When Loki failed to present himself at the council meeting, there were several possible reasons why. Some were treasonous, some mischievous, some troubling indeed.
"Where is my brother?" Thor inquired of Heimdall, as soon as the most urgent matters--meaning the ones more likely to result in all their deaths than any of the others--had been dealt with. "Please tell me you can see him."
Heimdall went thoughtful for a moment, and then: "The prince is in his quarters."
"...Doing what?" A thousand possibilities came to mind, not one the sort of thing Thor wished to have to handle right now. Not when the last attack by pirates had been yesterday, and the ship limped along with only half its engines functioning. They would make it to the next port, but only just. One more disaster. That was all it would take.
Heimdall paused. That couldn't be good. "His current activities are of a personal nature. I do not believe they endanger any of us."
"Meaning?"
When he'd been a boy, Heimdall would have stopped this there. For a long moment, Thor expected him to do so now, as well. But Thor was no longer a boy, no longer a mere prince. And so although Heimdall gave the answer with a clear reluctance, he gave it nonetheless.
*
"Loki," Thor shouted, pounding on the door. "Loki, I know you're in there!"
Long ago, Loki had always complained when Thor requested his presence loudly from outside the door. It had taken some centuries for Thor to realize that Loki didn't have a problem with him creating a scene. Loki enjoyed scenes. But Loki also enjoyed being able to have enough silence inside of his mind to open a path to somewhere Thor wasn't. As far as tactical strategies went, the best one when there was a locked door between them was clearly to bang on it and shout, until Loki got annoyed enough to--
The door opened, Loki's livid, sweaty face on the other side of. "What could you possibly want?" he hissed, the picture of the sort of pure, incandescent outrage that had gotten Thor stabbed between the ribs seventy-four times since they were eight.
Spotting what Thor meant to do, Loki then attempted to close the door. But Thor's right foot was already in his room, shortly followed by the rest of him. He shut and barred the door behind him. "Brother, I--"
"You shouldn't be here," Loki said. "I'm unwell."
"Loki, I know, I--"
"I believe I picked up something from the last planet we visited," Loki continued. "That horrible place, you must recall it. I may be contagious. You should go."
For someone who might have been contagious, Loki certainly was crowding in close to him. One moment, his hand stroked Thor's bicep. The next moment, the hand closed into a fist, and he tore it away.
"Loki--"
"If we both were to fall ill, then the throne would go to whom?" Loki continued. "Heimdall?"
"That's not actually a terrible idea," Thor said, thinking on it...then realized he was being allowed to speak now only because he had followed Loki's misdirection, and added quickly, "Loki, I know you're in season."
"--What are you talking about," Loki said flatly, an effect somewhat diminished by the way his eyes kept flitting around, landing first on Thor's mouth, and then on his groin, and how harshly his breaths were coming. Thor had seen Loki in similar distress before, but then he'd always been crying, because the distress was always anger, and a great enough anger was sure to cause Loki to weep.
If he truly didn't know what Thor meant, then surely he would have been angry enough, between being in heat and not understanding what was happening--surely he would be crying, then? But he wasn't, and so that meant he was lying; and if he was lying then surely that meant he knew? Thor thought so, but was not entirely certain. Finally he had begun to understand Loki well enough to manage him at least some of the time, but he didn't think he'd ever understand him well enough to manage him all the time. This subject in particular was a terrible minefield between them, and perhaps always would be.
Still, he hesitated for only a moment. While a king must sometimes wait and see, other times he must act swiftly, no matter how terribly he might err. With Loki, acting quickly was always preferable, lest he get too far ahead; and in this, Thor chose to err on the side of assuming Loki did not know, and that someone ought to tell him, and that that someone must be him by virtue of the circumstance:
"You are my brother," he said, feeling his face warm before he was even close to the heart of the matter. "I have never doubted it. But you are also Jotun. Your body works differently from mine. Every few centuries, you will--"
Thor was not sure he'd ever seen such mortification on Loki's face by the time he put up his hand and said, "Don't describe it. Please."
He turned back to the bed that took up half the small space, and sat down on its edge. Thor followed, and sat beside him, and counted this venture a success thus far, in that Loki had not stabbed him yet, nor even objected to Thor remaining so close.
"You should go," Loki said, though that was another statement that was very difficult to take seriously, considering how he leaned toward Thor, and shivered, and then pulled back stiffly, before beginning the cycle all over again. "Where did you hear about Jotun seasons, anyway?"
"I read about them. Jotuns. In the library. After you fell, and before you came back."
They had been terrible, dark days, the first time Thor had believed Loki dead. He had worked his way through every book in the palace library that had to do with Jotuns whether entirely or in part. It had been very difficult, and not because he had always preferred to do literally anything other than studying with his time. He had been driven by the need to understand. It had not taken very many books to realize that he would not know who his brother had been from reading books about a heritage neither of them had known anything about for most of their lives. Still, he had kept at it until the task was finished. Until he knew what there was to know, none of which had been of any use until now.
Perhaps his feelings on the matter were not totally obvious in the few words he said about it, for Loki's expression had darkened. "You read books about Jotuns? You did? When did I ever have the chance to do as much?"
"When you were ruling Asgard for the last four years?" Thor suggested, recognizing melodrama when he heard it. They seemed on more familiar ground here, somehow. "Or were you too busy with your plays to open a book?"
Silence, while Loki traced a finger up and down Thor's thigh. Then, "I did find it strange to find them all shelved together. I thought it was some sort of trick, honestly. Someone wished me to believe Jotuns were even greater animals than I had known. I didn't believe a word of that particular volume until--" He jerked his hand away. "Thor. Why are you here."
"I came to help you," Thor said, relieved to finally be back where he'd meant to be in the first place.
"Help me."
"You could be like this for weeks, otherwise. You would suffer greatly. I can't bear the thought of your misery, brother."
"Perhaps I'd rather be miserable than fuck my brother," Loki said. "My brother who does not, it seem, feel as brotherly toward me as he claims."
It seemed an odd argument coming from someone who had spent years insisting they were not brothers, and whose hand was back to massaging Thor's leg, less than an inch from his cock. However, as someone who had been stabbed seventy-four times by Loki for lesser transgressions than pointing out such an obvious hypocrisy, and who was currently intent on keeping the peace, Thor decided to leave it.
"I suppose it would be more convenient for you, if I were not indisposed for such a length of time," Loki continued in a rather nasty tone. "So, you'd fuck your own brother in the name of expediency. You're a more ruthless king than I ever thought you'd be."
"Actually, my job would be much easier if you were locked in here for a few weeks," Thor said, not at all certain if he was cutting through Loki's script, or merely following along. Either way, he was, he decided, done with this. He stood up, and said, "I just thought I'd offer. Give you the option, you know. I'd forgotten how much you enjoy misery. I'll be going now. Since you're clearly not interested."
He was halfway to the door when Loki said, "--Wait."
"Yes?" Thor said, looking back to see Loki, hunched forward in a way that was doing little to hide the erection Thor had been trying very hard not to see until now.
"Your cock can't possibly be the right shape," Loki burst out. "We can't even be certain it would work if we didn't actually tie."
"Yes, I had the same thought. But I also had an idea..." Thor said.
*
Later, Thor's closed fist was buried deep inside of Loki. It had been in there for at least forty minutes. Every so often, Loki clenched around it even more tightly, his face smoothing into even more of a blissful expression. By now, Loki had come three or four times, yet every time Thor so much as inched his other hand toward his own aching cock, he was accused of having done this for lustful, unbrotherly reasons. When he objected to the latter, Loki was quick to use their brotherly-ness to make him feel terrible about the former. Or if not that terrible, since looking back he was quite certain that Loki had tried to seduce him multiple times in their youth, then at least too self-conscious to go ahead and get himself off anyway.
"I hate you so much right now," he said.
"Do you really? The position you're in suggests otherwise," Loki all but purred. "Get comfortable. I imagine we have a while to go yet."
Thor had things to do. Many things. Kingly things. But all the fires greater than this had been put out before he'd shown up at Loki's door, and so unless their current state lasted well into tomorrow--unlikely, he hoped, although the books he'd read had all been vague when it came to the timetable of this sort of thing--he supposed there was nothing left to do but wait.