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Title: Sciamachy
Chapter One: Pale September
Fandom: Thor/Marvel Cinematic Universe
Pairing: Loki+Thor
Rating: PG (for sexual imagery)
Includes: Preslash, pre-incest (at least as far as the pair knows at this time), surprising gentleness with just a touch of pre-d/s :)
Notes: Set well prior to the first Thor movie, around Loki's mid to late teens. Chapter includes abilities (telepathy, hypnotism) which are canon for Loki in the Thor comics but have not been explicitly evidenced in the cinematic universe.
sciamachy
n. Rare. A fight with an imaginary enemy. (C17: from Greek skiamakhia a mock fight, from skia a shadow + makhesthai to fight)
The embers in the hearth had died down to a subtle glitter, like flecks of bright gold amid the ash. Loki did not feel the chill, had always been slow to shiver in the frozen months, but at the sound of shuffling steps along the hall he turned, and, noting the state of the fire, swelled it back to small lapping tongues of flame with a gesture.
It was a late hour for visitors, and he amused himself analyzing the footsteps- to whom did they belong? Nothing sprang to mind. At times they fell into a rhythm that seemed familiar, but then they stumbled and scuffed out of it. Loki suspected his visitor must be a man in his cups or one whose mind was plagued with some dread.
It was possible, until the sound of those steps came to a stop, that the person to whom they belonged would go on, would pass Loki's door on some other errand, but Loki never even toyed with that thought. No, this man would come to him, likely for counsel on some secret matter. More than half the court had done so, many more than once, despite how they contrived in public to pretend that they had, overall, more interest in the elder brother- a creature of bright swagger and easy smiles. A creature thoughts of whom made Loki's stomach twist with a thousand mingled emotions.
Loki contrived to open the door just as a hand would lift to knock, and as the portal swung open upon him Thor seemed nothing of the bright swaggerer, absent of his easy smiles. His hair was dark with sweat, his eyes bruise-blue from sleepnessness. He staggered, wearing a dressing gown that seemed half wet as though he had fallen into a bath or a bank of melting snow. His breath was sweet with mead, but it was not drunkenness that made him stagger there in Loki's doorway, no, it was something else, entirely more inimical than alcohol.
"Thor," Loki said, gently coming forward to take his brother's arm. "Look at the state of you. Come in at once."
Thor was unresisting in his grasp and uncharacteristically silent. A small flutter of fear rose in Loki; he quashed it and continued to move with natural, practiced ease, as if this sort of thing happened all the time and he could not be more confident. First, he shut the door, then he turned Thor toward the fire (not yet more than a few flames, not warm enough for a sodden and half-naked man!) and quickly stripped him of his wet things.
This seemed to wake Thor somewhat. He blinked and made a low noise something like a growl only more inquisitive. His body looked gilded in the firelight. Bronze skin gleamed over sculpted muscle. In some ways Thor had no rival in Asgard. Loki quickly got a blanket, wrapped it around Thor, and dried him with swift, brisk rubs of skin through cloth.
"L-Loki?" Thor said.
"Were you sleepwalking, brother?" Loki asked.
"I-" The shudder that ran through Thor's body echoed in his deep voice. "I... hope not." His arms slipped under the blanket to hold it to him and his eyes searched at the fire for something, then flicked to Loki. Thor flinched then- not noticeably, but clear enough to someone who knew him well.
Unlike this strange quietness, this flavor of pain that seemed to haunt his brother, that small flinch was familiar enough to Loki. He'd seen it several times over the past few days, and liked seeing it no more tonight than he had when it first emerged, after a sidelong glance, in the celebratory feast after Loki's first war game- and it's subsequent victory. Loki did not know what the flinch meant, but he could imagine well enough; he is sly, the courtiers said, and Thor's friends often loudest of all, we never know what he is thinking. How can one know with a master of magic?
Loki never felt anger the way that others seem to- his father aside, for Odin's wrath is slow and cold and terrible, just as Odin, as the wags seem to forget, is as powerful in magic as he is in wisdom and in war. Others seemed to flare suddenly hot, to bluster like a scalding summer wind, their fury loud and quickly forgotten. Loki felt anger like a cold diamond in his heart, repeated pressures condensing the rage, making it something bright and sparkling and somehow precious.
The whispers did not particularly annoy Loki; sometimes they even amused him. They could never know what he was thinking, nor understand his thoughts if they managed to puzzle them out. None of them could. But that little slip of emotion on Thor's face, the doubt,- that fed his anger. That made the diamond of it sharp inside him.
And because Loki had never been one to shrink from a wound, he turned that diamond on Thor almost instinctively, made the pain double-edged by prodding directly at whatever had so driven his brother from his bed- or likely, someone else's- in the late hours of the night.
"We should get you to your bed," Loki said, and said it with soft solicitude, the same tone he had used when he meant nothing more than to soothe. This time he meant to startle out a deeper flinch, more unease, because surely Thor would not be here if his own bed offered any comfort. A bad dream? Loki wondered. Most assuredly.
He could play Thor like a dulcimer, although usually he forebore except for Thor's own good. But he was not surprised when his gambit yielded exactly the result he wanted: Thor looked lost, swayed on his feet and lifted a hand to scrub at his eyes. "No," he grated, the word drawn out and scarcely above a whisper.
Loki resisted a smile of satisfaction. No, Thor? Surely, if you don't wish to be around me, your bed would be a better refuge than mine. The thought startled him after he thought it, but only for a moment. His first thought upon seeing Thor in that state had been to warm him up and get him to rest. Loki rarely slept in any case, and would not mind a night in his chair before the fire. That was all he had meant.
Of all the inhabited rooms in Asgard, Loki's was one of the very few Thor could expect to fall asleep in unmolested. And now that particularly pleasant little thought had wormed its way into Loki's mind, he found himself unable to prevent thinking about it, about how they would seduce his brother. The court ladies (and lads), Thor's bosom friends, they would see how Thor shivered still, before the fire, and wrap their arms around him, stroking at the golden hair, nails massaging the edge of his beard, gentle caresses that would soothe at first but would quickly turn to something else. When Thor was pulled back from whatever darkness he had trod unwary into in the pathways of his dreams,- those touches would turn then into caresses along the side of the strong neck, trail the course of a broad shoulder. They would be at once unable to forget that Thor was nude beneath the blanket. They would look up into his eyes, trapped for a moment, then place the most delicate of kisses on the side of his mouth-
Loki broke off the images with a small flinch of his own, and was glad Thor was not particularly observant at the best of times. "Then what do you want?" he said, and heard the faint edge in his own voice. "You ought to rest."
Thor looked miserable, and it disturbed Loki that the largest issue he had with that fact was that, like this, he couldn't take his eyes off his brother. He took a small step forward and placed a hand gingerly on Thor's shoulder, gripping it through the blanket.
Thor smiled his thanks, absently, and reached up to clasp his own larger hand over Loki's, closed his eyes, and half-leaned back as if he had forgotten for the moment which of them were taller, and by how much. Thor was a creature of touch and had always yearned for it, needed it, been comforted by it.
"Can't sleep," Thor said, "I do not want to see it again. What I dreamed."
"Ah," Loki said delicately. It was precisely what he had guessed, but it left him feeling precariously close to some abyss. It was an odd feeling, wanting and yet not wanting something. He banished the weaker parts of himself with a ruthless mental twist and placed his other hand on Thor's opposite shoulder, the better to guide his brother to the edge of a divan. "It may be difficult, Thor, but perhaps you should tell me of that dream. Waking speech and thought often banishes the worst demons of our nightmares."
Thor sighed and leaned more fully against him, heedless of his weight, like a great squirming dog. "I cannot really remember it. I just know that I do not wish to see it again. Know that it is bad, unutterably-- and it is just waiting there for me to close my eyes."
"But you must sleep," Loki said, trying not to wince or laugh as Thor's weight fell against him, not in his lap thanks to all that was holy, but half-draped over him. "You have the tournament tomorrow. Would you lose to some lesser warrior merely because of some faceless night-terror?"
"No," Thor murmured, "of course not. But..." He shifted again, all elbows, and Loki quickly eased him down until his head rested on Loki's lap, encouraging such a restful and ultimately controllable position with a ghosting touch of fingers on Thor's hair, across his eyelids.
"Shh," Loki said. "no more talk, now. I will not be humiliated by watching my hero brother lose. Sleep."
"Loki," Thor murmured.
"Silence, Thor." The harshness in the words and the brief pinch he gave to the outer edge of his brother's ear was softened somewhat by Loki's tone, which was still soothing, gentle, almost hypnotic. "I will fetch more bedding. The fire will soon die."
Thor had never quite come awake from his dream, and exhaustion took its toll swiftly the moment he was partly horizontal. Still, he reached out as if to grab Loki when he slipped off the divan. Loki evaded as kindly as he could and gathered the rest of the furs and blankets from his bed. He rolled one to slip beneath Thor's head and piled the others over him, pausing to touch Thor's cheek.
"Fool," he murmured fondly. "What sort of grown man lets a dream so torment him?"
There was no response. Thor's face was soft and his breathing steady with the first lull of sleep, which, Loki suspected with an inward wince, would soon turn to snores. He gauged the forest of blankets and furs draped over Thor, then gingerly plucked the top fur, a soft white one stippled with hints of black, as the only one he might bother with for his own bed that night. He draped it, half-folded, over one arm, then hesitated.
"Thor," he said again, softly, experimentally. No answer. Slowly, Loki knelt beside the edge of the divan, fingertips almost touching his brother's temple but not quite. Loki drew in a breath, then plunged into his action, dipping lightly over the surface of Thor's sleeping thoughts. He had not done this often and he found it strangely difficult and confusing, like swimming in swirls of thick honey.
"What was your dream?" he whispered. His will formed paths through the strange eddies and pitfalls of Thor's mind, blank and disoriented with sleep. He felt his own words, like a visceral echo, shiver around him, and drew slightly back, keeping his touch featherlight, skirling the surface of what he would see. It took patience, but the dark, confused, fearful images formed at last into clear thoughts and then played out into a scene. He saw as Thor saw, though more dimly, still apart in his own mind and still, Loki told himself, in control.
The halls around him loomed, half-weird and half-familiar, for Asgard's halls and rooms seemed much larger to the eyes of a child. Thor knew them well, at least those around his family's apartments in the citadel, and knew that they should not echo with a baby's keening wails. The sounds strobed strangely, as if through water, and then there was only the memory of crying, as sometimes sounds did not form perfectly in dreams. Thor ran and ran, pushing through doorways into a sudden maze, as if reality had lengthened and multiplied.
(Was this all? Loki wondered. Frustrating, yes, but dreams where one sought and never found were fairly common, he understood.)
Then the child-Thor rounded a corner and pushed into the small day-room off their parents' suite. Moonlight poured in through the great windows, past curtains usually closed to the night air. That moonlight drenched a small white basket set upon legs- a basinet- and what lay inside it, something like an infant made of pulsing, glimmering ice. Its crimson eyes peered wildly from the bluish crystalline skin.
(A Jötun?)
The child-Thor approached the basinet, but then Frigga was there, sweeping him aside, into her arms and a confusion of half-awakening, Thor confusing the dream-embrace with the heavy warmth cocooning him. Loki drew partly back, annoyance sparking at the tameness of the vision and its complete absurdity, but then sleep's tendrils drew Thor back in again, in shadow forms and fragments that formed... that formed Loki.
It was not Loki the way he had ever imagined himself, but he recognized his face, his body, even through the lens of Thor's thoughts. He sat by a warm pool, trailing his fingers through the water. As Thor approached, he looked up with a piercing, knowing expression in his eyes, a faint smile on his face.
(Is that how I look? Loki thought. Not displeasing. Apparently his efforts to control his expressions and school himself to a perfect grace had not been without benefit.)
"Come here, Thor," the dream Loki called, and the dream Thor came closer, step by step gliding into a mist of heat from the pool. The dream Loki's eyes flashed, then he laughed. "I know why you've come," he said. "So disgraceful."
Thor felt a wash of embarrassment and pain. He tried to turn away, but the dream had him (Loki felt Thor's mind pull at the bonds of his own tangled thoughts and fail to enforce any control over them) and instead, he crushed the dream Loki to him, pressed them roughly together.
Their lips met, Thor's arm came up behind him, an embrace like silk and lavender and ice, a confusing blend of real textures and imaginary ones. Loki looked on in shocked silence, his own mind reeling, as the dream images of his brother and himself fell past humid steam and the hot water enveloped them. For a moment the caresses and kisses felt real, the real pressure of lips and teeth, of fingertips and fingernails, then the dream-Loki began to melt into the water as if he were made of ice, horrifying and vivid, tragic and strangely lovely, until all that was left of him were knowing eyes reflected in the choppy waves their bodies had made.
Loki pulled back, his breathing harsh and fast. He staggered backward, touched his forehead and then turned to gaze at the dead ashes in the fireplace before he took a deep cleansing breath and returned to his bedroom.
"A dream," he murmured to himself. A dream he would have to consider, would have to puzzle out in much more detail. "A dream," he said again.
Chapter One: Pale September
Fandom: Thor/Marvel Cinematic Universe
Pairing: Loki+Thor
Rating: PG (for sexual imagery)
Includes: Preslash, pre-incest (at least as far as the pair knows at this time), surprising gentleness with just a touch of pre-d/s :)
Notes: Set well prior to the first Thor movie, around Loki's mid to late teens. Chapter includes abilities (telepathy, hypnotism) which are canon for Loki in the Thor comics but have not been explicitly evidenced in the cinematic universe.
sciamachy
n. Rare. A fight with an imaginary enemy. (C17: from Greek skiamakhia a mock fight, from skia a shadow + makhesthai to fight)
The embers in the hearth had died down to a subtle glitter, like flecks of bright gold amid the ash. Loki did not feel the chill, had always been slow to shiver in the frozen months, but at the sound of shuffling steps along the hall he turned, and, noting the state of the fire, swelled it back to small lapping tongues of flame with a gesture.
It was a late hour for visitors, and he amused himself analyzing the footsteps- to whom did they belong? Nothing sprang to mind. At times they fell into a rhythm that seemed familiar, but then they stumbled and scuffed out of it. Loki suspected his visitor must be a man in his cups or one whose mind was plagued with some dread.
It was possible, until the sound of those steps came to a stop, that the person to whom they belonged would go on, would pass Loki's door on some other errand, but Loki never even toyed with that thought. No, this man would come to him, likely for counsel on some secret matter. More than half the court had done so, many more than once, despite how they contrived in public to pretend that they had, overall, more interest in the elder brother- a creature of bright swagger and easy smiles. A creature thoughts of whom made Loki's stomach twist with a thousand mingled emotions.
Loki contrived to open the door just as a hand would lift to knock, and as the portal swung open upon him Thor seemed nothing of the bright swaggerer, absent of his easy smiles. His hair was dark with sweat, his eyes bruise-blue from sleepnessness. He staggered, wearing a dressing gown that seemed half wet as though he had fallen into a bath or a bank of melting snow. His breath was sweet with mead, but it was not drunkenness that made him stagger there in Loki's doorway, no, it was something else, entirely more inimical than alcohol.
"Thor," Loki said, gently coming forward to take his brother's arm. "Look at the state of you. Come in at once."
Thor was unresisting in his grasp and uncharacteristically silent. A small flutter of fear rose in Loki; he quashed it and continued to move with natural, practiced ease, as if this sort of thing happened all the time and he could not be more confident. First, he shut the door, then he turned Thor toward the fire (not yet more than a few flames, not warm enough for a sodden and half-naked man!) and quickly stripped him of his wet things.
This seemed to wake Thor somewhat. He blinked and made a low noise something like a growl only more inquisitive. His body looked gilded in the firelight. Bronze skin gleamed over sculpted muscle. In some ways Thor had no rival in Asgard. Loki quickly got a blanket, wrapped it around Thor, and dried him with swift, brisk rubs of skin through cloth.
"L-Loki?" Thor said.
"Were you sleepwalking, brother?" Loki asked.
"I-" The shudder that ran through Thor's body echoed in his deep voice. "I... hope not." His arms slipped under the blanket to hold it to him and his eyes searched at the fire for something, then flicked to Loki. Thor flinched then- not noticeably, but clear enough to someone who knew him well.
Unlike this strange quietness, this flavor of pain that seemed to haunt his brother, that small flinch was familiar enough to Loki. He'd seen it several times over the past few days, and liked seeing it no more tonight than he had when it first emerged, after a sidelong glance, in the celebratory feast after Loki's first war game- and it's subsequent victory. Loki did not know what the flinch meant, but he could imagine well enough; he is sly, the courtiers said, and Thor's friends often loudest of all, we never know what he is thinking. How can one know with a master of magic?
Loki never felt anger the way that others seem to- his father aside, for Odin's wrath is slow and cold and terrible, just as Odin, as the wags seem to forget, is as powerful in magic as he is in wisdom and in war. Others seemed to flare suddenly hot, to bluster like a scalding summer wind, their fury loud and quickly forgotten. Loki felt anger like a cold diamond in his heart, repeated pressures condensing the rage, making it something bright and sparkling and somehow precious.
The whispers did not particularly annoy Loki; sometimes they even amused him. They could never know what he was thinking, nor understand his thoughts if they managed to puzzle them out. None of them could. But that little slip of emotion on Thor's face, the doubt,- that fed his anger. That made the diamond of it sharp inside him.
And because Loki had never been one to shrink from a wound, he turned that diamond on Thor almost instinctively, made the pain double-edged by prodding directly at whatever had so driven his brother from his bed- or likely, someone else's- in the late hours of the night.
"We should get you to your bed," Loki said, and said it with soft solicitude, the same tone he had used when he meant nothing more than to soothe. This time he meant to startle out a deeper flinch, more unease, because surely Thor would not be here if his own bed offered any comfort. A bad dream? Loki wondered. Most assuredly.
He could play Thor like a dulcimer, although usually he forebore except for Thor's own good. But he was not surprised when his gambit yielded exactly the result he wanted: Thor looked lost, swayed on his feet and lifted a hand to scrub at his eyes. "No," he grated, the word drawn out and scarcely above a whisper.
Loki resisted a smile of satisfaction. No, Thor? Surely, if you don't wish to be around me, your bed would be a better refuge than mine. The thought startled him after he thought it, but only for a moment. His first thought upon seeing Thor in that state had been to warm him up and get him to rest. Loki rarely slept in any case, and would not mind a night in his chair before the fire. That was all he had meant.
Of all the inhabited rooms in Asgard, Loki's was one of the very few Thor could expect to fall asleep in unmolested. And now that particularly pleasant little thought had wormed its way into Loki's mind, he found himself unable to prevent thinking about it, about how they would seduce his brother. The court ladies (and lads), Thor's bosom friends, they would see how Thor shivered still, before the fire, and wrap their arms around him, stroking at the golden hair, nails massaging the edge of his beard, gentle caresses that would soothe at first but would quickly turn to something else. When Thor was pulled back from whatever darkness he had trod unwary into in the pathways of his dreams,- those touches would turn then into caresses along the side of the strong neck, trail the course of a broad shoulder. They would be at once unable to forget that Thor was nude beneath the blanket. They would look up into his eyes, trapped for a moment, then place the most delicate of kisses on the side of his mouth-
Loki broke off the images with a small flinch of his own, and was glad Thor was not particularly observant at the best of times. "Then what do you want?" he said, and heard the faint edge in his own voice. "You ought to rest."
Thor looked miserable, and it disturbed Loki that the largest issue he had with that fact was that, like this, he couldn't take his eyes off his brother. He took a small step forward and placed a hand gingerly on Thor's shoulder, gripping it through the blanket.
Thor smiled his thanks, absently, and reached up to clasp his own larger hand over Loki's, closed his eyes, and half-leaned back as if he had forgotten for the moment which of them were taller, and by how much. Thor was a creature of touch and had always yearned for it, needed it, been comforted by it.
"Can't sleep," Thor said, "I do not want to see it again. What I dreamed."
"Ah," Loki said delicately. It was precisely what he had guessed, but it left him feeling precariously close to some abyss. It was an odd feeling, wanting and yet not wanting something. He banished the weaker parts of himself with a ruthless mental twist and placed his other hand on Thor's opposite shoulder, the better to guide his brother to the edge of a divan. "It may be difficult, Thor, but perhaps you should tell me of that dream. Waking speech and thought often banishes the worst demons of our nightmares."
Thor sighed and leaned more fully against him, heedless of his weight, like a great squirming dog. "I cannot really remember it. I just know that I do not wish to see it again. Know that it is bad, unutterably-- and it is just waiting there for me to close my eyes."
"But you must sleep," Loki said, trying not to wince or laugh as Thor's weight fell against him, not in his lap thanks to all that was holy, but half-draped over him. "You have the tournament tomorrow. Would you lose to some lesser warrior merely because of some faceless night-terror?"
"No," Thor murmured, "of course not. But..." He shifted again, all elbows, and Loki quickly eased him down until his head rested on Loki's lap, encouraging such a restful and ultimately controllable position with a ghosting touch of fingers on Thor's hair, across his eyelids.
"Shh," Loki said. "no more talk, now. I will not be humiliated by watching my hero brother lose. Sleep."
"Loki," Thor murmured.
"Silence, Thor." The harshness in the words and the brief pinch he gave to the outer edge of his brother's ear was softened somewhat by Loki's tone, which was still soothing, gentle, almost hypnotic. "I will fetch more bedding. The fire will soon die."
Thor had never quite come awake from his dream, and exhaustion took its toll swiftly the moment he was partly horizontal. Still, he reached out as if to grab Loki when he slipped off the divan. Loki evaded as kindly as he could and gathered the rest of the furs and blankets from his bed. He rolled one to slip beneath Thor's head and piled the others over him, pausing to touch Thor's cheek.
"Fool," he murmured fondly. "What sort of grown man lets a dream so torment him?"
There was no response. Thor's face was soft and his breathing steady with the first lull of sleep, which, Loki suspected with an inward wince, would soon turn to snores. He gauged the forest of blankets and furs draped over Thor, then gingerly plucked the top fur, a soft white one stippled with hints of black, as the only one he might bother with for his own bed that night. He draped it, half-folded, over one arm, then hesitated.
"Thor," he said again, softly, experimentally. No answer. Slowly, Loki knelt beside the edge of the divan, fingertips almost touching his brother's temple but not quite. Loki drew in a breath, then plunged into his action, dipping lightly over the surface of Thor's sleeping thoughts. He had not done this often and he found it strangely difficult and confusing, like swimming in swirls of thick honey.
"What was your dream?" he whispered. His will formed paths through the strange eddies and pitfalls of Thor's mind, blank and disoriented with sleep. He felt his own words, like a visceral echo, shiver around him, and drew slightly back, keeping his touch featherlight, skirling the surface of what he would see. It took patience, but the dark, confused, fearful images formed at last into clear thoughts and then played out into a scene. He saw as Thor saw, though more dimly, still apart in his own mind and still, Loki told himself, in control.
The halls around him loomed, half-weird and half-familiar, for Asgard's halls and rooms seemed much larger to the eyes of a child. Thor knew them well, at least those around his family's apartments in the citadel, and knew that they should not echo with a baby's keening wails. The sounds strobed strangely, as if through water, and then there was only the memory of crying, as sometimes sounds did not form perfectly in dreams. Thor ran and ran, pushing through doorways into a sudden maze, as if reality had lengthened and multiplied.
(Was this all? Loki wondered. Frustrating, yes, but dreams where one sought and never found were fairly common, he understood.)
Then the child-Thor rounded a corner and pushed into the small day-room off their parents' suite. Moonlight poured in through the great windows, past curtains usually closed to the night air. That moonlight drenched a small white basket set upon legs- a basinet- and what lay inside it, something like an infant made of pulsing, glimmering ice. Its crimson eyes peered wildly from the bluish crystalline skin.
(A Jötun?)
The child-Thor approached the basinet, but then Frigga was there, sweeping him aside, into her arms and a confusion of half-awakening, Thor confusing the dream-embrace with the heavy warmth cocooning him. Loki drew partly back, annoyance sparking at the tameness of the vision and its complete absurdity, but then sleep's tendrils drew Thor back in again, in shadow forms and fragments that formed... that formed Loki.
It was not Loki the way he had ever imagined himself, but he recognized his face, his body, even through the lens of Thor's thoughts. He sat by a warm pool, trailing his fingers through the water. As Thor approached, he looked up with a piercing, knowing expression in his eyes, a faint smile on his face.
(Is that how I look? Loki thought. Not displeasing. Apparently his efforts to control his expressions and school himself to a perfect grace had not been without benefit.)
"Come here, Thor," the dream Loki called, and the dream Thor came closer, step by step gliding into a mist of heat from the pool. The dream Loki's eyes flashed, then he laughed. "I know why you've come," he said. "So disgraceful."
Thor felt a wash of embarrassment and pain. He tried to turn away, but the dream had him (Loki felt Thor's mind pull at the bonds of his own tangled thoughts and fail to enforce any control over them) and instead, he crushed the dream Loki to him, pressed them roughly together.
Their lips met, Thor's arm came up behind him, an embrace like silk and lavender and ice, a confusing blend of real textures and imaginary ones. Loki looked on in shocked silence, his own mind reeling, as the dream images of his brother and himself fell past humid steam and the hot water enveloped them. For a moment the caresses and kisses felt real, the real pressure of lips and teeth, of fingertips and fingernails, then the dream-Loki began to melt into the water as if he were made of ice, horrifying and vivid, tragic and strangely lovely, until all that was left of him were knowing eyes reflected in the choppy waves their bodies had made.
Loki pulled back, his breathing harsh and fast. He staggered backward, touched his forehead and then turned to gaze at the dead ashes in the fireplace before he took a deep cleansing breath and returned to his bedroom.
"A dream," he murmured to himself. A dream he would have to consider, would have to puzzle out in much more detail. "A dream," he said again.
