nexus_crossings | Time-sensitive question how flirt girl

Time-sensitive question how flirt girl

It's been some time since Thor has sought the Nexus for advice. Which is not to say that he's not a regular visitor, but he's felt relatively assured in his day-to-day life enough to feel that he has a good handle on what he's doing with himself, or at least that his struggles are routine and need little guidance to overcome. Today, apparently, this is not the case.

One might be forgiven for assuming the glass bottle in his hand is beer at first glance, but on closer inspection it seems to be a cream soda instead. It's not what he wants, but just having a drink in his hands seems to be a comfort, making it easier to think. The little picnic table is off to one side off the main Plaza, its benches warmed by the summer sun as it overlooks a small koi pond. Thor's one good eye stares through the glinting fish rather than watching them, lost in thought.

What's he supposed to do now?

Is this even a good idea? What happens once a few decades pass? What if he decides not to risk it, and she leaves? Should he even be seriously considering putting himself through this again? He doesn't even know his own heart yet, what if he ends up stringing her along without meaning to?

Those are the questions he keeps to himself, but there are more yet to ask. He picks at the soda label with his prosthetic fingers, metal lightly tapping against the glass.

"How do you realize when you're in love?" Not quite getting to the point, but Thor is honestly not even sure where to start on this one.

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Despite his conflicting thoughts, Thor's face visibly lights up a bit when he sees his brother, accepting the unexpected gift with amused exasperation. "Questionable? Do I want to know what's in this?" he asks, making a show of peering into the bag.

Loki may not be good with feelings, but he's certainly better with words than Thor is prepared to be. Every bit of that rings true, especially the last part. He lifts the cream soda a little in mock toast. "Truer words. I've not been looking, but it may have found me." Though not in the way he would've expected. Then again, does it for anyone? "I didn't know it could be so... slow."

The bread looks more or less like bread. Boxy loaves with rounded corners, maybe a little overly-browned at the ends. Wrapped in rainbow-tinted plastic wrap.

...oh, wait, no, it's normal plastic wrap. It's the bread that's tinted. Hmm.

"Well," Loki says, "first they tried to make it with pop rocks because Una thought biting into fizzy bread would be fun. That didn't work well, though, because pop rocks effervesce as soon as you mix them with anything wet, so it fizzled out in the oven. It came out rather light, though. Bit crumbly. A little bit watermelon-flavored."

"Then they decided to put Skittles in the next batch, which made them very heavy and very chewy and I'm afraid I'll hurt my teeth on them. I prefer walnuts, personally."

He sniffs a little when Thor raises the soda. Already he's pretty sure it's not alcoholic, but cream soda has a nice smell, not quite like how it tastes.

"I think the slowness comes from us being a little older," he admits. "Abrupt and passionate love affairs go better with adolescence and young adulthood. We're...almost like mature adults now."

"They could not have used chocolate chips?" Thor grumbles good-naturedly, shaking his head with fondness and closing up the bag to set it aside. He's going to try to eat it, certainly. The children will no doubt ask him what he thought of it the next time he sees them anyway, and it can't possibly be as unfortunate as the Halloween of years ago now.

Almost like, Loki says, and Thor lets out a surprised chuckle. "Hey," he protests, but there's no heat to it. He's in good spirits despite the dimming of his smile, a more thoughtful look taking its place. He's quiet for a moment, sipping his soda as he mulls it over. "Can you court someone without realizing you've been doing it?"

"That's what I suggested, but they wanted them to be colorful, and we didn't have M&Ms, so it sort of escalated. I don't like to curtail their creativity as long as they're being safe, but I might have let them get out of hand this time."

The results are probably edible, anyway, if a little too sweet and hard to chew.

Loki bumps shoulders with him playfully at the protest, but says nothing, seeing that thoughtful look taking over. The question makes his brows crease, and he folds one knee up to his chest as he thinks it over.

"Depends what you mean by courting, I suppose? You can't formally pursue romantic favor with someone, via gifts and time spent together, without knowing you're doing that. You can certainly pursue time in someone's company without recognizing you're trying to deepen your relationship with them, though, and give them gifts just because you like them and the gift made you think of them."

"I'm not sure how different platonic emotional intimacy and romantic emotional intimacy are, when it comes right down to it. But then, I didn't have a lot of friendships before I came to the Nexus, myself."

Out of hand or not, Thor doesn't seem to hold it against any of them. His nieces and nephews are quite dear to him, as is Loki's place in his life. If he must occasionally suffer through eating candied zucchini loaf, it's worth it. "Well, I'm sure it won't kill me," he adds with a grin.

Loki's answer gets a thoughtful 'hmm' from Thor, a small frown etching a line between his brows. "When I was with Jane, she arranged several 'date nights' for us. Time spent alone, either over dinner or stargazing, that sort of thing. She'd ask me questions about Asgard and the stars, and I'd ask her questions of herself, or things I'd seen on Earth that I did not understand." He shakes his head slightly, old regret still clinging to these memories, though it's dulled in comparison to who has his thoughts now. "Have I been doing that this entire time?"

"No, no, I monitor their baking too well for them to slip anything lethal into it." Not that they ever would on purpose. "I've considered baking a shiv into a cake as a joke before, mind you, but I wouldn't let them handle a shiv in the first place, so it would be from me alone."

...this is probably a joke.

He listens to Thor's musing and taps his fingertips on his own knee. "You don't approach things physically the way I do. The first time Harley took me for ice cream she practically climbed into my lap, and I let her because she's gorgeous and I wanted the attention."

(The sparkly outfit and many inches of bare skin showing were also an incentive, but he's not going to go into that with Thor.)

"It's only as I came to know her better that I found out how well we fit together as people." A frown. "Going about things that way makes for less chance of misunderstanding one's intentions, I suppose, but being friends first and then seeing if there's any other kind of chemistry is probably...I don't know. It sounds more sensible."

He looks at him again. "At what point did you look at Jane and think you wanted to be with her romantically, not as a friend? Surely not right after the car accident."

In their younger days, a confession like that would have gotten a suspicious look from Thor, and quite possibly a mistrustful gaze at the zucchini loaf he's been gifted. While the side glance that Thor gives to his brother is indeed a dubious one, there's an air of playfulness about it, more like sharing a private in-joke among family, and he nudges his shoulder up against Loki's.

He's still going to cut the loaf into slices before eating it, but that's just being practical.

There's something strangely nostalgic about sitting here with his brother, speaking of matters of the heart, though they've never really done so before. Not like this. Perhaps they should have, ages ago, when they'd reached an age to care about such things. But then, much of Thor's interests had lain more in brief dalliances, nothing that would last past the night, uninterested in attaching himself to any of the eligible young ladies that were introduced to him. He'd known then that their families had a mind for politics more than love, and he'd considered such things a problem for Future Thor to deal with.

Well, here he is now, older and wiser. So perhaps he was right all along, in some way.

Loki's question draws a brief, surprised chuckle from him. "No, neither. I was in no mind for affection either time." His smile fades slightly, picking at the cream soda's label again as he thinks. "It was later. After... I failed to claim Mjolnir." After Loki had come to visit him in his exile, though Thor does not say as much. Those ghosts have been laid to rest, as far as he's concerned. "Selvig took me to drown my sorrows, and Jane was waiting when we returned. SHIELD had taken her research and she was devastated by the loss of her work, and I was likewise unable to sleep, so we built a fire and sat under the stars."

"I'd stolen her notebook from the SHIELD compound, and when I returned it, I saw the light in her eyes. That was the first time I ever truly saw her, beyond simply what aid she could give me. She was curious of the universe outside her world, and brilliant and tenacious enough to chase the stars. She was kind and generous, giving me food and clothing and a place to sleep though I could not repay her, even when she thought me mad. She was fearless and passionate, her mind open to learning truth no matter how strange her people thought it. She saw me for the mortal man I was and wished only to know more, uncaring if I was a god or not."

His brotherly stabbing days are over, Thor, it's okay! Now, if he can find candy knives or swords around Halloween, that's a thing that could happen. He grins at the nudge and tilts his head, leaning it on Thor's shoulder briefly before resuming the conversation.

Truthfully, they were both idiots in romantic matters as young men, possibly in slightly different ways. Loki was extraordinarily bad at making friends, and a little suspicious of anyone who wanted to get close to him. His dalliances tended toward either court intrigues or encounters with humans on Midgard itself, which were very much non-Odin-approved.

He worries his lip briefly when Thor mentions the event, fully aware that he's dodging bringing up the part Loki played in his exile. Part of him wants to say something, apologize, explain, but...they've been over a lot of that already, haven't they? And there's no reason to make this about Loki. Instead, he puts his hand on Thor's bicep and gives a reassuring squeeze and a nod. Thank you.

It's a hell of a thing to be forgiven, just like that, even in the midst of talk of other people he wronged. Poor Selvig.

Jane is a little easier to focus on. He really did like her a bit, not solely for the slap, but she obviously had a steel spine, as well as intellect. "She's a remarkable person; I'm well aware of that. Just being brilliant and kind and courageous isn't all there is to attraction, though. There's some sort of alchemy that happens. You can meet a dozen suitable, attractive, single people, but something else has to click before devoting large swathes of your time to their company becomes not just appealing but compelling."

A sudden bark of laughter. "But now that you say it, there's a parallel between our respective dating preferences. Harley took me in right off the bat, too. Reckless kindness."

Leaving the past where it belongs is something Thor has slowly been learning these past few years, though at times it's far easier said than done. Not forgotten, of course, as old wounds don't heal by pretending they never happened. But neither will picking at those same wounds let them scar over. Whatever wrongs they've done to one another, there's no reason to dig them up now.

He smiles slightly at Loki's gesture of gratitude, returning the nod with a small one of his own.

It's the spark that Thor is having trouble putting to words, though the more he considers it, the greater the similarities seem. None would ever mistake Amelia for Jane, but there is that same tug toward her, the desire to spend his day in her company for no other reason than because he wishes it. Habit has become affection, her presence in the village crucial at first, and now welcomed not because she's needed, but because she's become a fixture herself. An Asvera without her would be missing something, a vital spark absent from his life.

Loki's sudden laugh brings him back to focus, and he can't help but grin a little. "You make us sound like strays they took pity on. Not that it's wrong."

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