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I don’t crave you in the morning, and at the company store
Before he wakes fully, before the haze of sleep slips from his eyes, down his shoulders and across his back, before the coldness from an empty stretch of bed can be comprehended from where it lays under his fingers, Thor forgets that he’s alone.
For a moment, he’s still wrapped up in dreams of clear eyes and mischievous smiles, soft black hair under his fingertips, fine tunics and fair skin. He can almost smell the clean scent he has known for centuries, held so dear and so close that the notion of never truly breathing it in again is foreign and unwanted, however true it may be. In his dreams they are boys, young men, wizened fighters. In his dreams they are everything they could never be in life: happy and together, never separate, never apart. It seems almost cruel, that in the moments when he is so blissfully parted from this world, all he can dream of is Loki, so real and so vivid before him that often he wakes, crying out his brother’s name, hands grasping at nothing at all, hair pressed back against his scalp, slick with sweat. Often he wakes, cold and alone, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes to hold back the burning he feels there. The dull ache that has found a home for itself in his chest that he doesn’t believe he will ever truly live without. He should live a thousand more years, and never quite be rid of it, be rid of this constant longing, this painful reminder of what he has lost and must now live without.
When the battle was over, that horrifying, anguish filled moment when they realized they had lost , there were funerals. Ceremonies. Commemorations for lives lost, a few billion people gone, just like that. Thor attended all those he was expected to, stood by Steve’s side and gave his condolences, put on the brave face of a ruler who had already lost everything, what else was there to take of him?
Privately, he mourns. He mourns with every waking breath, and every one when he’s asleep. He mourns his home, now ash and rubble on the far edges of the galaxy. He mourns his people, extinct all but him, slaughtered on a foreign ship minutes after attaining their salvation. He mourns Heimdall, Valkyrie, and Korg. He mourns his family, his father who wanted so much more for Asgard, so much more than he was capable of giving. He mourns and aches and, in a moment of despair, thinks fighting Hela was all for naught if in the end he couldn’t protect his people from the greater monster hiding in the shadows of the universe.
But nothing compares with how he mourns Loki.
Nothing compares to the nights, the weeks, where he can’t sleep. Where he dreams in fits and bursts, of arguments and forgotten things said that feel like salt in an already festering wound. Where he dreams of all the moments in his life he has been unforgivable to Loki, treating him like a stranger, no better than the common thief on the street, instead of the brother he loves so dearly that to lose him leaves an impression within Thor greater than when Hela stripped his eye from him and left him weak in the grass beside his father.
Nothing compares to the bone deep feeling of loneliness that takes over his very essence, to the point where Rocket jokes that Thor isn’t capable of smiling anymore, that Thanos took that from them too.
He cries, so often that sometimes he thinks that there isn’t enough left in him to shed another tear, and then he will see a flutter of a green silk and surprise himself with the depth of his own sorrow that it is so easily brought to the surface.
He rages, knowing truly that this time, Loki isn’t coming back. There will be no magic, no nervous laughter and uncomfortable smiles, no jokes and poorly written theatrical productions. No whispered apologies lit by weak lanterns and hushed in the space where his neck meets his shoulder, murmured into the expanse of his collarbones, whispered into the shell of his ear. There will be no apologies, no forgiveness for a death well constructed, because there is no one to forgive. There isn’t even a body to bury and a grave to place flowers on. There is nothing of Loki’s that Thor can hold dear to himself save the memories he carries of him.
It hurts in a way the others can’t, won’t, understand. Of all, Steve may come the close, having lost Barnes to forces he cannot control more than once, having to live through seeing his closest comrade, his lover, come back as something unnatural and so far from the man he knew him to be. Steve may begin to understand, but the love of a century pales in comparison to the love of millenia. A love that has been torn apart and stitched back together so many times that it haunts Thor, it follows him through sleep and wakefulness, and tears restfulness from the back of his mind.
A week after the initial destruction and the shock wears off, Shuri corners him in his room to ask him to teach her how to fight so that she may put in her challenge to take up the mantle of Black Panther. When he brushes her off, tells her that while her wish is noble, it is foolish for someone so young to take on so much responsibility, she screams at him that he is not the only one who has lost someone dear to them because of Thanos, that she needs to do this to keep her brother’s memory alive. Thor, chastened by this, helps her of course. Teaches her all the things that he has learned over the centuries, the different fighting styles adopted in the nine realms, and the particular tactics he’s picked up in Midgard that no Asgardian could ever see coming, save for Heimdall. She blooms and blossoms and becomes inordinately good in such a short period of time under his instruction that, when the time comes, she invites him to stand with her mother to watch her battle for her brother’s crown.
Thor makes his way through the days, helps plot, helps devise a plan to fix this, fix what they have failed to do, and bring those back that they can. He spends hours in the Wakandan war room, going over plan after plan, model after model, reviewing and rereviewing what they know and what they don’t about Thanos. Weeks later, Tony finds them, brought back to Earth from a destitute planet by way of a distress signal picked up by a group of ravengers scouring its solar system for something worthy to sell. He tells them what he knows, and makes it very clear that he would like to keep the fact that he lived a secret from the rest of the world, choosing instead to spend his time in Shuri’s lab discussing theoretical physics and potential upgrades to his suit that she suggests. When Thor can’t stand the planning anymore, he finds himself in the training room with Okoye and the remaining other Dora Milaje to practice, to train, to make sure that next time when he’s faced against Thanos he goes for the head.
Other times, he dresses simply, and goes out to help the Wakandans repair what is lost, what has been taken from them in a fight that no one asked for. He helps move rubble and rebuild buildings, he helps plant crops and tend to the wounded, he sits with the families who mourn loved ones that they never expected to lose so quickly. He tries to keep himself from living in his own head, but it only barely helps.
Slowly but surely, the nightmares of his indiscretions against Loki begin to fade, begin to become something sweeter, something worthy of wanting, of hoping for. They becomes stolen moments in time when everything had been right between them, when they had spent whole years wrapped up in each other, tumbling through the silk of their bedspread and hanging on to the moments where the torches burned low or the sun burned bright. Tracing line after line over each other’s skin and whispering all the things Thor never could say to Loki when he was still with him. Slowly, but surely, Thor begins to crave the moments where he sleeps, when he slips from the reality of things to the softness of his mind’s creation.
It takes two whole years of planning, of mourning, of night spent going over plans until the others complain they see them in their sleep before they are ready. And this time, when they fight, they take it to Thanos and take him apart piece by piece, Stormbreaker swinging cleanly through to sever his head from his body and Thor feeling like he has finally , done something worthy, something of note, something to write odes and ballads about. So it isn’t a question when Tony is holding the gauntlet and they need a god to power it, a god to bring back all they have lost and reverse the destruction Thanos caused with just a snap of his fingers. He doesn’t know if he will survive it, doesn’t know if it can save his people, gone before the others even had an inkling of what was coming, but he can try and he can hope and after all, what did he have left to lose?
(The moment is blinding and all encompassing, feeling like the universe has been righted and brought back to its natural state. Somewhere, not far from them, there is a ship drifting filled with a people with no home but a vague notion of a destination, piloted by a fearsome warrior who feels an ache like something fundamental is missing from her bones. In the vastness of space, families are reunited and celebrations erupt. A king is welcomed back to his rightful throne, his loyal guard falling to the ground around him in respect. A boy and a magician are reunited in a home neither of them can quite place. A soldier breathes air again, and a team is reassembled save for one; there are some deaths that even the stones cannot undo.)
Thor realizes what is being asked of him, almost as it occurs, when he realizes that to give the people back all they have lost, he must give all of himself, and he accepts it as calmly as he can. With only the gentlest of smiles, he lets the stones take everything from him so that he may give his friends back what they have lost. When his body slumps, his knees buckle as the lighting surrounding him begins to fizzle out, when the lights embracing him go out entirely, the others begin to panic, begin to understand the sacrifice that Thor has done for them. They reach out, but it is only moments before his body disintegrates into the air in a way that is far too familiar to them for comfort. They return to their homes to understand the magnitude of what they have done, what they have righted, and never once stop telling the world what Thor has done, the gift he has given them all. They hail him with statues and memorials, songs and epics, the only right way to praise a god, Steve quips wryly.
Thor opens his eyes, and is graced with a view of Valhalla he had not expected to see for quite some time. He is welcomed heartily by the warriors who live there, assured that in time he will not only see his father, but his mother and his close friends as well. The prospect of their reuniting begins to fill the gnawing hole that Thor carries in his chest and could not have hoped to mend before. But before that has begun, before he can mend the ties that have been lost to this war and many others, he is ushered to the room he has been given for his stay here, the hint of a torch burning bright spills out from under the door as Thor approaches and cautiously pushes open the wood there.
“Loki?”
And all at once, he is whole again.