Pain, first; it clutches him by the spine and drags him into the hot, sharp reality of it. Loki might struggle now, but Thor has anchored himself deep in mind as well as body. There is nowhere left to hide, with all of the dark secret spaces within him flung open and ransacked by well-beloved hands, and Loki can do little but press his head back against the bulwark and take his breath in half-wrought syllables of Thor's name.

Thor's face is split in two by the shadow of a data-console; Loki's fingers spider into the spill of his hair, holding him near. "Move," says Loki, though the pain clutches at him still. Better to be rent apart by the hands that hold him now. Pieced back together in the neural drift, the clasp of their minds a terrible inevitability, until Thor is but an extension of himself. Until they are inextricable even beyond Mjolnir's womb. "Now, Thor," he says, with urgency shredding his voice.