Thor has always known Loki was special. For all of Odin's first-son favoritism, Thor knows different. From the time they were little, Thor two years older and two inches taller, he's known that he is the golden child only in as much as the colour of his hair. It is his brother, Thor's constant, inky shadow, that is the shining son of Odin.
Thor was the child people noticed first. They noticed his bright hair, his booming laugh, the reckless abandon that he displayed. They would smile indulgently, patch his playground wounds, and then send him on his way, shaking their heads and laughing at his fearlessness.
Loki was noticed second, but the attention lingered. The slight, quiet child that people glanced over until he made them notice, with his pranks or with his brutal intellect. When he was fifteen, the murmurs of brilliant and potential became too loud for the Alliance to ignore.
It never occurs to Thor to be jealous of his brother. When his friends roll their eyes and call him obnoxious, Thor shrugs their complaints off. They do not understand his brother. It is not easy to earn Loki's affection; however, once gained, Loki loved with a ferocity that out-blazed Osiris' sun. Thor will take that hard won affection over the approval of his friends any day of the week.
When Loki receives his invitation into the Academy, Thor is seventeen, and just starting his military training. Thor has never been prouder, nor happier, to let the brunt of Odin's attention slide to his brother, who under his father's new-found approval, glows with a mixture of deep satisfaction and uncertain pride.
Loki writes him for a year, once a week, excited recounts of his intense language and art classes, the mathematics courses that even make his brain hurt. Then he writes him for another year, once a month.
Then he stops writing entirely for six months. Thor's increasingly panicked inquires are met with silence, until, two weeks after Thor has left a grand total of fifteen phone calls and twenty-eight frantic messages, Thor gets a letter.
It's a confused, misspelled mess. It cuts off in strange places, picks up with entirely different subjects, and makes absolutely no sense. It ends with an insistent confirmation that he's quite all right, no problems, he's just very busy, and may not write again for some time.
Thor supposes that its intention was to comfort, and to stop Thor from worrying.
Thor thinks that for all that these Academy people are supposed to be the geniuses, and him the dumb grunt, it was incredibly stupid of the Academy to let him have that letter.
He sends back a cheerful message, all "okays" and "no problems" and "I understand". Then he gets to work.
It takes him two years to get Loki out.
Two years, disownment, two trips to prison, a particularly nasty stab wound when the right seedy people he needs turn out to be the wrong seedy people, nearly all of his money, to end up on a ship that is more than a little suspect.
Two years until Captain Rogers throws the lid off of the freezing box, and Loki wakes screaming from a nightmare that Thor has only just begun to comprehend.
Two years and Thor holds Loki on the deck of a rebel ship, staring down the bewildered looks of Serenity's crew.
Two years, and he gathers his cold, broken brother protectively in his arms and says,
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