[thorki, ~750 words, writober, SFW, apocalypticinktober list]
Loki presses himself against the library wall. It’s cool against his side, looming up over him as he looks down at the street. The tumbled rooftops and vine-covered concrete cast lengthening shadows on the broken pavement, and small night birds have started to sing. There is no one out hunting, no one that Loki can see, but he stays in the shadows of the library’s great walls, out of sight of any prying eyes.
Far below him, in the open foundation pit of some great building that was, something darts out. It barks, and suddenly Loki can piece together the outline of a huge, wolf-like dog. It resolves out of the twilight, and behind it a man appears.
Loki looks side to side, checking to see if the broad library steps are clear. They’re just as empty as they have been the whole day, and so he sneaks slowly to the side stair that wanders down to the street just beyond the huge expanse of the main entrance. He pauses at the top, pulling one of his knives from the sheath. Sun glances off it. Below him, the dog barks again.
He picks his way down the stairs, stepping lightly around broken rocks and shattered remnants of statues. They are covered in the dust of thousands of pounds of exploded granite, in the fallen leaves of twenty winters, in the detritus of a city and a civilization dead and gone.
The pit is only a few yards away from where the library still stands in all its solitary glory. Loki scrambles down the rope that hangs inside it. Inside, walls loom large, open only to the sky above. He pads across floors covered with rotting weeds, and slips through a doorway which might have once had a door. It doesn’t now, but scraps of metal linger, still hinged to the frame.
“Fenrir,” he calls quietly. For a moment there is no answer, and then, through another doorway to his right, the dog comes racing out. He almost bowls Loki over, leaping upward to lick his face. Loki laughs under his breath, holding his knife out to one side, and cuddles Fen to him. He buries his face in Fen’s hair, putting his knife away, and sits down with a heavy thump, Fen’s tongue moving all over his ears and neck.
“Did you miss me, boy?” Loki asks, though he already knows the answer. He raised Fenrir from a pup, a little abandoned ball of fur stumbling awkwardly around the collapsed ruins of a building Thor said had once been a school.
They’d only lived there a few weeks, almost seven years ago. It was just after they’d finally found their father’s tooth-marked bones, hidden away in a corner not far from where they’d last seen him, fighting with a man who was skin and sinew and desperate muscle. Odin’s ghost had haunted that school, and chased them away from that part of the city with its lingering memory.
Fenrir was the only good thing they took when they left.
Loki pushes himself off the ground as Thor steps into view. He smiles. Thor smiles back. When he holds out his hands, Loki goes to him, Fen trailing at his heels. Thor smells like sweat and ash and a long day’s work, but Loki still buries his nose in Thor’s neck and folds himself into Thor’s embrace. They hold each other tightly.
“How was the library?” Thor asks.
“Quiet. How was the city?” Loki replies, as he does every day they don’t spend together.
“I saw Tasha. Traded her a rabbit for a nice whetstone for your knives.”
Loki holds Thor a little closer. It is only them in their little corner of the world here. In other parts of the city, there are other pairs, other small clans of people, eking out a life in the corpse of a failed civilization. But here, it is only him and Thor, and save for their meetings with Tasha and her small band, this is the only life Loki wants to know.
Thor strokes his hair, nosing at his temple. Loki sighs, tilting his head to give Thor better access and letting Fen worm his way between their legs.
“Thank you, Thor,” he finally breathes.
“Give us a kiss?” Thor says, laughing.
Loki does. Loki does, as he always does, and always will. It’s them against a dying world, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.