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When Thor was nine years old he fell over the rail of the royal galley.
It was early spring and the ocean must have been cold, but that’s not what he remembers. He remembers being so startled that he didn’t even try to swim. He remembers having his eyes wide open, staring up through an all-encompassing quiet. He remembers the sun shivering until clouds of bubbles moved to block his view.
Guards of course jumped in to save him, but in their haste they didn’t remove their heavy clothes. His mother has told him they themselves needed to be rescued a few minutes later.
His father on the other hand had cast off his crown and his golden cloak before running to the rail, his hands braced on the wood as he prepared to vault overboard. Then Thor had emerged from the water, gasping for breath and coughing to expel the weight of salt from his throat. He’d inhaled hungrily as the sun had warmed his face.
“Why were you there?” Thor asked, sitting with Loki beneath an apple tree, branches heavy with the hard little fruits which would soon enough be good to eat. Gudrun, gnawing on a necklace of amber beads Frigga had given her, rested her head against Thor’s chest, tucked into the curve of his arm.
“Why was I where?” Loki responded mildly, studying a sprig of mistletoe he twirled between his fingers.
A breeze pushed through the grove of fruit trees, sending sweet scents and pink-white petals spinning. Gudrun watched the flowers fall, reaching out to grab at one which eventually landed in Thor’s beard. The prince smiled. “The ocean. The Ginnunga Gap.”
Loki shook his head. “You’ll have to be more specific than that Thor. I spent much time in that abyss.”
The prince watched as his lover reached out to pick up the desiccated foot of a storm petrel. It was laid out along with myriad other materials on a square of red silk between them, it’s glossy black talons looking agonized, frozen forever in a stiff curling clutch.
“The time I was there as well.” He clarified.
Gudrun’s gold eyes followed the movement of her father’s hands, lips wet with spit as she teethed.
“Ah.” Loki murmured. “That time.”
Thor laughed lightly. “I would not know of any other.”
Loki hummed but said nothing more as he held the mistletoe and foot in one hand, pawing through his leaves and sticks and flowers with the other, coming up with a long white birch twig and several leaves of mullein.
It was a lazy afternoon, heading into evening. The day had been warm, though as the sun sank ever lower a coolness rolled in. The spring had been so rainy as to at times risk flooding, but a dry spell had lasted for several days and had given the ground a chance to drain.
When Loki did not reply Thor did not goad an answer, becoming absorbed instead in watching the mercreature at his task. He did not pretend to know anything of his friend’s craft, did not pretend that magic even really interested him, but he enjoyed watching Loki work his talents. His fingers, fine boned and self-assured, were beautiful to him in any context.
Gudrun babbled in his arms, her eyes reproachful when he glanced down. He murmured his apologies and shifted her up so she rested more against his shoulder, her hand fisting happily in his beard.
Though Thor does not remember it, Loki has told him that the grip he’d had on the forearm around his waist had been vice-like, hard enough to bruise, nearly strong enough to break. Thor has asked him why he did not drop him, but Loki has never given him a reason.
“I was exploring, I imagine. I cannot say I recall my precise motivations.” Layering the Mullein over the foot, under the mistletoe, he held the bunch firm to the birch as he reached for a length of deer hide to bind it all together.
Thor remembers watching red tentacles squirming. He remembers watching them weave about his legs, feeling their supple strength. Smaller and shorter than the ones he’d seen in the great tapestries, but in his child’s eyes they were still huge. Long strands of black hair had tickled his neck and shoulders, reaching like the tentacles did to drift in the water around his head. The blue skin of the arm clutching at him had seemed so very dark in comparison to his white tunic.
“It is very lucky, is it not, that you were there that day?” Thor shifted so a knotted root did not dig into his back quite so painfully. A raven landed in the tree above them, paying them no heed.
“I suppose it was.” Loki agreed, clearly distracted. Each pass he made with the thong over his bundle was perfectly even, as tight as it could be pulled. “You can thank my father for that.” Then Loki snapped his lips shut around his words and gave a particularly savage tug.
“What do you mean?”
Loki held out his hand to Thor. “Your knife, please.”
Thor obliged, tugging his knife from its sheath and flipping it so he could offer the handle to Loki.
“Only that I’m certain he played a part in motivating my journey into the gap.” The blade slid easily through tough hide, removing the excess from the secured tether. Loki’s eyes studied his creation critically as he passed the knife back to Thor.
“Are you certain you don’t recall?”
“Yes.” Loki snapped, eyes taking on a glint of frustration. “Do you remember so much about your youth?”
“Of that day I remember many things.”
Yet he can only barely recall Loki’s face, seeing it only from what had felt like a very great distance. He can remember blood red eyes and a pair of thin lips which turned downward at the corners. He can remember still struggling to breathe, salt burning his throat, leaning heavily on the rail, unable to look away even as his mother’s handmaidens sought to usher him to a shaded space under an awning.
Abstractly he knows Loki must have looked like a child himself then, being two years Thor’s junior, but when he tries to recall him as he was then he can only see the face of a solemn teenager staring back up from the waves.
Their eyes lock for a long moment, then Loki is gone, disappearing back to the depths.
Thor can remember mother being very cross with him over all this.
Loki meets his eyes and frowns. “I was very young, Thor.”
“As was I.” Feeling a sudden and inexplicable wave of disappointment Thor dropped his eyes to the collection of herbs and objects, poking at the few he could identify and knew would not cause him to break out in a rash. “It is a very important memory to me. It was the first time I realized I was mortal.”
He heard Loki laugh at that, and he let the sound ease some of the ache. Gudrun hiccuped and burrowed more snugly against his tunic.
“What do you think she will remember?” Thor asked quietly, reaching to pet her cheek gently.
“Nothing of this.” Loki was rolling an iron nail between his fingers, watching the tip grow red hot. “She is just 3 months this week. It will be years before her mind will retain memory.”
This made Thor frown. “Then why do you read to her from your books?”
“She has ears, does she not? Let her hear real words that will one day be useful to her.” Laying the wand flat on his thigh he hunched over it and began to trace careful runes into what was left of the exposed wood, the heated iron leaving little curls of smoke to rise in the air.
Thor bristled. “If her memory is to be like yours, then such endeavors are useless.”
Loki’s head snapped up, but not before he pulled the nail away from the wand. His eyes were narrowed, a spark of heat glinting in their depths. “My memory is impeccable, thank you.”
Thor frowned. “Then how can you not remember the day we met?”
It was petulant, Thor realized as such the moment he said it, but he could not withdraw the words already spoken. Loki gave a little snarl and stabbed the nail into the ground. “I remembered enough to recognize you years later when we met again, that is all I needed.”
Thor wanted to press the issue. He wanted Loki to be honest. He wanted Loki to put his heart into something, to invest in the memory, but he didn’t want to start a fight. It had been a nice day otherwise. Letting his frustrations leave him in a sigh he shifted himself into a cross legged position and stared off at the horizon. The bottom of the sun was not an inch from the curve of the earth and descending fast. He squinted at it’s blaze, then blinked away the spots from his eyes.
He figured they should gather Loki’s things together and begin to make their way back up to the palace, dinner would be soon enough.
Calmed by the thought of such easy and mundane things Thor opened his mouth to suggest they pack up, ready to forget their conversation, when Loki beat him to speaking.
“I do not think you remember nearly so much as you let on.”
“What?” It was a loosing fight to let the argument go. Thor’s lips twisted in offense. “Why would I lie about such things?”
“No, I don’t think you lie.” Loki’s voice was cold but the sneer and the snarl had gone out of it. “I think you have filled the shell of a memory with figments and fantasies.”
“Fantasies of drowning?” Thor barked a laugh, but cut it off when Gudrun shifted in his hold.
With a look of mild distaste Loki dug his nail out of the ground and brushed the dirt from its tip before once again heating it to a red hot burn. “The drowning is the only real thing you recall.” He muttered, returning to his work.
Thor swallowed. His free hand made a fist over his thigh. “You were real, were you not?”
Ire bristled over Loki’s shoulders, but he did not reply as he completed his rune work, his marks blind to his frustration. The raven above them cawed once before hopping to a new branch, pecking speculatively at an unripe fruit. Little crescents bit into Thor’s palm as his fist tightened. Even the arm which held Gudrun tensed unintentionally, though for once the baby seemed untuned to the emotions of the adults around her. Or perhaps she was simply used to their rampant swings from one extreme to another.
“I did not forget you, Thor.” Loki conceded to speak, turning Thor’s eyes to him, startled. “For all other things know that I was young and that that day lies far away in the past.”
“You remember holding me. You remember the clasp I had about your arm, I know you remember these things.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“You remember how I looked down at you? You remember how I would not go though my mother called? How I would not look away from you?”
“I remember.”
Thor stared for a long moment, then nodded and sighed. “These are the things which are important.”
With a slight trawling flourish Loki finished his line of runes, and pushed the nail back into the earth with significantly less force than he’d used before.
“How do you recall it?” His face was blank when it half turned to Thor, eyes averted to the face of the babe in Thor’s arms.
Thor smiled. “I remember knowing, without fear and with absolute clarity, that I was going to die, then knowing with the same assuredness that I was saved. I did not have time to think, it all happened so fast, but those two truths rang perfectly clear.”
The pause between words was heavy, and Thor reached out to grab Loki’s hand.
“I fell in love with you then, I think.” He confessed at length, Loki’s fingers stiff and cool under his own.
“You were nine, Thor.” The prince could hear the condescension and it made his grip grow tight.
“I am aware of this.” His thumb bumped over Loki’s knuckles. “The notion however that children cannot feel as strongly or as truthfully as adults has always sat ill with me.”
“You are a sentimental fool.”
“That is not the first time you have called me that” Thor’s grip relaxed and he let go, moving instead to rest his hand on Loki’s thigh. “I believe you are running out of creative insults.”
“Never.” Loki sneered, settling against the trunk of the tree.
“What was the weather like?” He asked after a moment’s pause and Thor squeezed the leg under his hand.
“Oh it was all sunshine. Cold, but bright. Everything smelled like salt and the air was dry, even out over the ocean as we were.”
“It was cloudy.” Loki rebutted. “It had rained that morning.”
“Surely not.” Thor sounded scandalized. “No, it was most definitely sunny, I remember the way my father’s crown gleamed when we approached the galley.”
“And I remember chasing a school of blue whiting who were feeding after a rainfall.”
“So you do remember!” Thor beamed at his friend but Loki only rolled his eyes.
“Little things.” He conceded. “Not the full scenes you claim to recall.”
Thor opened his mouth to continue but Loki shifted forward, dislodging Thor’s hand from his thigh, and reached for Gudrun. The prince gave her up with only a little reluctance.
“This is for you.” the mercreature explained once he’d settled his daughter against the crook of his arm, her chubby neck just recently strong enough to hold itself up on its own. She picked up her beads again and started to gnaw on them as she stared at the wand Loki held in front of her face. “Do not chew on it.” He commanded.
The mullein leaves were soft and Loki let them trace over the round pink spots of her nose and cheeks and chin. She giggled, still a new sound in her repertoire, and Thor’s heart felt too big for his chest.
Shadows crept towards the sun, which was sinking now in earnest, and Thor began to gather Loki’s odds and ends together for him, rolling the lot up protectively in the silk. Loki clucked his tongue and tugged his nail from the ground, flicking his fingers to tell Thor to unroll the bundle again so he could add the forgotten component.
“You know, I believe that that was the only time I ever saw your father afraid.”
“Excuse me?” Thor stood with the bundle in one hand and brushed off the backs of his trousers before reaching to help Loki to his feet as well.
The mercreature accepted his hand with a smirk. “Odin, the king. He was afraid that day.”
Thor frowned. “I do not remember that.”
“Of course not.” Loki settled Gudrun against his hip. “You had eyes only for me.”
Not knowing rightly how to reply Thor started to walk back towards the palace without saying anything, Loki falling in easy step behind. “I remember wishing...” Loki began to speak, but paused, eyes turned towards the sun and the not so distant wash of the ocean. “I wished,” He continued quietly. “I could make my father so afraid. That I could make him feel the grip of terror the way Odin had.”
Thor did not turn to look at his lover.
“But my father fears nothing.” Loki muttered in reply to himself.
Behind them the raven lifted itself from its branch with a caw, and sailed towards the beach where there was sure to be some carrion for its supper. A wind came from the sea, smelling clean and cool and with the bite of salt and Thor breathed deep, holding the air in his lungs for a long time before exhaling.
Loki drew up alongside his lover, close enough that their shoulders touched and smiled sideways at him.
“I still say I do not remember much.”
“Like why you were in the Ginnunga Gap in the first?”
“Precisely.”
Thor’s tone was tolerant, his eyes with a touch of laughter as he dropped his free arm around Loki’s shoulders and said. “I will remember the day for both of us, if I must.”
“A momentous day it was indeed.” Loki mused, letting the arm remain. “Love and death and all things in between.”
Thor’s gaity bled out. “Do not mock. I am sincere when I say that day was important to me. It is from that day that all good things for us have sprung.”
Gudrun hiccuped and Loki brought her up higher so she rested against his shoulder, Thor lifting his hand from the plane of Loki’s shoulder blade to cup the curve of the child’s skull.
“It was important to me too Thor, you can be certain. I would not lie about that.”
Thor beamed, and since they were still out of sight of the castle guards, he pressed a kiss to Loki’s temple.
“I am glad of that.” He cooed and Loki rolled his eyes but did not bat him away for his affections, holding Gudrun tight to his shoulder, tapping the wand of birch and and leaves and bone against her leg as he walked.
He might have even smiled, but Thor knew better than to draw attention to such things.