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Things change achingly slowly, like mist creeping in over the horse pasture. At first it’s almost nothing - just the faintest shimmer in the air, the softest cool dampness against the skin – but then it builds, on and on, until everything familiar is utterly unrecognizable.
Gradually, subtly his relationship with Loki shifts, twisting and morphing into something Thor no longer understands.
By the time he finally notices that something is different, the (seemingly) endless familiarity Thor remembers from what Loki snidely terms their youth – from as recently as last summer, if Thor’s memory serves, and he knows it does – is gone entirely. And in its place is something he doesn’t recognize at all.
“Get away from me.” Loki – fifteen now, going on sixteen, and lovely in a graceful, luminous way Thor isn’t sure he’s ever seen before on anyone or anything, let alone his brother – shoulders past him. Thor catches Loki by the arm; his brother hisses and twists free. “I mean it. Keep your paws to yourself.”
Thor frowns. His brother has been increasingly reclusive in the past few weeks since school ended and, when Loki is even anywhere to be found, Thor’s own attempts at rekindling the brotherly warmth they’ve always shared have been met with – at best, and the best doesn’t come very often - growing displeasure. “Since when can’t I hug my own brother,” he grumbles.
Loki straightens, head high and eyes flashing. He looks Thor up and down, expression- disgusted. “Since we’re not little children anymore?” Loki often uptalks when he’s feeling particularly sarcastic, and today is clearly no exception.
“What?” Thor practically squawks out a laugh. The two of them haven’t been little children in the better part of a decade, and yet it’s never posed any kind of problem before. “What are you talking about. Loki?” He reaches out again as his brother dances away. “What is it? What’s going on?”
“Nothing?” This time Loki looks through him, rather than at him. And now that Thor thinks about it they stopped making comfortable eye contact about the same time they stopped- touching. “Why does there always have to be an explanation?”
Because that’s the way I think? “I’m logical,” Thor says instead, catching Loki gently by the wrist. “I know things happen for a reason.”
“So what’s the reason I’m so fucked up,” Loki whispers. He twists free and is gone, door slamming behind him, before Thor can spit out an answer.
Thor shakes his head, at no one. He no longer even remembers what he’d originally wanted, besides to give Loki a quick squeeze in passing. Certainly not this – again – anyway.
~
“It’s a difficult age,” their mother reminds Thor when he asks if she knows what’s going on. “There’s so much change, and it’s a lot to get used to. Don’t you remember?”
He’d been fifteen himself not more than a couple of years ago, but it somehow feels like an eternity. “I don’t remember acting like this,” he protests. “I didn’t turn on everybody.”
She smiles. “Well, no. You and your brother do handle things differently. But as I recall you did punch your way through more than one pillow.”
The skin of Thor’s neck and face feels tight and hot. She’s right. It had been stupid, sure, but it was also the best alternative to punching something he could hurt. Or something that could hurt him. “That’s different,” he grumbles, because it is. It was, rather. He doesn’t do it anymore. He’s grown up. At just eighteen, he’s a man.
“Hm.” She purses her lips, but her eyes sparkle. “I’m not so sure that’s true, actually.”
Thor doesn’t question what she means, exactly. He isn’t sure he wants to know.
~
“You’re avoiding me.” Thor’s not asking, and he’s not really accusing. It’s just a fact, albeit one that frustrates the shit out of him, and he’s not even really expecting an answer.
“Wow,” Loki says, pausing just outside the door to his bedroom. It’s the first time he’s spoken all afternoon, even the part where they were both scraping together lunch in the kitchen.
Thor is twice as startled by the sound of his brother’s voice itself as he is by anything Loki’s actually saying. Which he isn’t listening to, of course, because doing so is only courting trouble. Sometime about being a genius and fuck you and “haven’t you got anything better to do with your time than to fritter it away coming in here and annoying me?”
“No,” Thor tells his brother, flatly. He’s tired of this, tired of the dodging and the fighting and the hot, angry glares. Tired to the point of something approaching anger, which even now tends to be where his emotions run if he lets them. And, every now and again, when he truly doesn’t mean to. The more Loki gets snippy, the more Thor gets mad. “I don’t. What are you planning to do about it?”
He walks towards Loki, not even really meaning to threaten, but when his brother backs away it’s- somehow irresistible. “That’s it? All that tough talk and you’re just going to run? Oh no you don’t, not this time. I don’t think so.” Thor can play this game too. He pounces and lands with the flats of his hands just alongside Loki’s shoulders, half-trapping his brother against the wall. When Loki hisses Thor leans in, closer and closer, until he’s near enough to feel the heat coming off his brother’s skin. “What,” he asks again when Loki doesn’t grace him with an answer; they’re so close now that his own nose is no more than a couple of inches from Loki’s sharp, pink-tipped one, “are you going to do about it?”
What Loki does is punch and kick and flail. Thor’s practically on top of him, though. There’s no room for Loki to get enough momentum to really put any weight behind his blows, and it’s easy enough to get a thigh in front of his legs, so even the worst of it hardly hurts at all. It isn’t even going to bruise. Just about the time Thor thinks he’s going to win this without even getting really sweaty, Loki twists and works in close enough to Thor’s bare forearm to bite. Hard.
That does hurt, surprisingly badly. Without even thinking, Thor puts an abrupt stop to it.
“Mmmph! Mmop!” Loki shouts into Thor’s broad palm, his breath hot and his lips wet. “Mehme oh! MEH ME OH!” And then he somehow gets enough leverage to bite again, this time sinking his perfect white teeth (without braces or anything, which never seemed fair and still doesn’t, but there you have it… and Thor does know he himself got the muscles, which maybe isn’t fair either) right into the meatiest part of the heel of Thor’s hand.
“Fuck!” Thor goes from half-playing to furious in the space of half a second. He wrenches his hand free (which is a mistake, yes, but it’s too late by the time his brain catches up with his reflexes) and slaps at Loki. Blood from his palm smears the side of his brother’s face. “You fucking bit me.” He crowds the last little bit of the way into Loki’s space, feeling dangerously angry and full of adrenaline and- oh.
Oh.
Thor freezes, one hand in the air and his body rigid against his brother’s.
Because Loki’s dick is hard, so hard that it digs into the long muscle down the front of Thor’s thigh.
His brother lets out a broken little whimper. “Get off me,” Loki says, very softly, and this time Thor obeys. By the time he manages two full steps back, his brother’s footsteps are already thunking down the stairs.
~
“Is something going on?” Thor’s mother passes him the plate of sugar cookies. He stuffs one in his mouth, then grabs another and another. “Between you and Loki, I mean. Maybe I’m wrong,” she goes on in that tone of voice she always uses when she’s stating the obvious while steadfastly pretending otherwise, “but I get the feeling you’re avoiding one another.”
Maybe they are. Thor isn’t sure. Now that he’s lost in his own (rather worrisome, if he lets himself go there, which he’s been trying not to) thoughts night and day, he’s kind of lost track of how often he’s seen his brother. “Nah,” he assures his mother, with a lightness he doesn’t feel. “We’re fine. Just busy.”
“Don’t forget to make time this summer to be busy being friends,” she reminds him. “You’ll be off to college in a few weeks, and your brother will be here alone. Which I guarantee you isn’t a small thing. You’ll both want a few more good memories to treasure and… well, I just don’t want you to look back on the past few weeks and regret having wasted your last real summer together being- petty. If that’s what you’re doing, I mean.”
“It’s nothing, mom,” he says again. But she probably isn’t wrong, and now he’s doubly worried.
~
“I love you, Lo,” Thor says into the inch-wide crack between Loki’s door and the doorframe. He knows better than to push his way in without knocking, but whenever the door isn’t latched he takes his chances. “And I miss you.” He’s been doing this for days now, every time he walks by Loki’s room. Which is more and more often, what with time running out and all.
Each time, he’s counted to thirty before heading on down the hall. Each time, Loki hasn’t answered. Of course, this will be no exception.
Except- “no you don’t,” Loki says, just as Thor starts to walk – sadly, resigned - away.
Thor turns and carefully opens the door, barely wide enough to see in with one eye. His brother is holed up on the bed. “No, I do,” he disagrees, pleasantly. “I always have. I always will. How could I not? You’re my brother.”
Loki glares across the room at Thor from where he’s reclining against the mountain of pillows. It’s been a hot week; his hair is up, little loose tendrils curling around his neck. Thor blinks away the urge to dive onto the bed and nuzzle into them. “Well, for starters,” Loki grumbles, “I’m a pervert, and a freak.”
The way his own thoughts have been running recently, ever since that fateful afternoon in the hallway – the one where they’d been home alone, and he’d discovered a thing or two about his brother (and three or so more about himself) – Thor knows he’s hardly one to be judging Loki. Which he expressly isn’t.
Thor’s mouth is dry. His heart is thumping unpleasantly against his ribs. Now, he thinks, or never. Not that there’s really any choice to make. He clears his throat and eases the door open a little bit wider. “It’s fine,” he says, and this time he means it. “That’s part of what I love about you.”