Here, between them, a memory: the sky folding in on itself, the sharp crease of horizon hiding the sun's bashful face. Loki had been a quiet child, preferring only Thor's presence over solitude, and solitude over all else. Once, he'd hidden his silence in the branches of a tree that overlooked the ancestral manor he'd believed to be his birthplace. He'd hoped that his father's fear-masked-rage at his disappearance would be enough to soothe the anger and the loneliness and the jealousy that had burned even then. Yet Odin, strongest and bravest of all Aesir, had little reason to notice his youngest's twenty-four hour absence.

Still, Loki had not braved the heights alone. Thor, laughter caught in his lashes, had found him, staining his hands and knees with woodsap rather than putting forth the logical question.

Thor is nothing like he had once been, shaped now as a god rather than a sliver of youth. But the laughter remains in the fan of his lashes, bright and sweet in the afterimage of his mind overlaid Loki's own. A day from now, a year from now, the intimacy of their neural communion may fade, but Thor presses now into the hollow of Loki's body, his breath alone inflating the lungs damned to a lifetime in Loki's chest. Would that this fragment of time could be as bread and butter for the years of hunger to come, as Loki has starved and starved and now finally his hunger begins to ebb.

"Enough," he whispers, softly enough that he can barely hear his own voice over the thundering rush of his own blood. Thor's fingers are warm and calloused, painful even with the perfunctory slick, but Loki's mouth is an open chasm, his mind blessed and free from all thought. He does not want to be cossetted. Neither does he want to cosset in return, for this has been burgeoning between them for longer than he knows. Pleasure is too kind for the desperation that blackens the green of Loki's eyes; so he asks for pain instead. "Give it to me, brother."