I commissioned @kingloptr to illustrate a scene from the first fic in my Thorki series, “Desert Flowers.” I’m feeling really good about my spending decisions right now.

The relevant scene is excerpted under the cut.

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“Let’s take a concrete example.” Loki’s smile still looked hungry, but it wasn’t the predatory hunger it had shown just a moment ago. “Every society that we might consider advanced by any criteria—technological or cultural—has had a taboo against incest. But what makes us think that it is really, truly morally wrong?”

Thor’s breath caught. “Well, it certainly makes sense—children born of incestuous unions, especially several generations of them, are more likely to be born with deformities, or congenital diseases…”

“All right, but what if precautions were taken to prevent conception? Or—what about relations between family members of the same sex?”

Thor felt his heart beating faster, and its erratic thumping seemed to be located nearer his throat than usual. He was frozen in place as Loki stood, walked deliberately around the table, and leaned over Thor’s chair, his fists resting on its arms. Thor knew what he was going to do, and something in his brain screamed wrong, but he also couldn’t bring himself to move. Loki rested one knee on the seat of the chair, his leg brushing lightly against Thor’s; then he leaned forward and pressed his lips against his brother’s. For reasons he didn’t want to think about, Thor found his mouth opening under Loki’s, letting in the questing tip of his tongue, meeting it with his own. Loki’s movements were a bit clumsy—Thor had reason to think he had never really done this before—but his smell was heady, at once deeply familiar and utterly new, and his tongue tasted of ash and honey and something undefinable.

Finally Loki pulled away, much too soon and not nearly soon enough, and grinned down at Thor’s shocked expression. He had wanted to do that for ages, but he could never think of a pretext; and what better than the influence of foreign drugs, combined with the desire to prove a point? Well, he had answered one question about himself: he was not completely uninterested in the pleasures of the flesh; he only wanted the one person he could never have. The one person he wanted to have because he was everything Loki could never be: all easy, open warmth, guileless joy, effortless strength; the sun shining through stormclouds, made flesh.

“Well, Thor? Did the earth cry out against us? Has the sky fallen around our ears?”

“No, but—”  Thor tried to gather his scattered wits. He had no idea what that was about, but figured it was safest to treat it as a joke. “Norns, Loki, the lengths you’ll go to just to win an argument…”

‘Just’? Loki thought. Well, if it comforted Thor to think so, let him. “No, but…?”

“But it still felt… wrong.”

Loki pushed away from Thor’s chair, stood upright, and folded his arms. He felt stung, unexpectedly, but was quick to hide it behind his air of arch playfulness. “Wrong how? Did you feel outrage? Indignation? Or something more like… disgust?”

Thor paused, unsure what to say. Disgust was not the word he would have chosen, but… it had felt something like nausea. Or that adrenaline-intoxicated point where nausea and hunger meet.

Loki took his silence as an answer. “And that, brother, is the power of the morality of mores—of custom. You can’t think of a reason why it was wrong; no one was harmed, no one’s rights violated. But custom tells you it was wrong: something we just don’t do. And your reaction—disgust, not indignation—was fundamentally an aesthetic one.”

Thor shook his head, trying to banish the feeling of Loki’s lips on his, the memory of his newly novel smell. “I think I lost track of what point you were making.”

Loki sat down again in his own chair, picked up his long-forgotten mead goblet, and took a sip. “The point, Thor, is that morality has been half aesthetic—or more than half—for all of history, and long before.”