Chapter Text
Their place is old, really old. A big rambling farmhouse that's been in Odin's family for generations. Long ago their ancestors had actually worked the farmland - even as recently (although it’s the kind of recently that might just as well be an eternity in the minds of two young boys) as Grandpa Bor's day, Frigga has told them, Odin’s uncle had rented out the fields to neighboring farmers - but as far as they know everything has lain fallow for their father's adult lifetime.
Odin calls himself a consultant. He provides pre- and post-sales support for a big company, one that specializes in farm automation. His business cards and email signature proudly claim that he’s a Black Belt. When they were younger Thor and Loki thought that was incredibly awesome; their father, the Suit Ninja. Now they know it's really just something about process improvements.
It sounds incredibly boring, especially in comparison to life as a ninja, but Odin tells them it pays better.
He says a lot of things that make being a grownup sound pretty unappealing.
~
Most of the fences have long since rotted away. There is next to nothing left of the property lines but the snaking, tumbledown ridges of dry-laid stone. Everything is mossy and overgrown with raspberry canes. As little children the two of them had waged countless battles – hour upon hour of imaginary warfare - across those sprawling rock piles. Sometimes they fought against one another; more commonly they banded together against some imaginary enemy only the two of them could see.
They’ve never once turned on the little animals living among the stones, though; Loki has always had a soft spot for animals.
Thor has always had a soft spot for his brother.
He likes the animals, he does. He protects them, though - and always has, since the first dead mouse that had made little Loki cry so inconsolably Thor’d wondered if it was possible for someone to actually die of sadness - for his brother.
~
The collapsed barn, looming even in ruin over its equally ramshackle collection of outbuildings, is the best thing on the property. It is also the farthest off limits; the most strictly forbidden. As long as Thor can remember they’d been told to keep away, but the extra official ban had been in place ever since the summer they were- seven, maybe? The summer when Loki had stepped on a rusty spike and needed sixteen stitches in his foot and three different colors of pills.
The pinkish-orange ones had been huge; Loki’d gagged on every dose, from the first to the last, and Thor had cried right along with him.
Odin had pointed out, not unkindly, that this was just further proof that he’d ordered them not to go in the old barn for good reason.
Their subsequent arguments in favor of playing in the wreckage - they'd done it almost daily for three straight years, with just this one unfortunate incident marring an otherwise perfect record… on top of which they now knew exactly what to watch for - had invariably fallen on the deafest of deaf ears imaginable.
"Let me make this simple: If I catch you in there so much as once, you're both grounded until you graduate high school," Odin had reminded them regularly. Still does, now that you mention it, if perhaps a little less often.
"You know how your father gets when his mind is made up," their mother had told them when they'd gone to her for aid. "He's even more stubborn than you are." She'd knelt and looked them each in the eye, first one sullen twin and then the other. "And he will outlast you. He's had a lot more practice."
When they'd protested further, she'd dropped her joking tone and reminded them seriously (in that voice she always used when they’d been a terrible disappointment) that she simply could not live with herself if one of them was badly hurt. Or worse.
~
For a few of years it had worked. It had scared them straight, because neither of them would ever have – then or now - dreamed of bringing harm down upon their beloved mother. Of killing her.
After that, though, Frigga had gone back to work and the twins had turned crafty. Really, it was Loki who’d turned crafty. He’d made no attempt to hide it from his brother, though, and Thor had made no attempt whatsoever to stop him.
~
"We're banned from the barn," Loki points out.
They're both keeping their voices low out of long habit, even though their mother won't be home for at least two hours (more, if she gets chatting with her coworkers on the way out to the parking lot… today is Thursday and, this late in the week, that tends to happen quite often) and Odin is in Hawaii until next Tuesday. Their father is, despite appearances, traveling on business. He’s visiting a customer who farms up along the north coast of the Big Island.
"This isn't the barn." Loki nods towards the moldering woodpile that had once – long, long ago - been some kind of workshop. "And if it were to happen to connect to the barn through a tunnel running underneath the brush," he goes on, eyes sparkling, "that would just be a happy accident, wouldn’t it?"
Thor clears his throat. At eleven years old he is no coward. Inside he just might be terrified. Outside he isn’t telling.
~
The interior of the barn is dark and spooky. Over the fallen-down hay mow some of the roof still stands, the big planks in the end wall jutting up against the sky like broken teeth. The air is thick with heavy, swirling dust. Something rustles in the faded straw at their feet, in among a scattering of rotten shingles.
Thor jumps. His sudden movement flushes out a bird. It flutters and flaps, squawking indignantly, just over their heads before swooping into the hay mow to perch – still chittering angrily – up among the twisted rafters.
“Huh,” Loki says when their hearts are beating again. “I wonder what’s up there.”
“No, Loki,” Thor pleads, but his brother is already climbing.
He’s not sure which of them screams when Loki falls. Maybe they both do.