdoms one day—bring about an alliance,
bring about a permanent peace—through you. How would that have worked, if
Laufey had never wanted him? And how could Odin know he was Laufey’s son, if he
had been left alone to die?

Loki was starved for knowledge, and he knew he would not get
it from Odin. Nor could he expect truth from his mother, from Frigga: Odin
might well have told her the same lies. No, there was only one person he could
ask: Laufey himself. As a king to another king, Laufey owed him the courtesy of
truth.

Keep reading

I adore that you’ve included Loki’s brothers. I’m always sad when they’re not included (and it seems they really don’t exist in the MCU…). The entire confrontation is excellently done! Poor Loki 😦 Yeah, I’d stab Laufey, too. He could have at least worded it a little nicer. Then again, flowery language doesn’t really seem like Laufey’s style. Not who Loki inherited his silver tongue from.

Thanks! It’s pretty standard fanfiction practice to include Loki’s brothers, even in human AUs where Thor and Loki come from different families, but the MCU seems to have decided (oddly) that Laufey doesn’t have any other kids. Careless of him not to secure the succession. And if Loki is the “rightful king of Jotunheim” (per those dimwitted hacks Markus & McFeely), who’s been in charge there for the past 7 years? Do they have a Gondor-style Steward who keeps things running while waiting for the king to return?

If Loki inherited his eloquence from anyone, it was Farbauti; more likely he learned it from Frigga.

The Ninth Deadly Sin (Thorki giveaway fic)

I finally finished the fic that @wouldyouknowmore won in my 666-follower Satan-themed giveaway. Yours is next, @shine-of-asgard… sorry I’m slow :-

The prompt wouldyouknowmore gave me was: “what would you think of writing Loki and Thor as personifications of two of the seven deadly sins? Patron demons, if you will. I’ll let you choose which sins, of course.” I suggested writing it as a workplace comedy taking inspiration from Good Omens and “The Good Place”; this is what resulted. It’s almost 3000 words rather than the intended 1000-2000… I’ve never been good with word limits.

It was virtually inevitable that Loki would end up both loving and hating Thor; it was in their natures.

They worked in the Deadly Sins department of the Pre-Death Acquisitions division of Hell. It was a common misconception that there were seven of them—there was definitely something satisfying about the number seven, and “Seven Deadly Sins” had a nice ring to it—but there were in fact eight. Someone should have told Pope Gregory that Pride was a very different sin from Vanity; it would have been obvious, Loki thought, if only he had met both Thor and Fandral. Vanity is the obsessive preoccupation with outward appearances and with the opinions of others; pride is an excessive inner confidence in one’s own abilities and worth. Loki found vanity (and Fandral) to be contemptible, servile, and therefore unattractive. Pride, on the other hand… there was an alluring swagger to it (and Thor). It may have been a moral vice, but Loki considered it an aesthetic virtue.

Loki envied Thor his prideful swagger. Of course he did; he was, after all, the embodiment of Envy. Which he might have found contemptible in himself, but he comforted himself with Nietzsche’s argument that envy was a Homeric virtue which spurred its possessors to great deeds in the agon, and was moved by the inscription from Hesiod: “Two Eris-goddesses are on earth… the one, the cruel one, furthers the evil war and feud! … Zeus the high-ruling one, however, placed the other Eris upon the roots of the earth and among men as a much better one. She urges even the unskilled man to work, and if one who lacks property beholds another that is rich, then he hastens to sow in similar fashion and to plant and to put his house in order; the neighbor vies with his neighbor who strives after fortune. Good is this Eris to men. The potter also has a grudge against the potter, and the carpenter against the carpenter; the beggar envies the beggar, and the singer the singer.”

And if that didn’t help to make him feel better about himself, he could always console himself that “whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” Loki read a lot of Nietzsche.

But Loki’s envy of Thor wouldn’t have spurred him to much if it weren’t for Amora—fittingly, for she was the spirit of Lust.

For about a century Loki had been carrying on an affair with the Grandmaster, who worked in Post-Death Retribution. His specialty was to pit the damned souls (conveniently re-embodied for the purpose) against each other in gladiatorial combat—not to the death, of course, since that was a fait accompli, but certainly to the painful mutilation. He was more than a little eccentric, but he was very high up in the demonic hierarchy and accordingly well compensated. He doted on Loki, constantly lavished him with fine new clothes in every style imaginable, displayed him proudly on his arm (as if he were some kind of designer bag) at the most decadent restaurants and clubs in Pandemonium.

The Grandmaster, whose true name was En Dwi Gast, claimed to be one of the original angels who rebelled with Lucifer. Loki wasn’t sure he believed that, but he did have enough access that at an incredibly exclusive party, he was able to introduce Loki to Satan himself. The Prince of Darkness (in a dazzlingly well-tailored suit that Loki instantly coveted) briefly eyed Loki up and down and, without a change in his cool expression, said, “You know, they always say that Pride was my cardinal sin, but I think they underestimate the… pull of Envy.” Loki thought the Grandmaster’s simpering smile in response had a touch of sourness in it; and perhaps he was only imagining it, but it seemed that when he glanced over later to the dais where the Lords of Hell sat, Satan winked at him.

For all his caprice and possessiveness, the Grandmaster was an attentive and extraordinarily creative lover. All in all, Loki thought as he lay sleepless beside his softly snoring patron and paramour, he should have been satisfied with his situation. But of course, since he was the personification of Envy, satisfaction was not in his nature.

The next day Amora noticed Loki looking even more dissatisfied than usual, more wan and distracted and with deeper shadows under his eyes. As soon as Heimdall, their supervisor, left the room to meet with Odin (an exceptionally successful embodiment of Greed who had been promoted to Temptation Coordinator), Amora sauntered over to Loki’s desk.

“You look like someone who needs some cheering up,” she said with a little sympathetic pout.

If he had been anyone else, Loki would have thought Amora was trying to seduce him; but he knew her well enough to know that that was just her default manner, and she knew him well enough to know that she was definitely not his type.

“Why, do you have any suggestions?” he asked dully. He imagined that she might recommend some truly depraved sex act he could try with En. The thought didn’t exactly appeal to him.

But no, Amora directed her heavy-lidded gaze significantly toward Thor’s desk at the front of the room.

“Amora, you know I have an arrangement with the Grandmaster.”

Amora gave him a disdainful look that somehow managed not to be sexy. “Loki, we are demons who are literally the embodiment of sins.”

“It wasn’t a moral objection!” Loki protested, indignant. “You know how jealous the Grandmaster is. If he found out…”

Amora scoffed. “What would he do? Kill you? Force you to battle some pathetic mortals?”

“He could destroy my career!”

Amora snorted. “That’s what you’re worried about? You really want to work in your daddy’s corner office, filing paperwork and drawing up presentations?”

Loki flushed a little at the description but insisted, “You know who I am, what I am. Anyway, I definitely don’t want to go back to being an imp, whispering in mortals’ ears about how shiny their neighbor’s new car is and how delightful it would be to put a little scratch in the paint. I’ve been doing really good work here! Reality TV? The explosion of social media? That was me! I made that happen!”

“Of course, you’re very talented,” Amora said soothingly. “Someone who works as hard as you do deserves to do something nice for himself.”

Loki glanced over at Thor, who at that moment happened to be stretching his shoulders in a way that seemed to make all the muscles in his upper body ripple and bulge.

“And by ‘something nice’ you mean seducing my coworker who also happens to be my adoptive brother.”

“When you put it that way, it’s almost irresistible, isn’t it?”

Loki looked over at Thor again. Now he was gathering his abundant golden locks into a loose bun, exposing the tantalizing angle where his surprisingly slender neck met his powerful shoulder. Loki sighed. Thor was the one thing he had always wanted most but had never allowed himself to dream he might have.

“And you really think it will work?” he asked, more plaintively than he had intended.

“Of course! You’re the most desirable demon in Hell… excepting myself, of course. Satan himself made a pass at you. Why wouldn’t he want you?”

“Thor, he’s… not the type to want something just because everybody else wants it.”

“Did I suggest anything of the kind? No, he’ll want you because you’re beautiful and stylish and smart and ambitious.”

“But how do you know?” Loki insisted. His insecurity was something else he hated about himself, but it seemed inescapable.

Amora sighed and leaned closer. “Loki, it’s my job to know. I watch people. I watch people watching other people. And shit like that—that ridiculous stretch, that unnecessary fussing with his hair—Thor doesn’t do that unless he thinks you’re looking.”

“Oh,” was all Loki could say to that.

“And Loki…” Amora added as she got up to return to her desk. “If the Grandmaster isn’t making you happy, you should break it off with him.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that. I would have thought you’d want me to be getting as much as I can, wherever I can.”

“Only if you’re actually into it. I’m the spirit of Lust, not distasteful, calculating sex for career advancement.”

“No, I suppose that’s more in my purview,” Loki acknowledged.

When work hours were over, Thor, as usual, made his way to the work station of his three best friends, Volstagg, Fandral, and Hogun. Volstagg was the spirit of Gluttony; Hogun embodied a less-understood sin, not Sloth as it is commonly called (which causes it to be mistaken for laziness), but Acedia, which is perhaps best translated as Apathy. Their other good friend, Sif, the spirit of Wrath, had joined them. She was, as usual, griping about something; this time it was her girlfriend’s boss. Sif was in a passionate, tempestuous, but remarkably constant relationship with Brunnhilde, the Apocalyptic Horsewoman of War; and Hela, the chief Apocalyptic Horsewoman representing Death, was by all accounts a heinous bitch.

Loki, as was not usual, steeled himself and wandered over with affected casualness to join them.

“Brother!” Thor greeted him with his typical booming joviality. “It seems that we have not spoken in an age.”

Thor’s friends did not share his enthusiasm. They said nothing, but their cold suspicion spoke clearly enough from their faces.

Loki forced himself to ignore them. “I have almost certainly bidden you good morning a few times in the past age.”

Thor laughed. “There is speaking and then there is speaking, and we have hardly spoken of late. Come, Loki, have a drink with us; I want to know how my brother has been passing his time.”

Do you really? Loki wondered. “A drink sounds good” was all he said.

“I’m afraid I have a date night with Brunnhilde,” said Sif. Loki didn’t know if she was making that up as an excuse not to have to interact with him; she always spoke in that brusque tone, so it was hard to tell if she was being hostile.

“I’m having dinner with the wife,” Volstagg said, patting his belly in anticipation. Volstagg was married to a Retribution demon whose specialty was forcing people who in life had spent their obscene wealth only on their own enjoyment to gorge themselves on endless gourmet meals of nauseating richness. Needless to say, her vocation and Volstagg’s were perfectly suited to each other.

“Fandral, would you care to join us?”

“I, too, have a date,” Fandral said, running a hand through his artfully mussed hair for the umpteenth time that day. Loki neither knew whether he was lying (to avoid Loki? for the sake of appearances?) nor particularly cared.

“Hogun?”

“Nah,” was all Hogun said. No one pressed him further.

“Well, I suppose it’s just us,” Thor said, turning back to Loki. If anything, he looked even more cheerful than before. Loki wasn’t sure whether to be hopeful or suspicious.

They walked to the little pub around the corner from their office. One might have considered its dim lighting romantic, but it was loud and grungy enough that Loki usually didn’t. Thor ordered a beer; none of the wines were up to Loki’s increasingly exacting standards, so he ordered a gin and tonic. It was hard to go wrong with that, even in Hell.

“So, how has my brother been passing his time?” Thor asked.

Loki felt his face heating, but he couldn’t have said whether it was from shame or from the disarming warmth of Thor’s smile. “Work has been taking up most of my time lately,” he said, not untruthfully. “The social media project has really taken off… which is gratifying, of course, but also creates more work. No rest for the wicked.”

Thor chuckled at his witticism, then said, “Ah, yes; Fandral talks endlessly about the success of his collaborations with you on ‘social media.’”

Loki nodded. “Our joint efforts have been very productive. Together we came up with the ‘selfie’ and the ‘humblebrag’… but the selfie stick was all Fandral.” He was good at his job, Loki had to give him that.

“Yes, he’s extraordinarily proud of that… or vain about it, perhaps I should say.” Thor smirked at his own joke.

“Rightly so,” Loki said graciously. “It’s exactly as infernal as something invented in Hell should be.”

Thor laughed aloud, so boomingly that Loki glanced around to see if other patrons were staring at them (not many, fortunately).

“What about you? How have you been keeping yourself occupied?” Loki asked, half fearing the answer. What if he had a lover Loki knew nothing about?

“Like you, mostly work. Envy and Vanity are certainly more widespread sins than good old-fashioned Pride, but I’ve been focusing my efforts on a few powerful industries and it’s really paid off.”

“You got that award for the financial crash ten years ago…”

“I did! And I made sure no one on Wall Street learned any lessons about the danger of hubris. The tech sector was a little more cautious after the bubble in the ’90s, but they’ve gotten well past that now. And they might have learned something after the last American election, but it certainly wasn’t humility.”

Loki smiled, but couldn’t help thinking that Thor was doing better than he was, achieving far-reaching results by instilling his sin in fewer people with a greater concentration of power and influence.

“What about your social life?” Thor asked, trying to sound offhand. “Who have you been spending your time with? Since I know it isn’t me.”

“Oh, I get out enough with Amora and Lorelei.” Amora’s younger sister was a succubus, which is what Amora had been before she was promoted.

Thor gave him a look that said he knew Loki was being evasive. “Any… romantic entanglements?” he pressed.

Loki looked down into his drink. How had it gotten empty so fast? He waved to get the bartender’s attention and answered his grouchy “Yes?” with “Another gin and tonic, please.”

Thor cleared his throat, not too overtly but with definite purpose, to indicate that he wasn’t going to let his question drop.

“You’ve probably heard about me and the Grandmaster,” Loki mumbled.

“Just rumors.”

“It’s not… serious. Not official.”

“That’s not what the rumors said.”

Oh, thank Lucifer the second gin and tonic had arrived, and it was strong. Loki drank about a third of it in one pull, then asked testily, “Why are you so nosy about my sex life all of a sudden?”

“I didn’t ask about your sex life, I asked about your love life,” Thor pointed out. “And I’m interested because you’re my little brother. I care about you.”

Loki snorted. “We’re demons, Thor. Love and care isn’t exactly what we do.”

“Says who?”

“God. The Devil. Everything.”

“I know you read a lot of philosophy and you’re smarter than I am, and that’s great. It’s part of what I love about you. But I’ve been doing some thinking myself, and I’ve been thinking… maybe only bad people can truly love, completely and unreservedly.”

“All right, I’m intrigued. Why would you think that?”

“Because good people can be forced to choose between someone they love and doing the right thing. Maybe they have to leave the person they love to go fight for a just cause. Or maybe the person they love does something evil. Do you turn them in, punish them? We never have to choose. I can always choose you.”

Loki was at a loss for words. Fortunately he still had some of his drink left, and he bought a few seconds by taking a slow sip. “What if you had to choose between me and doing something exceptionally evil?”

“Fortunately for me,” Thor said, matching Loki’s mischievous tone, “you are something exceptionally evil.”

Loki’s face was feeling hotter than ever, his heart going uncomfortably fast. “I didn’t think it was a question of doing me.”

Thor put an enormous hand over Loki’s on the bar, gave him the cockiest grin Loki had ever seen, and said, “Isn’t it?”

The air seemed to leave Loki’s lungs like an untied balloon. “But we’re brothers,” he managed to say wheezily with the little breath he had left.

“We’re demons, Loki,” Thor parroted back at him. “Who gives a shit?”

Loki’s mouth was hanging open, and Thor seemed to take that as an invitation. He leaned in and kissed Loki slowly but firmly, with an air of confident ownership that only the spirit of Pride could convey.

After they parted, Loki had to take a few moments to recover. “So you don’t care about the Grandmaster?” he said eventually.

“You don’t love him,” Thor declared. “So he can get fucked.”

“Oh, I’m sure he will,” Loki muttered. He wondered if that bothered him—the idea of his old lover, the powerful demon who had showered him with favor, finding another favorite to pamper. Oddly enough, he didn’t think it did.

Thor laughed heartily; he had always seemed to appreciate Loki’s sense of humor. “And so shall we,” he announced. He put some cash down on the bar to pay for their drinks—well over what they owed, Loki noticed; typical of Pride—extended a hand as if to help Loki down from his seat, and led him toward the door. Loki’s already rather tight trousers were now feeling uncomfortably tight; he very much hoped no one would notice that they weren’t quite lying the way they were supposed to… but he also hoped they would notice whose arm he was gracing now, and eat their hearts out.

Thanks, Amora, he thought, and he mostly meant it.