Loki saw the grief flare in her eyes, and he knew immediately that he'd reopened a wound that she'd been training herself to scab over. She had to in order to function. That was part of why the post-Games interviews and the Victor Tour were scheduled a few weeks after the Games themselves; so the traumatized children they'd turned into celebrity killing machines would have a little time to recover from their trauma. Not that Loki had recognized it as trauma, before. Not until he'd seen Thor. Not until he'd helped to run the Games himself. How natural it was, for them to grieve. How hard it was for them to do anything else.
Perhaps that was why -- not even for the first time that night -- Loki chose to answer her question honestly. In fact, it was less of a choice and more of a reflex. As if it were something she was pulling from him, somehow. "We were once," he murmured. "Less so, now."
Loki's choice of career had put an irreparable strain on his relationship with his brother, and Loki wondered sometimes, on those rare occasions when he indulged in a few too many drinks, whether he would have still pursued this particular dream if he'd known what it would do to them. How it would make Thor look at him, now that he was on the other side, pulling the strings. The worst part of such musings was that he always came to the same conclusion. Yes. Yes, he would have. Yes.