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“Don’t you feel the cold?”
Thor had been standing in the open dark of the night, watching the snow fall. He turned to the sound of Sam’s voice with that same easy smile he so often wore. His friend was rugged up in warm winter woollens and a festive season beanie (Thor smiled a little wider; it was the falcon-themed one he’d bought Sam in this year’s Secret Santa), while Thor was dressed more moderately, in jeans and a tired old hoodie. His hood was down however, his short-cropped blond hair covered with a dusting of snowflakes. Somehow, Sam found that change more jarring than the eyepatch. “Not as you do, I think.”
Sam nodded thoughtfully as he came to a stop beside Thor, his footsteps crunching in the snow. He eyed his tall companion with a sidelong smile. “Seems like that’s the rule for you guys.”
“I suppose so.” There was a quiet in Thor that Sam wasn’t used to; he supposed that was to be expected after all that had happened off-world. The big Asgardian tended to weather problems better than almost anyone else he’d known - which made sense when he considered the wide expanse of Thor’s life - but he rather suspected that this was different. That maybe the quiet cheerfulness, this time, was not so completely sincere.
Thor was watching the stars, and he had been since before Sam had walked through the snow. He stuffed his gloved hands in the pockets of his coat and looked up in the direction Thor was gazing. “King of Asgard, hey.” He gives his head a little shake. “Seems like a lot, man.”
As Sam had expected, Thor’s smile as he looks to him is a little forced. “It’s what I was born to be. Trained my whole life for.”
“Not like this though, right?” Sam supresses a shiver as a gust of wind and snow cuts through his warm winter clothes, watching Thor’s face with care.
Thor sighs, looking down from the stars to the distant line of lights that marked the nearest human settlement to the Avengers Compound. When he looks back at Sam, his smile is decidedly forced. “No, not like this.”
Sam had opened his mouth to speak, but Thor continued before he could. “I thought I’d feel ready.” Thor spoke the word that he suddenly felt forbidden. “Worthy.”
Thor turned to Sam again, and the smile he wore this time somehow carried the weight of his thousand-odd years of life with it. “I thought I wanted nothing else for most of my life. I saw it as another path to glory, I suppose, but I… Was a fool.”
“Hmm,” Sam considered, looking for an angle to approach this to better help his friend. For all that he and Thor were very different, if there was one thing he’d learned through the course of their friendship, it was that if you took the time to look a little deeper, it was easy to find that they weren’t so different at all.
“My Pépé told me once– that’s my–”
“Grandfather, I remember.” Thor offered a small smile, and Sam continued after returning a much larger one of his own.
“My Pépé, he told me once that sometimes to get good at something, you gotta be bad at it for a while. You have to do badly before you can learn to do well.” Sam smiled, remembering Thor’s earlier delight, years ago now, at the last time he’d shared some of his family’s wisdoms.
Thor, though brighter, still looked apprehensive. “Even at being a king, do you think?”
Sam chuckled and put a hand on Thor’s shoulder, ready with an answer. “At the time, I had just crashed the family boat into our dock. Maybe not the same scale as being king of a whole people, but my family did need it to eat.”
Thor nodded thoughtfully, weighing Sam’s words in his mind before he spoke again. “And did you learn to master the vessel?”
Sam made a small sound in the back of his throat. “Well, yeah, I got good eventually. But to be honest, I never got as good as Dad or Pépé. And that was okay, too.”
“We cannot be the best at everything,” Thor murmured, a small but genuinely felt smile on his lips as his gaze returned to the distant stars. They shone bright and clear in the cold of the night, and Thor felt closer to them than he often did when on Midgard. “Your ancestors were men of wisdom,” Thor smiled, finally seeming to come back to himself as he took Sam’s shoulder in hand. “And so are you. Thank you, Sam.”
“Anytime, Thor.” He glanced back to the warm golden light of the compound, then back to his friend’s face. “Do you mind if we go inside? It’s cold as hell out here.”