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[mjolnir_retriever]

[From here.]

The lawn outside Milliways is not much more private than the main bar, though it's more open and significantly less populated. But it's a more congenial place for a serious talk, and there are private places. You've just got to travel a ways to get to them.

Luckily, that's something Mjölnir is good for!

Loki wanted to come on a quick flight over to the mountains, right? It's fine, Thor's flown plenty of humans this way. (No, he doesn't snatch Loki up without warning or anything. But Loki knows perfectly well what the come on, grab hold, we're going thataway body language is like, and also what Thor looks like when he doesn't plan to take no for an answer.)

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[never_promised]

(For the very first time, Loki doubts, just faintly, that he is really himself. It's a thought process that goes like this:

Ha, Thor missed me.
Did I miss Thor?
No, he's so predictable that you can always just imagine yourself a Thor to argue with, you don't need a real Thor.

Except he can't remember spending nearly a year arguing with Thor in his head.

...Well, that's wormholes for you, right? Do funny things with time. You Thor, me Loki.

Me Loki.)

Loki (who is definitely 100% Loki, glad we sorted that out) realizes he's been silent a little too long, thinking a little too long, staring down at the buildings a little too long. He shakes himself and laughs. (It turns into another coughing fit. Possibly all this fresh mountaintop air isn't quite the thing for someone with the flu.) "That's barely a heartbeat, brother. You can't even have noticed I was gone."

He's not fishing for reassurance. Loki would never.

[mjolnir_retriever]

It cuts through his anger and outrage and confusion in a way that earlier wide-eyed frailty didn't: the reassurance Loki is definitely not fishing for, the silence before it, the coughing fit that takes over from a laugh as if it's catching Loki by surprise, too.

Thor steps in to put a hand to Loki's shoulder. Low, rough now with affection rather than anger or grief, he says, "Don't be an idiot. Who could annoy me like you?"

Is it cold up here? It's not for Thor, it never would be for Loki, but for a human body he's not sure, now. Loki -- Harry's body -- is really not looking so great.

[never_promised]

Human bodies don't usually feel this hot to the touch. It is cold, and Loki is shivering, but his face and throat are clammy with sweat.

It's his instinct to play it up a little, he should hold Thor's gaze, stifle a trembling lip, reinforce Thor's sympathy, something like that, but he's just too tired to think it through. Just...leaning here will have to do. And coughing some more, again unplanned, which makes him catch at Thor's arm for support. And then try to push it away crossly. He doesn't mind losing control of a scene--it can be exhilarating--but right now he doesn't even know what he wants and everything is wrong in the wrong ways and it's not exhilarating at all.

Loki wipes his mouth. "I'm annoying myself right now. There--there has to be something better than this body."

[mjolnir_retriever]

Thor breathes out, a rueful puff of a sigh.

We'll find it -- but can they? Sometimes it's so hard to remember that this isn't fully Loki, and sometimes it's impossible to forget. Right now, it's hard to remember.

"You and me, brother. We'll manage something."

And that's true no matter what: if Odin's sons are together, what can stand against their combined might?

He holds out an arm, letting Mjölnir drop to its strap from his other hand, ready to twirl up momentum. "Come."

[never_promised]

Right now the combined might of Odin's sons is just Thor plus a deadweight--a damp and coughing deadweight. But that's not going to stop them!

The flight back down sets off more coughing, and when they get inside, Loki's table of tissues and science looks to him more like a mountain to climb than a fortress of security. Ugh. None of the parts seem likely to come together into anything, and he's losing track of what some of them were for in the first place. But damn it all he's going to make it work.

Something. Make something work.