Chapter Text
As always, Natasha’s first thought upon stepping into Iðavoll, the king’s hall in New Asgard, was that it looked like something a Hollywood set designer would come up with. She stood by the doors for a moment, looking around at the elaborately decorated walls and columns, which had gained a few more carvings and some new inlay since the last time she had been here. It was a style that she mentally classed as somewhere between nearly-Celtic and nearly-classical, but not quite either; something about it was subtly nonhuman in a way that she couldn’t put her finger on and grew more so the longer she looked at it, until it felt wholly alien.
Behind her, the great hall opened into a courtyard flanked by two long sides of the building, like an E with the middle missing. Past the open double doors where Natasha stood, it was one big room, large enough to hold the entire population of New Asgard at need. Long wooden tables were spaced between the columns along the sides of the room and there was a raised firepit in the middle whose glowing coals gave off heat as Natasha walked past it. At the far end of the chamber was a dais with another long table on it, behind which sat the room’s sole occupant.
“Whatever you want, the answer is no,” Loki said without looking up. He kept writing with what looked like a quill pen, thin, elegant lines of runic script that were completely indecipherable to Natasha when she stepped up onto the dais and looked down at the sheaves of paper in front of him. The rest of the table was littered with books, daggers, a couple of fist-sized crystals, pieces of pale bone carved with runes, an elaborately-figured shallow metal bowl full of water, and a teapot shaped like a fat-bellied dragon that steamed gently. A matching cup held down one corner of what looked like a map, though Natasha couldn’t recognize anything on it.
Loki flicked the end of the pen at her. “Go. Shoo. I’ve no tolerance for playing polite just now and surely there’s a cat up a tree somewhere you need to save.”
Natasha raised her eyebrows. “I see you’re in a mood.”
“I save my better nature for more important visitors than you,” Loki said.
“Now that’s where you’re wrong,” Natasha said, “because I’m the most important visitor you’re ever going to get.”
“I sincerely doubt that.” Loki went back to writing.
“We have a way to fix this.”
The quill pen paused. “Do you,” Loki said, his voice flat. “And how precisely are you planning to do that? With the Infinity Stones destroyed there’s no power in the cosmos strong enough to ‘fix’ this. I have spent,” he added bitterly, “a great deal of time attempting to discover one, to no avail.”
Natasha blinked; she hadn’t known that. “I’ll tell you when we get to the compound,” she said.
Loki finally looked up at her. He had let his hair grow long over the past five years, now braided back with golden charms at the end of each braid. It accentuated the sharp angles of his face, making him look subtly inhuman despite his otherwise ordinary garb of a black sweater over a collared green shirt. “As I recall, I signed quite a lot of paperwork saying that I wouldn’t enter your country without proper supervision as a condition of my being allowed to stay on this planet. And honestly, I can’t say that I’ve particularly regretted the loss. Typically when you arrive there’s either a great deal more notice or significantly more urgency on your part, so I assume this is something other than the usual nonsense.”
“Well, it is different than the usual nonsense,” Natasha admitted. Some of the strict restrictions on Loki’s travel outside of New Asgard had been lifted over the course of the past few years, which meant that she and Steve didn’t have to escort him everywhere he went, just most places; fortunately he wasn’t inclined to go anywhere he needed a babysitter. They also hadn’t had any recent Avengers emergencies bad enough to require them to go through the political rigmarole necessary to bring Loki in, even though when you needed a Asgardian on your side, you really, really needed one, and the last two times they’d skipped the red tape. Loki had come, since his presence on the Avengers roster had been part of the Asgardian Accords he had signed and he was always punctilious about obeying the letter of the law, or at least the parts of it he thought were most important at any given moment. The last time had been a couple years ago, though.
She hadn’t seen Loki in person since the previous year, since she and Steve had been part of Loki’s escort when New Asgard’s deputation had attended the United Nations session in New York, on the usual grounds that Steve could probably handle him if he had a sudden psychotic break. Loki hadn’t, and instead had spent most of the session exchanging probably-derogatory handwritten notes with the Valkyrie, who had come with him to serve the multiple purposes of advisor, bodyguard, and definitely being able to handle him if he had a sudden psychotic break.
She forbore from mentioning that this time they didn’t technically have government permission for Loki to enter the United States, which had been part of the terms of New Asgard’s settlement on Earth. A surprising number of countries had decided that his invasion of New York had been an American problem and didn’t particularly care, especially in the aftermath of the greater problems the Snap had created, but the U.S. definitely cared. She and Colonel Rhodes had debated attempting to get that permission and decided that it wasn’t worth the publicity and hassle it would take. They didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up about the possibility of reversing Thanos’s culling.
Loki stared at her for a long moment; Natasha guessed that he was doing what he had mentioned to her once, back in those awful weeks between the Snap and the arrival of the surviving Asgardians, and trying to work out what Thor would have done under these circumstances. Finally, he just said, “Who’s ‘we,’ precisely?”
“The Avengers, all of us,” Natasha said, and bit back her urge to remind him that these days that included him. “I think you’ve met everyone but Ant-Man.”
“Ant…I don’t want to know.” He frowned for a moment. “Lang, wasn’t it? I thought he was on the list of those taken in the culling.”
“False alarm,” Natasha said. “So are you coming or not?”
It took a couple of hours for Loki to talk the Valkyrie or any other Asgardians out of coming with him, then make the necessary arrangements for New Asgard to continue running in his absence. “They don’t need me, particularly,” he explained to Natasha, who watched all of this in fascination; she hadn’t seen much of the settlement the last few times she had been here and she had only the most cursory knowledge of how the Asgardian government functioned when left to its own devices. Usually when Loki had to leave it was either on several weeks’ notice because of all the red tape or none at all because the Avengers really, really needed an Asgardian to punch something. “A few things need to be rescheduled and I need to leave the seal with the Valkyrie in case anything needs to be signed in my absence.”
At her raised eyebrow, he flicked an ironic glance at her. “I was, in fact, raised to be a king,” he said. “Granted, these weren’t the circumstances I expected.”
When he vanished upstairs into the levels of Iðavoll he used as his living quarters in order to pack a bag or whatever it was he did when left to his own devices, the Valkyrie took Natasha aside and said, “If this is some attempt to imprison or execute him, I’ll kill you.”
“It’s not,” Natasha promised. “I swear. If he gets arrested, we’ll take care of it.” Note to self, she thought, don’t call the Valkyrie if Loki gets arrested. She was still more worried about Clint being arrested than Loki; she had dropped him off at the compound that morning with strict orders not to leave the property before she had come to New Asgard.
Loki came down the stairs, his hands empty, and stared suspiciously at them. “If you’re quite done threatening each other, can we get on with this? I’d prefer to get the inevitable unpleasantness out of the way sooner rather than later.”
“Don’t do anything stupid, your majesty,” the Valkyrie said, stepping back from Natasha.
“Perhaps it’s just me, but the entire conceit of this endeavor seems to be to do something stupid,” Loki said. After a moment he added, “Thor would love it.”
“I haven’t even told you what it is yet.”
“As I said.”
He followed her out of the settlement to the field where she had parked the Quinjet amongst New Asgard’s ragtag collection of spacecraft, pausing now and then to say something to one or another of the Asgardians who passed them. He dropped into a seat in the back of the jet as Natasha slid into the pilot’s chair. When she looked back, he had produced a thick leather-bound book from thin air and seemed to be engrossed in it. She waited until they were over the Atlantic and she felt all right putting the Quinjet on autopilot before going back and sitting across from him. He flicked a glance at her over the top of his book and raised one eyebrow.
“You remember that most of Asgard’s problems date from before the culling, surely?” he said. “This won’t fix anything for us, assuming you’ve actually stumbled across a real solution.”
“You still lost half of your people, didn’t you?”
After a moment he nodded. “Half of those who remained,” he said, his mouth tight.
Even after all this time, it still felt odd to think of him as responsible, Natasha decided. After the battle in Wakanda, after everything had ended, Loki had swung wildly between furious rages and silent depression, all while drinking too much. Natasha couldn’t blame him for that; most of the surviving Avengers had been in the same position. When he had shown no sign of leaving on his own, there had been a half-hearted discussion of whether or not to turn him over to the authorities, but after what he had done on the battlefield it hadn’t felt right. They had ended up taking him with them back to the Avengers compound in New York when they had finally left Wakanda, where Loki had taken over Thor’s barely-used bedroom and shown no real sign of caring if the remaining half of Earth lived or died, let alone whether he was arrested. The subject had come up again on Tony’s return and gone predictably badly, but had at least resulted in Loki showing a few more emotions until Steve and Carol had had to keep him from throwing Tony out a window, which Natasha really couldn’t blame him for at the time. He had gone with them to kill Thanos happily enough, which had ended in them learning a lot of things about him and the Chitauri Natasha would have preferred not to know and with Nebula putting her sword through her adopted father’s head.
The arrival of the Asgardian remnant had tabled any possibility of his arrest for good as they and the Avengers wrestled with what was left of the various world governments until everyone involved had gotten a handful of the concessions they wanted and no one was happy, except that Loki had gone off to Norway and was finally out of their collective hair. That had lasted until it had been made very clear to the remaining Avengers that they were expected to babysit Loki any time he did something remotely worrisome, which for the first two years had been pretty much everything. At least it had kept Steve and Natasha on their toes, since Ross seemed to consider dealing with Loki a punishment detail for them; Bruce had spent a lot of time with the Asgardians anyway and Rhodes usually got out of it.
When Loki had turned up in Wakanda during the battle, Natasha’s first hysterical thought had been of the Project Pegasus footage she had seen. She had watched space-time ripple before he had appeared from what seemed to be thin air, already spinning to fling a brace of throwing knives into the throats of the nearest Outriders. To complete the impression of having stepped out of the past, he had some kind of polearm with a curved blade like a bird’s skull, glittering cold and deadly in the wash of his green-gold magic which had followed the knives and incinerated the wave of Outriders who had charged the new arrival. The raccoon with the big gun and the walking tree that had followed him out of the space-time fold had felt almost normal in comparison, or maybe by that point Natasha had just lost the ability to be surprised by anything else. (She hadn’t, though. She had learned that soon enough.)
Before Wakanda, she had never really seen him fight before. His arrival at the Pegasus facility could more accurately be described as a slaughter than a fight and since his intentions at Stuttgart had been to get captured that hardly counted either. She hadn’t seen any of his fight with Thor on Stark Tower.
Between his knives, his magic, and his polearm, Loki had gone through the battlefield like a plague, his face a mask of grief and rage. It was Thor’s berserker battle lust on his brother’s sharper features and it had been that which told Natasha that Thor had to be dead.
Loki had helped. So had Rocket and Groot, but in the end it hadn’t been enough. She didn’t think that anything would have been enough.
“How have you been?” Natasha asked him eventually.
“Well, my brother is still dead, my parents are still dead, my planet is still destroyed, most of my people are dead, my species is functionally extinct and actually it’s not even my species, which somehow makes it worse,” Loki said, gave her a small, tight smile. “And now we’re all stuck on Midgard, of all places. Oh, and let’s not forget that five years ago a genocidal madman killed most of the people my sister didn’t slaughter, murdered my brother in front of me, and then wiped out half the universe. How have you been, Natasha?”
“I’ve been worse,” Natasha said. “It’s been helping to have something to work on, something that really might work.”
Loki scoffed, closing his book and resting it across his knees. “You must be truly desperate if you’ve come to me for help.”
“It takes one to know one,” Natasha said, and when he raised his eyebrows, went on, “You barely even hesitated when I said there was a chance.”
“Perhaps I’ve merely been bored.”
“Do kings get bored?”
“Frequently,” Loki said. “But unfortunately, as I just mentioned, there is no one else, because my entire family is dead and the only one left is me. The criminal. Not even an Asgardian, really.” His mouth twisted. “Nobody actually seems to mind.”
“You know, we’ve got this little thing called democracy –”
“Please don’t tell me you’ve been corresponding with Korg.”
“We might have exchanged a few e-mails,” Natasha admitted. “He seems nice.”
Loki rolled his eyes. “And we’re familiar with the concept of democracy. Even its practice, believe it or not.”
“I thought you guys had an absolute monarchy – god-kings and all that,” Natasha said, testing.
“We’re all gods,” Loki said patiently. “Not just the royal family. That would be…odd. And uncomfortable, surely.”
“How does that work?”
He shrugged. “It just…does? I’ve never known anything different.” His mouth twisted again. “Not that it did us much good. Anyway, yes, we have democracy, or something like it, at least, even by Midgard’s standards. We’ve got the Althing, which is it at the moment; we used to have – we used to have many smaller Things and they’d send representatives to the Althing a few times a year. An assembly, I think, might be the closest word in your tongue, or parliament, maybe; it’s not quite the same as the Things you have on Midgard. We do send someone to the Storting in Oslo now; I’ve been a few times. Most of the actual governing of Asgard was done by the Althing, except at the highest levels; Odin oversaw the Nine Realms, certain internal affairs, and anything that the Althing couldn’t reach a consensus on or thought was an affair for the throne. We’ve still got an Althing and anything they can’t agree on, which is most things, they send to me.” He gave her a small, humorless smile. “Any citizen of Asgard can attend the Althing, speak, and vote, if they so choose. Including Korg and the other former gladiators, though most of them don’t bother.”
“Do you go?”
He shook his head. “By tradition no one from the royal family attends so there can’t be any claims of favoritism or intimidation or anything else like that. It’s worked for the past twenty thousand years, with a few dramatic exceptions.”
“Huh,” Natasha said, digesting that. She had known about the Asgardian assembly in theory, but hadn’t been certain how seriously to take it or, for that matter, how seriously Loki, one-time would-be conqueror, was taking it. Aside from the surprisingly successful attempts to publicly rehabilitate their new king, New Asgard had been very, very quiet since its arrival on Earth. Most of the publicity had been focused on Loki rather than the Asgardian people, which seemed to be both human and Asgardian preference. The most recent had been a minor stir of interest around the Olympics the previous year, but the IOC had firmly declared that nonhumans couldn’t participate, following up on their previous declaration a decade earlier that enhanced humans couldn’t participate either.
Loki picked up his book again, but didn’t open it. “You’re not wrong,” he said eventually. “I am desperate. So are you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you humans are quite resourceful when you’re desperate. I am here, perhaps, out of an excess of optimism. And boredom,” he added, before going back to his book.
“I’ll take it,” Natasha said to the leather-bound cover of the book and got up to go back to the cockpit.
The Benatar was already parked when she set down on the landing field. Loki stood up, peered at it, and said, “Oh, you convinced Nebula and Rocket of your madness as well, I see. That’s – not very encouraging, actually.”
“You’re here,” Natasha pointed out.
“Well, I’m somewhat mad, as is well-known.” He followed her out of the Quinjet, remarking, “If I get arrested again, I shall be very displeased and also the Valkyrie will kill you, your friends, and whoever is holding me at the time. I know Earth doesn’t currently think much of Asgard, but we are still very efficient at killing people. Especially mortals. You’re all quite fragile.”
“Yeah, I got that memo,” Natasha said. “Come on.”
She led him into the main facility and put her hands into the pockets of her jacket, fingering the widow’s stings there, since there was every chance she might need them in the next thirty seconds.
The living room was full of people – real people, which made a nice change from holograms and ghosts. Steve looked up at her and grinned as she came in; having something to do, having a plan, seemed to have brought him back to life from the dark place he went to whenever the awfulness of the past five years got to be too much for even him to handle. It seemed to have brought most of them back to life.
“Hey, Nat’s back,” he said, which got almost everyone else looking around too – Rhodey and Bruce tensing in anticipation and Tony surreptitiously letting a repulsor gauntlet spread over his right hand.
“Oh, hey, Nat,” Clint said, twisting around from where he was sprawled over the couch. “Where’d you –”
Then Loki came in behind Natasha.
Clint’s eyes went huge. He vaulted the couch, snatching up the sword he had leaned against the arm, and was shoving Natasha out of the way an instant later. She let him, taking the widow’s stings out of her pockets as Loki just cocked his head and said, “Hello, Clint.”
He put his hand up to catch the sword blade as Clint swung at him; it didn’t even pierce the skin of his palm or fingers. He flicked a glance at Natasha, his eyebrows raised, and said, “Really? A test? After all we’ve been through?”
“You bastard,” Clint said. His muscles were straining as he tried to bring the sword down further; Loki just looked bored.
“Does he need this?” he asked Natasha.
“To be on the safe side, probably, yeah,” Steve said. He had stood up, but wasn’t making any attempt to pull Clint back or get in the way.
“Am I missing something?” Scott said, sounding a little nervous. “Wait – isn’t that the guy who –”
“Hmph,” Loki said, then twisted his wrist and sent the sword spinning out of Clint’s hand and into a wall, where it stuck point-first, quivering.
“– isn’t that the guy who invaded Manhattan with an army of aliens?” Scott said. “Like six years ago – eleven years ago?”
“Yes, that was me,” Loki said graciously. He put his hand up to catch Clint’s fist as Clint swung a punch at him. “But don’t be concerned. This time I’m on your side.”
“Nat, what the hell,” Clint said.
“He’s the only one who knows about the Reality Stone,” Steve said.
“Literally the only one,” Tony said. “On the entire planet. Believe me, I’m not any happier about it than you are.”
“Well, in that case you could have just sent an e-mail,” Loki said, annoyed. “Could someone please get him off me? You mortals have such fragile bones and I’d rather not break any if I’m trying to play nice.”
“You haven’t even broken one of his bones yet, Loki?” Nebula said. “Huh. You are playing nice.”
“Yes, thank you, I’m aware. It’s a pleasure to see you too, by the way.”
Natasha decided she probably wouldn’t have to stun either of them and put her widow’s stings back in her pockets. “Come on, Clint,” she said. “He’s on our side. He was in Wakanda with us.”
Clint gave her a betrayed look. “You know what he did –”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Natasha told him. “He’s here for a reason.”
“I would also like an explanation,” Loki said. “If it isn’t too much of a bother.”
Clint finally pulled his fist back and Loki immediately put his hands down, then smoothed out his shirt cuffs with precise, fiddly movements. His cufflinks were gold and shaped like lightning bolts, Natasha noticed for the first time. His gaze moved across the room, taking in its occupants. He blinked at the sight of Bruce in his Hulk form and edged back half a step, before giving a brief, general nod of greeting.
“It’s still me,” Bruce said.
“Forgive me if I don’t find that quite as reassuring as you seem to think it is,” Loki said; Natasha thought for a moment and realized that they hadn’t seen each other since Bruce and the Hulk had gotten their relationship stabilized.
Loki looked around again, then fixed on the one unfamiliar face and said, “You must be Ant-Man. Lang – Something Lang, isn’t it? Stephen – Peter – do all you Anglophone humans have the same dozen names or so? I thought you’d gotten better since you were all named John and Peter and Henry in the thirteenth century. I suppose there were a few Richards in there.”
“I’m Scott,” Scott said, nervously.
“I am Loki of Asgard.” He grinned wickedly at Clint and added, “And I am burdened with glorious kingship.”
If looks could kill, Loki would have been a smoldering corpse.
“Uh,” Scott said. “Should we be bowing? Or kneeling? Or something?”
“No,” Loki said. “Will someone please tell me why I’m here?”
“We’re going to go back in time to get the Infinity Stones before they were destroyed and use them to reverse the Snap and bring everyone back,” Tony said. “You keeping up, Reindeer Games?”
Loki blinked once. “Well, that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You have fun with that; I’m going back to New Asgard before someone notices I’m here and arrests me for trying to take over the planet eleven years ago.”
“That sounds like a great idea,” Clint said. “We should definitely do that. Or, listen, I have a better idea –”
“I do have to admit I’m surprised I haven’t seen you before now,” Loki told him. “I thought I’d be first on your list. I’m almost insulted, really.”
“Loki, stop,” Steve said, massaging his forehead. “It’s a good plan. It will work. We just need your help.”
“My help,” Loki said flatly.
“We can’t possibly need his help,” Clint protested. “Come on, Steve! Nat – Tony – Bruce, come on, you know what he is.”
“A god?” Loki said.
“Shut up,” Clint said furiously.
“The king of Asgard?”
“Only because Thor got killed and from what I’ve heard about it, because you screwed up and handed over an Infinity Stone –”
Loki’s face went cold and dangerous.
“Yeah,” Clint said. “There you are.”
“And where were you during the battle for the fate of the universe, Barton?” Loki said. “I know where I was. I know where the dead were. I know where everyone in this room was – except for you,” he added to Scott.
“Uh, I was in the Quantum Realm.”
“That’s not what I was expecting, but I’ll allow it,” Loki said. An instant later his expression went vicious again, all sharp teeth and the same casual cruelty that Natasha remembered from the helicarrier, like a feral animal.
“Yes, Barton,” he said, his voice low. “I got my brother killed. I made a mistake, I miscalculated, and instead of dying like I expected, my brother was murdered in front of me while I stood there helpless. And then, instead of dying alongside him and our people like I should have when our ship was destroyed, he and his friends found me.” He pointed at Rocket without looking at him.
“Hey, don’t drag me into this,” Rocket muttered.
“I wasn’t strong enough or smart enough or fast enough or Thor so then the bastard who murdered my brother wiped out half of the universe and I still didn’t die, since it seems that is my one great trick, not dying, and now I have to live with that while I attempt to keep my people from going extinct because, if you weren’t aware, Barton, my planet was destroyed and my people were slaughtered and that was before the Mad Titan found us.” Loki’s voice had been steadily rising the whole time, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “And yes. I gave the bastard an Infinity Stone because I couldn’t watch him torture my brother to death and then he killed Thor anyway and I have to live with that for the next six thousand years. Is there anything else you’d like to say to me or can we get on with it?”
Clint’s mouth worked silently.
Cautiously, Bruce said, “Look, Loki – you know we’re only trying to undo the Snap, right? That’s all. We can’t – we can’t change anything else.”
Loki didn’t look at him, but his voice was very hoarse, as if he was trying to keep himself from screaming, “As I said, Asgardians are now functionally extinct. Restoring those who were destroyed in the culling might – might – keep my species alive. I am willing to take that risk even if your so-called plan is utterly imbecilic.”
He flicked a glance around the room, taking in the silent occupants, and said, “Have whatever conversation you apparently still need to have in order to convince yourselves of my good will. I’ll be in my room, assuming you haven’t given it away to someone since the last time I was here.”
He stormed out, boot heels clicking heavily against the floor.
“So that went well,” Tony said into the silence which followed.
Rhodes gave him a dry look. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Nobody’s dead. I mean – no one new is dead.”
Steve put his head in his hands. “Oh my god,” he muttered.
“I can’t believe you just sprung him on me,” Clint said to Natasha, furious. “Why would you do that?”
She tilted her head. “You know why.”
“Yeah, and screw you too, Romanoff,” he said, and stormed out in the opposite direction Loki had taken.
“Yeah, that could have gone worse,” Rocket said. “Hey! What’s for dinner?”
Loki joined them for dinner. He and Clint sat at opposite ends of the big table and the simmering tension between them replaced the nervous, uncertain tension between Steve and Tony that had been dominating the past couple of days, which at least made a change of pace. They opened a couple bottles of wine and passed around a truly enormous amount of Chinese takeout – Steve, Bruce, and Loki together ate enough food for eight ordinary humans. The conversation was polite if occasionally strained, mostly about New Asgard and what everyone else had been up to since the last time they had all seen each other.
At a break in the conversation, Rocket said, “So what’s the story between you two? You guys used to date or something?”
Clint was too horrified to respond immediately. Loki said calmly, “When the Mad Titan sent me to Earth eleven years ago with the Mind Stone in order to retrieve the Space Stone, Barton here was one of the humans I used the Mind Stone to control. He was a very efficient second-in-command.”
Scott gaped at him. “You – what? You worked for Thanos?”
“That’s not exactly the term I would use,” Loki said. He and Nebula exchanged a look, then she silently passed him a container of fried rice and he busied himself spooning some onto his plate.
“You thought we were dating?” Clint finally managed to say.
“No, not really,” Rocket told him. “I just thought it would get a rise out of you.”
Steve massaged his forehead and Natasha patted his arm sympathetically.
“Well, this is awkward,” Rhodes said. “Pass the eggrolls?”
“Wait, New York was him?” Scott said.
“No, it was me,” Loki said. “And – well, yes, it was him.” He and Nebula looked at each other again. Loki’s jaw worked briefly, then he said awkwardly, “If it’s – any consolation, and I understand that after all this time it probably is not – I do regret what occurred. It was not one of the better decisions I’ve made in my life, but at the time it was the best of several bad options, inasmuch as I had options at all.” He made an expression that might have been a smile on someone else, but couldn’t quite manage the expression on his sharp features. “And I think I’ve paid for it in full, with change.”
Clint got up and left the room. A moment later a door slammed somewhere inside the compound.
Loki put his chopsticks down and sat with his head bowed, though he turned a little as Nebula leaned over to say something to him. Natasha gave Clint a minute to himself, then got up and followed him out.
She found him exactly where she had expected him to be, sitting on the edge of the rooftop balcony with his legs dangling into empty air as he stared down at the landing pad where the Quinjet and the Benatar were parked. Natasha walked over and sat down beside him. “Hey.”
“Hey.” After a moment, he added, “Springing him on me was a dick move, Romanoff.”
“Yeah,” Natasha admitted. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He scratched at his hairline, not meeting her eyes. “I get we need him. And I get that he was in Wakanda when it…happened. It’s just – you know. Seeing him here. Alive. When so many other people, good people, are dead. Gone. You know.”
“Yeah,” Natasha said. She put a hand on his shoulder, and after a moment he tipped his head sideways against hers.
“I didn’t think he’d actually apologize,” Clint said after a while. He frowned. “If that counts as an apology. I’m not sure if it does.”
“I think it’s the best you’re going to get,” Natasha said.
He snorted. “Yeah, probably.”
The sun was setting. They watched it creep below the horizon, and when the world was awash in pinkish-gold light Clint said, “I…might have known that there was someone else pulling his strings. He got weird a couple of times, back then. But you know I don’t remember it very well. I thought I was making it up, trying to find excuses – like maybe he was still in my head. And then Thor took him back to Asgard and then he died – or Thor told us he died, anyway, I – wait, how is he still alive?”
“Faked his death, magicked his dad, pretended to be Odin for a few years while Thor was away, apparently.”
“Wow,” Clint said.
“Yeah,” Natasha admitted. “Well, I didn’t say he wasn’t an asshole, I said he was on our side.”
“Enemy of my enemy, I guess,” Clint said.
They sat in silence watching the sun go down, and when it was dark Natasha stood up and offered Clint her hand. He took it and let her pull him to his feet.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go fix this.”
“This is the worst plan I’ve ever heard,” Loki said. “And I grew up with Thor, so that’s saying something.”
They had all reconvened in the conference room, where Tony and Bruce had just finished explaining their plan to Loki in greater detail than Tony’s earlier summary. He was sitting on a couch with a half-empty glass of wine in one hand, his expression disbelieving. Going by the bottles on the table, he and the others had already made a serious dent in their after-dinner drinking – everyone drank too much these days, when all the awfulness of the past five years caught up to them. Loki had flicked a glance at Natasha and Clint as they came in, but hadn’t otherwise acknowledged their arrival.
“Messing about with time is a terrible idea,” Loki went on. “I’ve never heard a single tale of it ending well. When you mess with time, it tends to mess back. The universe wants to continue along a single path and when that path is interrupted, it always, always self-corrects. And for the record, as the god of mischief, it gives me no joy to tell you that sometimes the rules exist for a reason.”
“Right, right,” Bruce said. “But the Stones themselves are unnatural, right?”
“They were created at the birth of the universe, by the birth of the universe,” Loki said. “So they’re certainly more natural than you are. No offense meant.”
“None taken. Okay, so the Stones are natural, but what Thanos did with them, wiping out half the life in the universe – that’s unnatural, right?”
“Yes,” Loki said, sounding like he knew there was a trap somewhere in Bruce’s words but couldn’t spot it yet.
“So maybe this is the universe’s way to self-correct,” Bruce said. “It has to be undone and the Stones are the only way to do it. You said yourself that you’d tried to find other ways.”
“It’s entirely possible that there are still many I haven’t discovered yet,” Loki said warily. “My library access is not what it once was, with Asgard’s library destroyed and the great libraries of other realms somewhat reluctant to let me take books out. Everyone in the Nine Realms knows that what’s left of Asgard is now on Midgard and no one wants even the King of Asgard to bring their books to Midgard.”
“What’s wrong with Earth?” Steve asked.
“Would you like that list chronologically, alphabetically, or in order of what I find most offensive about your realm?” Loki said.
“You’ve only been here for five years and the time you tried to take over, which was, what, like, three days?” Rhodes said. “And we’ve been having half an apocalypse the whole time.”
Loki gave him what Natasha privately thought of as his bitch, please smile. “I’m over a thousand years old and I was worshipped as a god on this world for centuries – I still am in some circles. I’ve been on this planet at least once every few decades for the past ten centuries. My father –” His voice stumbled for a moment, then strengthened. “My father used to send me to investigate affairs on Midgard that he thought might require Asgardian attention, as unlike most Asgardians I could name – all of whom are dead now…” He swallowed. “As unlike most Asgardians I am actually capable of blending in.”
“That explains so many things about Thor and absolutely nothing about you,” Tony said.
“Wait –” Clint said. “Hey, you remember that time Thor was invited to go on Ancient Aliens?”
“I was probably in prison,” Loki said. “Or pretending to be my father. One of the two.”
“I wasn’t talking to you. But you remember when he said –”
“The D.B. Cooper thing?” Tony said.
“Oh, that,” Loki said. He smiled again. “That was me. I lost a bet with Thor.”
“What?” Scott said. “Wait. You were D.B. Cooper?”
“Surprise!” Loki said brightly.
“You didn’t see the episode?” Tony asked Scott. “Or the clip? I think it broke some kind of YouTube record.”
“No, I was probably in prison,” Scott said.
“Oh, wow, this was not on my bingo card for how tonight was going to go,” Rhodes muttered. “Seriously, Loki? That was true?”
“Hello, trickster god, remember?”
“Wait, does that mean the thing Thor said about the Loch Ness monster was true too?”
“What’s the Loch Ness – oh, yes, that was also me. I mean, I’m not a bilgesnipe, but I did bring her to Midgard.” He smiled reminiscently. “I hope she survived the culling, I haven’t thought about her in decades.”
“I liked your segment on Drunk History,” Natasha said to Loki; it had been one of the media attempts to rehabilitate his public image, and one of the more successful ones, at that. Steve and Rhodes had escorted him to the studio for that; she had been busy at the time.
He smiled again. “That was fun.”
“I don’t know if any of it was true, but it was fun. And I know how much alcohol it takes an Asgardian to get drunk, so how long did Comedy Central have you in there before you got wasted enough for them?”
“Some time,” Loki said. “And I actually can’t recall if I talked about any Midgardian history.”
“You said you had some of the lost Fabergé eggs,” Natasha said. “And then you tried to pull one out from up your sleeve or something but instead you had the FIFA trophy that went missing in 1983. And then FIFA tried to sue you for stealing it. Since you’d left it in the studio when you went back to New Asgard and wouldn’t answer their phone calls Comedy Central eventually just gave it to them.”
“Oh, is that what that lawsuit was about? I was very drunk during filming and I believe my clerks thought the calls were more death threats.” Loki frowned for a moment, then balanced his wineglass on the arm of the couch and made a twisting gesture with his hands. A large white and blue enamel egg unfolded itself between his palms. It was elaborately decorated with gold and gems, with the figure of an elephant on top and set on a pedestal made up of heraldic lions. Loki looked at it fondly. “Is this what you meant? It’s egg-shaped and these look like Midgardian animals.”
“Oh my god,” Rhodes said, and put his head in his hands.
“That’s the Royal Danish egg,” Natasha said. “It was made in 1903 as a gift for the Dowager Empress of Russia, who was born a princess of Denmark, and it hasn’t been seen since the Russian Revolution. Maybe earlier, maybe later; there’s a description of it from 1934. What?” she added as several people stared at her. “I like Fabergé eggs. They’re pretty. And they always have surprises inside and I like that about them.”
“Would you like this one?” Loki said. “To keep, I mean. I don’t believe I’ve looked at it in the better part of a century. It’s attractive enough, I suppose. A little overwrought.”
“You should probably give it to Denmark or Russia so they feel less weird about you and New Asgard,” Natasha said regretfully. “But I’ll hang onto it until then.” She went over to take it from Loki as he held it out, trying not to gape.
“I’ll have you know that New Asgard has a very good relationship with Denmark,” Loki said.
“Yeah, I know, I watched the livestream of the lecture you gave at the University of Copenhagen two years ago. There were protestors.”
“I get that a lot,” Loki said; that had been after restrictions on his travel had eased in several countries, so Natasha hadn’t been there. “I also teach a class at Uppsala University in Sweden every year. And I’ve given talks at several other universities in Europe. I get death threats every time. And protestors. And marriage proposals.”
“I have literally no way to process this information,” Clint said. “Can we go back to something that makes sense, like time travel and the Infinity Stones?”
“Certainly, but I think I’ll need another drink before that,” Loki said, looking at his empty wineglass.
“I think I need one to start with,” Clint muttered, and Steve said, “I wish I could get drunk.”
“Drunk History really wanted you on,” Natasha reminded him, and he nodded, quirking a grin at her.
“Yeah, but even if I could get drunk, Fury said he’d skin me if I said yes because most of what I remember about the war is still classified.”
“That just makes it more fun,” Tony said. “I still say you should have said yes. They’d probably have you now if you called them.”
“Still can’t get drunk,” Steve pointed out.
“Maybe the Asgardians have something that will work on your metabolism.”
“You guys are weird,” Rocket said, “but I could take a drink.”
“All right, drinks for everyone,” Tony said, getting to his feet. “Natasha, you want to give me a hand if you can stop fondling the egg? I can get you one to keep, if you really want.”
“Aww, that’s sweet,” Natasha said. She handed the Royal Danish egg to Clint and said, “If you drop that, I will break all of your fingers,” before following Tony into the next room where the liquor cabinet was.
“Before you say anything, you should probably know that I’m pretty sure Loki can still hear us,” she said as Tony picked up a bottle of whiskey and frowned at it thoughtfully. “I think it’s an Asgardian thing; Thor always had freakishly good hearing too.”
“I was going to ask about Barton,” Tony said, low-voiced. “What do you think?”
“I think if he’s going to try to kill Loki while both of us are in here, he’s not going to get very far,” Natasha said. “They’ll be fine. Clint’s a professional; he can do his job. Loki’s – I don’t actually think he cares that much, not about Clint. Maybe he actually does feel bad, but I can hardly ever tell when he’s being sincere.”
“That’s not the impression I got,” Tony said.
“What, about me or him?” She picked up a couple of bottles of expensive-looking alcohol at random, figuring that between the ten of them they’d go through them all.
“Did you know?” Tony asked, his voice barely more than a whisper now. “About you know who and – the other you know who? How much in control was he?”
“He said a few things after Wakanda while he was drunk that made me think it might have been the case,” Natasha said carefully. “But not much. And Thanos said a few more things before Nebula killed him, but the truth is that I don’t know, Tony. I’m not sure even he knows. You usually don’t in situations like that.”
“I wouldn’t think they happen all that often.” Tony compared two bottles of wine and said, “Hey, do you think the 2012 would be appropriate, considering?”
“You’re going to do it and see if he notices, aren’t you?” Natasha said.
“Yep.” He tucked the bottle under his arm, then picked up another two and said, “There’s glasses out there, right? Everyone’s already been drinking? I guess we can always make two trips if we need more glasses.”
They took the bottles back into the conference room, where Bruce and Steve had gone back to trying to convince Loki of the wisdom of what they had all started calling the Time Heist.
“This is a terrible plan,” Loki said. “Absolutely dreadful.”
“But you’ll do it, right?” Bruce said.
“Of course.”
He took the wine bottle that Tony handed him, looked at the date on the label, and said, “Very funny, Stark,” before popping the cork and refilling his glass.
When everyone who wanted one had a drink in hand and Natasha had taken the Fabergé egg back from Clint and placed it carefully on a side table, Steve stood up and said, “Okay, so we’re all agreed that this is what we’re doing. The how works; now we gotta figure out the when and the where. Almost everyone in this room has had an encounter with at least one of the six Infinity Stones.”
“Or substitute the word ‘encounter’ for ‘damn near been killed by one of the six Infinity Stones,’” Tony put in, activating the holographic screens that displayed the Stones and their known locations.
“Well, I haven’t,” Scott said, “but I don’t even know what the hell you’re all talking about.”
“Why is he here again?” Loki said.
“He’s the one who figured the time travel out,” Steve said.
“Well, actually that was me,” Tony said. “Well, I mean, I made it work, I guess it was his idea.”
“Wow,” Scott said. “That’s just – god, I wish Hank was here. But he really hates you, so he probably wouldn’t have come anyway.”
Bruce made a gesture of agreement. “We only have enough Pym particles for one round-trip each, so having Hank Pym be here would really, really help with that. These Stones have been in a lot of different places throughout history.”
“Our history,” Tony clarified. “So not a lot of convenient spots to just drop in, yeah?”
“Which means we have to pick our targets,” Clint observed, rolling his beer bottle back and forth between his palms.
Loki tossed back the remainder of his glass of wine and reached for the bottle again. He only looked up from pouring when Steve said, “Let’s start with the Aether. Loki, what do you know?”
“Well, the Dark Elves tried to use it to wipe out reality five thousand years ago and again ten years ago when they murdered my mother trying to get it,” Loki said, and took a gulp of his wine. “Also me. But I got better. She didn’t.”
They all stared at him.
Loki tipped his glass up and drank the rest of his wine in one long swallow, his voice a little raw when he went on. “Five thousand years ago, my grandfather – Thor’s grandfather – King Bor defeated and killed most of the Dark Elves and hid the Aether away on a prison planet somewhere deep within the Nine Realms, a prison only accessible through the Bifrost. It remained hidden until the next Convergence, when the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil all align and the boundaries between the worlds begin to thin. Jane Foster – Thor’s girlfriend – ex-girlfriend – stumbled on it and absorbed it somehow.”
“Wait, it’s a rock, isn’t it?” Rhodes said. “How do you absorb a rock?”
“The Aether’s more like an angry sludge in its resting form, not a true stone like the others,” Loki said. “And I was in prison at the time, so I have no idea precisely what Dr. Foster did to get the Aether inside her. Thor found out, brought her back to Asgard, and then the Dark Elves attacked and murdered my mother. And my father didn’t let me go to the funeral. No one even told me until after it was over. The last thing I ever said to my mother –” He rubbed his hands over his face, closing his eyes briefly, then said, “Thor broke me out to take us to Svartalfheim, homeworld of the Dark Elves, without using the Bifrost – you all recall I can walk between the worlds of the Nine Realms, yes? It’s how I brought Rocket and Groot to Midgard from Nidavellir five years ago. Thor used Dr. Foster to lure Malekith – the leader of the Dark Elves – to Svartalfheim so that he could remove the Aether from Dr. Foster and it could be destroyed. It didn’t work. You can’t destroy an Infinity Stone even by hitting it with lightning, though Thor certainly gave it his best shot. And then I got stabbed in the chest and died or nearly died or – anyway, I’m not certain, it didn’t take, anyway, but Thor thought I was dead. Or at least I hope he thought I was dead, because he left me there and I woke up alone with a hole in my chest –” He stopped, staring off into space.
“Elves are real?” Scott said.
Loki blinked and looked at him. “Well, the Dark Elves are now all dead, which was supposed to have already happened five thousand years ago, but I suppose Grandfather Bor lied about that.” He poured himself more wine. “Which seems to be a family trait, since my father also lied about a lot of things. Though it does raise the question of why I was the one who was born the god of lies and I’m not even related to Bor or Odin. Anyway, the Dark Elves are extinct, assuming Thor got them all, but there are still millions of Light Elves on Alfheim. I got shot in the face once on Alfheim about fourteen years ago. Elves are very annoying.”
“This – all this – was when Thor was fighting aliens in London back in 2013, right?” Rhodes said. “SHIELD did the clean-up.”
“What happened to the Aether after that?” Natasha prompted Loki.
“Oh. Well. Thor brought it back to Asgard after he defeated Malekith and Odin sent it to the Collector on Knowhere. Well,” he said again, and smiled thinly, “I sent it to Knowhere, since I had already usurped my father at that point. We already had the Tesseract and I thought having two Infinity Stones in one place would be too much temptation for the Mad Titan to resist. Two Infinity Stones and me,” he added, looking down at his now-empty wineglass, then reached for the bottle again.
“Okay,” Natasha said. “So we’ve got one day – maybe two? – when the Aether and the Tesseract are both on Asgard.” She wrote that down in her notebook, since she thought better when she could look at something physical instead of a screen. “What’s Knowhere?”
“It’s in space,” Rocket said. “You guys know what space is, right? Not you, I know you know, Asgardian, we pulled you out of it. I still can’t believe you guys can survive vacuum.”
Loki raised his wineglass in a salute. “Unfortunately. Or fortunately, depending on your point of view.”
Clint leaned over to whisper in Natasha’s ear, “I think we’re already getting another episode of ‘Loki does Drunk History.’”
“I’m not drunk, I’m drinking,” Loki said. “I can hear you. If you wanted that, you’ll have to wait at least one more bottle.”
“Well, we still got the Mind Stone and the Tesseract to go,” Tony said. “We could leave them for last, see how you’re feeling then.”
Loki knocked back his wine again, then picked up the bottle, drained the last inch or so of its contents, and turned the bottle around so that the label was facing them. He tapped a finger against the date on it. “I should think,” he said, his voice hoarse and his words very precise, “that the answer to when to get the Mind Stone and the Space Stone was obvious. The Time Stone as well, I suppose.”
“Huh,” Steve said. “When he’s right, he’s right.”
“Please never say that about Loki again,” Clint said.
Loki put the empty bottle down and reached for the full one next to it. “It undoubtedly won’t be as dramatic as whatever adventure you were hoping for,” he said, producing a knife from thin air and sabering the top off the bottle. The sight of Loki with a knife in his hand made all of them except Rocket and Nebula tense. “But there’s a very simple way to get the Scepter and Tesseract.”
“And what’s that?” Steve said warily as Loki poured his wineglass full again.
He put the bottle down and pointed at himself with the knife he was still holding. “I had them both when I was trying to take over your realm, so it should be easy enough to retrieve them from some point before I went to Germany and you kicked me in the face. And I’ve wanted a rematch with the sorcerer.” He looked down at the knife, seemed to realize the tip was pressed against his chest, and made it vanish in a flicker of green-gold light.
Natasha and Steve looked at each other. He was right, but – “We need you to go to Asgard,” Steve said. “None of us have ever –”
“No,” Loki said flatly. “I am not going to Asgard. I am especially not going to Asgard then. You can either fetch it from Knowhere or you can go back to the previous Convergence and attempt not to get killed during the war between Asgard and Svartalfheim, but I am not going to Asgard.”
“Okay,” Tony said. “Not to get weird about it, but why’s that?”
“I have no need to explain myself to mortals,” Loki said, drank his glass of wine in one gulp, then immediately contradicted himself by saying, “Putting aside the obvious difficulty of the fact that I was in prison at the time and thus have no idea where anyone was on that particular day – and that I was in prison at the time – I can’t promise that if I was to go back I wouldn’t do something rash. My father didn’t allow my mother to visit me in prison,” he added, and his voice broke briefly. “She sent her projections through her magic, but –” He passed a hand over his face, wiping furiously at his eyes. “I remember the precise moment that I touched my mother for the last time and it was two years before she was murdered. So it probably isn’t wise for me to go to Asgard. And my father’s there, and the last time I saw him he told me he loved me and then he died and unleashed my secret evil sister, who broke Thor’s hammer, threw us off the Bifrost, and then murdered most of our people until Thor and I had to blow up the planet to stop her. And that was the last time I saw Asgard, when it was being reduced to atoms by the fire giant who was prophesied to destroy it and whom I had to call up in order to destroy my secret older sister – well, Thor’s sister, because I was adopted, which my family lied to me about my entire life.”
He picked up the wine bottle and drank straight from it, then wiped a hand over his mouth. “And Thor’s there and – and Thor’s there. The last time I saw him – I can’t go back to Asgard.” He drank again, emptying the bottle, then frowned down at it “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned all that. What is in this wine?”
“Alcohol,” Tony said cautiously. “Which you’ve had four bottles of, one of them in the last thirty seconds. Uh, you want some water there, Loki?”
“I want Thor and I want to go home,” Loki said, putting the wine bottle down very carefully on the empty air next to the table, then looking surprised when it fell and shattered. He waved a hand that glittered with green light and the broken pieces flew back together. Loki nudged the empty wine bottle under the table with one foot and then leaned forward with his elbows braced against his knees and his head in his hands, his long, braided hair falling down to hide his face from view.
“Okay,” Steve said, looking concerned by the sight of Loki so obviously undone. “So Asgard’s out. Rocket, Nebula, what do you know about Knowhere and this Collector person?”
Rocket gave Loki a look that was equal parts worried and sympathetic, at least insofar as either emotion was visible on a raccoon’s face. “Well,” he said, “we actually did have the Power Stone there for a couple of hours. So that could work.”
“The Collector is supposed to be impossible to steal from,” Nebula said.
“Well,” Tony said, “we’ve never tried. Hey, Polly Pocket, you’re a thief, right?”
“Not a thief, a burglar. Cat burglar. And retired,” Scott protested. “And like – on Earth.”
“It’s the same principle, it should be fine,” Tony said. “So you’ll go with them to steal stuff in space. What else we got?”
“Soul Stone,” Steve said.
“Thanos found the Soul Stone on Vormir,” Nebula said.
“Is that another planet?” Clint asked.
“It is a dominion of death at the very center of celestial existence,” Nebula said, looking like she wished she could follow Loki’s example and get drunk. She had said that something about most Earth alcohols interfered with her altered physiology. “It’s where Thanos murdered my sister.”
“I wish there was less of that going around,” Loki moaned into his hands.
“Okay,” Tony said, “well, Vormir’s in space, so – space team and Earth team, huh?” He pointed at Rocket and Nebula. “You’re on team space – you too, Scott, Bruce –”
“I’m not working with him,” Clint said, pointing at Loki. “I’ll go to space.”
“Steve and I will go with Loki to 2012,” Natasha said, after a quick glance at Steve to make sure they were thinking along the same lines. “Tony? Rhodey? What about you?”
Scott mouthed, please don’t leave me with them, at Rhodes, who said reluctantly, “I guess if anyone can handle Loki in 2012 it’s you guys, but –“ He grimaced. “It’s sounding like we might do more good on the space team. Tony?”
“What’s your plan, anyway?” Tony said to Loki.
Loki raised his head and pushed his hair out of his face, making the golden charms on the ends of his braids chime softly against each other. “My plan was to walk into Barton’s little underground headquarters, pick up the Tesseract and the scepter, and walk out again.”
“Aren’t you forgetting one really important part?” Clint asked.
Loki spread his hands in confusion.
“You?” Clint said pointedly. “Back then? Because I don’t remember you ever putting that scepter down.”
“Oh. I can deal with that – him – myself – easily if it becomes a concern, but I’m not expecting it to be. And your presence wouldn’t do any good, Stark. Your skills are more likely to be useful dealing with the Collector.”
“Did he just say I have skills?” Tony said.
“I’m quite drunk,” Loki said. “I wouldn’t take it to heart.”
“Well,” Steve said. “It sounds like we’ve got our teams. Six stones, two teams, one shot.”
Notes:
11/18/2021: The beginning of this chapter was heavily revised to better match the worldbuilding from later in the story, and there are a number of other smaller revisions throughout this chapter. As well as rewrites, about 500 words have been added (mostly in regards to the description of New Asgard and some character dynamics, as well as changed dialogue).
Chapter Text
Natasha walked into the kitchen the following morning to find Scott and Loki sitting together at the island drinking coffee and watching YouTube clips of Loki’s Drunk History episode. She blinked at this unexpected sight, then shook her head and made a beeline for the coffeemaker instead. Tony had provided it years ago and it practically required an mechanical engineering degree to use, mostly because it had broken so many times and been put back together in increasingly esoteric configurations. Scott had gotten it to work, Natasha found. Loki either hadn’t or didn’t care for coffee, since when Natasha got to his far side she found he had some kind of gold-looking kettle balanced on a tripod over a miniature brazier next to his left elbow, giving off a fragrant herbal scent like nothing on Earth. The brazier had actual coals in it.
“I don’t remember this at all,” Loki said as Natasha found a mug and wrestled with the coffeemaker until she had freed the pot.
“You look pretty wasted, man,” Scott said.
“Well, it isn’t called Entirely Sober History, that’s my other class.”
“You mean ‘So You’ve Just Found Out Aliens Are Real In the Worst Possible Way: A History’?” Natasha said.
“That is not what it’s called,” Loki said.
“What is it called?” Scott said.
“I don’t remember. It’s a history of the Nine Realms and Yggdrasil’s place in the greater cosmos because no one on Midgard knows anything about cosmic history, which was charming ten years ago and is less so now.”
“Ig-dra –”
“Just say ‘the Nine Realms,’ it’s less painful for me to listen to.”
Natasha opened the fridge and extracted one of the six different milk containers; they seemed to have spawned after all of the remaining Avengers had moved in, not just her and Steve. It was still a little shocking to find a full fridge, let alone a house full of people. “Is it actually still the Nine Realms?” she asked him, inspecting the label on the milk container before putting it back and picking up another one instead. As long as she had options, she didn’t see the point in settling for what came first to hand. “Because Asgard –”
“Asgard’s not a place, it’s a people,” Loki said, his mouth going briefly tight. “It’s been the Nine Realms for several thousand years, it’s a hard habit to break. But yes, some of the realms have stopped calling Yggdrasil that. Every time I talk to the Vanir they seem to delight in throwing ‘the Eight Realms’ in my face. The Ljósálfar – the Light Elves – have never called it the Nine Realms as the Dark Elves were supposedly wiped out before there were Nine Realms under Asgard’s protection, though Asgard has claimed the actual planet of Svartalfheim for eons.” He let a hand waver in the air, palm down as he tipped it back and forth. “It’s something of a tense political situation that your government has decided to remain blissfully unaware of despite the fact that Midgard is part of the Nine Realms…” He shook his head, annoyed.
“I’m still back here at ‘elves are real’,” Scott admitted.
“Elves have been real since long before the ancestors of humankind crawled out of the swamps,” Loki said. “And have I mentioned how annoying they are recently? And that’s just the Light Elves, not the Dark Elves, who were a great deal worse than merely annoying.”
“You did say you got shot in the face once by elves?” Natasha said, putting the milk back in the fridge. “I thought you people didn’t use guns.”
“I got shot in the face with an arrow,” Loki said. He tapped his left cheek with one finger. “I was commanding a troop of ulfhednar – rangers, you might say, woods-walkers – to deal with a rebellion on Alfheim and then Thor had to show up because he thought he was missing out on the fun of living in the woods for a month with elvish guerrillas taking potshots at us and while we were yelling at each other one of those guerrillas shot me in the face. And then he burned down half the forest with lightning and then I had to smooth things over with the queen because who has always done all the diplomacy in the family until I – well – anyway. Elves are very annoying and I think the queen still holds a grudge. And some of the elves use guns, just not those particular ones.”
He frowned for a moment, then made a gesture with one hand. Green-gold glimmered on his fingertips and resolved into a straight-shafted, metallic-looking arrow that he passed to Natasha when she held her hand out. It wasn’t metal, she discovered as she took it, but a very fine-grained wood; the fletching wasn’t feathers, either, but some kind of fibrous material she didn’t recognize. The tip was barbed and finely-etched in unfamiliar patterns that glowed a little as she touched a finger to them.
“That’s not the one that Thor pulled out of my face, by the way,” Loki said. He hesitated, then said, “You can give that to Barton, if you like. Peace offering. I’ve got more.”
“Thanks, I think,” Natasha said. She put the arrow down on the counter and picked up her coffee again.
“You do need an elvish bow to actually activate it as anything other than a very sharp arrow,” Loki said.
Natasha looked down at the arrow. “It’s an energy weapon?”
“Just because you hear me say the word ‘elf’ doesn’t mean you should assume they’re anything like the elves in your myths or your media,” Loki said dryly. “They do have pointy ears, though.”
“And are really into bows and arrows,” Scott said, nodding. “Have you seen the Lord of the Rings? Or read it?”
“I actually met Professor Tolkien,” Loki said, his mouth twitching a little. “He didn’t know who I was, of course.”
Natasha decided to leave that to mentally process another time, perhaps after she had more than two sips of coffee. Talking to Loki had that effect, far more so than Thor had ever had. It wasn’t that she had never been aware that Thor was a god and functionally immortal – or at least so long-lived that to humans it was essentially the same thing – but he had usually been less inclined to throw it in their faces.
Loki poured himself more of whatever it was he was drinking. Despite the brazier and the exotic kettle, he was using one of the novelty mugs from the kitchen cupboards, a heat-sensitive poison apple mug that Sam had bought at the Disney Store years ago. Only about half the color-changing portion still worked, but it was still mildly disconcerting to watch Loki drink from, which Natasha suspected had been his point in choosing it.
She opened the fridge again at the sound of the back door and had a glass of orange juice to hand Steve as he came in from his morning run around the lake. He took it with a nod of thanks, blinking at the sight of Loki and Scott seated together, then again when he saw the arrow on the counter.
“Steve,” Loki said, tipping his mug towards him in greeting.
“Morning, Loki.” He looked down at the arrow. “Did I miss something?”
“Nothing important,” Natasha reassured him. “You want some coffee?”
“Or some of this?” Loki said, indicating the kettle next to him. “We did determine that while it’s extremely toxic to most humans, you seem to be able to consume it with no ill effects.”
Steve’s mouth twitched a little. “I’ll stick to coffee, thanks.”
“It’s toxic?” Scott said, edging sideways away from him.
“Only if you drink it,” Loki said.
“You’re drinking it!”
“I’m not human,” Loki pointed out, and took another sip. That probably explained why he had picked the poison apple mug in the first place. “For which I am eternally grateful. Though since we’re on the topic of my species, I do have a somewhat related question.”
“Yeah?” Steve said, managing to get the pot out from the coffeemaker without breaking anything this time – that was what had led to the last series of repairs. He poured himself coffee and leaned against the counter next to Natasha. He had told her once that the caffeine didn’t do much for him, but he liked the taste.
Loki balanced the mug between his palms, the handle pointed outwards towards them. “How certain are you that this plan of yours will actually succeed? Realistically, I mean, not optimistically.”
“Pretty sure,” Steve said.
“It’s my plan,” Scott said. “I mean, mostly. So yeah, I think it’ll work.”
Loki frowned. “You really believe that, assuming we can get all of the Infinity Stones, we’ll be able to bring back those who were culled.”
“Yes,” Natasha said, nodding. “We believe that.” We have to believe that, she didn’t add; he knew that already.
“Right,” Loki said. He tipped his forehead down against the edge of his mug for a moment before saying, “Then I’ll have to make some arrangements.”
Steve frowned. “We’re not making any public promises,” he said. “Or announcements, or –”
“Probably wise in your case, given the absolutely appalling state of your so-called government,” Loki said. “However, as you may recall, when the culling occurred Asgard was not on Earth; the majority of Asgard was on a number of escape pods and assorted vessels in space. Should the culling be reversed, would the disappeared then reappear on those vessels? We still have most of them in New Asgard, but others were sold. Or would they appear in the physical location where they were when the culling occurred, which was in the midst of deep space? Asgardians can survive in space for a time, but not all those who were culled were Asgardian and I’d rather no one return from the dead to die instantly in the cold vacuum of space.” He gave them a thin smile.
“Oh, shit,” Natasha said, looking at Steve. “I didn’t even think about that – how many planes do you think were in the air during the Snap?”
“Oh, shit,” Steve echoed.
“I’ll talk to Rhodey,” Natasha said. “I think most civilian aircraft were grounded after the New York and Edinburgh attacks, but I know there were military planes in the air. Maybe he and Tony can come up with something.”
Loki put his mug down and laced his fingers together. “There is also the chance,” he said hesitantly, “that not everyone who was on the Statesman was dead when the culling commenced. I’ve believed for the past five years that I was the only survivor, that it was – that it was Thanos’s punishment for me to survive when Thor and the remainder of our people were slaughtered. By the time the Valkyrie and I were able to return to the wreckage, there was no one left alive, just the dead. That was weeks later.” He swallowed. “We had an accurate census of those who were onboard before the attack and we know who made it to Midgard, even those who didn’t stay in New Asgard and chose to go to Vanaheim or one of the other realms instead. But we’ve never been certain how many of the escape pods were destroyed during the attack or who was still on the ship when it was boarded, or – or any of it, really. I only know what I saw. And no one else made it off. It was just me.”
His laugh was harsh, broken. “I probably wasn’t even supposed to survive, given that Thanos blew the damned ship apart with the Power Stone. It’s just – it’s incredibly difficult to kill an Asgardian and I wasn’t injured, not really. Just cuts, bruises, a cracked rib, a broken wrist. Nothing serious. I would have survived for weeks more even if Rocket and his friends hadn’t found me – I literally bounced off their viewport, you’ve heard?”
“He might have mentioned something about that,” Steve said. He was watching Loki the same way that Natasha was, wary and cautious; Loki had never said this much about the attack on the Statesman in the five years they had known him as someone other than Thor’s psychopathic brother. They had had to piece it together from the fragments he had let slip after the Battle of Wakanda.
“In vacuum?” Scott said, horrified. “For weeks? How do you even find that out?”
“Personal experience,” Loki said, with a humorless smile. “It may have also left me slightly unhinged, but that could be unrelated. Events both preceding and following did not help, so it’s hard to say how much effect falling endlessly through the void of space had.”
Scott edged a little further away from Loki.
“Regardless, Asgardians can survive for quite some time in vacuum – and I was neither the first nor the last, so it’s definitely an Asgardian quality and not a frost giant one, as I am not actually an Asgardian.” He flexed his hands, restless. “There is a chance, though admittedly a slim one, that anyone who survived Thanos’s attack and then the Power Stone’s destruction of the ship may have been destroyed in the culling. There wasn’t much time in between the two events, and when the Valkyrie and I finally made it back to the wreckage, there weren’t…there weren’t enough bodies. But we’ve never known exactly who never made it off the ship and the escape pods that were shot down were entirely vaporized. And the Power Stone itself…” He rested his fingers against his forehead. “It’s incredibly difficult to kill an Asgardian. Anything that doesn’t kill us instantly, no matter how unpleasant the experience, we’ll likely recover from. If there were Asgardians onboard who were injured, not dead, or if – if – there’s a chance that anyone who survived was destroyed in the culling. Just a chance, but –”
He stood up abruptly, made a gesture at the brazier to instantly cool the coals, and then left the kitchen.
They watched him leave. Steve waited to say anything until after they had heard a door slam somewhere deeper inside the compound, then he said very quietly to Natasha, “Do you think he believes Thor might have survived until the Snap?”
“I don’t think he wants to let himself believe that,” Natasha said. “The Valkyrie told me once they never found Thor’s body. God.” She put her coffee cup down and ran her hands over her face. “They both seemed pretty sure Thor was dead.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. He looked down at his now-empty coffee cup. “But, you know – I thought that about Bucky once. I’m not going to be the one to tell him no.”
Various other Avengers wandered into the kitchen over the course of the next few hours as people woke up. Since they were already there, Steve, Natasha, and Scott made breakfast for ten, then Steve made a shopping list since having to feed an Asgardian on top of a super soldier and the Hulk put a serious dent in their supplies. Loki came back to eat and ignore Clint’s suspicious glares, talking to Rhodes and Tony about the aircraft conundrum, which after a few minutes they all realized would be a problem for ships and submarines as well. Cars and trains too, but since that likely wouldn’t result in immediate death it was less urgent. Into this, Rhodes said abruptly, “Oh, God, the ISS,” and put his hands over his face.
“No, wait –” Bruce said, pointing at him with a fork. “Nobody on the ISS got snapped five years ago, right? I remember hearing that on the news.”
Rhodes opened his mouth to reply, thought about it, and then said, “Oh, thank God, I didn’t want to have this conversation with NASA too.”
“Did you really not think about this before?” Nebula said.
“We were sort of focused on making sure that it might actually work,” Bruce protested.
“Wow,” Scott said. “Thanks. Whole lot of trust there, guys.”
“You turned into a baby!”
“We would have fixed that eventually!”
“And I fixed it for you,” Tony said. “You’re welcome.”
“This is really Earth-centric,” Rocket said through a mouthful of pancakes, spraying crumbs in all directions. He and Nebula had spent the night on the Benatar, but predictably appeared for breakfast. “You guys know this is the whole universe, right? People live in space.”
“Well, excuse me; we’re on Earth!” Tony protested. “We’ve got enough problems with our one planet!”
Loki massaged his forehead. “I’ll have to go to Vanaheim anyway to speak to the Asgardian expatriates there,” he said. “I can speak to the Ruling Triumvirate of the Vanir while I’m there and if they can refrain from reminding me how much they hate the Aesir every other sentence they may actually listen, though I wouldn’t put money on it. Nidavellir will probably hear me out; Alfheim and Niflheim probably will not; Muspelheim and Jotunheim definitely will not.”
“The what now?” Tony said.
“The other six realms in Yggdrasil,” Loki said, very slowly and clearly, like he was speaking to a child. “Midgard is your problem; Asgard is mine.”
“That’s eight,” Clint said.
“Svartalfheim is no longer a factor,” Loki said thinly. “As their entire population has been dead for quite some time now.”
“Are they all like you?” Scott asked. “Asgardians or – I mean, you said there were elves out there –”
“The Vanir are related to the Aesir – to Asgardians – but broke from the Aesir many, many eons ago. Or the Aesir broke from them; it was so long ago that we no longer have records, just stories, and both Asgard and Vanaheim tell different versions of that particular tale.” Loki frowned sharply. “Nidavellir is home to the dwarves – we were there five years ago,” he added to Rocket, who nodded.
“I thought that guy said they were all dead.”
“On the forge ring, but their homeworld is actually in the neighboring system. Eitri knows that I came looking for him at the forge after the culling, so at least they remember me fondly and anyway, of all the Realms, they’ve always had the best relationship with Asgard. Alfheim is home to the Light Elves –”
“Who shot you in the face,” Natasha said helpfully.
“– who have been clients of Asgard’s for many millennia and were quite thrilled when Asgard was destroyed, though they’ve had some political problems as a result and have been on the verge of civil war since the culling. Not that that’s new; the elves are always fighting with each other. Niflheim is a prison realm home to the outcasts and criminals of the Nine. Muspelheim is the home of the fire giants, also not particular friends of Asgard’s, and Jotunheim is the home of the frost giants.” Loki gave them a very thin smile. “They once invaded Midgard more than a thousand years ago and Asgard pushed them back, then invaded Jotunheim in turn, killed a great many of their people, and forced the Jotun king to sue for peace, which lasted until twelve years ago.”
“What happened twelve years ago?” Clint said warily.
“Oh, I tried to blow up the planet,” Loki said.
Dead silence.
“Uh,” Scott said eventually.
“In my defense,” Loki said, “Thor broke the treaty first. In any case, they are also not particular friends of Asgard’s and they are certainly not going to be inclined to listen to anything I have to say.”
“Why did you try to blow up the planet?” Rhodey asked tentatively. “And what did you use to do it?”
“The Bifrost,” Loki said, not answering the first question.
“Didn’t you say that you were a frost giant?” Scott said.
Loki gave him a withering glare, then went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “I’ll speak to the Ruling Triumvirate when I go to Vanaheim and to Eitri when I go to Nidavellir. I can attempt to speak to the queen in Alfheim, I suppose; Niflheim doesn’t have any government to speak of. I’d rather not put Muspelheim and Jotunheim off on the Ruling Triumvirate, as I wouldn’t like them to get ideas above their station – not that they don’t already have those now that Asgard is gone, but I have my pride –”
“Okay, quick question,” Tony said. “Why do these Vanir people hate you? You try to blow up their planet too? Invade them with an alien army?”
“Not personally,” Loki said. “You’d want to go back about seven thousand years for that to my grandfather Bor. And then again on at least three dozen occasions with my father Odin and my insane sister Hela and also my mother. And Thor. And me,” he admitted, “but Thor and I were still quite young the last time there was open warfare between Asgard and Vanaheim and relations have been mostly peaceful for the last six hundred years. Most of the fighting since has been in Vanaheim’s defense, as they’re on the outer edge of the Realms and also everyone else in the Realms hates them.” He thought about it. “Except for that one time with the kidnapping and the dragon and the assassination attempts, but let’s not talk about that.”
“God, you guys are unbelievable,” Tony said.
Loki raised an eyebrow. “I’ve studied enough of Midgard’s history to know that we’re hardly unique in this sense. You all just do the same thing on a much smaller scale.”
“He’s got us there,” Natasha admitted. “Except for the dragon.”
Steve massaged his forehead. “I guess we can contact Carol – and Rocket and Nebula know the Ravagers, so –”
“Yeah, but we need a date and a time,” Rhodes pointed out. “Otherwise it’s just more fearmongering and wishful thinking and we’ve all had enough of that. And no offense, guys, but we actually don’t know if it’s going to work. I think we can take the risk here and Asgard obviously has to, but I don’t think we should spread this too far. Yeah, there are going to be casualties, but – we can’t be responsible for everyone in the universe.”
“No, just the half you wish to restore,” Loki said, like he couldn’t help himself from being contrary.
“You got a problem with this?” Clint demanded.
Loki glared at him. “Just pointing out a fact,” he said.
“Don’t,” Clint suggested.
Loki rolled his eyes and ate a piece of bacon. He did manage to restrain himself for most of the rest of breakfast, aside from a few sarcastic asides and the odd helpful comment. He had one eye on the clock, though, and after he had taken his plate into the kitchen to wash he said, “I need to contact the Valkyrie so that Asgard can start making arrangements to return to the place of our culling and to the St – to the wreckage. She should be in by now.”
“Not going to help with the washing up, huh?” Clint said dryly.
“Well, I can, certainly.” Loki stood in the entrance to the kitchen, looking at them meaningfully.
Natasha hid a smile behind her nearly-empty glass of orange juice. Loki did actually mean it, which had shocked them all the first few times. “It’s fine, Loki,” she said. “Go make your phone call.”
“Oh, I have something a bit less crude than a phone.” Magic glittered on his fingertips as he held up a hand and a fist-sized round of amber shimmered into existence on his palm. He looked into it and said, “Brunnhilde, can you hear me?”
They all jumped as the Valkyrie’s voice came from the amber round. “I got you, Loki. Not in prison yet?”
“No, but the day is young.”
“I don’t see how that’s better than a phone,” Tony said. “Or a hologram. Or even Zoom.”
Loki glanced at him. “Well,” he said, “for one, no one can hack in and listen and I know your government monitors my communications. For another, I don’t have to worry about poor reception. For a third – it’s just cooler.”
“You are such an ass,” the Valkyrie said.
“You have no respect for your king.”
“Nope,” she said. “None at all.”
Loki rolled his eyes, but he looked genuinely amused.
“Tell her I say hi,” Bruce said.
“She can hear you,” Loki said, as the Valkyrie said, “Tell him he should come visit.”
“He can hear you.”
“Hey, big guy, you should come and visit; the kids miss you,” the Valkyrie said, pitching her voice to carry.
Bruce looked touched, since even in his current arrangement with the Hulk that wasn’t a common sentiment. “Maybe after all of this is over,” he said.
“‘All of this’?” the Valkyrie echoed. “What in Hel are you people doing? I’ve only got the one king left, you know, and I’ve gotten attached to the little cockroach.”
“Cockroach?” Clint said, trying to get a look at the amber ball without letting Loki know he was interested. “I think I like her.”
“Who’s that?”
“The human I mind-controlled when I attempted to take over the planet eleven years ago,” Loki explained.
“The serial killer we had to up our security for?”
Clint’s mouth opened and closed indignantly.
“That’s fair,” Rhodes told him.
“She didn’t have to say serial like that,” Clint muttered after a few moments.
“Aww,” Rocket said. “That’s cute. Wait, you Asgardians were worried about this guy? He’s just a human. I’ve seen bullets bounce off you people. Though, I mean, bullets, you Terrans are pretty primitive –”
“I wasn’t concerned for myself,” Loki said haughtily. “I have magic and I sleep with a great number of knives. We have children in New Asgard and I wasn’t certain how discriminating you might be.”
Clint looked horrified. “I don’t go after kids!”
“You’re a serial killer?” Scott squeaked.
“No!”
“You sleep with knives?” Tony said to Loki.
“Yeah, he does,” Steve and Natasha said together, then Steve shut his eyes and Natasha smirked. Loki just looked amused.
“Oh my god,” Rhodes said, putting a hand over his face.
Clint looked like he was going to die right on the spot.
“Can we go back to the serial killer part!” Scott said, his voice rising.
“I’m not a serial killer!”
Tony made a “what can you do” kind of gesture.
“And you’re a convicted felon, I once tried to conquer this realm and destroy another, Nebula is Thanos’s daughter, Stark was a war profiteer, Natasha burned down a hospital, Steve was the most wanted person on the planet for several years, Bruce has destroyed several major urban areas, and Rocket –”
“Also a convicted felon,” Rocket said, and gave Scott a thumbs-up.
“– try and keep up,” Loki said. “And on that note, I’m going to continue this conversation in private.” He gave them a little wave and left the dining room, his voice going serious as he and the Valkyrie began speaking again.
“You burned down a hospital?” Scott said to Natasha.
“Tall, dark, and crazy just told us he tried to blow up a planet and that’s what you’re focusing on?” Tony said.
“You know, he didn’t say anything about me,” Rhodes said. “Thank god.”
“I’m not totally convinced he knows who you are,” Rocket told him.
“Nat – Steve – what the hell,” Clint said helplessly.
Steve massaged his forehead. “It’s not what it sounds like – I mean –”
“Do you happen to remember when New Asgard was in the international news because a couple of press helicopters got footage of the Valkyrie kicking the shit out of a bunch of white supremacists who tried to sneak in?” Natasha said.
“I was a little preoccupied.”
“Killing people?” Scott demanded.
“No! I mean, yes, but that’s not –”
Natasha ignored them. “Loki kicked up a fuss about the insult and Steve and I had to go to Norway to smooth things over before someone declared war on New Asgard or New Asgard declared war on someone else, because it was touch and go for a while there. Also it was an election year and I really needed to get Steve out of the country before he did something stupid and went back on the top ten most wanted list.”
“Oh, yeah,” Rhodes said. “That year.”
Steve lifted his hands helplessly and opened his mouth a few times, but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.
“What happened?” Scott asked warily.
“More like what didn’t happen,” Tony said. “You’re lucky you missed it. Oh, well, nobody started a nuclear war, though that was touch and go for a while too even before His Royal Craziness got involved. God, what a year.”
“Anyway,” Natasha went on, “Steve and I stayed with Loki while we were there because New Asgard doesn’t have any hotels.”
Clint looked at her meaningfully. Natasha stared back at him, unblinking. Steve hid his face in his hands, but his ears were bright red.
Clint broke first. “I can’t deal with this,” he said. “I’m going to go wash dishes.” He gathered up a stack of plates and went into the kitchen. A moment later he yelled, “Why is there an arrow in here?”
“It’s for you!” Natasha yelled back. “It’s from Loki!”
Clint came back into the dining room, holding the arrow in one hand. “What?”
“He said he got it from elves and it’s a peace offering.”
“I’m not going to be bought off,” Clint said indignantly. “Why is it glowing? Is it radioactive?” He held it out at arm’s length.
“It’s an energy weapon if you use it with the right kind of bow, I guess?” Natasha said. “He didn’t say if he had the right kind of bow somewhere in his dimensional pocket.”
Tony raised his hand. “I want a look. Don’t even think of throwing it.”
Clint rolled his eyes but trotted over to pass the arrow to Tony, who inspected it and then said, “Can I keep this for a few days?”
“Sure,” Clint said. “Go crazy. That’s not the one that was in his face, right?”
“He said it wasn’t,” Natasha told him.
Nebula had been listening to the conversation with an expression of increasing disbelief. “We’re all going to die,” she said.
“Well, that seems pessimistic,” Scott said.
She gave him a pointed look.
“Hey, come on,” Tony said. “We’re Earth’s mightiest heroes. We got this.”
“Oh, man, we are gonna die,” Rocket said.
Loki wasn’t the only one who had affairs to settle before the Time Heist commenced. Time wasn’t a non-factor – Loki couldn’t stay here forever without someone noticing, for one – but they didn’t have to leave within the next twenty-four hours, either. Both teams had reconnaissance to do so that when they did start the Heist itself they could be in and out within, hopefully, a couple of hours. Even if no time passed in the present, the less time they spent in the past the less likely they were to cause a paradox. Loki told them this in no uncertain terms when he had finished talking to the Valkyrie and returned to the conference room so that they could start planning out their next steps.
“Don’t make the mistake of believing you’ve invented time travel,” he warned them. “It’s been done before, quite often, and every account I’ve ever read of it has never worked out exactly as planned and some of them have ended catastrophically.”
“Yeah, but we’re not trying to change anything,” Bruce assured him. “Like I said last night. We’re just going to get the Stones, bring them here to undo the Snap, and then take them right back. No one’s even going to know they’re missing.” He paused. “You do remember last night, right? You were pretty drunk.”
“I wasn’t that drunk,” Loki said dismissively. “It was only wine and Earth wine at that. It wore off fairly quickly.” He thought about that and then added, “Unfortunately, though I can’t regret not getting a hangover.”
“Thank god,” Tony muttered; Natasha had to agree with him, since she had seen Loki hungover a few times in Wakanda and it had been nightmarish.
“And I’m aware we’re not deliberately attempting to change anything,” Loki said. “Why do you think I told you I refused to go to Asgard?”
“Uh,” Natasha said, which got her a glare from him.
“Well, you were pretty drunk,” Rhodes said, politic for once.
Loki rolled his eyes. “That’s enough about me, I think. What I mean to say is that on some level it doesn’t matter how much we intend not to alter the course of history. Our very presence, no matter how unobtrusive, will have unintended consequences. We can’t make the assumption that these events have already happened in our own history and gone off without our noticing simply because we have no memory of them.”
“That doesn’t mean they didn’t –” Bruce said reasonably.
Over him, Rocket said, “Aren’t you supposed to be a god of chaos or something? You’re sounding pretty boring and rule-abiding right now.”
“I’m the god of mischief,” Loki said, rolling his eyes. “Not chaos. They’re two different things. And no, it’s against my nature to advise such things and I truly don’t enjoy it. However, I am a god and the king of Asgard and for what little it’s worth these days, the Lord Protector of the Nine Realms as well. It’s my responsibility to tell you all of this with the understanding that you will ignore me and do whatever you want. Now that I’ve done that, can we get on with it?”
“I just don’t get you these days,” Tony admitted, staring at him as if Loki had begun speaking in tongues.
Loki opened his mouth, obviously about to say something cutting, then stared up at the ceiling and ground his teeth together. Natasha had seen him do exactly the same thing a dozen times at the UN last year, reminding himself that he was Asgard’s king and the last and best defender of the Aesir in an arena which the Valkyrie had no experience in. He was the only person left who understood what it meant to be all of those things he had just said – a god and king of Asgard and protector of the Nine Realms. And maybe, when he had said it was against his nature, he had meant it entirely literally. Natasha didn’t know what it meant to be a god – if it really meant what it sounded like or if it was just what the Asgardians believed about themselves. Or if it mattered.
Thor had never seemed particularly bothered by it, but when Natasha had known Thor there had still been an Asgard and thousands of Asgardians. He hadn’t outlived the destruction of his planet by more than a few days and he had died as part of Thanos’s near-genocide of the surviving Asgardian people. Thor had never had a reason for all of that to matter, or at least not one that Natasha knew of.
“Well,” Loki said eventually, “we never really did talk, before.”
“You threw me out a window that time.”
“I’m not certain that constitutes conversation.”
“You threatened me some before that.”
“You threatened me back. I suppose I’ve had that drink now, though eleven years is a bit of a delay.”
“I think you were faking your death for part of that,” Tony said.
Loki spread his hands and shrugged.
“Also the part where you’re a war criminal who tried to take over the planet with an army of aliens.”
Loki shrugged again. “I believe I heard something about a robot army that tried to wipe out your species when an attempt to construct an artificial intelligence went predictably awry?”
“Okay, moving on!” Bruce said brightly, clapping his hands together. “So, tell us about this Knowhere place where you sent the Reality Stone. Scott, Rocket, get in here, you’re the only professional thieves we’ve got.”
“Yeah, all the stealing Nat and I’ve done was just government work,” Clint said, coming in with a cup of coffee and sitting down at the table next to her. “So I guess it doesn’t count as professional.”
“I’m a burglar,” Scott protested, sitting as far away from Clint as he could. “Not a thief.”
“What’s the difference?” Rocket demanded, hopping up into the chair beside him.
“Five to ten, depending if the theft gets charged as a felony or a misdemeanor,” Rhodes said, straight-faced. “Burglary’s a felony.”
“That’s not what I was convicted for – you know what, never mind.”
“Hey, how much time did you do in prison for trying to take over Earth, anyway?” Tony asked Loki. “Does time work the same on Asgard as it does on Earth?”
Loki stared at him. “Not anymore, since the planet of Asgard no longer exists.”
Tony winced. “Sorry.”
“Yes,” Loki said pointedly. “You should be.” He made a gesture at the center of the conference table as Nebula and Steve, the last two stragglers, came into the room, and green-gold glimmered briefly before resolving into the form of –
“Is that a skull?” Natasha demanded.
Rocket pointed at it. “That’s Knowhere.”
“It’s a skull,” Steve said.
“It is the severed head of a long-dead Celestial,” Nebula said.
“A celestial what?” Clint asked.
“A Celestial,” Nebula said.
“Right, a celestial what?” Bruce said. “Celestial’s an adjective, not a noun.”
“You heard her,” Rocket said. “A Celestial.”
“No, I mean, a celestial what? What are you talking about?”
“Oh, brother,” Rocket said. “This is going to take a while, isn’t it?”
Loki rubbed a hand over his face. “I see we’ll have to start from the lowest levels of the Learning Halls or your half of the mission will end not only in failure but also abject humiliation.”
Rocket climbed onto the table and plopped some kind of holoprojector down in the center of Loki’s illusion, which vanished with another wave of Loki’s hand to be replaced with a near-identical hologram of Knowhere. Loki rolled his eyes and sat back as Rocket began to half-harangue, half-lecture them.
Well, Natasha thought, exchanging a long-suffering look with Steve, at least they only had to worry about Earth in 2012. If they got their timing right, there would just be the one alien running around they would have to worry about.
After some discussion, Loki elected to remain at the Avengers Compound in New York rather than return to New Asgard until the actual mission was underway. Either one was a risk, as flights in and out of New Asgard were monitored by several governments and too many back and forth trips in a short period would send up flares. If he was caught in the United States without government permission, even in the company of the Avengers, he would be arrested and imprisoned, a diplomatic disaster that no one wanted to deal with. Natasha absolutely believed the Valkyrie when she said that the Asgardians would kill everyone between them and their king if it came to it; she was also absolutely certain that Vice President Ross (unfortunately not one of the casualties of the Snap) did not. Ross had the usual arrogant American belief that all refugees were desperate and inferior, which in this case wasn’t helped by the fact that the Asgardians all looked essentially indistinguishable from humans. He had also never actually met Thor, so his entire perception of Asgardians was based off Loki’s immediate post-Snap casual disregard for…well, everything. Natasha still thought it was a minor miracle that Loki hadn’t actually stabbed him the first time they had met, but she had gotten the impression at the time it was too much effort for him to muster up.
Showing a level of caution that Natasha hadn’t been certain he had, Loki spent most of the next few weeks inside the compound where neither satellite surveillance nor the civilian drones that occasionally snuck past the perimeter would register his presence. The government wasn’t any happier about the Benatar and its crew, but Nebula and Rocket didn’t have to worry about staying in Earth’s good graces. Loki did.
Natasha and Steve, who could still move around with relative freedom aside from being public figures, took several reconnaissance trips to the site of Loki’s old hideout – Clint went with them that time – and to the Sanctum Sanctorum once Tony and Bruce had located it on Bleecker Street. The former was deserted except for rats; the latter was occupied by a couple of wary sorcerers who greeted them politely enough. Natasha knew the sorcerer who had taken up the title of Sorcerer Supreme in Stephen Strange’s absence; Wong occasionally joined in on Avengers holocalls and had been out to the compound a few times in the past five years, but generally the surviving sorcerers kept to themselves. They had some kind of magical exchange program with New Asgard and were actually on friendlier terms with Loki than with the Avengers, since they had never let any of the Avengers find the Sanctum before. Wong hadn’t been pleased when Steve and Natasha had shown up on his doorstep, and they had both known better than to bring up the reason for their visit. She had gotten the impression that he wouldn’t be any more in favor of it than Loki had. She and Steve had made their excuses for their visit, then left, though she was certain that Wong suspected they were up to something.
After they had killed Thanos, when it had become clear that there was no end in sight, Natasha and Steve had made a point of finding everyone left on Earth who could possibly be a factor in the planet’s defense. She was certain they were still missing people, even after digging up the old Project Insight files of SHIELD’s – well, HYDRA’s – potential threat list.
You, a TV anchor in Cairo, the Under Secretary of Defense, a high school valedictorian in Iowa City, Bruce Banner, Stephen Strange, anyone who’s a threat to HYDRA, Jasper Sitwell had said all those years ago. Zola’s algorithm had been one of the few things she hadn’t released after SHIELD’s fall. She had also, even before Ultron, known better than to pass it to Tony to look at. She hadn’t even wanted to know it existed.
At the time, Natasha had thought that letting everyone who had been targeted by Insight go on with their lives without ever knowing how close they had come to death was the best thing for everyone involved. After Thanos, all she had been able to think about was that maybe if she had hunted all of those people down, then maybe, just maybe, they might have actually had a chance.
Or maybe not. Thanos had taken the Power Stone and the Reality Stone from advanced alien civilizations, apparently without a hitch. He had gone through the remnants of Asgard like they were nothing. He had defeated both Thor and Loki. He’d killed Thor. There was no reason to believe that a few humans more or less, no matter how powerful, would have changed the final result of the battle.
But maybe they would have. They would never know now. All Natasha could do was make certain that when the next alien psychopath came along spoiling for a fight, Earth would be ready. By now the greater cosmos had mostly adjusted to the new normal, which in practice meant dozens of warlords of failed planetary states rattling their sabers and taking potshots at their neighbors. From what she had heard from Loki, the Nine Realms had been teetering on the verge of dissolving into similar chaos for the past five years, but hadn’t quite gotten there yet.
“Probably not on my account,” Loki had said haughtily when Natasha asked him about it. “But,” he had added after a moment of hesitation, “it also doesn’t hurt that there’s a son of Odin as king of Asgard, even if it’s me and even if most of what’s left of Asgard is on Midgard just now.” His jaw worked silently and he had looked aside; Natasha studied the wall behind him until he had himself under control again. “The king of Asgard is still the Lord Protector of the Nine Realms and I’ll hold that title until someone comes and kills me for it. Perhaps that means nothing now except pride, because I doubt that Asgard could enforce it if challenged. Certainly five years ago I would have told you that it was pride and nothing more. I would have allowed the Protectorate to wither on the vine – at the time I didn’t work very hard to keep it in one piece. But now…” He shook his head.
“Thanos did not dare enter the Nine until Odin was dead and Asgard was gone. I know that for a fact, because while my father was alive the only way he attempted it was with a son of Odin at heel.” Loki’s jaw worked again. “And you and I both know how well that went, though I suppose he got what he wanted in the end. I’ve no idea how long Asgard’s name will be able to sustain the defense of the Nine, but I’ll barter with that currency as long as I still can, and spend it if I must for whatever good that will do.”
Even if the only coin you have to spend is your own body? Natasha thought. She didn’t know if Loki had believed in Asgard’s supremacy over the Nine Realms while his parents and Thor had still been alive – in fact, she rather doubted that he had, given everything she knew about his history. But all of them were gone now and whatever Loki might privately think about what they had done, he would live his memory of their legacy – or maybe what he thought their legacy should have been – and live it as perfectly as he was capable of until it killed him. Even if it was, as he had said, against his nature as the god of mischief. Natasha understood that.
Empires fall every day, she had said to him all those years ago. They died fast or slow, in fire or by a thousand cuts, and afterwards there was nothing to do but pick up the pieces. You couldn’t go back, just live with the past and use it if you could, and she could tell that Loki was as aware of that as she was. Like him, she had come to terms a long time ago with the fact that this wasn’t the kind of job you retired from; the only way you left this line of work was in a casket. They had that knowledge in common.
She had left him to brood on that while she, Steve, and Clint tried to reconstruct the timeline of Loki’s initial invasion. After a while Loki came and joined them, though the process was hobbled by the dual facts that Clint didn’t have a particularly clear memory of the time he had spent under Loki’s control and Loki himself didn’t seem to remember it very well either. Natasha dug up the SHIELD files from the original investigation, most of which still existed, though some had vanished – either into HYDRA or during the destruction of SHIELD or as casualties of Nick Fury’s paranoia, she wasn’t certain. A combination of all three, probably.
While they were doing that, the space team was doing reconnaissance of their own. Rocket and Nebula took everyone – Clint included when he got tired of being in the same room as Loki – out to Knowhere, which had been deserted since Thanos’s attack on it. No one had seen the Collector or any of his living exhibits in the five years since, though Rocket said that it looked like scavengers had gone through a few times to clear the settlement out of anything valuable. On their second excursion they brought back an intact exhibit case, which Tony, Rocket, and Scott took into the lab to pick apart for vulnerabilities, occasionally joined by Bruce and Rhodes. Loki stood in the doorway and watched them for a while when they finally started getting somewhere, then remarked to Natasha – who was passing by on her way to the training room – that if he had known that a few mortals were capable of bypassing the Collector’s security, he would have run the risk and kept the Aether in Asgard’s vault anyway. “Not that it would have made a difference in the end, but I have my pride.”
“Hey, quick question,” Scott said to Rocket. “Do they have ants in space?”
Loki winced. “And on that note –”
Natasha patted his back reassuringly. “Want to come spar with me and Steve?”
“With pleasure. I feel like hitting something.”
They had been doing a lot of sparring recently. If everything went as planned, they would be in and out of 2012 without any trouble, but if anything went wrong they could find themselves fighting their way through the younger Loki’s army of hired goons. After almost eight years without it, Steve was still reaccustoming himself to using his shield, which had put a lot of dents in the supposedly undentable walls and taken the barrel off of one of the War Machine suit’s guns, to Rhodes’ vocal complaints. Sparring with Loki was exhausting but also just fun; Natasha had a craftswoman’s appreciation for any kind of unfamiliar combat style and Loki’s was totally unlike anything from Earth. It was only occasionally like sparring with Thor had been, though there were enough similarities that Natasha could tell they had been trained in the basics by the same people. Loki defaulted to his superior Asgardian strength less often than Thor had, which seemed to be a matter of preference; although he tended to fight with his polearm (called Mistilteinn, apparently) or his knives, occasionally he produced another weapon from his dimensional pocket – just to keep himself in practice, apparently. Natasha and Steve usually went two-on-one with him, but sometimes they were joined by other Avengers as they all got used to fighting as a team again. Even Clint, though he clearly wasn’t happy about thinking of Loki as an ally, let alone an Avenger.
In between training and planning – and the joyride Rocket had taken most of the space team on to one of the nearby inhabited systems outside the Nine Realms so that, as he said, “you humies don’t lose your shit the first time you see an A’askavariian or a Pluvian” – Natasha, Rhodes, and Loki coordinated as much of the potential return as they could without having a specific target date or time and without making it obvious that that was what they were doing.
Loki had the advantage of being able to tell the Valkyrie their plans directly without having to dance around it. He had left the compound – had left Earth – at one point to walk the paths between worlds to Vanaheim to speak to the Asgardian expatriate community there, formed around the garrison which had been stationed there prior to Asgard’s fall. The bulk of the Asgardians who had been caught offworld during Hela’s invasion and the subsequent destruction of Asgard had elected to relocate to Vanaheim rather than to New Asgard, to Loki’s weary resignation. While he had never said as much, Natasha had gotten the distinct impression that the reasons for choosing Vanaheim over Earth mostly fell into one of the two categories: mistrust of Loki (and by extension the survivors’ accounts of Ragnarok and Thanos’s attack, which annoyed everyone in New Asgard) or plain dislike of Earth (which also annoyed everyone in New Asgard). The expatriates still nominally acknowledged Loki as their king, but Loki said that probably had more to do with the alternative being the acknowledgment of the Vanir Ruling Triumvirate as their monarchs rather than any actual preference for him personally. “Oh, yeah, we do that sort of thing here on Earth too,” Natasha had told him, and he’d cracked a smile at that before admitting that one of his old friends had been with the Vanaheim garrison before being taken by the Snap. “Well,” he clarified, “one of Thor’s friends, I suppose, as the last time she saw me as myself she threatened to kill me. But either way I’d rather have Sif back among the living if there’s a chance.”
Natasha couldn’t argue that. She had acquaintances like that too.
While Loki was offworld, she called Okoye and Queen Ramonda to let the Wakandans know they had a viable plan for reversing the Snap. The hope on the queen’s face had been painful; Okoye’s reaction had been subtler, but Natasha had seen it anyway. Since Wakanda had been the site of the battle, the combatants’ sudden return would be chaotic, especially when they found themselves without half their comrades or any enemies to fight. She left the details of the Time Heist out of the conversation and was careful to stress that it while they were pretty sure their plan would work, they couldn’t be absolutely positive. She just wanted Wakanda to be prepared, since it was the one Earth government they could tell straight-out.
The day before they had finally scheduled the Time Heist to go off, Vice President Thaddeus Ross showed up at the gate.
They were sparring again – Nebula, Tony, Rhodes, Clint, and Bruce against Steve, Natasha, and Loki, with Rocket sitting on the sidelines commentating sarcastically and Scott beside him with an icepack pressed to a black eye he had gotten early on in the fight. Loki wasn’t using his magic, just his polearm and his fists, which made it close to a fair match even with Tony’s most recent upgrades to the Iron Man suit.
“Oh, shit, guys?” Scott said, looking at the tablet he was holding, then waving it to get their attention. “Guys!”
They stopped, Loki shunting a stray repulsor blast aside with a flare of green magic. Tony retracted his helmet, Rhodes put his face plate back, and Loki leaned heavily on Mistilteinn, watching Scott with sharp eyes. All eight of them were breathing hard and soaked with sweat, even Nebula and Loki.
“The gate sensors just went off,” Scott said. “It’s Secretary Ross.”
“Actually he’s the vice president now,” Rhodes said.
“That’s awful!”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” Bruce said, then the implications of what Scott had said caught up to him. “Oh shit!”
Steve was faster on his feet. “Clint, Scott, Loki, you’d better get out of sight. You two are technically in violation of the terms of the Sokovia Accords and your plea deals –”
Scott gasped in indignation. “The Sokovia Accords are still in effect?”
“Yeah, they got stricter,” Natasha said. She and Steve had gotten presidential pardons that exempted them from having to sign, but also meant that at any moment someone could decide to enforce the Accords on them anyway.
Steve ignored the interplay. “Loki –”
“Yes, I’m aware, thank you,” Loki said, “and since I suspect you don’t want the Valkyrie to kill your entire government as punishment for my arrest, I’ll take them.”
“Oh, the hell you –” Clint began.
Loki waved a hand. He, Clint, and Scott vanished in a shimmer of greenish light.
“– will,” Clint’s voice finished.
“Are we invisible?” Scott said, sounding equal parts freaked out and fascinated. “I knew a girl like that once.”
“My, aren’t you humans enterprising,” Loki said.
“I think it was an accident. She could only sort of control it.”
“Fascinating. Come along.” Loki must have still been able to see them, because he chivvied them along like he was herding geese. The training room door slid open and then shut after them.
Steve caught the towel Natasha tossed him and wiped sweat off his face as he stepped over to Tony to have a look at the holographic monitor he had pulled up. “God, what does he want now? He couldn’t have waited a couple of days?”
“Better let him in now that our fugitives are out of the way,” Rhodes said, his mouth twisting. “You know how he gets.”
Steve’s expression said it all. He and Natasha exchanged a look, then Steve groaned and adjusted his grip on his shield, tossing the towel into the basket by the door. “Let’s just get this over with. Go ahead and let him in. You should probably come too, Tony.”
“I think I’ll just stay out of the way,” Bruce said.
Steve had been there the last time Bruce and Ross had come face to face, so he just nodded and said, “That’s probably for the best.”
Natasha slid her stun batons into the harness she was wearing over her tank top and followed him to the compound’s front entrance, stepping out of the doors just as Ross’s SUV and a couple of follow cars pulled up.
“You lost, Mr. Vice President?” Steve said, his voice utterly flat.
Ross’s gaze swept over Steve, moved to Natasha next to him, then to Tony and Rhodes as the latter two emerged from behind them. His gaze went back to the shield on Steve’s left arm, incongruous against Steve’s shorts and “Made in Brooklyn” t-shirt, before he said, “Well, I heard you two made up; I had to come see it for myself.”
“Eh, you know how it is,” Tony said, stepping up on Steve’s other side as Rhodes fell in beside Natasha. He had gotten out of the War Machine suit, but the arc reactor was still shining on Tony’s chest, clearly visible through the hoodie he had quickly zipped up. “You can only hold a grudge for so long and that thing takes up a lot of space.”
In their sweat-soaked workout clothes, the four of them should have seemed unprepossessing, and Natasha could tell from Ross’s face that he was aware of that. It didn’t keep the Secret Service agents who had gotten out of their cars from watching them behind mirrored sunglasses, braced for trouble. None of them were crass enough to reach for their sidearms, not when all the Avengers were doing was standing there. But they were all waiting for an excuse.
“I interrupt something?” Ross asked.
“Just practice,” Steve said.
“I see your friends are here.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the Benatar, parked on the compound’s landing pad. “They’ve been making a lot of trips on and offworld lately. That and all of you here – and I assume Banner inside, maybe a few of your other friends? – suggests something.”
Steve tilted his head a little to one side, his ice-chip eyes cool with apparent disinterest and boredom. “Sounds like you’re the one suggesting something, Mr. Vice President. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We’re not stupid, Rogers,” Ross said. “You think no one’s noticed that Rhodes and Romanoff have been making inquiries? Or that we’ve been getting a lot of offworld traffic in the past couple weeks, including with the space Vikings over in Norway? Or that you’re here now, Stark? Seems like you’re getting ready for something. Or someone else is.”
“Of course someone else is.”
Natasha didn’t jump at the new voice, and neither did Steve, though Rhodes and Tony both twitched a little and Ross’s eyes went wide. The Secret Service agents all reached for their sidearms as Loki shimmered into existence on Tony’s other side, looking utterly bored. Unlike the rest of them, he was in black slacks and waistcoat over a green silk shirt, his hair pulled back with a gold clasp that matched his curving gold tiepin. He regarded Ross’s Secret Service agents with a look as cool and disinterested as Steve’s.
“Spare yourself the trouble, I’m as aware of the terms of New Asgard’s settlement as you are and I’m not physically present,” he said. He passed a hand through Tony’s shoulder to prove his point, his fingers dissipating briefly in a shimmer of green and gold magic before reforming. Something about the way the light shone on him didn’t quite look right either; Natasha looked at him out of the corner of her eye, trying to figure out what it was, and realized that it was dimmer than the bright sunlight and flickering. Like firelight.
It would be about late evening in Norway right now, she calculated, and her respect for Loki’s illusion skills went up a reluctant notch.
“Of course someone else is getting ready for something,” he said derisively, folding his arms. “Someone else is always getting ready for something. The cosmos has been in chaos for the past five years. Do you truly believe that Earth is alone in its suffering, Mr. Ross? As I’ve told you people time and again, Thanos’s culling cut the whole universe in half. Everyone else is just now dragging themselves out of the muck, just as you yourselves are. It’s no secret that most of those who finally destroyed the Mad Titan were warriors from this world. Any warlord who’s able to conquer Earth will have quite the feather in his cap. Some of them are starting to turn your way.” He arched an eyebrow. “Our way.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Odinson?” Ross said.
“It’s ‘your majesty,’” Loki said flatly. “And no, it’s not a threat. I live here; my people live here. I’ve seen enough dead Asgardians and enough dead humans not to want to see any more if it can be avoided. Up until recent years, Earth has been relatively protected because of its position within Yggdrasil – within the Nine Realms. Besides Thanos and my invasion –” He smirked at Ross, who ground his teeth, “– you had a small Kree incursion about thirty years ago when the movement of the Nine briefly brought Earth to the outer edge of Yggdrasil, leaving it vulnerable. Asgard’s destruction and the dousing of the Nidavellir forge star have both changed the orbit of the worlds within Yggdrasil. Even our greatest scholars have not yet been able to predict what effect that will have on the orbits of the worlds within the Nine, but even beyond that they’ve created gaps along Yggdrasil’s defensive line, gaps which Thanos was able to exploit five years ago. There have been scout ships from beyond the Nine recently testing those gaps. I came here to speak with the Avengers about that.”
“Sounds like a lot of bullcrap to me,” Ross said.
“You think Thanos or the Chitauri were the only aliens out there?” Tony said; his fists had gone white-knuckled as Loki spoke. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in getting caught by surprise again. Especially as one of the guys who’s going to be out there slugging it out with giant alien space worms or whatever.”
“All we’re interested in is being ready, Mr. Vice President,” Natasha said coolly. “We’re not here to start a war, just finish one if someone else brings it to us. I think we’ve had enough surprises to last a few lifetimes.”
Ross looked at her. Natasha met his gaze, raising her eyebrows in response.
After a moment, Ross turned his gaze towards Loki again. “Doesn’t look like you were expected.”
Loki tilted his head a little. “I was.”
“We got a little preoccupied and lost track of time,” Rhodes said. “And then, you know, you showed up so we couldn’t keep our appointment.”
Ross’s expression suggested that he wanted to argue the point further, but couldn’t think of a good response. Finally, he said, “You might be on the President’s good side now, Rogers, but this is her last term and she’s not on the ticket next year.”
“If that’s the biggest problem I have, I’ll deal with it,” Steve said. “You fellas need an escort on your way out, Mr. Vice President?”
“I think we can find the way.” He smirked briefly. “Tell Banner I said hello.”
“I’ll pass it along,” Steve said flatly.
The five of them stood there watching as Ross and his Secret Service agents piled back into their cars and drove away. Once the front gate had shut behind them, Loki’s illusion vanished and the Asgardian himself walked out from one of the columns.
“Jesus,” Tony said, flinching at his sudden appearance.
In the flesh, Loki looked exactly like he had in the training room – long hair plaited back and wearing track pants and a t-shirt with a picture of an opossum and the words “Live Weird, Fake Your Death” printed on it that Natasha had gotten him in New York. He frowned after Ross. “Well, that was inconvenient.”
“Was all of that true?” Tony asked him. “About the warlords and – all that?”
“Of course,” Loki said. “If I’m going to bluff, it’s always better to do it with the truth.”
“He’s been telling the UN about it for years,” Natasha said. “They’ve been saying pretty much the same thing as Ross just did.”
“I haven’t really been paying a lot of attention,” Tony admitted.
Steve silently mouthed the words “no shit,” but didn’t say anything out loud. At least the only people facing him to see it were Natasha and Rhodes.
“The good news,” Loki said, “is that if our little endeavor succeeds it will cause far more chaos in the rest of the cosmos than it will here and unless any of the warlords are particularly quick on their feet, then it will take them some time to recover. And by then Earth should have most of its defenders back.” His mouth worked briefly for a moment, like he had just remembered that his brother wouldn’t be among them. “So you actually are being quite proactive in Earth’s defense.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Well. I guess we should get to it, then.”
Notes:
A few notes: I know word of god says Wong got snapped, but since as far as I could figure out there was no onscreen confirmation we're going with "he survived IW." I've also extrapolated the political structure and worldbuilding of the Nine Realms based on a combination of film canon and what works for me; this isn't based on comics canon except in occasional cursory details. Also, yes, the incident on Alfheim is the same one that Thor and Loki reference in Better in the Morning Chapter 2; I nearly always use the same background and worldbuilding across multiple fics, even if they're not in the same universe.
For new readers, I do daily progress reports over on Tumblr, under the tag "daily fic snippet," if you want to keep track of what I'm working on or get a hint of what's happening in the next chapter or two. I am currently working on this fic and Better in the Morning.
Chapter 3: Gently Rise and Softly Call
Chapter Text
Natasha had been on hundreds of missions in her life and she had lost any kind of pre-mission nerves before she had hit double digits. Or at least that was what she thought before she found herself lying awake the night before the Time Heist, staring at the glow-in-the-dark constellations she had stuck on her ceiling in a fit of whimsy years ago. She watched the minutes tick by on the electric clock beside her bed for the better part of an hour before she finally got up, pulling the first sweatshirt that came to hand on over the tank top and shorts she was already wearing. She went soft-footed by the closed doors of the other bedrooms down to the kitchen, vaguely thinking about either chamomile tea or vodka.
She wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep, she found. Clint was sitting at the island, nursing a beer bottle that was weeping condensation onto the coaster he had put under it – Laura had trained him into that, Natasha remembered.
He looked up as she came in. “Hey.”
“Hey.” She went to the freezer and dug out the bottle of vodka that Bruce had stashed there the last time he had made a grocery run, then tipped it inquisitively in Clint’s direction. When he nodded, she got a couple of shot glasses out from the cupboards and went over to the island to sit down next to him. She poured both glasses full and pushed one in his direction.
He took it, running his thumb over the rim of the glass. “You know, I always used to sleep like a baby before an op,” he said. “Well, better than one, because I don’t think my kids ever slept through the night until they were toddlers.” His jaw worked silently. “This has to work, Nat.”
“It’ll work,” Natasha reassured him. “It will.”
“What if it doesn’t?” he asked her. “What if it doesn’t work and we’re right back where we started, except with no Pym particles, no plan, no hope –”
Natasha squeezed his shoulder. “It will work, Clint.”
“God, Nat –”
“It will work,” she repeated.
“Then why are you up too?”
She shrugged.
“That’s real reassuring,” he said, but there was a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He finally picked up the shot glass and toasted her with it. “За нашу дружбу.”
“За семью.” Natasha clicked her glass against his, then downed it. She considered the bottle for a moment, then got up to return it to the freezer and put both glasses in the dishwasher. She went back to Clint and put an arm around his shoulders. “Get some sleep,” she told him. “Busy day tomorrow.”
He closed his eyes briefly, then nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
“We’re all going to be okay.” She pressed a brief kiss to his forehead. “This is going to work, Clint, and we’re all going to be okay. I really believe that.”
He reached up to catch her hand, callused fingers gripping hers with desperate strength. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Then I’ll believe it too.”
They were all quiet and nervously focused the next morning. Nobody talked much over breakfast, then they scattered to take care of any last business before they suited up. Loki already had his amber orb in his hand as he left the kitchen, talking quietly to the Valkyrie, who was leading the Asgardian recovery fleet.
Natasha went upstairs to her room and sat on her bed for a few minutes before leaning over to pull one of her burner phones out from her nightstand drawer. She dialed by memory and set the phone to her ear, letting it ring. She hadn’t expected an answer and wasn’t surprised when the call went straight to voicemail, but at least she had the security of knowing that that was just because her sister hated answering the phone, not because she was no longer among the living.
“If you know this number, you know what to do,” Yelena’s voice said brusquely.
“Hey,” Natasha said. “It’s me.” She was quiet for a moment, thinking about what she could say. “We’re going to do something – we’re going to fix this.” She pressed the disconnect button and tossed the phone back into the drawer, then got to her feet.
She was the last one out to the hangar where they had built the quantum tunnel. They were an eclectic bunch, as the Avengers always were. There was something harder and grimmer to them now than there had been back in 2012, as if everything they had been through over the last eleven years had left a stain on them. Tony hadn’t activated his quantum suit yet and was standing with his AR glasses on, speaking to Pepper; Rhodes was bulky next to Rocket and Nebula in the battered War Machine armor. Clint and Bruce were talking quietly to each other, and Scott was rubbing his hands together, looking nervous but excited. Steve, in an upgraded version of the blue stealth suit he had worn while he worked for SHIELD, was standing by one of the floor-length windows and looking out at the lawn, his expression surprisingly calm. Loki was the only one seated, his elbows braced against his knees and his forehead pressed to his clasped hands, his long hair falling over his face in an apparently random assortment of thin braids and loose curls.
He was wearing Asgardian clothes for the first time in what was probably years – the same black and green garments and battered golden armor he had been wearing during the Battle of New York, sans cape and a few of the armor pieces. The exact same; he had pulled it out of his dimensional fold when Tony had offered to make him a new version. There had been a fist-sized hole in both front and back that Loki stuck his fingers through in annoyed resignation.
“Yeah, that looks bad,” Rocket said.
“Yes, that’s what happens when a Dark Elf stabs and kills you,” Loki had replied blandly. “And then I got better. I would have burned it, but my mother gave it to me.” He spread the garments over his lap and held his hand out palm down over the hole. Green light glimmered as fabric and leather wriggled and then began to grow over the damage, until it looked like it had never existed at all. Loki prodded it thoughtfully, then shrugged and said, “Well, it’s already proven it won’t help against getting stabbed, but that was a Dark Elf weapon and we shouldn’t have to worry about any of those running around Earth for another year. Bullets or other human weapons shouldn’t be a concern.”
He was the only one of the three going to 2012 who had to worry about matching his old appearance, though he had refused to cut his hair and said he’d glamour it instead. On Natasha’s advice, Steve had grown his beard back out; the less both of them looked like their younger selves the better, even though they were still a day or two away from becoming public figures. Even though his return hadn’t been publicized until after the Battle of New York, Captain America had already been a public figure; there was every chance that some WWII fanboy would recognize him if he was walking around with the shield, even covered. It was the same reason he was wearing the stealth suit instead of one of the star-spangled suits. Natasha wasn’t particularly worried about being recognized by anyone other than Clint, mind-controlled as he might be at the time, and her particolored hair would help with that.
Clint came over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “You ready for this?”
“Come on,” Natasha said. “It’ll be fun. Hey, you get a cool alien planet; I get an abandoned train station full of mind-controlled mercenaries and a mad god. And a wizard.”
“Technically they weren’t mind-controlled,” Clint said. “Just mercenaries.”
“Eh.” Natasha shrugged. “Whatever, there’s mind control involved.” She and Clint both looked over at Loki, who hadn’t moved from his seated position.
“Pretty sure he was crazy then, though,” Clint said.
“I heard that,” Loki said without looking up.
“Yeah, you were meant to,” Clint said.
Loki made a vague gesture that wasn’t disagreement, still not looking up.
Clint’s mouth twisted. He leaned close to Natasha and said, low-voiced, “Watch your back with him. He’s been okay here, but – once you’re there –”
“Don’t worry about me,” Natasha reassured him. “We’ve got this. You and Bruce watch your backs when you’re on that, uh, dominion of death, okay?”
Vormir had been deserted when the reconnaissance team had visited it; they had decided that between Bruce and Clint – and the Hulk’s partnership with Bruce – that would cover all intellectual and physical bases, whether they ended up needing to punch or shoot something or solve a puzzle. That left Rhodes and Nebula to go to Morag for the Power Stone and Rocket, Scott, and Tony to go to Knowhere for the Reality Stone; they had decided that the double heist was too risky to pull off when there was an easier option.
“Always do,” Clint said. He gripped her fingers briefly, then released her. “Get those Stones and get out, Nat. Don’t stick around until the Chitauri come calling or Fury notices you’re there, you got that?”
“Hey, it’s Earth in 2012,” Natasha said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Clint pointed at Loki.
“Oh, please, he wasn’t the worst. He was just the warm-up.”
“I can hear you, you know,” Loki said dryly. He finally got to his feet, bracing himself on Mistilteinn. “There’s no need to be insulting.”
Natasha smirked and he rolled his eyes.
“Okay, team,” Tony called, taking his glasses off and stowing them in a pocket. He clapped his hands together. “Let’s get this show on the interdimensional road.”
Natasha bumped her knuckles against Clint’s. “Come on. Let’s get it done.”
He nodded, then said, “I can do this, Nat. I know you needed me in Wakanda and I wasn’t there, but I can do this.”
Natasha leaned up and hugged him. “I know you can,” she said against his ear.
He hugged her back, then they both stepped back and tapped their wristlets to expand their quantum suits. Natasha hated the feeling of the nanotech crawling over her body, but she only had to deal with it for this one op. Maybe it was convenient and sturdy, but it didn’t feel real; she preferred a little more security in her uniforms.
From Clint’s expression, he felt the same way. The nanotech made an awkward lump over his quiver and sheathed sword, the same way it presumably did over her baton harness. Steve had slung the shield over his back so that the nanotech covered it completely; Loki, looking mildly annoyed by the whole concept, had conjured a strap for Mistilteinn and had it over his back too. He had said he wasn’t positive he would be able to access anything he put into his dimensional pocket in the present day once he was in the past, so the polearm stayed with him. When he activated his quantum suit it pressed the long split tails of his coat against his legs and made strange patterns over the fine details of his armor. He made an expression of disgust when Tony looked at him.
“Well, if you have a better idea –”
“No, no, by all means.” There was no real ire in his voice; he sounded distracted more than anything else and as if his distaste for the suit was pro forma. “I’m sure you did the best you could with the time and materials you had.”
Tony stared at him consideringly, then wagged a finger at him and said, “I’m going to let that slide, because I think you’re mad about having to go to 2012 and deal with yourself back then.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Tony tipped his head to one side and shrugged. “I call it like I see it, Reindeer Games.”
“Okay, enough of that,” Steve said. “Bruce, are we ready to go?”
“2012 and 2014 laid in,” Bruce said, tapping at the console by the quantum tunnel. “Ready when you are, Cap.”
The Avengers assembled on the platform around the quantum tunnel – seven humans, a cybernetically-enhanced Luphomoid, a genetically-altered not-a-raccoon, and the last king of Asgard. They didn’t quite fill the platform; Natasha could put a face in every one of those gaps. Sam. Wanda. T’Challa. Bucky. Vision. Nick Fury. Maria Hill. Scott’s partner Hope, whom she only knew from files. Tony’s young protégé Peter. Nebula’s sister Gamora and the rest of Rocket’s crew.
Thor.
All of them should have been here, and even after all this time their absence was an open wound that had never fully healed – had barely even scabbed over.
This is wrong, Natasha thought suddenly. We shouldn’t be splitting up. We should be doing this as a team. As a family.
She knew as well as anyone else that that wasn’t an option for this particular mission. They were the Avengers; they’d get it done. But they should have been doing it together.
Steve was looking around too and Natasha could see the same knowledge etched on his face. He didn’t look as hollow as he had back in Wakanda, but maybe it was just that she had gotten used to seeing it or that he had gotten used to living with it.
“Five years ago we lost,” he said, and the soft, scattered murmurs of nervous conversation stilled. “All of us. We lost friends, we lost family – we lost a part of ourselves. Today we have a chance to take it all back. You know your teams, you know your missions. Get the stones and get them back here. One round trip each; no mistakes, no do-overs. Only a few of us are going somewhere we know, so be ready for anything. Look out for each other.” He took a deep breath. “This is the fight of our lives,” he said quietly, as if it was just for himself this time, and not for them, “and we’re going to win, whatever it takes.”
He looked around at them again, a brief, electric moment of eye contact with everyone there, and Natasha felt it – felt it like she had felt it back in New York, in Sokovia, in Washington, even in Germany, as if he was speaking directly to her, touching that part of her that had survived the Red Room and the KGB and SHIELD. The desire to do better, the desire to be better; not just the desire but the knowledge that it was already there, waiting for her. There was a reason Steve Rogers was Captain America.
“He’s pretty good at that,” Rocket said, impressed.
“Right?” Scott said, beaming, and his enthusiasm made Natasha smile too.
“All right, let’s sync up,” Tony said, and they put their fists together in some kind of bizarre parody of a high school pep squad. Their wristlets beeped as they synchronized their departure and return times.
“See you in a minute,” Clint said to Natasha, grinning at her, and she grinned back.
Her nerves were gone. Natasha had had enough of waiting, planning, grieving; all of it makework building up to this one mission. Now it was time to do something.
The first thing that struck Natasha about New York City in 2012 was the noise. It was a nearly physical thing that staggered her back as she tapped the wristlet to deactivate her quantum suit, an overwhelming press of sound from the street outside the alley where they had landed. People and cars rushed by, more of them than she had seen in five years and all together – moving with the hurried pace that had been characteristic of the city before they had had half an apocalypse. Scent followed a moment later, and the only half-familiar taste of the air – clouded over and heavy with the promise of an upcoming storm, with the faint grittiness of a New York City still rich with life.
2012. Six years until disaster. Six years until half of those people hurrying past vanished into ash.
She clasped her hands together and pressed her fists briefly to her face, overwhelmed with the enormity of it for a moment. She had thought she was over this – that she was used to it.
Steve put a hand on her shoulder. Natasha reached up to grab it, hanging on for dear life until her shaking stopped.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “Okay. I’m fine. I just – I just needed a minute.”
“Yeah,” Steve said, squeezing her fingers. “I know the feeling. It’s not my first time.”
“This sucks,” Natasha said. She released him and turned to look at Loki.
He was looking up at the slice of sky visible between the tall buildings on either side of the alley, the expression on his face nothing short of pure longing. In his Asgardian clothes, he was an oddly discrepant sight amidst the ordinariness of the alley, like an exotic bird dropped into the middle of a chicken coop.
“Are you all right?” Steve asked him gently.
Loki blinked and looked at them, then nodded. “Asgard is still here,” he said, his voice distant. “Heimdall, Odin, my mother – Thor. They’re all still here. My mother dies in a year, Thor – my father – Asgard – in six. But right now they’re still here.” He wiped a hand furiously beneath his eyes, then turned the gesture into a wave.
Green-gold magic washed over them. Natasha shifted uneasily as her jumpsuit turned into the jeans, t-shirt, and bomber jacket she had been wearing two days ago, her guns shifting from their thigh holsters to the small of her back and her staff suddenly in her hand in the form of an umbrella, the weight of the harness gone. Steve blinked rapidly as his stealth suit was replaced by civilian clothes and the shield on his back by another backpack. Loki was in a long black coat over a pale green shirt and a darker green scarf with gold embroidery at the ends, his hair pulled into a knot at the back of his head. He flipped the cane he was holding up and caught it again; Natasha assumed it was Mistilteinn, transformed into something he could walk the streets with.
“Suitable?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
Natasha checked to make sure her guns were actually still there and that the weight on her wrists was her widow’s bites, mostly hidden by the sleeves of her jacket. Steve had pulled the backpack off and was looking at it dubiously.
Loki flicked his fingers and the backpack glittered briefly, the shield flickering into sight for an instant before it became a backpack again. “Satisfied?” he said.
“Is it real?” Steve asked.
“It’s real enough. You can put things in it if you like, though I can’t be certain they’ll still be there when we return to the present day as that will shuffle them into another dimensional fold. It’s not exactly an illusion or a glamour, though it’s not a pure shapeshift either. It’s –” He thought about it for a moment. “It’s a rearrangement of matter, to be crude about it.”
“Got it,” Steve said, slinging the backpack over his shoulders again. “Let’s go find Strange and the Sanctum. If we landed in the right spot, we should only be a block or two away.”
“Lead on,” Loki said. “The last time I was here I didn’t go in through the front door.”
Natasha’s mouth twitched. She had heard that story from Wong, who maintained that it had been a very, very stupid and very dangerous thing for Stephen Strange to do and Earth was lucky that Thor and Loki had taken it so well. He had thought it was funny, though, since neither Asgardian had retaliated by burning down the Sanctum and killing everyone in the city. Or on the planet.
Her smile fell away as they stepped out of the alley onto the street. On some level she knew that it wasn’t even all that busy – they were in Greenwich Village, not Times Square, and it was an odd hour of the day anyway – but it was still more cars and more people than she had seen in a single casual setting in years, all of them going about their lives without the slightest awareness that in six years half of them would be nothing more than ash in the wind. She didn’t even know any of them.
No wonder Loki had refused to go to Asgard.
Natasha Romanoff wasn’t often a woman to look for comfort, but she found herself reaching back for Steve anyway. His hand closed reassuringly around hers, familiar and real, something from the world she lived in.
“This is stupid,” Natasha said.
“No,” Steve said. “No, it’s not stupid.”
“I could call Fury right now,” Natasha said. “I could tell him – I could –”
Nick Fury and Maria Hill – probably on the helicarrier right now, briefing Steve and Bruce; Tony wouldn’t arrive until Stuttgart. Yelena, still under the Red Room’s thumb; Alexei, in prison; Melina, refining the mind control drugs for Dreykov’s Widows iteration by iteration. Sam, secure in his life in DC; Wanda and Pietro in Sokovia; Bucky –
She looked up at Steve and saw the knowledge writ clear on his face, too. Loki’s grim expression mirrored it.
“I know,” Steve said quietly.
Natasha had spent her whole career making compromises. This was just one more.
Natasha nodded in response, her throat tight, and squeezed Steve’s hand before releasing it. The three of them went down the sidewalk, searching for the characteristic front window of the Sanctum Sanctorum, and found it a block from their landing place. Natasha and Steve almost walked right past it before Loki cleared his throat and pointed it out; even then, it took Natasha nearly a solid minute of blinking and staring before the building came fully into focus. She kept wanting to just keep walking, convinced that there was either nothing there or what was there was another run-of-the-mill townhouse.
“A minor spell to prevent casual visitors,” Loki said, frowning at the front door – doors, rather, painted green and with clouded glass windows. “I expect the postal service and food delivery workers have trouble finding it, unless they’re specifically excluded. Even then it’s not a very discriminating spell.”
“They probably have a PO box,” Steve said.
They followed Loki up the front steps, where he tapped the head of his cane against one of the doors. Natasha never saw them open.
They were suddenly standing in the Sanctum’s foyer, warmly lit and paneled in worn, dark wood, with artifacts from all over the world displayed on and against the walls. When she looked behind her, it was to see the front doors still shut.
Steve looked just as rattled as Natasha felt. He was in his stealth suit again, the edge of the shield gleaming over his shoulders. When Natasha looked down at herself, it was to find that her civilian clothes were gone and she was holding her staff instead of the umbrella Loki had transformed it into. She disconnected the halves and slid the batons back into her harness. “I hate it when they do that.”
“No, I did that part,” Loki said; he was in his Asgardian clothes again. “Apologies.”
“A little warning would have been nice,” Natasha said pointedly.
“I did just apologize.”
“An Asgardian,” said an unfamiliar woman’s voice. Natasha looked up to find the speaker standing at the top of the stairs, backlit by the window behind her. “I’m honored. It’s been some time since we’ve had one of the Aesir here – you are Aesir, yes, not Vanir?”
“I am, yes,” Loki said, cautiously polite. “More or less.”
“Is it more or less?” When she came down the stairs, the speaker turned out to be a tall shaven-headed white woman in robes like the other sorcerers Natasha had met, except that her robes were yellow. She was wearing the Eye of Agamotto.
“For the moment, it’s more,” Loki said.
“And which of the Aesir are you?” the sorcerer asked.
“I am Loki,” he said. “God of mischief.”
The woman smiled slightly. “And magic, I think?”
“It’s one of my epithets.” He was regarding her with a slight frown, his eyes narrowed.
“Loki, god of mischief – son of Odin, son of Frigga. Prince of – no.” The woman frowned at him, as if she was seeing something other than the man in front of her. “Not prince; that’s not the magic that clings to you. King of Asgard, Allfather of the Aesir, and Lord Protector of the Nine Realms. So Odin is dead in your time, then.”
“Every creature that was ever born must die, wise one,” Loki said. “Even the immortal gods.” He relaxed a little, as if he had just worked out some riddle, then his brows drew together again in confusion. “We’ve met. Not recently – I was very young at the time.”
“We’ve met twice,” the sorcerer corrected him. “The first time you were barely out of your swaddling clothes. Your mother brought you with her when she came for a gathering of the vǫlur.”
“The last time the vǫlur met on Midgard was more than ten centuries ago,” Loki said. “Humans don’t live that long.” He frowned at her, blinking several times as if looking for something that wasn’t visible to human eyes, then said, “Oh. That’s a dangerous trick for a mortal to try.”
Under less serious circumstances it would have been funny to see Loki so obviously rattled by a human, let alone cautious of one. As it was, Natasha cleared her throat and said, “I’m Natasha Romanoff and this is Steve Rogers.”
“Ma’am,” Steve said.
“Captain America,” the woman said, sounding less impressed than she did intrigued. “You look different than in your film reels, but the beard suits you. And – I’m sorry, I don’t know you,” she said, turning to Natasha. She sounded genuinely regretful.
Natasha smiled. “You wouldn’t. Not yet.”
“Ah. A mystery. But I’ve been rude to keep you standing here. Will you join me for tea? Unless your purpose in coming here is so urgent it can’t wait.”
“We would be pleased to join you,” Loki said, with all the courtly grace of a king.
Steve glanced at Natasha, who shrugged in response. It was time travel. In theory, they had all the time in the world, as long as they got to the younger Loki’s hideout before he left for Germany. Neither Clint or Loki had remembered exactly when that had been, but their best guess had been between five and seven hours from their arrival, which should be enough time to drive there. Natasha wasn’t sure of the details of that yet; it was the kind of thing that they had decided to figure out on the go.
“I am called the Ancient One,” the sorcerer said as she led them out of the foyer and through two similarly decorated rooms to a well-lit sitting room. Natasha frowned at the windows as she sat down cross-legged on a battered but comfortable cushion on one side of a low table like a Japanese chabudai, Steve and Loki flanking her and the Ancient One settling down across from her. Loki set Mistilteinn down behind him as he sat and Steve did the same with his shield. There was a Japanese-style tea service laid out already on the table, and as the Ancient One busied herself with it Natasha looked back at the windows.
“That’s not New York,” she said. The view outside was that of a forest, light shining down through the canopy above. Natasha calculated the angle of the sun against the time in New York and guessed western Europe somewhere.
The Ancient One glanced up, followed her line of sight, and smiled. “Ah!” she said. “The Teutoburger Wald. I felt the need for a change – perhaps I had some notion I might have company today, and one of the royal Aesir at that.”
Loki blinked. “What does a forest in Germany have to do with me? I know there was a time when the Aesir and Vanir were worshiped from Scandinavia almost to Italy, but most of that was before I was born.”
“As was this,” the Ancient One said. “You’ve heard of the clades Variana, perhaps? The Varian disaster, in English.”
“It was a Roman defeat in the first century AD,” Steve said. “Germanic tribesmen lured the army into the Teutoburg Forest, ambushed them, slaughtered three legions – sixteen, twenty thousand troops, maybe. What?” he said as Loki looked at him in surprise. “I read.”
Natasha hid a smile. She took the cup that the Ancient One offered and folded her hands around it, breathing in the fragrant steam of the tea. It smelled as grassy and green as it looked; a second-flush sencha, if Natasha was any judge.
“What does that have to do with the Aesir?” Loki said. “It certainly has nothing to do with me; I wasn’t born for another nine centuries.”
“Oh, not you. Your sister, Hela, the goddess of death. She was one of the patrons of the tribes of the Germani – she whispered in the ear of the man history has remembered as Arminius and many others on Earth over the millennia before Odin locked her away. Some say she even walked battlefields with the Cherusci and the Chatti and the Batavi – all those tribes that the Caesars tried for years to bring to heel and who fought them tooth and nail and left rivers of blood across Europe. When you and your brother Thor came to Earth ten centuries later to walk amongst the last of the Norsemen and drive them into battle, hundreds suffered for it, maybe thousands.”
Pain flashed across Loki’s face at the mention of his brother’s name, but he said, “That was really more Thor than me.”
“But not him alone, nor Hela either. There have been many of the Aesir and Vanir over the millennia who have treated Earth as their playground. Every time your kind comes here to walk alongside men, it’s humankind who pays the price.”
Loki sighed and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “And this started on such a good note,” he said.
The Ancient One smiled at him, but there was steel in it. “Wherever Asgard goes, there is war, ruin, and death. Which of them have you brought today, god of mischief?”
“You know, you’re not actually the first person to tell me that,” Loki said.
Steve put his teacup down. “We’re not here to start a war, ma’am, and we’re not here to kill anybody or destroy anything. We’re here to save our people.”
Natasha smiled thinly. “To save the universe.”
“Then save it,” the Ancient One suggested, “in your own time.”
“We can’t,” Natasha said. She kept her hands wrapped around her teacup as she leaned forward, meeting the other woman’s eyes. “Five years ago, an alien warlord called Thanos gathered all six Infinity Stones after a lifetime killing thousands –”
“Millions,” Loki said. “He’s almost as old as I am and far less principled. And I say that as someone who once tried to blow up a planet.”
“Not helping, Loki,” Steve said.
“He’s actually succeeded in genocide, I only attempted it.”
“Still not helping.”
The Ancient One tipped her head slightly at Natasha in a “you see?” kind of gesture.
“Let me rephrase,” Loki said, “when I say he succeeded in genocide, I mean that my people were the last he slaughtered in the conventional manner before he got the Infinity Stones and could do it with the snap of his fingers.”
The Ancient One turned towards him in shock. “Asgard is gone?”
“I am king of ashes and atoms and the three hundred and seventy-nine Aesir who survived my sister killing everything in her path, Surtur’s destruction of the planet, Thanos’s massacre of those who escaped, and his final culling of half the universe,” Loki said, his voice trembling with sudden rage. He flattened his palms on the table in front of him, as if aware that if he closed his fists he would break something. “You are lucky, sorcerer, that I have come only to bargain for what I need and not to take it.”
There was no threat in the Ancient One’s voice, just quiet competence. “That would be a grave mistake, god of mischief.”
“I make grave mistakes all the time,” Loki said. “But they never seem to work out.” He gave the woman a thin smile, then made a small “go on” gesture at Natasha, sitting back and lifting his cup again.
Natasha took that to mean that, having made his point, he was going to leave the rest of the negotiation to them. Thank god. Loki could be pretty convincing when he wanted to be, but it was obvious that he wasn’t going to make any headway with the Ancient One.
“Let’s start over,” the Ancient One said, with an unspoken “now that the Asgardian has decided to shut up” implied. “Unless I’m much mistaken, it wasn’t me you came here looking for. Who was it?”
“Stephen Strange,” Steve said, after a brief moment of hesitation.
Her brows knit for an instant. “Then you’re about five years early. Stephen Strange is currently performing surgery about twenty blocks that way. What do you want from him?”
Natasha’s mind ticked over the words and filed them away to consider another time; once she had known about Strange, she had assumed he had pinged HYDRA’s radar because of his position as Sorcerer Supreme, but that had been back in 2014, still three years away from the date that the Ancient One had just named. Zola’s algorithm must have picked up on something else.
“We need the Time Stone,” Natasha said.
“I don’t think so,” said the Ancient One, kindly but firmly. “You seem to have mastered time travel already yourselves, something I might be surprised that your companion hasn’t warned you against – if he wasn’t the god of mischief.”
Loki sighed pointedly, but didn’t say anything in response.
“He did,” Steve said. “And before you ask, since you obviously know who I am, that part doesn’t have anything to do with time travel. Just hear us out before you tell us no, okay?”
“I’ll indulge you, Captain Rogers,” the Ancient One conceded. “I have some time to spare today. But it won’t change my answer.”
“Maybe it will,” Natasha said. “Yes, we’re from the future, but not very far in the future. Five years ago in our past, six years from now, an alien warlord called Thanos succeeded in gathering all six Infinity Stones, including the two that were on Earth at the time. When he had them all, he put them together into a gauntlet –”
“Forged by the dwarves of Nidavellir,” Loki said quietly, “under duress.”
Natasha nodded. “– and used them to wipe out half of all life in the universe. Then he used the gauntlet again to destroy the Stones.”
The Ancient One’s eyes widened slightly, though the reaction hadn’t come at Natasha’s mention of the Snap, but at the destruction of the Stones.
“We’ve lived with that for five years now,” Natasha said. “Friends gone, families destroyed, children orphaned – and that’s just the personal cost. I’m sure you can imagine what happens to an airplane or a nuclear submarine when its pilot turns to ash at the controls. Or a bus or a train. Or what it does to a country – or a planet. It happened all over the universe. We’ve spoken to people from far, far beyond the Nine Realms, and they’ve spoken to those from even further away, and no one was spared. The Stones took half of all living things in the universe and turned them to ash.”
“A tragedy, to be sure,” the Ancient One said. “And one that you and your friends now seek to keep from ever coming to pass.”
“No,” Steve said, putting his cup down and leaning forward. “We’re not trying to keep it from happening; we’re not trying to change the past. We’re going to reverse what Thanos did in our own time. But since he destroyed the Stones, we need to get them from a point in time when they still exist. We don’t have any intention of keeping them in our time. We’ll use them to restore those who were snapped – who were taken in the culling – and then we’ll return them to their proper times.”
The Ancient One blinked at him for a moment, looking honestly taken aback, then turned to Loki and said, “And you went along with this?”
His eyebrows arched at the irony, considering what she had accused him of only a few minutes earlier, but he said gravely, “While the notion itself is mad, the theory is sound. I am very desperate, wise one – we all are – but I wouldn’t have gone along with it if I didn’t believe it could be accomplished. I am the god of mischief, not fool’s errands. I am also the King of Asgard, with no heir and no living kin. I don’t take this risk lightly, not when my loss would put my people in an impossible position.”
“An admirable task,” the Ancient One said, “since I assume that you, at least, know what’s at stake, Asgardian. But I cannot help you. If I give up the Time Stone to help your reality, I’m dooming my own.”
“There are five other Infinity Stones besides the Time Stone,” Natasha said, hoping that the Ancient One wasn’t aware that two of them were currently on Earth. “We’re not the only members of our team getting them. We know where they are and when they are. This mission is in motion whether or not you like it. We need the Time Stone or all the rest will be for nothing.”
“And we won’t be able to return those Stones if we can’t undo the culling,” Loki said. “The, ah, method we used for this excursion is not replicable without one of those who was taken.”
The other woman’s lips thinned slightly. “Not magic, then.”
“No,” Loki said. “Not magic. Though as the humans say, any science significantly advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” He tipped his head a little side to side, with a wry smile. “Crude, but not totally inaccurate in this case.”
“Hmm. Not something I expected to hear from an Asgardian.”
Loki spread his hands, amused.
“We’ll bring the Stone back when we’re done with it,” Steve said. “We don’t want to keep it, to keep any of them. I’ve got some experience with Infinity Stones and so do Loki and Nat and they’re more trouble than they’re worth. If it wasn’t for the fact that we need them to reverse this, I’d be glad they’re gone in our time. I promise you,” he added, with the good-natured earnestness that made him so disarming and so dangerous, “that when we’re done with this Stone and the others we’ll return them to the exact point we removed them, so it won’t change anything going forward. You’ll barely even know it was gone.”
“I can also remove your memory of this meeting afterwards,” Loki said helpfully. “If you’d prefer to never know it was gone.”
Natasha gave him an ironic look.
“Yes, but you’re leaving out the most important part,” the Ancient One said. “In order to return the Stones, you have to survive.”
“Well, nothing else that’s tried has been able to actually kill me yet, so we should be able to manage that,” Loki said.
“Loki –” Natasha said.
“We’re not taking the Stones to a battlefield or a war,” Steve said. “We’re just taking them to our home. We’re going to use them once and then bring them back where they came from, that’s all. Even if it’s not one of us three that brings them, someone from our team will. And they’re all good people. None of us are doing this for power or to take over the universe or to – to change the past, nothing like that. We just want to fix something that these Stones did. That’s all. I promise you.”
“I can’t risk this reality on a promise,” the Ancient One said. “It’s the duty of the Sorcerer Supreme to protect the Time Stone.”
“Then why did Strange give it away?” Natasha asked pointedly.
The Ancient One blinked. “What did you say?”
“He gave it away,” Natasha repeated. “Stephen Strange – he gave it to Thanos.”
Loki looked away.
“Willingly?”
“Yes,” Steve said.
The Ancient One looked genuinely baffled. “Why would he do that?”
“Very likely,” Loki said quietly, “he realized that he couldn’t bear to watch someone else be hurt when that person’s life was in his hands. It is very easy to say such things before the screaming starts. And it’s easier – as such things go – to bear the pain yourself. When it’s someone else – even if it’s not someone you care about, someone you love, but a comrade, a child, even a stranger – the choice can seem very simple then. If it’s someone you love then it’s no choice at all.”
“You say this as if you’ve lived it,” the Ancient One said.
Loki nodded. His eyes were very bright.
“Or he might have had a reason,” Steve said. He shot Loki a worried look, but Loki’s gaze was downcast, his fingers pressed to his forehead. “It can show you things, can’t it? The Time Stone? Tony – our friend Tony, who was there – said that Strange looked into millions of possible futures and only saw one success.”
The Ancient One nodded slowly, and said, her voice low, “Strange is meant to be the best of us.” She stood up – Natasha and Steve stood as well, though Loki remained seated – and made a gesture with both hands in front of the Eye of Agamotto. The center of the necklace unfolded, revealing a gleaming green gem.
Loki flinched.
The Ancient One drew the Time Stone out, balanced in mid-air between thumb and forefinger but not touching either. Steve put his hand out, and she set it into his palm, then folded his fingers around it, keeping his hand clasped between both of hers. “I’m counting on you, Captain Rogers,” she said. “We all are.”
“You have my word,” Steve said.
When she finally released him and stepped back, he stowed the Time Stone carefully in one of the pouches on his belt, then leaned down to pick up his shield.
“Thank you,” Natasha said. “We’ll see you again soon, I hope.”
“I hope so too,” the Ancient One said. She still looked worried. Natasha tried to find something that she could offer as comfort, but couldn’t think of anything they hadn’t already said.
Loki pushed himself slowly to his feet, leaning on Mistilteinn as he did so. “You have my thanks as well,” he said to the Ancient One.
“I’m sorry for your grieving,” she said, “and for your loss.”
He nodded, not quite looking at her.
“You’ve been touched by the Stones before,” she said. “More closely than either of your companions.”
He nodded again. “I’d rather not talk about it,” he said. “They’re not pleasant memories.”
“I understand.” She looked between the three of them. “I suppose you’ll be on your way now.”
“Actually,” Loki said, looking up suddenly, “you might be able to help us with that.”
They stepped out of a sparking golden ring into a day so heavily overcast that it looked like it was twilight, despite the fact that it was barely noon. Natasha glanced upwards at the dark clouds; across the river the storm was much closer than it had been in Greenwich Village.
The Ancient One’s portal had deposited them in a side street less than a block from the closed-up entrance to the abandoned train station where Clint and Loki had set up their safe house in 2012. Magic washed across them again; this time when the gleam of Loki’s power faded Natasha and Steve were both in black tactical gear, the anonymous uniform of mercenaries the world over. Steve’s shield had vanished entirely, though Loki had left Natasha’s baton harness in place. Instead, Steve had a couple of pistols in thigh holsters and a machine gun on a strap over his shoulder. Natasha assumed the first two were true illusions and the latter was his shield.
“Better fix your hair,” Steve said to Loki.
Loki made an annoyed expression and twitched his fingers, replacing his braided hair with the shorter, spikier hair Natasha remembered from before. The armor on his outfit faded away in a slower shimmer of green-gold, leaving him in what Natasha supposed must be the equivalent of fatigues; it was what he had been wearing on the helicarrier. Mistilteinn turned into a replica of the scepter when Loki scowled at the polearm.
“Well, let’s get this over with,” he said. “Follow my lead.”
He strode out from the alley without waiting for either of them to respond. Natasha rolled her eyes at Steve and followed, keeping her gaze moving around. She spotted three guards on the entrance to the train station, two on the ground and the third on the roof. The two on the ground stood respectfully back for Loki as he walked past them and didn’t look twice at Steve and Natasha, either.
The station didn’t look too different from how it had the last time Natasha had scouted it in 2023, at least not until they got down to the lower level. Then, seemingly all at once, it was buzzing with activity – more mercenaries, mostly dressed like she and Steve were, and a bunch of white-coated scientists she recognized from old SHIELD files. There were various work stations set up, all of them playing fast and loose with safety protocols in a way that would have made even Tony Stark wince, and a big makeshift lab cordoned off with plastic sheeting that held an all-too-familiar machine. The scientist who seemed to be in charge of it was standing by the edge of the sheeting, talking to another man in black whom Natasha recognized from behind.
“– it’s very hard to get hold of.”
“Especially if SHIELD knows you need it,” Clint Barton said.
“Well, I didn’t know,” Erik Selvig said, then turned towards them, manic and blue-eyed. “Hey! The Tesseract has shown me so much – it’s more than knowledge, it’s truth.”
“I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Loki said, which got a confused look in return from Selvig.
“Natasha?” Clint said, looking at her over Loki’s shoulder. “What are you doing here?”
His eyes were shot blue through and through, and Natasha felt a stab of anger at Loki even though this was years past and gone. The lines of grief were gone from this younger Clint’s face, replaced with the steely determination Natasha remembered from the fight on the helicarrier, like all that mattered was the mission.
“Well, you spoke so highly of her,” Loki said. “I couldn’t resist bringing her in.”
“Good choice,” Clint said. “Who’s your friend, Nat?”
“Stevens,” Natasha invented. “He’s working with me, but STRIKE’s been headhunting him.”
“Hi,” Steve said.
Clint nodded shortly. “Sir –”
Loki moved past him to part the plastic sheeting and step into the lab. “I’ll need the Tesseract, Erik,” he said. “Just for a short while.”
“Of course, of course! I’ve got it just here.” Selvig’s hands hovered jealously over the glowing blue cube in its case before he shut the lid and locked it, handing it to Loki.
“Thank you,” Loki said. “Everything else is going well?”
“Yes, yes. We just need one more thing that Agent Barton’s managed to find –”
“Very good.” Loki touched a green-glowing finger to his forehead, making Selvig stiffen. “Forget this.” He stepped out of the makeshift laboratory and repeated the process with Clint, who stood stock-still as Loki handed the Tesseract case to Steve and stalked away. After a moment of hesitation where she and Steve just stared at each other, Natasha and Steve followed him.
Natasha didn’t see the younger Loki at first, not until Loki stepped up to what seemed to be an empty step and said, “I’m afraid I need that.”
The Asgardian shimmered into existence in a familiar wash of green-gold light. He was sitting on the step with the scepter in his lap and –
Natasha hadn’t remembered him looking quite that bad.
He looked brittle and ill-kempt, eyes bruised with weariness and cheeks hollowed, the bones of his face standing out sharply. He looked up at Loki standing over him with an expression that was less surprise and more confusion, then put the hand without the scepter in it to his forehead in the same gesture Loki had used in the Sanctum.
“Enough,” he said wearily.
“Up,” Loki said.
The younger Loki stood. “You’ve made your point,” he said. “Tell your master I –”
Loki’s punch snapped his head back. He snatched the scepter from his younger self’s hand as the other Asgardian crumpled, his eyes rolling back in his head before they shut. Loki handed the scepter back to Natasha without looking at her, then flexed his fingers as if trying to shake off the feel of the thing. He stood looking down at the other Loki.
“I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “though I do know you can probably hear me. Go home. I know groveling is absolutely excruciating, but in this case it’s the better option for everyone, yourself included. And if I truly believed that you think this is anything other than another hallucination, I wouldn’t tell you any of this, but I know you won’t. I’ll take that.” This last was to Steve, who released the Tesseract case to him with only a moment’s hesitation.
Only Clint frowned after them as they made their way out of the makeshift laboratory, but Selvig drew him back into conversation and he let them go without question. None of the other scientists or mercenaries so much as glanced at them.
Instead of going back to the alley, Loki kept stalking down the street until they reached a mostly empty lot which was blocked on three sides by tall buildings. Then he stopped, shuddering, and let Mistilteinn – now back in its regular form – stand upright as he pressed his free hand to his face.
“Are you all right?” Steve asked him. “We’ve got all the Stones, we can go back now –”
“I just need a moment,” Loki said as thunder rumbled overhead, a thin streak of lighting illuminating the dark clouds. “Just a moment, please.”
Natasha and Steve exchanged a look, then Steve said, “Yeah, of course.”
Loki nodded. He stood still for a moment more, then opened the briefcase and took the Tesseract out, lifting it until it was eye level with him. Its blue glow illuminated the sharp angles of his face. “I never thought that I would see this thing again,” he said eventually. “I never wanted to. I was – I was glad when I found out that it had been destroyed.”
His long fingers flexed against it. “My brother died for this,” he said. “I took it from the vault during Ragnarok because I didn’t think Surtur’s fires would be capable of destroying an Infinity Stone and for that Thanos slaughtered my people and killed – and killed Thor.”
There was another crack of thunder, though no accompanying lightning. Natasha shifted her shoulders, not wanting to get soaked in the inevitable storm, but she wasn’t going to stop Loki now.
“It was supposed to be me,” Loki said. “It was supposed to be me. I was so sure that it was going to be me. And it wasn’t me. It was supposed to be me, and it wasn’t me. I gave the bastard the damn Tesseract so that he would stop hurting Thor. I was out of magic, I was out of tricks, and all our people were dead. I pulled a knife on him – on the Mad Titan. I thought he would kill me for that and let Thor live. I was so sure. It was me he hated; I was the one who failed him, and he’d – he had made me certain promises about what would happen if I did. It was supposed to be me.”
There were tears on his cheeks. “Thanos let me scream the whole time he was killing my brother,” Loki said. “It took – it took a long time and I screamed the whole time. I begged him. I told him I’d get him the Stones, I told him I’d kill anyone he wanted, I told him I’d give him the Nine Realms, I told him – I offered him anything he wanted.” He let out a crack of broken laughter. “‘Your world in the balance and you bargain for one man.’ I told you that years ago, do you remember? I begged. And the last thing Thor ever heard in this life was me screaming for him.
“When he – when it was over. He left Thor there. Left us both there. Surrounded by our dead, by Asgard, what was left of Asgard. I should have died with Thor. I was ready to die with him. When the ship blew up – I was ready to die with him. I should have died with him, and I didn’t, and all of it, all of that suffering, because of this, this – this rock. I killed Thor as surely as if it had been my hands around his throat. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t stop Thanos. It should have been me. It was meant to have been me, and if it couldn’t have been me, then we should have died together. We should have –”
“Brother,” Thor said.
In the eight years since she had seen him last Natasha had forgotten how absolutely silent Thor could be when he wanted.
The glamour ran off Loki like ice melt as he turned to face Thor. Natasha already had her hand on her pistol; she hadn’t heard Thor approach at all. Steve swung his shield up; Loki had removed the transformation magic from them when he had dropped it on himself.
Thor blinked for an instant at the unexpected change in his brother’s appearance. He looked younger than Natasha remembered, his golden hair a little shorter than it had been when she had seen him last; his storm cloud eyes were dark with concern. His hammer was hanging at his belt.
Loki dropped the Tesseract. It landed crookedly on top of the padding in the case; Natasha hesitated, then leaned down to nudge it into position with the barrel of her pistol until she could close the case. Thor’s glance flickered towards her briefly, then he visibly set her presence aside to deal with later.
“Brother,” he said again.
Loki took a shaky step towards him, then another, his hands coming up as if he wasn’t certain what to do with them. Thor closed the gap between them in a few quick steps, pulling his brother into a hug as Loki began to cry.
“It’s me,” Thor said, one hand on the back of Loki’s neck. “It’s me, I’m here.”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Loki mumbled, his voice muffled by the fact that he had his face buried in Thor’s shoulder. His hands were white-knuckled on the back of Thor’s leather jerkin; Thor wasn’t wearing his cape. “You’re not supposed to be here yet. You’re early. You’re never early.”
Thor rubbed a hand in soothing circles over his brother’s back; he looked on the verge of tears himself, and Natasha suddenly remembered Thor telling her once that Asgard had assumed Loki was dead for almost a year before he had reappeared on Earth. “When Heimdall saw two of you on Midgard, he and Father decided it was worth the risk to send me before they were certain of having enough dark energy for the journey.”
“Heimdall…I forgot.” Loki pulled back enough to wipe a hand under his eyes, though Thor kept his hands on his shoulders.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Thor said, his voice very gentle. “In your time. Like me.”
Loki nodded, his mouth trembling. “Thor…what you heard…”
“You’re my brother, Loki,” Thor said. “No matter what has passed between us, now or in the future, do you think that I would not give up my life for yours in a heartbeat and think the bargain fair?”
Loki’s eyes filled with tears. “It wasn’t a fair bargain,” he managed to say.
“You’re alive,” Thor said, “so it was fair enough.”
Loki wiped at his face again, shaking his head, then his eyes went wide with horror. “Brother, you can’t be here. You can’t – you can’t be here. You can’t change anything.” He reached up with a green-glowing hand. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I have to take this memory, I’m sorry –”
Thor caught his wrists with both hands. “Loki, wait,” he said. “Wait.”
“Thor, I have to –”
“I know, I know,” Thor said quickly. “I know how a temporal paradox works. I know you have to take it. But if you’re going to take this memory anyway, then let me – let me carry a little of this weight for you, if only for a few minutes.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Loki said.
“No,” Thor agreed. “But you do. You can tell me anything. It doesn’t matter; you’re taking the memory anyway. It’s all right, brother. I understand.”
The glow faded from Loki’s fingers and he put his hands over his face briefly, before he lowered them again, like he couldn’t deny himself the sight of his brother. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he repeated.
“It’s all right,” Thor said again. “Tell me – tell me whatever you like.” His gaze darted around the empty parking lot, and he nodded a greeting to Natasha and Steve.
“Hi,” Natasha said. “It’s – it’s been a while, Thor.”
“We haven’t met yet,” Steve added. “But we are – we were – friends.”
Thor nodded gravely. “Then I look forward to our meeting,” he said, and gave them a small smile before turning his attention back to his brother.
“I don’t know what to say,” Loki said, his voice very small.
“Tell me –” Thor searched for a moment, then his gaze fell on Mistilteinn, still standing upright where Loki had left it, and he said, “Tell me about your weapon. I haven’t seen it before.”
Loki glanced over his shoulder as if he had forgotten the polearm existed. “Mistilteinn,” he said. “Father’s – Odin’s last gift to me, if you can call it that. He had it made for me before the coronation, but – you know what happened. So Eitri kept it until I turned up on Nidavellir after you – and after the Statesman – that’s the ship we were on after Ragnarok –”
Thor flinched for an instant.
“– yes,” Loki said. “Ragnarok happened too. It was…it’s been an exciting eleven years. Since now. Too exciting.”
“Oh,” Thor said quietly. “I’d assumed it was longer.”
Loki shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s – it’s only six years from now. I wish it was longer too.” His voice broke. “Father’s dead. And Mother. And Heimdall and the Warriors Three and Sif and – and everyone, they’re all dead. The rest – they made me king. The Althing – and that’s everyone, that’s everyone left now, two hundred and twenty-three Aesir in New Asgard, one hundred and forty-seven on Vanaheim, and nine elsewhere in the Realms – they voted and they made me king. Me.”
“You’re Odin’s son,” Thor said, though he had flinched with each name and number. “And you’ve always cared for Asgard. Even – even what happened last year with Laufey and the Jotuns – I know you did it because you thought you were protecting Asgard. The people know that. We were both raised to be kings, remember?”
“I may have also bespelled Father and usurped the throne for a few years,” Loki admitted. “But to be honest I’m fairly certain that half of Asgard knew it was me and not Odin. I think people were exchanging money when you turned up and revealed me.”
“You did used to do that all the time,” Thor said encouragingly. “People used to bet on whether it was actually you or Father or Mother or me – not that Father hasn’t deserved to be usurped at times.”
“He did, he did deserve it, and it’s not like I actually hurt him. He – it was after Mother was murdered and I think he was a little mad.”
Thor flinched. “Mother –”
“It’s been – it’s been an awful twelve years,” Loki said. “That’s counting what happened – last year for you, I suppose, what happened with Laufey and Jotunheim and the Destroyer. I sort of – panicked. I think I lost my mind when I found out – when I found out what I was.”
Thor just nodded.
“I’ve done dreadful things,” Loki said. “I’m doing dreadful things right now, and you’ll hate me for them, but you don’t know – you’ll never know the half of it. I’ve killed people. I’ve hurt people. Not for Asgard. Not even for myself. I’ve done it because I have to – because I’ve had to. When I – fell –”
“Tell me, Loki,” Thor said when he went quiet.
“I can’t.”
“Brother, it doesn’t matter, you’re going to take the memory anyway –”
“Thor,” Loki said, somewhere on the verge of both hysterical laughter and tears, if Natasha was any judge, “I don’t even want to think about it.”
Steve edged over to Natasha and said quietly, “The other guy’s probably going to start waking up soon and wondering where the scepter went, if he’s not already.”
Natasha nodded reluctantly. She didn’t want to take this away from Loki and she could tell that Steve didn’t either; he would probably be doing the same thing if it was Bucky here.
“Loki,” Steve said gently. “We gotta go.”
Loki looked at them and then nodded, his expression miserable. He turned back to Thor and put his arms around his brother again, whispering something in Thor’s ear as Thor returned the embrace. Then he stepped back and raised a green-glowing hand.
“It’s all right, brother,” Thor said. “I understand.”
“I’m sorry,” Loki said, tears running silently down his face as he touched his fingers to Thor’s forehead. “I’m sorry, brother.”
Thor went rigid. He was still staring blankly at nothing when Loki took his hand away and rejoined Steve and Natasha, collecting Mistilteinn and slinging the polearm over his back.
Steve put a hand on Loki’s shoulder. Loki didn’t pull away, just stood still for a moment, breathing hard, then said, “Let’s go home.”
The first thing Natasha did when they landed back on the platform around the quantum tunnel was look around and count heads. Ten. They were all there. Everyone had come home. A few of them looked a little freaked out – Nebula, standing next to Rhodes, was staring around as if she had no idea where she was or how she had gotten there – but they had all come home. The knot of nerves in her chest eased.
Across from her, Rhodes lifted the silvery orb that held the Power Stone and said, “Are you telling me this actually worked?”
“That was both terrifying and incredible,” Scott said, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet as he retracted the quantum suit. He lifted a stone-looking box with a thin line of glowing red running around it and added, “And you were right, Loki. It is kind of an angry sludge. I – what the hell happened to you, man?”
Natasha spun on her heel. Bruce was just outside of her peripheral vision, partially blocked by Clint standing between them; she had included him in her head count but had been too busy counting to take a second look. Clint, looking almost as shaky as Nebula, stepped back to lean against one of the platform supports and Natasha got a good look at Bruce.
And it was Bruce, not the Hulk, looking absurdly small after they had all gotten used to seeing him in his Hulk form. He was the only one of them who was still wearing his quantum suit, probably because the Hulk’s clothes wouldn’t fit him.
“Bruce?” she said.
“Are you okay?” Steve and Tony asked in badly-overlapping unison.
“He’s – he’s gone,” Bruce said shakily, looking down at his hands, then touching his face, his chest, his arms, as if reassuring himself that they were still there. His curly hair was damp and slicked close to his skull. “The Hulk. That was the trade. A soul for the Soul Stone. I guess the big guy counted, he – it –”
“It was weird,” Clint said. “There was this, like – ghost guy? And he pulled the Hulk right out of Bruce, or Bruce out of the Hulk, or – I really felt like I was third-wheeling it, I –”
Natasha grabbed him and pulled him into a hug. He stiffened for a moment in surprise – he hadn’t been expecting it – then relaxed and returned the embrace. “You okay, Nat?”
“Even with that hair you look better than you did in 2012,” Natasha told him.
“Oh,” Clint said, wincing. “You didn’t hit me again, did you?”
“No,” Natasha said. “Loki knocked out 2012 Loki, though. One punch.”
Clint looked over her head at Loki, who was leaning back against another of the supports with his head in his hands. “One punch?”
“Solid right hook.”
“I’d have liked to have seen that.”
“I don’t know if he’s – if he’s gone gone,” Bruce was saying to Tony and Steve when Natasha pulled back from Clint. “But I can’t – you know, I could always feel him? All the time, even back before we came to our arrangement? But I can’t feel him now. But I don’t – I don’t remember what it felt like – what I felt like, when it was just me. Does it feel like this?”
Steve put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked him again.
“I don’t know,” Bruce said. “Oh – I’ve got this –” he added, and handed the small orange Soul Stone to Steve. “It was – he volunteered. The other guy. He said it was something he could do that wasn’t smashing. And he jumped – we jumped – and then – there was a lake and I had the Stone –”
“Yeah, I had to climb down the mountain by myself,” Clint said. “It was snowing and I thought they were both dead, it sucked.”
Tony slung an arm over Bruce’s shoulders. “We’ll go run some tests while we prep the Stones, okay. Everyone got their Stones?” he added, raising his voice. “Anyone break the space-time continuum?”
Loki raised his head and said, his voice very flat and almost entirely devoid of emotion, “Well, I’ve just had to alter my dead brother’s memory after he turned up twelve hours early, so if you don’t have an immediate need for me, I’m going to go throw up and then change into clothes I’ve never died in.” He leapt down from the platform rather than use one of the ramps and stalked off.
“So that’s a maybe, then,” Rhodes said, looking after him. “Thor showed up?”
“Yeah,” Natasha said. “I guess Asgard was monitoring Earth and saw us arrive, sent Thor early. They – oh, shit.”
“Loki only wiped Thor’s memory,” Steve said, letting his breath out. “But if Asgard was watching somehow –”
“And Thor being there early at all,” Clint put in.
They looked at Tony and Bruce, as the resident geniuses. The two scientists looked at each other, but it was Scott who said, “Well, we’re still here, so whatever happened either didn’t change anything enough that we’d notice or the timeline branched and created a new reality – I think those are the two main options that have been theorized.”
“Yeah, about,” Tony said. “Couple other theories that have been floated, but it’s not like we can prove it.”
“Or do anything about it,” Bruce said, his mouth twisting.
“Yeah, doesn’t seem like our biggest problem right now,” Rocket agreed. “Hey, can we get this show on the road? I don’t know about you guys, but I got some people I wanna see again.”
Bruce ended up running most of the tests himself with Natasha, Scott, and Steve hovering nervously nearby and helping when he needed another hand; he knew more about the Hulk and his original serum than anyone else. While he was doing that, Tony, Rhodes, and Rocket worked on putting the new infinity gauntlet together with Tony’s nanotech, Tony occasionally drifting over to the other side of the lab to check on Bruce.
“Well, the serum’s still there,” Bruce said eventually, sitting back from the lab table and gesturing to toss the image from the microscope onto one of the holoscreens. “Look here, it’s still in my cells, same as before.” He pulled up an image with a two-year-old timestamp on it; they were nearly identical. “And the gamma radiation levels are the same. But it’s like there’s nothing for them to latch onto.”
“Can you transform?” Steve asked, leaning against a nearby lab table with his arms crossed over his chest.
“I don’t – I don’t think so,” Bruce said. “The serum, the gamma radiation, they’re there, but they’re not – they’re not doing anything. And he was always there – the other guy, I mean. Always. I don’t remember the last time I was alone in my head. Before – before, I guess.”
“How does it feel?” Scott asked him.
“Quiet,” Bruce admitted after a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t know if I like it. Even after – you know – Thanos, when we were having our thing, he was still there. Now it’s just quiet. Empty.” He looked up at Natasha, who was sitting on the lab table next to Steve. “I’ve wanted this for so long and now that I’ve got it – maybe got it – I don’t know what to do.”
“Live your life,” Natasha told him. “Just be Bruce Banner.”
“I don’t think I know who the hell Bruce Banner is anymore.”
“Now you can find out,” Loki said, making them all jump; no one had heard him arrive. He had changed from his Asgardian garments into black slacks and a collared green silk shirt with very faint gold striping, his long hair in a single plait over his shoulder. “You’ve been given a gift, Bruce.”
“Yeah,” Bruce said. “Maybe.”
“Boom!” Rocket yelled from the other side of the lab, and they all jumped again.
“We got it,” Rhodes called.
“One infinity gauntlet coming right up,” Tony said. “Make your calls, people. We’re just about ready to go.”
Natasha, Rhodes, and Loki all stepped out of the lab to do just that, Loki removing himself to a corner with his round of amber in one hand and a chased gold dish filled with water on the table in front of him; he seemed to be having two conversations at once. Natasha and Rhodes had more mundane forms of communication. They had set as much of this up in advance as they could manage, but it was still a lot of calls to make and Natasha couldn’t shake the feeling that they had forgotten something.
“We’ve done all we can,” Rhodes said when they had both shut their last holograms down. “It’s better than nothing, Nat.”
She pressed her fists together and bowed her forehead briefly against them. “God, I hope this works. I think Okoye might kill me if it doesn’t.”
“I’ll work,” Rhodes assured her. “It has to. Asgard’s ready?” he asked Loki as the other man joined them.
He nodded. “The Valkyrie’s taken most of our remaining starships to the location of the culling in deep space and there’s a Ravager vessel with one of our healers at the wreck site, as well as people standing by in New Asgard just in case. I’ve spoken to the Asgardians on Vanaheim and to the Ruling Triumvirate of the Vanir, and to my contacts in the other five realms – I’m surprised Jotunheim took my call, to be honest.” He wrung his hands nervously together as the three of them went back into the lab, his lips shaping the word please.
“Question is, who’s going to snap their freakin’ fingers?” Rocket was asking as the door slid shut behind them. The other Avengers were gathered around the nanotech cradle, staring at the new gauntlet. Only Nebula was absent; Natasha couldn’t recall having seen her since they had left the quantum tunnel. She had been too focused on the dual problems of Bruce and the Stones to see where Nebula had gone.
Loki shifted uncertainly from foot to foot. “I’m a god,” he said. “And I’m the king of Asgard and Lord Protector of the Nine Realms. It’s my responsibility.”
“You can’t even look at the glove straight-on,” Rocket said, not ungently.
Loki’s jaw worked. “I’m the only person here who’s ever used an Infinity Stone. The rest of you are mortal. You saw what it did to Thanos –”
“Yeah, exactly,” Steve said. “Loki –”
“You’re not the only one here who’s ever used an Infinity Stone, pal,” Rocket said, his voice overlapping with Steve’s.
“Oh, excuse me, I don’t believe holding one-sixth of the Power Stone actually counts as using it,” Loki snapped. “This is the infinity gauntlet. It’s channeling enough power to light the forges of Nidavellir for a century. I am a god, you dull creature –”
“Man, you’re such an asshole when you’re in a mood,” Rocket said.
“Thank you, it’s both nature and nurture.”
“I thought you were adopted,” Scott said cautiously.
“I have both met and killed my blood-father,” Loki said. “But if you had ever met Odin, you wouldn’t argue the point.”
“Okay, wow, we’ll unpack all of that later,” Tony said hastily.
“No wonder you and Nebula get along so well,” Rocket said. “You guys should start a club.”
“Yes, thank you, we were in one,” Loki said. “It was called the Black Order. You may have heard of them. They didn’t have t-shirts.”
“Wait, you were actually in the –”
“It was not one of the better times in my life,” Loki said shortly.
“Okay, that’s – that’s also going on the list of things to unpack later,” Tony said. He put his hands up and added, “Just wait, okay, we haven’t decided who’s going to put it on yet.”
Loki looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “You’re all mortals,” he said. “It will most likely kill any of you instantly. There’s not another option. It has to be me.”
“I mean, I think we should at least discuss it,” Scott said.
“What is there to discuss?” Loki said, his voice slightly shaky. “I’m Lord Protector of the Nine Realms, it’s my responsibility. It’s my duty.”
“Loki,” Natasha said gently, “you can’t even look at it.”
He was looking anywhere but at the gauntlet, his gaze darting around the lab without settling on anyone for more than a few seconds at a time. That gaze flickered to her only for an instant before moving away again. “I don’t need to look at it to put it on. And if you’re concerned that I’ll use it to take over the universe –”
“Not worried about that, buddy,” Tony said.
“Well, now I’m just insulted.”
Natasha and Clint exchanged a look, which Rhodes caught and nodded a little in response. It was obvious to all three of them – and probably to Scott and Tony too – that this wasn’t a conversation that an unenhanced human had much of a voice in. Natasha didn’t mind throwing her body between Earth and aliens or killer robots or psychopathic godlings and if there had been no one else she would have put the gauntlet on without a second thought for the consequences; any of them would have. But right now that wasn’t the situation and all the regular humans could do was listen and try to keep the enhanced ones – and the god – from doing anything reckless.
“Look,” Steve said, holding up his hands. “Let’s just talk about this for a minute.”
“I don’t see what there is to talk about or what other option there is –”
“There is another option,” Bruce said from behind Natasha. She turned to look at him as he said, “And it’s not an option. It’s gotta be me.”
Tony and Loki both stared at him. Tony said, “You don’t have the Hulk anymore.”
“But I’ve still got everything else,” Bruce said. “The serum, the gamma radiation, all of it – it’s all still in me. You saw what the Stones did to Thanos. None of you could survive.”
“I’m a god –”
“Doesn’t make you immortal, pal,” Bruce told him gently, resting a hand briefly on Loki’s arm as he walked past him to stare down at the gauntlet. “And Asgard needs you.” Loki looked away.
“How do we know that you’ll survive?” Steve asked.
“We don’t,” Bruce admitted. “But the radiation that thing’s putting off is mostly gamma. It’s like…it’s like I was made for this.”
“Maybe the Hulk was,” Tony said, “but you –”
“Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean any of the rest is,” Bruce said. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you guys do, but it’s gotta be me. I got this.” He looked around at all of them. “Better suit up, though. Just in case.”
It took another couple of minutes for everyone who had taken off pieces of their gear to put it back on. There was no question of leaving Bruce to the face the gauntlet alone, so once they were all suited up again – except for Loki, who didn’t seem bothered by the prospect of whatever energy the gauntlet might put off – they arranged themselves around him at uneven intervals. Rocket hopped up onto a table behind Loki to get a better view as Bruce reached into the cradle and lifted the gauntlet out.
“Let’s do it,” he said. If he was nervous, it wasn’t evident from his voice.
It was like Natasha couldn’t remember how to read his face anymore – his face, and not the Hulk’s. They hadn’t seen much of each other these last five years, not since he had left after they had killed Thanos and made his deal with the Hulk. They weren’t strangers – hadn’t been for a long time – but whatever else they could have been other than friends and teammates had ended years ago. They’d both mourned that.
“Okay, remember,” Tony said, as nervous as Bruce wasn’t, “everyone Thanos snapped away five years ago, you’re just bringing them back to now, today. Don’t change anything from the last five years.”
“Got it,” Bruce said. The gauntlet looked like one of Tony’s Iron Man gauntlets except for the six glowing Stones across the knuckles and the back of the palm, elegant if oversized in Bruce’s hands. He ran his fingers across the hotrod red plating like he was memorizing it.
Natasha stepped up beside Steve and into the familiar shelter of his shield as Scott and Rhodes snapped their helmets into place. Rocket pulled his goggles down and edged behind Loki, who was watching with his arms crossed and his face unreadable. Tony tapped his arc reactor and let the Iron Man suit spread across him before producing an energy shield to protect Clint on his other side.
“FRIDAY, do me a favor and activate Barn Door Protocol, will you?”
“Sure thing, boss.”
The sound of blast doors closing all across the compound made the hair on the back of Natasha’s neck rise. The bright sunlight from the skylight above vanished as the heavy metal doors slid across the glass, leaving the lab lit with too-bright artificial lighting.
Bruce looked around at them again, as if memorizing them, and said quietly, “Everybody comes home.”
He put his hand into the gauntlet.
And screamed.
Energy ran up his arm in brilliant streams of light, burning through the fabric of his borrowed shirt as Bruce collapsed to his knees. It lit up the bone and muscle beneath, all of it fluctuating hideously between the Hulk’s green and the multi-colored illumination of the six Infinity Stones.
Take it off! Natasha almost shouted, but she bit her lip so hard it bled and held the words in. Clint’s face, when she looked at him, was as stiff as carved stone; so was Loki’s. Both of them flinched at each groan, but neither one so much as moved a muscle. Everyone there knew what was at stake. Bruce was an Avenger. He knew what he had chosen and why.
“Bruce, are you okay?” Steve demanded as Bruce groaned.
“Talk to me, Banner,” Tony added.
“I’m – I’m okay,” Bruce gasped, doubled over on the floor. “I’m okay.” Then he screamed again, bracing his right wrist with his left hand as he struggled back to his knees.
It was like the Hulk was fighting to get out of him. Parts of his face, his chest, his arms, his feet, all bulged suddenly and then retracted, green flaring across his skin and retreating almost immediately. His left shoe burst, the Hulk’s massive foot forcing their way through the nylon, before it shrank again. The gauntlet flexed and compensated as his right hand did the same, finger by finger.
“I’m okay,” Bruce said. “I’m okay.” He forced his right hand upwards with his left even as green skin ran in a flush from elbow to wrist, his shirt-sleeve tearing as muscle expanded and contracted. “Everybody comes home,” he gasped, and snapped his fingers.
The gauntlet hit the floor with a clatter of metal as Bruce collapsed. Natasha and Steve both threw themselves towards him, as did Tony and Loki; Clint kicked the gauntlet out of the way and stood peering over them worriedly.
“Bruce!” Natasha said, dropping to her knees beside him with Steve next to her. “Bruce, are you –”
He was still conscious. He grabbed her hand as Natasha reached for him, his fingers gripping hers with desperate strength.
“Don’t move him,” Tony ordered, the nanotech on his armor shifting as he activated his wound seal spray. Bruce’s right arm was black from fingertips to shoulder and stretching up along his neck, where green still occasionally flushed in quarter-sized patches before shrinking; the spray turned it pale and icy-looking.
Loki moved glowing hands in the wake of Tony’s sealant, his eyes narrowed to slits in concentration. “I can’t heal this,” he said after a moment. “Not right now, not without studying the damage. When Eir returns, maybe – I’m not a healer, not really.”
“Did it work?” Bruce gasped, his glazed eyes moving from Natasha’s face to Steve’s. Light spilled across them as the blast doors retracted and revealed the skylight again, adding an unreal quality to the scene. “Did it –”
“We’re not sure,” Natasha told him. “Just breathe, Bruce.”
“Honey?” Clint said.
She looked over her shoulder. He had been peering worriedly down at Bruce a moment ago, but now he had stepped aside to one of the lab tables where she remembered him putting down his phone before they had started. He was holding his phone to his ear now.
“Honey?” he said again.
Loki, crouched by Bruce’s head, looked up as a shadow fell over them. His face went dead white, all-consuming terror turning his handsome features into a skull. His lips formed the word no even as Natasha and Steve both twisted around to see what he was looking at.
The world exploded.
Chapter Text
Reality filtered back in around Natasha in fits and spurts of sensation.
Taste, first – something gritty and foul in her mouth. Then the sound of groaning, creaking metal and stone and someone else’s harsh breathing. The acrid scent of scorched concrete and steel a moment later. When she flexed her hands, she could feel the familiar texturing of Steve’s uniform against her fingers, the solidity of what felt like a shoulder and then the surprising fineness of his hair. He twitched a little in response.
“Nat?” he said.
“What – happened –?”
She had to blink grit out of her eyes before she could open them, coughing around the dust in her throat as Steve braced her. She still had her arm around his shoulders; she vaguely remembered him grabbing her and putting his shield over them both as the energy bolts slammed into the compound. She didn’t remember when she had lost consciousness, but didn’t think she had a concussion.
“We have got to stop meeting like this, Rogers,” Natasha said as his face came back into focus, illuminated by a few wildly flickering electric lights.
He grinned in relief. Dust had settled in his hair and beard, making him look twice his age – or his real age, rather. A fresh crop of aches and pains made themselves known as Natasha sat up, wincing and taking her arm down from around Steve’s shoulders. Beyond his head she could see a thin gleam of sunlight, obscured partially by the smoke rising from the ruins of the compound but mostly by the massive black spaceship blocking out the sun.
Natasha stared at it and said, “I don’t think I’m worried anymore about whether we caused a temporal paradox.”
Steve snorted laughter. “Do you have your comms? I lost my earpiece.”
Natasha pressed a hand to each ear, then shook her head. “Me too. Come on, give me a hand up.”
Steve got to his feet, the floor creaking alarmingly under him, and helped Natasha up, putting an arm around her waist as she leaned against him. It didn’t look like they had fallen far – maybe to the next level. Most of the walls had crumpled around the support beams and the blast doors, which had protected them enough to keep from being crushed to death by the collapsing ceiling. There was no one else in sight.
“Clint?” Natasha called. “Bruce? Tony? Loki?”
“That you, Romanoff?”
What she had taken for more of the malfunctioning electrical lighting resolved itself into the palm repulsors and arc reactor of the Iron Man suit as Tony shoved his way past the remains of a lab table and what looked like part of one of the upper floors. He retracted his face plate as he reached them, revealing a cut under one eye that had bled sluggishly down his cheek.
“You guys okay?”
“I’ll live,” Natasha said.
Steve nodded agreement. “What happened?”
Tony gritted his teeth. “Remember what Loki said about messing with time? Well, it messed back.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Natasha said, gesturing at the ominous shape of the spaceship above them. “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is. Please tell me it’s an entirely different alien.”
“Come see,” Tony said instead of answering.
“Oh, god,” Steve muttered, reaching to tighten the shield’s straps on his left arm.
“What about the others?” Natasha asked, looking around for any sign of life. “Clint – Bruce –”
Tony shook his head. “You two were the only life signs FRIDAY picked up, but all that rubble is blocking any sensors,” he added before Natasha and Steve had time to do more than draw in horrified breaths. “If they’re beneath it, my sensors can’t find them.”
“Them being beneath it is what I’m worried about,” Natasha muttered, then forced her worry aside with practiced effort. Anyone in the universe who was still alive right now essentially had the survival skills of a cockroach; the surviving Avengers had rolled sixes five years ago and the dice had kept coming up in their favor ever since. The only thing was that the dice had no memory.
But she couldn’t help them now. Later, maybe, if there was a later.
The three Avengers picked their way carefully through the wreckage to a place where part of the wall had fallen away entirely, leaving a clear view of what Natasha was pretty sure had previously been the hangar where they had built the quantum tunnel. Now it was littered with debris, making it impossible to tell what had been what before the compound had been reduced to so much rubble. Standing on the remains of a chunk of concrete flooring, clearly framed by the twisted ruin of steel support columns, wiring, and the little that remained of the walls and ceiling, was Loki.
He turned his head a little as Natasha and Steve came up on one side of him, Tony stepping up onto his other side. His face was a death’s head rictus of terror, but the only evidence of the building collapse was the dust in his hair and streaked across his shirt. He put a glowing hand on her shoulder and warmth spread from it, easing the aches in her body and reducing her new-formed bruises to nothing.
“Thanks,” Natasha murmured, but her attention was on the field below them.
Thanos was gleaming in battered golden armor, sitting on a chunk of rubble and contemplating his hands. A massive double-bladed sword had been stuck into the ground beside him, easily as tall as Natasha herself, with a big golden helmet resting on top of it. The Titan glanced up as Tony, Natasha, and Steve emerged beside Loki – he had clearly already been aware of the Asgardian’s presence.
“What’s he been doing?” Tony asked.
“Absolutely nothing,” Loki said, with a strained note in his voice like he was just barely keeping himself from screaming.
“Where are the Stones?” Steve asked.
“Somewhere under all this,” Tony said, gesturing at the rubble. “All I know is that he doesn’t have them.”
“So we keep it that way,” Natasha said, brushing her thumbs over the controls for her widow’s bites. She checked her pistols as Loki took his hand off her shoulder, then felt in her belt-pouches for extra clips. Her baton harness was a reassuring weight across her back, but at the moment she rather wished she could go back into the rubble of the compound and dig up the armory for some more firepower. Natasha could make do, though. She always did.
Loki was still staring at Thanos. “I know what I have to do,” he said, more to himself than to any of them. “It’s what my father would have done. It’s what my brother would have done.” He shut his eyes, breathing hard, then rolled his shoulders back like he was bracing himself to take on a hard job. When he opened his eyes again, his face was very calm.
“I am the King of Asgard,” Loki said quietly. “I am the Lord Protector of the Nine Realms.”
Green-gold gleamed around him as he stepped down and began to walk towards Thanos. His hair unbraided itself from its single plait and wove itself into his usual assortment of small braids and loose hair. Mistilteinn appeared in his hand, the sharply curved blade of the polearm shining coldly in the glow of his magic. Asgardian armor and clothing continued to form around him with each step, golden scale-mail running up his arms and down the outer thighs of the leather pants which shimmered into existence along with a full-skirted green and black leather tunic over the split skirts of a knee-length mail hauberk, finely-figured golden vambraces and greaves, and a long green cloak. It wasn’t what he had been wearing in New York; it was something else entirely, elegant and alien. Familiar golden horns curved back over his head, with green accents running along the rim of the headpiece’s circlet – it was more a crown than a helmet. The King of Asgard, armed and armored for war.
“So much for a plan,” Tony said. His helmet slid back into place as he followed Loki down onto the plain, Steve and Natasha just behind him.
“You again,” Thanos said, looking up as Loki approached.
“Me again,” Loki said, his voice hoarse. “You might be surprised at how often I hear that.”
“Come to surrender, Asgardian?”
“Surrender is not in my nature,” Loki said. “I’ll accept yours, though.”
Thanos chuckled, low and seemingly genuinely amused. “I see you’ve grown your spine back. I thought I’d broken you of that when I had yours torn from your body.”
Loki’s jaw worked silently. “You killed my brother,” he managed to say after a few moments.
“I’ve never met your brother,” Thanos said. “You never talked about him while you were one of my Children.” He smiled. “Not until your little revelation came out, and then all your secrets with it. You were a good son before that. You could have been one of my best.”
Loki flinched. He took a deep breath, his grip white-knuckled on Mistilteinn’s shaft. When he spoke next, his voice was still harsh from the effort it was taking him not to scream, but the words were steady. “Unfortunately for you,” he said, “I already have a family.”
Thanos smiled. “And where are they now, Asgardian?”
“I am son to a murdered woman,” Loki said, terror and hatred alike flat in his pale eyes, “brother to a murdered man, and Allfather to a murdered people.”
“You killed for me,” Thanos said.
Yeah, you bastard, I know you, Natasha thought as she crept closer; at least the rubble provided plenty of cover for her approach. His triumph had obscured him when she had seen him last back on his garden world, but he was clear enough now. Just another Dreykov, alien and writ large on an intergalactic scale, but all too familiar. There were always men like him.
Natasha was close enough now that she could hear Loki’s mail chiming slightly – he was shaking.
“Yes,” he said, and let the single syllable hang between them.
Thanos didn’t say anything in response, just watched him with that small, terrible smile on his face as Steve and Tony came up to flank them. Natasha circled wide; she wasn’t under any illusions about her ability to go hand-to-hand with Thanos, and maybe she could put a bullet or ten in his brainpan while he was distracted by the three men. Right now she didn’t have a shot; even unhelmeted, his gorget rose too high for her to get a bead on his brainstem, and she had seen enough to know that with his physiology her bullets would just bounce off his skull.
“I am King of Asgard,” Loki said before the silence between them grew too terrible, “and Lord Protector of the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil. The Earth is under my protection, Thanos, and I will give you this one chance to leave it and go elsewhere for your reaving.”
Thanos’s smile grew. “It’s all the same to you Asgardians, isn’t it?” he said. “Conquer it. Protect it. You couldn’t do either in the end, and where did it bring you? Back to me.”
“Well,” Loki said, “as a friend of mine once told me, if we can’t protect the Earth, then you can be damn sure we’ll avenge it.”
Thanos tossed aside the chunk of metal he had been toying with. “You could not live with your own failure,” he said, his gaze moving between each of the three men as he spoke. “I’m thankful. I thought by eliminating half of life, the other half would thrive. But you’ve shown me that’s impossible. As long as there are those who are able to remember what was, there will be those who are unable to accept what can be. They will resist.”
“Yep, we’re all kinds of stubborn,” Tony said, and Loki’s head jerked towards him; he had been so focused on Thanos he hadn’t realized Tony and Steve were there. The look on his face was sheer disbelief. Tony caught the expression and nodded to him in response; when Loki turned to his other side and saw Steve there, Steve repeated the gesture, and Loki’s eyes shuttered for a brief instant in relief.
That was the thing about being an Avenger, the thing that it had taken Natasha years to learn. Being an Avenger meant you never had to go it alone.
“I’m thankful,” Thanos said again, “because now I know what I must do. I will shred this universe down to its last atom.” He stood up, making Loki flinch, and reached for the helmet he had hung from the tip of his massive double-bladed sword. He turned as he did so, insouciantly putting his back to the three Avengers, and for a brief instant giving Natasha a clear shot at his left eye socket.
She didn’t hesitate.
Thanos was fast, impossibly fast even by the standards Natasha was used to – gods and super soldiers and people with tech straight out of comic books. He whipped his head around as she fired so that the bullet scored across his forehead rather than into his eye, drawing a thin line of purple blood as she came up firing. That huge double-bladed sword came up, sweeping aside her bullets before he threw it at her.
Natasha dove sideways for the cover of the nearest pile of rubble and the sword went over her head so close that she heard it whistle. Loki’s yell of incoherent fury was matched by Steve’s, then the sound of metal-on-metal and the Iron Man’s repulsors firing even as the sword swept back into Thanos’s hand. She popped up again with a pistol in each hand to see Mistilteinn flashing in Loki’s hands, the coldly-gleaming blade of the naginata-like polearm slashing through the vambrace on Thanos’s left wrist like it was so much cardboard. Thanos’s hand twisted, thrusting weapon and Asgardian both aside, but Steve was there before he could take advantage of it. He flung his shield into Thanos’s face at the same time Tony’s repulsor blasts struck, sending Thanos staggering momentarily back.
Loki had landed in a roll and come up on his knees, one hand bracing Mistilteinn as he thrust his other hand into the mess of dirt and shattered concrete beneath him. Magic ran out from his fingers, glowing green as it raced across the ground between him and Thanos. It slammed upwards as a tangle of wires and metal beams that knocked the Titan sideways, directly into the line of the energy blast that Tony had just reflected off Steve’s shield. That spun him around too, precisely into the line of Natasha’s fire.
She came up shooting. Her bullets struck sparks off his armor and the sword he spun to deflect them. Loki flickered out of sight in a flash of green light and reappeared nearly at Thanos’s feet, Mistilteinn slashing low in an attempt to cut Thanos off at the ankles. He ducked the backhanded blow that the Titan swung at him and planted Mistilteinn in the ground, using the polearm as leverage to swing himself up and around. His boots slammed into Thanos’s face just as Steve wound up and flung his shield at Thanos’s throat. Thanos knocked it aside with an armored forearm, sending the shield flying straight at Natasha.
She dropped her pistols to grab it out of the air, nearly dislocating her shoulder as she let its momentum swing her around. Natasha kept turning, letting the shield roll off her fingertips again.
“Steve!”
He caught it on the downswing from a flip-kick that had knocked Thanos into the line of half a dozen repulsor beams generated by the lotus-like emitters that the Iron Man suit had generated from Tony’s back. Mistilteinn flashed in the glow of the repulsors as Loki lunged forward; Natasha didn’t see what he did next in the seconds between dropping to scoop up her pistols. In those few instants there a horrendous crash-BANG and when Natasha rolled to her feet, her guns raised, it was to see Tony flat on his back in a tangle of splinters and rubble about twenty yards from the fight, unmoving.
But instead of him there were half-dozen Lokis and Steves fighting Thanos, the illusion magic that Loki excelled at and had used so effectively during their sparring sessions. Natasha couldn’t tell which was the real Loki or Steve until after each made contact, Mistilteinn or the shield or a well-aimed kick or punch. She didn’t dare shoot when she couldn’t be certain of not hitting Loki or Steve; getting shot wouldn’t do anything to Loki other than annoy him, but the serum didn’t make Steve bullet-proof. And it would definitely distract them both.
If they had been fighting anyone other than Thanos, Natasha would have trusted the two other Avengers to handle it and gone to find the others. Rhodes had been in the War Machine armor and was probably fine; Scott had survived the quantum realm and could presumably survive getting a building dropped on top of him. Clint and Rocket, though – well, Clint had survived worse, and Rocket seemed pretty tough. But Bruce…the Hulk could have shaken it off, but even if Bruce still had the serum and the gamma radiation inside him, they didn’t have any idea what the hell that meant, especially weakened by the infinity gauntlet.
She was bracing herself to run to Tony and either wake him up or drag him out of harm’s way if she couldn’t when a lucky strike by Thanos hit the real Steve and sent him flying, smashing into more rubble. At nearly the same instant Loki hooked Mistilteinn’s sharply-curved blade around Thanos’s blade and flipped the sword out of his hands.
Loki’s illusions vanished as Thanos grabbed Mistilteinn’s shaft, his muscles straining as he tried to snap the polearm between his hands. Loki’s heels left divots in the earth as he dug in with all of his considerable Asgardian strength, his teeth bared in a snarl and his eyes huge with terror.
“This is Mistilteinn,” he said through clenched teeth. “Forged of uru in the heart of a dying star by King Eitri of Nidavellir himself. Last gift of Odin Allfather from beyond the gates of Valhalla. In a thousand years I’ve only met one being capable of destroying a weapon such as this and you are no god.”
Thanos slammed his head downwards against Loki’s, breaking one of the horns off his crown with a sharp crack, and as Loki reeled backwards from the shock of the blow the Titan twisted the polearm. Mistilteinn went spinning away and stuck quivering upright in a mass of twisted metal as a kick knocked Loki onto his back. Thanos put one foot on his chest and pressed down.
“I own you,” he said as Loki gasped for breath. “Or don’t you remember how you came to me?”
“You think I care anymore?” Loki snarled. “You killed my brother, you son of a bitch!” Green light flashed in his hand in the instant before he buried a dagger in the weak joint between Thanos’s greave and the armor covering his massive foot.
It might as well have been an insect bite. Thanos ignored it and hauled Loki up with a hand around his throat, holding him with his feet dangling off the ground. Loki’s long, elegant hands seemed pitifully small as he clawed at Thanos’s massive fist.
“I’ve had enough of you, Asgardian,” Thanos said. “The line of Odin dies here.”
“One thing – you never – prized from – me,” Loki panted.
Thanos tilted his head a little to one side, curious. “What more do you have for me, King of Asgard? A truth or a lie?”
“One of each,” Loki gasped, “and one and the same. I’m not Asgardian.”
The temperature dropped so fast that the ground around them froze instantly and Natasha almost fell on her careful approach. Frost ran in a white scrim up the metal of Thanos’s armor where Loki’s hands were locked around his; where his bare skin touched Loki’s it blistered and turned black with frostbite. Loki’s bare fingers were turning blue, the color running up past the figured golden knuckle plates of his armor and vanishing beneath his long sleeves and scale mail only to reemerge from his collar, spreading up his face along with thin raised markings like scarification. As the color reached them his eyes turned blood-red. The bones of his face shifted very slightly, lengthening and sharpening until what had only seemed subtly inhuman in his Asgardian form was unmistakably alien.
He’s adopted, Thor had said all those years ago. Not even my species, Loki had said when she had picked him up in Norway before the Time Heist. Natasha had known that Loki wasn’t Asgardian, but it was one thing to know and another to see.
“Frost giant,” Thanos snarled, trying to release Loki and failing; Loki’s hands were clamped so tightly around his wrist that even when he forced his frost-bitten fingers free of Loki’s throat his knuckle plates and vambraces continued to freeze and then shatter as the temperature dropped. Armor began to flake off higher up his arm, where Loki wasn’t touching him, and the deep ugly black of frostbite spread up along his wrist and forearm.
Loki’s humorless grin was toothy and feral, a predator’s snarl. “Trickster god,” he said.
Thanos punched him with his free hand, knocking Loki’s head back. Blue blood ran from his nose, mouth, and forehead where the edge of Thanos’s knuckle plate cut him, but he didn’t let go, just hung on with grim determination. Even as Thanos hit him again frost ran up his other arm, the metal of his armor flaking and then shattering, skin blistering and turning black where he had touched Loki’s bare skin. Loki spat his own blue blood into Thanos’s face and where it struck the skin and flesh beneath froze instantly.
“Die,” Loki said, and in his alien form there was an odd, unfamiliar timbre to his voice. “Die, you bastard, for my brother, for my people –”
The words died in a choked gasp as Thanos forced his frostbitten hand around Loki’s throat again and squeezed. “No,” he said. “You die.”
Natasha launched herself at Thanos and landed on his shoulders, her legs locked around his neck as she drew the garrote tight across his throat. The cold was shocking, incredible, biting through the insulated synthetic material of her uniform as if it wasn’t there at all. Her breath rose in a cloud of steam even as she dragged on the garrote.
Thanos dropped Loki with a thud and got a blackened, frostbitten finger beneath the garrote. It snapped like it was nothing more than a single thread and Natasha reeled for an instant, briefly unbalanced, before she jammed her widow’s bites into his neck and triggered the electrostatic blasts. Thanos twitched under her and she saw the lines of electricity darken under his purple skin, but the shocks didn’t have any more effect than that. He grabbed her by the leg and tried to drag her off him; a blast of green magic from Loki sent him staggering backwards before he could. Natasha tightened her thighs around his massive shoulders, hanging onto his gorget with one hand as she freed one of her knives from its sheath on her belt. She had no idea if Thanos had a nervous system or a spinal cord that were anything like a human’s, but he had something.
Thanos reeled just as she stabbed downwards, and the knife that should have gone into the base of his skull went into the joint of his shoulder instead. He snarled like a wild animal, twisting and grabbing at her as he tried to unseat her. Another blast of green magic from Loki distracted him; the Asgardian was on his knees, breathing hard, that alien blue fading from his skin and running away down his face like melting ice. Thanos slipped briefly as the rising temperature around them turned the frozen ground slick and slippery. Natasha jerked backwards, trying to use his momentum against him and force him to fall, but her slight weight was too little to have much effect on him. She shocked him again just to give him something else to think about.
Loki’s eyes – blue-green again – flicked down towards the thawing ground. He slammed both hands palm-down against it, his teeth bared in a snarl as magic ran out from glowing fingers. Thanos staggered as the world rocked beneath him, solid earth turning to mud and then to quicksand. Natasha flung herself free as Thanos dropped in the suddenly liquid earth, landing in a crouch beside Loki. He flexed his hands against the ground in front of him and it suddenly solidified, trapping Thanos up to his chest in rock-hard earth.
Loki rose to his feet, wiping the back of his hand over his still-bleeding face. While the blue blood of his frost giant form was smeared across his cheeks and chin and in droplets against the curving gold adornment on his chest, he was bleeding Asgardian red now. He put his hand out and Mistilteinn pulled free of the rubble it had landed in and flew to him, slapping into his palm. He stepped towards Thanos, breathing hard, and reversed the polearm so that its blade was pointed down at the Titan.
“You killed my brother,” he said again, stepping forward. “You slaughtered my people. You bought me like I was so much chattel and you made me a traitor to my brother, to my father, to my mother, to the Nine Realms I was sworn to protect. You killed my brother.”
Mistilteinn flashed downwards and Thanos’s hand shot out impossibly fast, closing around the shaft of the weapon just above the blade. Natasha saw Loki’s eyes go wide with horror just before Thanos shoved and the blunt end of the weapon slammed into the underside of Loki’s jaw. Loki’s head snapped backwards and for a horrifying moment Natasha thought Thanos had broken his neck; she had no idea if an Asgardian could survive that. Then Thanos whipped Mistilteinn around with that awful alien strength and speed and struck Loki across the ribs. The Asgardian went flying. He hit the twisted metal arc that was the biggest remaining piece of the quantum tunnel, and it folded as he dropped to the ground and didn’t get up again.
Natasha had her pistols unholstered and was firing even as Thanos began to claw his way one-handed out of the earth. At this range it should have been impossible to miss but he flung up the arm he wasn’t using to dig his way out, deflecting the bullets with what remained of his vambraces. Natasha startled to circle – she had no problem shooting someone in the back of the head, especially if that someone was Thanos – when first one hammer then the other clicked onto an empty chamber.
Thanos grinned nastily at her, still straining to pull his way free of Loki’s trap. Natasha shot him in the face with her widow’s bites just so he didn’t get too cocky and skipped back out of reach of Mistilteinn as she started to reload. Instead Thanos drew back his arm and threw Mistilteinn like a javelin. Natasha dove sideways even as Captain America’s shield came out of nowhere and cracked off the shaft of the polearm, knocking it into the ground. The shield went spinning back onto the magnetic lock on Steve’s left arm as he came running up, already swinging a kick into Thanos’s jaw.
“Go!” he shouted. “Get Loki! I got this!”
Thanos had mostly dug himself free by now. Natasha didn’t bother to argue with Steve, just scooped up Mistilteinn on her way to the place where Loki had fallen, which was on enough of a rise that it gave her a good view of the battlefield.
He was conscious and had managed to drag himself to his knees, bracing himself against the crumpled arc of the quantum tunnel’s platform. His jaw was horrendously misshapen, knocked out of joint, and he had his hands on either side of it, gasping a little in pain as he tried to nerve himself up enough to pop it back into place himself. Natasha dropped to her knees in front of him, dropping Mistilteinn on the ground and said, “I got this, okay? This is going to hurt. Try not to bite me.”
Loki gave her an ironic glance and braced his fisted hands on his knees, his eyes fixed on hers as Natasha put a hand on either side of his jaw and slid her thumbs along the inside of his mouth, over the tops of his lower back teeth – not quite the same number of teeth as a human’s, she noticed for the first time, and even in his usual form sharper than a human’s. Hope this works on an Asgardian, she thought. “Ready?”
He blinked in acknowledgment, and Natasha pushed until she felt his jaw pop back into place. She withdrew her hands from his mouth, wiping them on the already filthy thighs of her uniform. “You okay?”
Loki pressed a green-glowing hand to his jaw, breathing hard. “Been better. Thank you.”
She nodded and looked over her shoulder at Steve and Thanos. It was – well, Steve wasn’t dead yet. Tony, a little ways away, was finally starting to push himself upright, so at least he wasn’t dead either. There was still no sign that anyone else was alive in the complex at all, though most of the compound was so much rubble. The rest of the Avengers had to be somewhere under all that. Alive, Natasha told herself firmly; she refused to let herself believe anything else.
Natasha reached for her pistols to finish reloading and only found one in its holster; she must have dropped the other when Thanos had thrown Mistilteinn at her. She ejected the spent clip and slid a new one into place, cursing silently. “Any bright ideas?” she asked Loki.
He was looking up at the spaceship above them, but at the question glanced back at her and shook his head a little.
“What’s up there?”
“An army, most likely. One which will make his forces in Wakanda look like a children’s play group, and the Chitauri like a friendly pack of hounds. That is Sanctuary.” A muscle twitched in his jaw, and he winced; the words were a little less crisp than usual, which might have been the recently-dislocated jaw or the panic attack he was very clearly barely holding back. “His flagship. That’s what he tore the Statesman apart with before he used the Power Stone to finish the job.”
Natasha looked up at the ship again. “Would a nuke work?”
“Do you happen to have one?” Loki inquired. “But probably not; I’d assume it would bounce off the hull and incinerate us instead. Nuclear weapons are fairly primitive technology by civilized standards.”
Natasha gestured at Mistilteinn. “That’s a spear.”
“And your point?”
She snorted. There was no arguing with some people – Asgardians, mostly, and Avengers. “Why haven’t they come down yet?”
“Why would they?” Loki said wearily. “He seems to have this well in hand.” He looked back at Steve and Thanos, then shut his eyes.
Natasha grabbed his shoulder. “Hey. What are you thinking? You have a plan?”
“I don’t have a plan,” he said. “I don’t – I don’t know what to do.” He dug his fingers into his hair. “He needs to die,” he said finally.
“Okay, no argument there.”
“We can’t kill him. There’s nothing we have that can kill him. Thor –” He looked at Thanos again. Steve was doing his best to keep out of striking distance, using the rubble as cover and throwing the shield as much as he could. Tony was still struggling upright, but wasn’t in fighting shape just yet.
Natasha twitched a little, wanting to be down there with Steve; if nothing else, she might be able to distract Thanos long enough for Steve to get a few good hits in. Loki might be able to do more than that.
“There’s one thing,” Loki said hesitantly. “It’s a myth, a legend, a story my mother used to tell us as children. But –”
“What?” Natasha asked.
“I don’t want to do it.” Loki pressed his clasped hands to his face. “But I can’t think of anything else. He has to die.”
“What?” Natasha asked again. She closed her hands gently around his wrists so that he would look at her. “What are you talking about?”
Loki’s jaw worked, and he winced again. “Godsdeath,” he said. “It’s a myth. No one’s done it in ten thousand years, not since the great Aesir-Vanir War between Buri and Njord, and maybe not since before then; even for us, that far back history gets muddled. I don’t want to – but I can’t think of anything else.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Natasha demanded.
“Godsdeath,” Loki said again. “It will kill him. It will kill me. It will kill everything else within at least a quarter-mile, maybe as much as a full mile, and Sanctuary is close enough that it should kill them too. You’ll have to get Steve and Tony out of here, the others if you can find them – I can distract him, give you as much time as I can before I – do it –”
“No,” Natasha said, her hands still tight on his wrists. “No. We don’t trade lives. Suicide’s not an option.”
“We don’t trade – what do you think we have been doing all day? What Steve and Tony are down there doing right now?”
Natasha glanced over her shoulder long enough to confirm that Tony was back up and on the battlefield with Steve, which eased the knot of tension in her chest. Not a lot, but at least a little. “There’s a difference between going into a fight knowing that you could die and knowing that you will die.”
“I literally cannot think of anything else,” Loki said, his eyes huge and panicked. “My mother gave her life to stop a monster from getting the Reality Stone. I can’t do anything less. Thor would do it. My father would do it.”
“I don’t care what they would do,” Natasha told him. “What would Loki do?”
“Historically, the answer to ‘what would Loki do?’ has not ended well for anyone, least of all me,” Loki said, his voice tinged with hysteria. “It’s better not to ask.”
“Hey,” Natasha said, “hey, look at me. You know where I come from, you know my history. You think I don’t wake up in the morning and wonder what Nick or Sam or Maria would do? What Steve would do? But I’m not them. You’re not Thor and you’re not either of your parents. Don’t sell your life doing something just because you think it’s what someone else would do, no matter who it is.”
“Natasha, I don’t want to do this,” Loki said. “I don’t – I don’t want to die. But it’s a king’s duty to die so that his people may live. I’m Lord Protector of the Nine –”
“You’re an Avenger,” Natasha said. “You know what that means? No one goes it alone. We do this together. We lose? We do that together too. But we fight and we fight to win, not to die.”
The air hummed around them.
For an instant the world turned blue; when Natasha blinked sparks out of her eyes she thought for one hysterical moment that she was hallucinating. Then what had just seemed like endless waves of blackness spread across the twisted ruin of what had been the Avengers complex resolved itself into alien forms – Outriders and Chitauri and a half-dozen other species she didn’t recognize, with the members of the Black Order stepping up behind Thanos. Massive war machines slammed down onto the earth around them, the triangular landing craft that were as big as skyscrapers, doors opening to spill out even more alien forces. Like a bad dream, Chitauri leviathans were drifting out from Sanctuary, scaly forms as awful as Natasha remembered from New York eleven years ago. The army stretched as far as Natasha could see in either direction, devouring the horizon. Steve and Tony were startlingly small on the field below, the wreck of the main compound rising on one side with the Avengers symbol a blackened memory on what remained of one wall.
“Oh,” Loki said, high-pitched.
“Oh, shit,” Natasha said.
Loki put his head in his hands, though not before Natasha saw tears on his cheeks. “Get the others out,” he said, his voice somewhere on the razor’s edge between resignation and hysteria. “I’ll buy you as much time as I can before I call down godsdeath. Tell the Valkyrie –”
His head jerked up abruptly, his shining eyes gone suddenly huge. He brushed a hand over them by reflex, his gaze fixed on the space behind Steve and Tony. Natasha followed his gaze.
There was something there, sparking and growing against the darkness of the ruined compound.
It grew and grew, a portal like the one the Ancient One had made for them eleven years and a few hours ago, and out of its shining surface came three figures. Then a fourth, soaring high above them on mechanical wings and circling.as Steve stared upwards in stunned delight. Behind them the portal resolved itself onto the familiar landscape of Wakanda, the spires of the city gleaming in the distance and hundreds of soldiers following their king and princess out onto the battlefield.
Natasha felt tears streaming down her face as more portals opened all along a line behind Steve and Tony. More Wakandans – Bucky and Wanda and the little tree-person, Groot – then the sleek neon lights of some alien world and dozens of Rocket and Nebula’s Ravagers buddies, the stark wintry heights of Kamar-Taj and the warm wooden halls of the other Sanctums. Gold sparked as the sorcerers called up their magic. Another alien world, worn by destruction, with only a few individuals stepping out of the portal; Rocket’s crew, the sorcerer Strange, Peter Parker. Smaller portals formed, letting through individuals – Hope van Dyne suddenly life-size as the Wasp’s wings closed behind her, Pepper Potts in the Rescue suit Tony had built for her. New Asgard –
“I will kill that wizard,” Loki said. “We don’t have enough warriors left for this fight –”
Lightning split the sky.
Loki went dead white.
The new portals opening were high above the others, and beyond them stars glittered in the blackness of space like diamonds strewn over dark velvet. The ships that slid from the deep void of the stars into the familiar air of Earth were alien, a few of them half-familiar only because Natasha had seen them in New Asgard. She watched hangar doors slide open and warriors leap down, unbothered by the height, to land all along the line of battle with the Asgardians and alien gladiators that had come from Norway – the Valkyrie in gleaming white armor and a blue cloak, a spear in one hand; other Asgardians, some armored, most not, all armed with swords and spears and axes. The last ship that appeared came on its own, and the single figure that leapt down from it streamed lightning.
Thor landed beside the Valkyrie, wreathed in lightning, and Loki began to weep.
Natasha grabbed his shoulder, holding onto him as he sobbed. “We did it,” she told him. “We did it.”
As the lightning faded and made him clearly visible, Thor looked different than she had seen him last – hair cropped short, a black eyepatch where his right eye had been, in black armor and no cloak, no hammer. He turned his head to look up and down the line of battle, nodding a greeting to Tony and Steve when he saw them, but he was searching for someone he couldn’t find. The Valkyrie said something to him, then unbuckled the sword belt around her waist and handed it to him.
The sound of breaking stone brought Natasha’s head up again as the Ant-Man’s helmet broke apart the remnants of the compound. Scott – giant-size now – clawed his way out of the ruins and opened a massive hand to release Bruce and Rhodes in the Hulkbuster and the Iron Patriot armor, with Rocket clinging to Rhodes’ shoulder. Even from here Natasha could see his feral grin.
Where the hell is Clint? she thought, her gaze sweeping over the battlefield again. There was no sign of him – no sign of Nebula, either. She pushed that aside with effort and thought, Get it done, Romanoff.
“Okay,” she said out loud. “Let’s go.”
“It’s not enough,” Loki said, wiping the tears from his cheeks. He looked one way at Earth’s defenders; the other way at Thanos’s massive army. Natasha could tell that they were still outnumbered three-to-one.
“What would Loki do?” he murmured to himself, then seemed to come to a decision. He picked up the broken-horned headpiece that he must have taken off to try and fix his dislocated jaw and put it on, settling the cheek plates against his face, then closed a hand around Mistilteinn’s shaft before looking at her. “Natasha – Midgard’s warden – will you give me leave to speak for Earth?”
“You’re an Avenger,” Natasha told him, and saw his eyebrows go up briefly at that before he nodded slightly in acknowledgment. “You don’t need my permission.”
“I’m asking it anyway.”
She nodded.
“What would Loki do?” he said again, then gave her a wry grin. “Odin would have seen all of Asgard dead before he did this.”
He rose to his feet and slammed the butt of Mistilteinn’s shaft into the ground. The sound it made echoed bell-like across the killing field to come, at odds with the coarse rubble it had struck. Heads turned towards him – allies, enemies. Thor looked up at his brother and his shoulders slumped in relief. He started to take a step forward before the Valkyrie grabbed his arm.
Natasha stood beside Loki as he let Mistilteinn stand upright and made a complicated gesture with his hands. The horn that unfolded itself between his palms came from no animal ever born on Earth, massive and twisted and capped with finely-engraved silver. Loki put the end to his mouth and sounded it – a terrible, wonderful cry that Natasha felt in her chest and vibrating through her bones as much as heard. He blew it three times, and each time it was as awful and awesome as the first, then made another gesture and the horn vanished. He picked up Mistilteinn and thumped it against the ground again, producing another bell-like sound that swept out from them like a physical wave.
Thanos pointed at him with his double-bladed sword, his mouth moving, but everything about him seemed slowed down, as if he was fighting his way through mud. Everything seemed to have slowed; Natasha was painfully aware of the pounding of her own heart, her own breath. Only Loki was moving in real time.
“Warriors of Yggdrasil!” he yelled. “Warriors of Yggdrasil, hear me! I am Loki Jotun-born, King of Asgard, God of Mischief, Allfather of the Aesir, Avenger of Earth! Second son of Odin One-Eye and Frigga the Golden; brother of Thor, Asgard’s Champion; brother of Hela, Asgard’s Bane; blood-son of Laufey of Jotunheim! I speak for Asgard by election of the Althing; I speak for Midgard by will of the Avengers! Hear me!”
Natasha had to admit the expression on Thor’s face and those of the other returned Asgardians at this announcement was a little funny. She suspected there was a lot of that going on all over the universe – all over the Nine Realms, certainly, because even though she was standing beside Loki and could hear him clearly, she also saw him. His words rang inside her head and she had some kind of strange, doubled vision; if she wasn’t looking directly at him, she could still see him as if from a distance, him and the battlefield around him and her standing beside him, looking absurdly small against his six feet and change.
Loki took a deep breath before he went on. He was glowing faintly, waves of green-gold lifting his long dark braids and lighting his eyes. “A thousand thousand generations ago, when the universe was young and the roots of the World Tree were new-grown, our fathers’ fathers’ fathers and our mothers’ mothers’ mothers came together to swear eternal alliance in defense of Yggdrasil. Warriors of Yggdrasil, I ask you now, as son of two realms, to honor the blood-oaths of our ancestors against a threat greater than any we have faced since the birth of the stars. I ask you to meet the warriors of Asgard and Midgard alike as equals upon the field of battle and in return I offer you your vengeance against he who stole parent from child, who broke apart lovers, who tore brother from brother –” He looked over at Thor “– who split the universe in twain and who seeks to do it once more. I ask you in the name of Jotunheim which bore me; in the name of Svartalfheim where I spilled my life’s blood in defense of these realms; in the name of Midgard which sheltered my people; and in the name of Asgard which raised me to manhood and which I rule as king and Allfather. In the names of all those who have come before and in the names of all those whom the Avengers returned to you, will you join us now on the field of battle?”
There was a long, waiting silence.
As the glow faded from Loki’s skin, he murmured to Natasha, “This will be so embarrassing if it doesn’t work, but I suppose that’s the bright side to the fact that we’ll all be dead in very short order if it doesn’t work.” He thought about that for a moment. “Except then I’ll be forced to hear about it until the end of time in Valhalla, so I won’t be spared even that, I suppose.”
“What – was that?” Natasha asked when she thought she could speak again. She couldn’t seem to tell if her heart was beating too fast or not fast enough; time felt stretched somehow, as it had in those endless heartbeats when they had been transiting the quantum realm. Her skin felt fever-hot, though when she pressed the fingers of one hand to the inside of her wrist her temperature felt normal, just a little sweaty from the fight and the pressure of her widow’s bites. When she moved her head too quickly, it was to a strange skirl of double sensation – blazing heat pressing in on her from one side, freezing cold from another; the warm scent of polished, unfamiliar wood; the sight of a hand that wasn’t hers seizing a longbow with no string down from a rack on a wall she didn’t recognize; the sound of shouting in deep, nonhuman voices; the screeching of some creature that rang at the inside of her head; a man’s laughter and a woman’s rallying cry –
She looked at Loki, and the world briefly resolved itself into something she was fairly certain was reality, or at least something close to it. His expression was nearly as shaken as hers and he seemed to be holding onto Mistilteinn as if the polearm was the only thing keeping him upright. He wasn’t looking at her or at the Asgardians with Thor and the Valkyrie. Natasha snuck a glance at them and realized that real time only seemed to have returned to her and Loki; everything else on the battlefield still seemed to be moving far, far too slowly; a hundred heartbeats for an action that should have taken one.
“Some old, old magic,” he said in response to her question. “And guesswork. Mostly guesswork, but it wouldn’t have done anything if the framework for the magic wasn’t already there.”
“Wait, none of that was true?” Natasha demanded.
The corner of his mouth lifted. “The truth is a matter of circumstance,” Loki said. “It’s not all things to all people all the time.”
“Yeah,” Natasha murmured. “Don’t I know it.”
“Why Nine Realms?” Loki said after a moment, his gaze fixed on the battlefield. “Why Yggdrasil at all? Asgard has only claimed dominion over the Nine since Bor’s day – my grandfather’s – and Odin made that claim reality. But the bounds of Yggdrasil have never changed, not in hundreds of thousands of years. So there has to be a reason. I guessed –”
He stopped mid-sentence as a sound like a massive set of creaking hinges rang out over the battlefield, his grip going white-knuckled on Mistilteinn’s shaft. Reality still felt fluid somehow, indistinct, as if the world beyond Natasha and Loki stood frozen and waiting even as space-time unfolded just below the little rise where they were standing. The glittering outlines of what seemed to be a massive set of double doors shimmered into existence, already swinging wide as armored troops marched onto the battlefield. They were Asgardian, Natasha thought, most in golden armor and horned helmets and armed with round shields and deadly-looking spears, with a few dozen in elaborately worked leather and suede. The latter carried recurve bows, short swords, and shields marked with stylized wolf’s heads. The leader was a tall, dark-haired white woman in silver and red armor who glanced around to orient herself, grinned at the sight of Thor, then climbed the rise to take a position at Loki’s other side.
“Nice speech,” she said.
“Hello, Sif,” Loki said; sheer relief made him look younger and less worn. “It’s good to see you too.”
The armored Asgardian troops arranged themselves in a half-circle around the little rise, the edges of their round shields overlapping in the front rank and their spears held upright, the archers behind them. They were mostly men with a few women, more of the latter among the archers than those in heavy armor. After a moment’s confusion Natasha realized that Sif – whom she remembered from some of Coulson’s SHIELD reports – must have brought the Asgardian garrison from Vanaheim, the bulk of whom would have been soldiers rather than the civilians in New Asgard. The ones in armor were einherjar; the archers were ulfhednar.
Sif nodded a greeting to Natasha and said politely, “I’m Lady Sif of Asgard.”
“Natasha Romanoff.”
“I remember you from Thor’s tales,” Sif said, which made Loki roll his eyes. She elbowed him familiarly in the ribs and added, “There had better be a good explanation for this.”
“I’m quite eager for one myself – oh, you mean about me being king.”
“I was thinking more about the fact that you were supposed to be dead –”
Loki sniffed derisively. “Literally half the universe has been dead, I’m not special.”
“Before that, Loki, you were dead before that.”
Whatever he might have replied to that was lost as another door swung open between the worlds, this one in the open space between the Asgardian position and the left flank of Thanos’s battle line. The leaders of the new force were on horseback – a man and woman in lamellar cuirasses that reminded Natasha of samurai armor, bright with lacquer and braided silk – and the soldiers that followed them onto the battlefield were a mixture of infantry and cavalry, all in the same kind of armor, though less elaborate. The two riders looked in Loki’s direction, and he dipped his head briefly to them in acknowledgment, a gesture both returned before they turned their attention to their own troops.
“The Vanir,” he explained to Natasha. “Those are the twins Frey and Freyja of the Ruling Triumvirate – Frey was taken in the culling. Freyja has spent the last five years claiming that he was speaking through her so she and Idunn never actually appointed a new member of the Triumvirate, but it was funny that Frey never seemed to disagree with Freyja when they voted.”
“Of course they wouldn’t come through with us,” Sif muttered, and the corner of Loki’s mouth quirked very slightly.
Another door opened on the far side of the battlefield and even from this distance Natasha felt the blast of cold that followed. From this angle she could clearly see icy cliffs and broken tracts of snowy plain through the portal as dozens of blue-skinned humanoid figures came out. They were near-naked, twice again as large as a human, and Natasha saw both Loki and Sif twitch a little in surprise at their arrival. The Asgardian troops beneath the hill tensed, wary at the arrival of what Natasha guessed had to be an old enemy.
“Frost giants – Jotuns,” Sif said before she could ask.
Natasha shot a glance at Loki, whose mouth was tight.
“Well, you did call on them,” Sif said to him.
“I didn’t expect them to actually turn up,” he protested. “Not for me.”
I tried to blow up the planet, Natasha remembered him saying, and I have both met and killed my blood-father. She could see why he was surprised.
Another door swung open, near enough to the frost giants that the wave of heat that followed melted some of the ice that was spreading out from where the frost giants had arrayed themselves. Those nearest turned and shook massive clubs and spears of bone and ice at the new arrivals – flickering figures of flame and shadow, squat troll-like beings (actually, maybe they really were trolls), and what Natasha was fairly certain were, in fact, dragons. Among the mismatched group were more humanoids as big as the frost giants, but whose skin seemed to be made of lava-like red and black.
“Fire giants?” she guessed, remembering Loki’s old lectures on the other realms in Yggdrasil. He and Sif both nodded. The Asgardian troops didn’t seem any happier about the arrival of the fire giants than they had the frost giants.
“Didn’t expect them to show up either,” Loki admitted.
“Who were you expecting to show up?” Sif demanded. “Besides us?”
“Nidavellir, maybe. Vanaheim and Alfheim, perhaps, if only to get some satisfaction out of Asgard begging for help. Honestly, I wasn’t certain that you would come; the expatriates on Vanaheim have barely paid lip service to my rule and the last time you saw me you threatened to kill me.” He cast an anxious eye around the battlefield, clearly aware that two of the realms he had just named hadn’t appeared yet.
“Loki, everyone you know has threatened to kill you at some point,” Sif said.
“I have,” Natasha agreed.
Sif grinned at her. “See?”
Loki rolled his eyes. “I prefer to think of the death threats as part of my charm.”
The next two portals opened almost simultaneously, one between the Asgardian position and the rest of Earth’s battle-array, and the other nearer the positions of the ice and frost giants. Sif and Loki both winced when they recognized the beings who emerged from the latter – humanoid figures of a variety of colors and sizes, some riding on what looked like horses or deer, others astride alarmingly large tigers, bears, and other animals, some recognizable, some unfamiliar. Still more flew through the portal on wings that rivaled Sam’s, bat-like or feathered, or rode winged horses. Their leader seemed to be what Natasha thought was a woman in a chariot drawn by a pair of polar bears.
“Light Elves,” Loki said. “Several of those tribes have been in vendetta with each other for generations,” he added warily, and rubbed at his cheek.
Sif smirked at him. “Fond memories?”
“Oh, shut up.”
The beings nearer them were as massive as the giants, but more thickly built – bearded men and stocky women whom Natasha identified immediately as dwarves despite their sizes; she had heard about them from Loki. The dwarf who had stepped through the portal first clashed massive metal fists together with a sound like thunder and grinned wolfishly through a tangle of dark beard. “Loki!” he shouted. “I thank you for my vengeance!”
“My honor in thanks for your coming, King Eitri,” Loki called back. “I – who’s that?” There was the gleam of another portal opening, far nearer Thanos’s troops than any others; Natasha couldn’t see who it was that came through.
Sif seemed to be counting in her head and said disbelievingly, “Niflheim?”
“Oh,” Loki said faintly. “That could be – that feels like a problem for if we survive all this, actually.”
“What’s wrong with Niflheim?” Natasha asked, since that sounded alarming.
“It’s a prison realm,” Sif explained. “No one goes there willingly, and no one ever leaves. There are beings who have been imprisoned there for millennia. There are stories that some have been there for so long that their names have been forgotten.”
“Honestly, I’m just relieved I didn’t end up there,” Loki said.
Sif shot a sideways glance at him. “Well, you’re Odin’s son.”
Loki made a pained face. “I hope there’s not another secret family member there and that’s why he didn’t send me or Hela there. Or Thor, when he was banished.”
He and Sif contemplated that silently and then both grimaced.
“Well, that’s definitely a problem for if we survive this,” Loki said brightly. “Which is not a given.” He leaned heavily on Mistilteinn for a moment longer, looking around the battlefield. His face was still badly bruised where Thanos had struck him and there was a cut slowly leaking blood high up on his forehead, just below the band of his broken-horned headpiece. Natasha had never figured out exactly how Asgardian regeneration worked when he wasn’t actively using his magic to help it along, but she suspected that in this particular case he had pushed most of his healing abilities towards his dislocated jaw and let the small stuff go.
Loki looked over at Thor and the Valkyrie again, as if to reassure himself of their presence, then let his gaze travel over the battlefield. The arrival of the other residents of the Nine Realms had added, at Natasha’s best estimate, somewhere between a thousand and two thousand other combatants – presumably everyone who could be rallied in whatever limited time Loki’s spell had given them. She could tell that time was still – odd was the best way she could think of it. She wasn’t certain what Loki had done, except that when she looked at Thanos he was still moving in slow motion, reacting to that initial horn-blow. The defenders of Earth were still looking in consternation up at the rise where she, Loki, and Sif stood, only a few of the beginning to turn towards the places where the portals to the other realms of Yggdrasil had opened. As if they had seen it all unfold, but been unable to react in real time – or at least what had felt to Natasha like real time.
Loki dropped his head briefly, breathing hard, then looked up again. “All right,” he said. “I believe our dance card’s full.”
Natasha quirked an eyebrow at him. “Time to get the party started, then.”
“Indeed.” Loki took a deep breath, then slammed Mistilteinn’s butt against the ground.
Reality snapped back around her like a punch to the face, leaving Natasha gasping for breath. Loki staggered and caught himself on Mistilteinn as Sif reached to steady him. The other Asgardian looked fairly shaken herself.
“That was a great deal of magic,” Loki said, his hands white-knuckled on the polearm’s shaft as he dragged himself upright. “Most of it not coming from me, fortunately, just…channeled.”
He took a deep breath, then tossed his hair back with a clatter of metal beads and straightened up to his full height, a thin gleam of sunlight glinting off the gold on his remaining horn and his battered green cape snapping in the sudden breeze. He was grinning now, sharp and vicious and full of teeth, but there was nothing of the cruelty that Natasha remembered from the helicarrier. She thought that Thanos must have been able to see it, from the way he pointed his double-bladed sword at Loki.
Loki smirked at him, then deliberately turned aside and looked for Steve. They exchanged a nod, a little bit of relief showing on Steve’s face, then Loki’s gaze moved to Thor. Both brothers were smiling berserker grins, near-identical and battle-hungry.
Scale mail crawled up Thor’s bare arms as he thrust his borrowed sword upwards, his familiar red cape suddenly flowing back from his shoulders. Thunder rumbled and lightning cracked across the sky and he shouted, “Asgard! The gods walk the battlefields alongside humankind once more!”
Loki’s voice met and matched his as he tossed Mistilteinn up and caught it, holding the polearm aloft over his head. “Make peace with your mortality, for the gates of Valhalla stand open!” he cried. “And the sons of Odin go to war!”
Notes:
While I know in the comics "Frigga" and "Freyja" are used more-or-less interchangeably, I wanted to keep Freyja distinct from Frigga here and slightly closer to the mythological Freyja (who is sometimes syncretized with Frigg, but that they're the same goddess is hardly a given). (If it wasn't evident from the bit about the Varian disaster in the previous chapter, IRL I am a classical and early medieval historian.)
As for the peoples of the Nine Realms, much like the MCU, I use the comics solely for what I find interesting or useful and otherwise do my own thing as makes sense for my purposes and amuses me.
Chapter 5: Jörmungrund
Chapter Text
You’re a spy, not a soldier, Clint had told her years ago. Now you want to wade into a war? Why? What did Loki do to you?
Natasha hadn’t said as much to him at the time, but it was the same thing then as now. An alien had walked through a door in space-time, killed her people, and then come back with an army. As far as she was concerned, that made things real simple, not as complicated as Clint seemed to think it should be. Not everything had to be shades of gray. Some things really were black and white.
“Is that him?” Sif asked Loki quietly, jerking her chin towards Thanos. Even at this distance he was hard to miss.
“That’s him.”
Natasha looked over to see a muscle work in Loki’s jaw. Sif glanced at him in time to see it too. For an instant the other woman’s face did something complicated – you didn’t have to be a spy to guess that the two of them had history – but all she said was, “Tactics?”
“Straight up the middle.” He wasn’t looking at either of them. “Overwhelm his opponents. Apparently he used to have a brilliant strategical mind, but that was centuries ago and he hasn’t needed to use it once his forces became strong enough. He doesn’t care how many people live or die, after all – in fact, the more the better, even among his own forces. He has more.”
“I thought he only killed half,” Natasha said.
“Of the survivors. If he’s in a good mood.” Loki’s voice was so thick with self-loathing that it made Natasha wince and Sif look worried. “He killed everyone on the Statesman but me – or thought he did, at least. He killed all the dwarves but Eitri when he ransacked the Nidavellir forge ring.”
“The forge ring’s gone?” Sif said, startled.
“He extinguished the star.”
“You seem to know a great deal about him,” Sif said, her voice so low that the only people who could hear her were Loki and Natasha, not the Asgardian troops arrayed beneath the rise.
Loki nodded. Almost as an apology, he said, “I have red in my ledger,” which made Sif look confused and Natasha smile wryly. “Does that change anything?”
Sif thought about it, but not for long. “Not a damn thing.” Louder: “Do you want to call it or shall I?”
“You’re the goddess of war; there will be time enough for mischief once the fighting starts,” Loki said, relaxing slightly. “Unless I’m much mistaken, you also have more recent experience with set-piece battles than I do. And the Vanaheim garrison will listen to you.”
“Mmm.” Sif didn’t argue. Her gaze flickered consideringly over the various forces arrayed on the battlefield, then she shook her head. “I wish we could coordinate this. Even with the rest of our people –”
“The only soldiers over there are the Valkyrie and Thor and a few of the einherjar and ulfhednar who came to New Asgard from the Vanaheim garrison.” Loki’s voice hitched slightly on his brother’s name. “Everyone else is whoever we could get off Asgard before Ragnarok. None of the einherjar from Asgard survived.”
“Mmm – wait, did you say Valkyrie?” She jerked around to stare at the white-armored figure who stood beside Thor, her blue cloak snapping behind her.
Loki grinned in genuine amusement. “You’d be surprised who you run into when you leave the Nine.”
“We had better survive this,” Sif muttered, then raised her voice and called, “Bows!”
Natasha had expected only the ulfhednar to respond, but instead light rippled off the shining tips of nearly two hundred spear points as the einherjar all grounded their spears beside them, swung their shields over their backs, then reached to pull something off their belts. Loki and Sif did the same, green magic glimmering on Loki’s fingertips as he did so. Two hundred longbows snapped into existence with a sound like a cracking whip as they extended from whatever mechanism the Asgardian soldiers used – like Clint’s extendable bow, presumably, except these weapons were gold-gleaming and strung with what looked like silver, the tips capped with ivory. The ulfhednar already had their recurve bows in hand.
“Don’t be offended,” Loki said politely to Natasha when she opened her mouth to say that she could shoot; no one who was friends with Clint Barton escaped a lesson or two. “But you’d be overbowed with these.”
“Fair enough,” Natasha admitted. She let her gaze travel over the battleground again, watching the other forces from Yggdrasil. Most of them seemed to have ranged weapons as well – six-foot longbows like Japanese yumi among the Vanir, crossbows and some kind of artillery among the dwarves, a mixture of bows and guns among the Alfheim contingent. She couldn’t see what the fire giant and frost giant contingents had, but they seemed to have something; she could see the flurries of movement from here.
Clint would have loved it.
Where the hell are you, Barton? she thought. He had to be alive. He had to be.
At another barked order from Sif, part of the Asgardian line picked up their spears again and pivoted like a hinge until they were no longer ringing the rise where Sif, Loki, and Natasha stood. They stood in ranks three-deep, at an off-angle from Thanos’s forces. Natasha watched the other alien forces doing the same, until there were six blocks of archers – or whatever – arranged to form a V facing Thanos, creating a gauntlet that his troops would have to pass before they could get to Earth’s defenders. To confirm her suspicions, she glanced over her shoulder at the mixed up ranks of Avengers, sorcerers, Wakandan troops, Asgardian warriors, and Ravagers, some of whom looked slightly confused by this maneuver. Steve and T’Challa had realized what the Yggdrasil forces were doing, though, and were both barking orders, rearranging whichever of Earth’s forces were actually inclined to listen to them – not a given, Natasha saw with a combination of amusement and annoyance. Humans weren’t good at taking orders, especially not from someone they saw as an outsider.
“God, I wish I had my comms,” she muttered to Loki.
He nodded and started to say something, but Sif snapped, “Heads up!” and they both turned to face the battlefield. Natasha also glanced up, taking her at her word, and wasn’t particularly pleased with what she saw there. She had really never wanted to see Chitauri leviathans again. But hey, at least they had dragons on their side this time, lurking huge and dark on the other side of the battlefield.
Thanos, who had watched the forces of Yggdrasil arrive with something like disbelief at their presence and amusement at Loki’s desperation, seemed to have come to a decision. He pointed his double-bladed sword at the center of the gauntlet, at what might have seemed like a clear path to Steve and the rest of the Avengers – if you ignored the thousand or so alien archers lining it. His forces began to rearrange themselves.
“He’s not this stupid,” Sif said disbelievingly, her gaze fixed on the enemy.
“Stupid? No.” Loki’s gaze was fixed on Thanos. “War’s different outside the Nine, Sif. When we fight, it’s a straight-up fight, a set-piece battle like this one. Out there – they fight in the air, in space, in small groups, door to door or in ambushes. Like most wars on this realm in the past seven decades or so.” He glanced at Natasha, who nodded in response. “Most of the time in the Nine when we fight it’s a slugging match on the ground. And we’re very, very good at it, but we haven’t fought anyone outside Yggdrasil in a long, long time – longer than you or I have been alive. Thanos fights on the ground by choice. He has to – that’s how he kills. But beyond the Nine most people don’t know how to fight that way anymore. They think of themselves as having evolved beyond it. It’s why his forces were so thrown in Wakanda.”
“That was thrown?” Natasha said.
“Oh, yes. Usually his forces simply overwhelm whoever attempts to stand in their way.”
Sif scoffed. “What happens when people fight him, then?”
“They die,” Loki said. “In confusion and terror. I’ve seen it.” His jaw worked. “I’ve been party to it.”
Natasha and Sif both looked at him; his gaze was on Thanos, his fingers shifting restlessly on the handgrip of the bow he was holding.
“You’re not talking about New York,” Natasha said after a moment.
He didn’t answer for what felt like a long time but was likely only a handful of heartbeats. Eventually, he said, “I have, perhaps, too much red in my ledger to wipe out.”
Natasha glanced at him, studying his familiar features. He was looking away from her, his gaze fixed on Thanos. “It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “I used to think it did, but – none of it, what we did then, what we do now – you can’t tally it up so that one column cancels out the other. You just do what you can.”
He finally looked at her, then nodded, unspeaking.
“Loki, I’m very happy that you’ve finally made a friend you have something in common with,” Sif said, her gaze on the approaching army, “but maybe you could bond another time, because we need to kill your former liege lord now.”
That got a sarcastic glare from Loki. “Well, Lady Sif, whenever you’re ready,” he said. “I certainly have nothing better to do just now. And I would hardly call him my liege lord since that implies a few things that are manifestly not true.”
Sif frowned at him briefly, then nodded at whatever she saw in his face and said, “Sorry.”
Loki looked startled at the apology. “Thank you,” he said after a moment.
“Well, you’ll have your vengeance soon enough,” Sif said.
There was a low rumble that Natasha could feel through the soles of her boots as much as hear. It grew steadily more intense as the army of aliens approached – Chitauri skiffs and leviathans in the air, Outriders and other creatures racing over the shockingly small stretch of open ground that separated them from the allied forces. Pebbles bounced, the earth shaking beneath their approach. Natasha licked her lips, feeling exposed and vulnerable in the face of their relentless advance despite the Asgardian troops around her. Loki was a reassuring solidity to her left; at least there was one other Avenger here with her, not just strangers.
Sif’s shoulders shifted a little in eagerness for the coming fight, but her gaze was calmly intent. She stooped briefly and put her hand to the scrum of dirt and rubble they were standing on, then brought a clod of something that was probably mostly dirt to her lips and kissed it. When she stood again, she said, “Earth must be fed.”
“Earth must be fed,” Loki and the mass of Asgardian warriors echoed, harsh with sincerity, many of them touching their fingers to their lips in turn.
They meant something different by Earth than Natasha did when she talked about her planet, something different than merely Midgard. Primordial earth, where Asgardians believed the roots of the World Tree were watered by its three great wells. It made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Loki was one thing, Thor another; they were – at this point – normal. But this wasn’t just Loki or Thor; this was Asgard. This was what had made them.
“Draw!” Sif’s voice snapped out.
Like one massive organism, two hundred odd Asgardians drew back the silver bowstrings on their longbows or recurve bows. As they did so, energy hummed and light glittered suddenly all around Natasha as bolts of energy appeared on the bowstrings – no physical arrows.
“Right,” she said out loud. “Aliens.”
“Gods,” Loki said kindly without looking at her. He had drawn with the rest of the Asgardians, his right hand back past his ear and the ivory-tipped longbow curved into a C.
Since she couldn’t do anything just now, Natasha looked across the battlefield. The Vanir had drawn their six-foot longbows too – like the yumi they resembled the huge bows had their grips about two-thirds of the way down the shaft, rather than centered like the Asgardian bows. The Light Elves, across from them in the gauntlet the Yggdrasil troops had made, had done the same.
She was close enough to hear the Vanir order ring out, though she couldn’t make out the words. Natasha knew the sound of a bowstring snapping against an archer’s bracer – but not the sound of hundreds of them all at once. Arrows – and bullets from some of the Light Elves – arced out from the Vanir and Light Elf positions like a pair of dark clouds, a shrill, high-pitched whistling sound that she wasn’t unfamiliar with, except that she had never heard it en masse before.
“Loose!” Sif’s voice cracked out.
Bowstrings snapped all around her. It was light that leapt up from the Asgardian bows, rather than physical arrows, like a meteor shower; the Asgardians were already drawing again before the first bolts had struck, sending another shimmering wave of energy into the air, then a third or a fourth – a relentless, unceasing ripple of motion that made Natasha’s all-too-human eyes ache. She couldn’t see what kind of weapons the frost giants on the other side of the gauntlet had, not with the star-bright glitter of the Asgardian arrows half-blinding her.
Outriders, Chitauri, and other aliens she didn’t recognize went down as if they had struck a wall. Those following scrambled over them, screeching the whole time; Natasha could feel the tread of their passage under her feet, the earth shaking as Thanos’s army came on relentlessly. Still arrows and other missiles lashed out, until Sif shouted an order and the front three ranks of the einherjar deactivated their longbows and took up their spears again.
“Shield wall!” Sif yelled, her voice a clear soprano that carried over the sound of screaming Outriders and Chitauri and the relentless snap-snap-snap of the archers who were still shooting, Loki and the ulfhednar among them.
The first rank of einherjar went to one knee, round shields coming up in front of them; the second rank’s shields went over those to form a wall studded with the sharp-gleaming points of their spears.
“We are the Aesir who saw our folk slaughtered by the living dead in our own land,” Loki said, the words undercut by the snap of bowstrings all around them. “We are the Aesir who saw Asgard burn. We are the Aesir who saw our folk massacred by a monster who sought nothing but destruction. We are the Aesir who saw the universe halved in a culling it has never seen before and will never see again. We are the Aesir who saw Ragnarok come and go and have lived on borrowed time past the end of days twice over.” He crouched and lifted a clod of earth to his lips in the same gesture Sif had used a few moments earlier. “Earth must be fed,” he said, “and it feasts on gods’ blood today.” He stood again, his fingers moving restlessly over the handgrip on his longbow. “And Titan’s blood.”
His voice rose, as heady and rich as fine wine. “Our kin are even now pouring out the grave-ale in the great hall where the brave live forever!” he cried. “If we fall, we go to feast with our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, our sisters, and the line of our people back to the beginning of time!”
“Hail to the Æsir!” Sif shouted.
“Hail!”
“Hail to the Ásynjur!” Loki shouted.
“Hail!”
Loki threw back his head with a clatter of metal hair-beads and a ululating hawk-screech of triumph. “Allfather Odin! Your son calls you, god to god, king to king, Allfather to Allfather! Some of our folk will greet you in Valhalla this day! I bid you welcome them beyond the great gates which even the divine Aesir pass but once! If I see you this day, I ask that you remember me kindly, for I and my folk come as warriors of Asgard! Hail!”
“Hail!”
Natasha’s skin prickled even as she unholstered her remaining pistol and clicked the safety off. By now she had known Loki for years – had fought with him, drunk with him, laughed with him, mourned with him. He had never felt as far away and alien as he did now, drunk on battle-fury and the sheer vicious fanaticism of utter belief. It left her small and human and very alone.
You and your brother Thor came to Earth to walk amongst the last of the Norsemen and drive them into battle, the Ancient One had said only a few hours before, and Loki had never denied his participation, just its extent.
Natasha could see it now in his wild-eyed fervor, the way she had seen it during the Battle of Wakanda when he had cut a killing swathe across the battlefield, reaping Outriders like a harvester reaped wheat.
What do the gods worship? Themselves, and their kin who came before.
There were shouts of agreement from the other Asgardians and a few cries of, “Valhalla, I am coming!” but Natasha thought most of the einherjar were a little shocked by the sincerity of Loki’s words. Even Sif glanced at him sidelong for an instant. Loki didn’t seem to see it, breathing hard and with his teeth showing in a wolf’s grin as he drew and shot, over and over again with a trained archer’s discipline.
These were not the Asgardians who had come with Loki to Earth, the folk of New Asgard who had seen him fight and bleed and mourn with them. Natasha knew those Asgardians as well as any human on Earth did; she knew that they loved Loki with the unyielding fervor of a people towards a ruler who had brought them alive out of hell and suffered every loss with them. But these weren’t those Asgardians. These were the Asgardians of Vanaheim, the Asgardians who after the Snap had turned their backs on New Asgard with polite disbelief for their kinfolk’s tales of Ragnarok and what had come after, or the snapped and returned Asgardians of the Vanaheim garrison whose last memory of Loki had been as the traitorous second prince.
New Asgard would have stood with Loki without so much as a heartbeat of hesitation. Natasha wasn’t entirely certain that these Asgardians would.
She had a heartbeat to worry at that thought before the first of the Outriders reached them.
They hit the Asgardian shield wall and bounced, screaming with rage the whole time. Even far back from the front Natasha staggered back from the impact as the ranks of einherjar flexed but held the line. Energy flared where the Outriders struck the surface of the shields – there was something other than merely metal there, apparently, and dozens went down on the spear-points of the einherjar as the warriors jabbed and thrust between the gaps of the shield wall. Loki, Sif, and the rear ranks of the ulfhednar and einherjar continued to rain arrows – or whatever – down on the Outriders as the aliens flung themselves still screaming at the Asgardians. Natasha raised her pistol, picked her target, and fired.
She could see Outriders and other aliens racing past the Asgardian redoubt, but didn’t have time to pay attention to them other than a vague worry for the Avengers and the rest of Earth’s defenders. Heedless of the dead piling up beyond the Asgardian line, Outriders continued to throw themselves at the Asgardians the same way they had done with the barrier in Wakanda. Then –
“Loki!” she shouted, and saw his gaze flicker towards her, though the smooth, repetitive motion of his shooting didn’t even hesitate. “They’re using the corpses as a ramp!”
The mass of dead Outriders – and a few Asgardians – made it more difficult for the first ranks of the einherjar to maneuver. Outriders were clawing their way up the piles of their dead companions to launch themselves onto the Asgardians from above, where the archers couldn’t shoot them without potentially hitting their own people.
Loki flicked his wrist and deactivated the bow until it was just the handgrip again, then made it vanish with a flicker of green light. “Sif!” he yelled as Natasha picked off two more Outriders with her pistol, then had to pause to eject the spent clip and slap a new one in.
She deactivated her bow when she saw the indicated danger and pulled her sword and shield off her back, shouting orders to the einherjar. There was a ripple of motion as the remaining archers among them deactivated their bows and took up their spears and shields.
Loki stood still for a moment, his gaze briefly considering as he took in the situation. The rear ranks of the einherjar had swung their shields up over their heads, studded with spear-points in the handful of gaps created by the interlocking rounds of metal and spellcraft. The spears were doing the work of keeping the Outriders from completely swarming the Asgardians as they flung themselves from the heap of corpses onto the top of the Asgardian position, screaming as their bare flesh struck the shields and burned against the energy – or magic – that made the metal flare white.
Loki shouted an order and the spear-points dropped down, the shields coming together to cover the gaps. Sif glanced at him, frowning, as Loki raised his arms crosswise in front of him, then brought them down to either side in a swift chopping motion.
Green fire rolled out over the top of the shield wall, turning Outriders to ash in the time it took Natasha to breathe in and out again. Then Loki leapt, Mistilteinn flashing in his hand and his torn green cloak a banner behind him, and ran over the tops of the shields to throw himself down into the mass of Outriders still charging the Asgardians.
“Oh, fu –” Sif screamed, the words lost in Loki’s hawk-screech of challenge. “What are we, six hundred again?” she shrieked after Loki, but she was already following him. “Ulfhednar, with me! Protect the prince – protect the king!”
The rangers flowed to either side of the mass of armored einherjar rather than over them, most still shooting, a few casing their bows in favor of their short swords and wolf’s head shields.
Natasha judged her moment, then leapt after Sif and Loki. The tops of the einherjar’s shields were oddly hot beneath her boot-soles, but didn’t burn her. When she reached the final rank, she looked down at the bemused Asgardian face that peered up around the edge of the shield, dark-skinned beneath the golden helmet.
“Give me a boost?”
The woman grinned. Natasha braced herself as the Asgardian flung her upwards into the air, angling her shield to send Natasha over the Outriders to Loki and Sif.
For a long moment she hung suspended, her trained mind taking in the sudden bird’s eye view her height gave her. The battlefield had dissolved into a mass killing ground, clumps of aliens from both sides fighting. Up above her, a pair of dragons, one ice-white and one the deep black-flecked red of lava, closed on a Chitauri leviathan, bugling war-cries; more Chitauri were leaping from skiffs or other leviathans as they swarmed Iron Man and Rescue, who were back to back in mid-air, War Machine fighting his way through the mass of screaming aliens to get to them and the Hulkbuster on the ground below with Chitauri crawling over him. After New York, Natasha supposed it made sense that the Chitauri hated Iron Man – and by extension, any suit of armor that looked like him – more than anyone else here.
Varicolored bursts of energy marked T’Challa’s and Shuri’s positions – the siblings were keeping close to each other, with most of the Dora Milaje and a number of other Wakandans around them. Glittering circles of magic indicated the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj. She couldn’t spot Steve, but he had still been in the stealth suit, which wasn’t as eye-catching as his old uniform. Lightning boiled like a pot on the stove; there was no question about where Thor was, and presumably the Valkyrie and the other Asgardians with him trying to make their way to Loki and the rest of their people.
Natasha took in all of this in the instant before she was hurtling downwards again, firing her last three bullets as she did and putting each one through the brainpan of an Outrider. She landed in a roll not far from Sif and Loki, and came up on one knee, sweeping her batons out of their harness. She put one into the throat of the first Outrider to charge her, shrieking like a banshee; an Asgardian arrow took the next Outrider that came towards her.
Natasha hadn’t particularly enjoyed fighting Outriders the first time she had done it.
She snapped her batons together into their staff configuration the first chance she had during a brief lull of no more than a few seconds, wanting the extra reach it would give her. She didn’t have superstrength, superpowers, or a suit of any kind. All she had was her training and her horribly fragile human body, which she intended to keep intact as long as possible.
The world dissolved into a splintered chaos of violence and bloodshed. Natasha was aware, in a distant sort of way, that Loki had fought his way over to her and Sif had followed him. Light flickered continuously at the edges of her vision – Asgardian arrows, Asgardian shields. Now and then the blades of swords or speared flared bright as well, which part of her mind automatically catalogued to ask Loki about later. Very occasionally she saw a flash of green-gold: Loki’s magic, which she knew he didn’t prefer to use in combat except as a last resort.
Now and then a shield went down alongside her to knock back someone’s energy bolt – a round einherjar or ulfhednar shield, or Sif’s kite-shaped buckler. There were Chitauri among the Outriders now, uncomfortably familiar, Chitauri and other aliens she didn’t recognize. The torn-up earth and rubble of the Avengers compound was turning to mud beneath her boot-soles, watered by alien blood, Asgardian and Outrider alike. Human too, undoubtedly, elsewhere on the battlefield, but Natasha hadn’t seen another human face since the fighting had started.
There was one of those brief lulls in the battle that she had gotten used to and Natasha braced the end of her staff in the mud to lean on, breathing hard. Directly in front of her, an Asgardian soldier took the head off an Outrider with one sword-stroke, only for two more to fall on him with ravening jaws and clawed hands outstretched. Teeth and claws scored across his golden armor and shredded his yellow cloak as the Asgardian turned and struck one across the face with his shield; an gleaming arrow took the other through its eye. To her left Loki and Sif were killing one of the Chitauri beasts that Natasha had silently dubbed “gorillas,” since that was what they most resembled, at least as they resembled anything of Earth at all; to her right a trio of einherjar and a pair of ulfhednar were keeping more Outriders back, the shrieking aliens bouncing off the einherjar’s shields and spears as the ulfhednar loosed and drew and loosed again. Above them winged figures – Light Elves – chased Chitauri skiffs and leviathans, some with bows or gun-like weapons, others with swords or bare hands.
There was blood in her mouth. It must have been hers, because it had the bright coppery taste of new pennies, and when Natasha swiped her tongue over her lips she winced at the sharp stab of a fresh cut she couldn’t remember receiving. She wanted to do nothing so much as lie down and take a nap.
She shot another Outrider in the face with her widow’s bites instead, which sent it reeling for an instant before Natasha dragged herself up and walloped it with her staff. Another Outrider came at her and she put her staff into what was probably its solar plexus, which didn’t have the effect she had been hoping for. The Outrider grabbed her staff with its first front four hands and dragged it out of Natasha’s grip. She threw herself into a roll as it swiped at her, just barely missing having her head taken off, and nearly stabbed herself on the sword still held by a dead Asgardian. She grabbed the wolf’s head shield from the dead man’s grip instead and barely got it up between herself and the Outrider.
Its claws scored the shield’s surface, forcing her back down against the corpse. Natasha curled her legs up and did her best to kick the Outrider in the chest, which had about as much effect as kicking a brick wall. She didn’t the raw strength to push him off even for the few instants it would take to get a hand out from behind the shield so that she could use her widow’s bites or a knife on the Outrider. It kept pushing her back down, screaming as she shoved the shield up against its ravening mouth.
Natasha Romanoff wasn’t too proud to ask for help. She filled her lungs as best she could and yelled, “Loki!”
She had no idea if he heard her, just curled herself up beneath the shield and kept trying to push the Outrider off her. It didn’t seem to be smart enough to realize that it could have dragged her out by her legs, at least. It kept clawing and gnawing at the shield, shoving her against the dead man, its ravening screams and the screeching of its claws against the shield filling her whole world –
Until all at once it was gone. Natasha didn’t even register the gunshots until after the Outrider had fallen heavily on top of her.
She shoved at it with the shield, but death hadn’t made it any lighter or more amenable. She had a moment of fear with its weight on top of her, cutting off her ability to breathe, before someone pulled the corpse off of her. Natasha forced the shield down from her face, breathing hard, and saw Loki toss the Outrider’s body aside one-handed on one side of her and Yelena peering worriedly down at her from the other.
“Thanks,” she gasped, taking Yelena’s hand when her sister holstered her gun and reached down to haul her to her feet. Then Natasha blinked and stared at her. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, everything was crazy when everyone who got snapped started coming back, and then this wizard showed up and –” Yelena made a circling gesture with one hand, “– and he said, ‘Come with me if you want your sister to live,’ and –”
“He said what?” Natasha said, appalled.
“– and I wasn’t really doing anything so I thought, you know, why not, and this might be the coolest thing you’ve ever done.”
“So this is the sister,” Loki observed dryly; Natasha vaguely remembered telling him about Yelena one of the times when they had both been drunk in Wakanda after the Snap five years ago.
Yelena gave him an unimpressed look.
“I’m Loki,” he said helpfully. “I –”
“I know who you are,” Yelena said. “I saw that YouTube video where you and Captain America read all those thirst tweets. That was funny.”
Natasha put her head in her hands, ignoring the fact that they were covered in mud and blood and worse things. “Oh my god.”
Loki pointed at Natasha. “It was her idea and that is why she no longer handles New Asgard’s PR.”
“Hey, it was part of that Disney World press tour, we all had to do it,” Natasha said. “You’re an Avenger, so you had to do it too. Don’t blame me; you shouldn’t have agreed to the interview.” She slid the Asgardian shield onto her arm after checking that the straps were still intact, then picked up the dead Asgardian’s sword, since she had no idea where her staff had gone.
“I don’t think that was in any of the paperwork I signed when your government allowed me to remain on this planet,” Loki said.
“Should have read the fine print,” Natasha said.
“I do read things before I –”
Natasha didn’t see what struck him, just that all of a sudden he went flying. He landed in a roll amid a tangle of green cloak and came to a stop against the feet of a tall, horned alien figure who kicked him over onto his back. Proxima Midnight put the tips of her trident against Loki’s chest and smiled down at him.
“Hello, little brother.”
“Oh, shit,” Natasha said, putting out the arm with the Asgardian shield on it to try and keep Yelena behind her, for what little good that did. Yelena ignored her outstretched arm and stepped up beside her instead, unholstering her pistol again.
Sif was still on her feet, backing warily up towards Loki with her sword raised over the protection of her shield, but Natasha couldn’t see any other Asgardians. The only other people standing around them were the members of the Black Order, Cull Obsidian reeling his chain hammer back up. There were other aliens with them, a mixture of species that surrounded the two Asgardians and two humans still left alive. At a gesture from Ebony Maw, they all turned their backs. From beyond them, Natasha could still hear the sounds of fighting – Asgardian battle cries, so at least the Black Order hadn’t slaughtered all of Loki’s people on the way to get to him.
“Oh,” Loki said. “It’s you.”
His gaze went sideways towards Mistilteinn, which lay where he had dropped it when Obsidian’s weapon had sent him flying, then he put his hands up to show Proxima that they were empty before pushing himself up to a sitting position.
“Who’re these guys?” Yelena demanded, though she was canny enough to keep her voice low enough for Natasha’s ears alone.
“Bad guys,” Natasha said.
“No shit.”
“Loki,” Sif said warily.
He put one hand up to silence her, which she regarded with an annoyed expression. Her gaze flickered quickly to Natasha and Yelena, marking their position, before it returned to moving restlessly between the four members of the Black Order, never resting on any of them for more than a few seconds.
Proxima reached down and hauled Loki to his feet with a hand around his throat, then sent him stumbling backwards before he regained his balance. “We’ve missed you,” she said.
“Then you should have been looking harder,” he said. “I wasn’t that hard to find.”
Proxima spun her trident around in her hands as Loki took a wary step back from her. “All those months you swore you would never go back to Asgard, to the Nine Realms.”
“Well,” Loki said, “perhaps if your master had listened to me, we wouldn’t be here now.” His gaze went unwillingly to Sif again. She wasn’t looking at him, her attention on the enemy, but Natasha could tell from the set of her shoulders that she was listening intently.
Loki swallowed and went on, “But he just had to have his way, didn’t he?”
There was something oddly bitter in Proxima’s voice as she said, “He always does.” She moved towards him and Loki took another step back, trying to angle himself closer to Mistilteinn. “You betrayed us. You ran back to Asgard the first chance you had, after all of your lies –”
“I lie to everyone. You’re not special.” A muscle worked in Loki’s jaw. “And I would hardly call being dragged to the dungeons in chains ‘running back to Asgard.’”
“Excuses, excuses. Pathetic. As always.”
“You sang a different song once upon a time, Proxima,” Loki said.
“You were moderately interesting once upon a time, little brother,” she said, dragging the tip of her trident across the blood-soaked ground as she moved towards him. “You should have stayed that way. You were…efficient. Flashy, but efficient.”
“Well, I didn’t have a choice, did I?” Loki said through clenched teeth. “Your master wanted the Tesseract more than he wanted another child and once he found out who I was –” He stopped, breathing hard.
“Excuses again.”
“Perhaps.” His gaze flicked sideways to Sif; he was clearly unhappy about letting his childhood friend hear any of this. Natasha doubted that he was particularly pleased about Natasha or Yelena hearing it either, but they at least had this in common with him, no matter how much the details differed. She wouldn’t have been any happier letting Steve or Bruce hear Dreykov spill all the unpleasant details of her past.
Sif didn’t look at him. She glanced at Natasha and Yelena instead, her expression clearly asking if the two of them together could handle the Black Order member nearest them. It happened to be Corvus Glaive, whom Natasha had already tangled with and beat once – albeit with Steve and Sam there to back her up – so she felt confident in her response. She wished she had a weapon she was a little more familiar with than a sword for it, but it wasn’t like she didn’t know how to use one. She nodded slightly in response to Sif’s questioning look and nudged Yelena slightly with her shoulder, tipping her head at the alien. She got a nudge and a ‘sure, why not’ look back in response.
It left the massive Cull Obsidian and Ebony Maw for Sif, if one or both of the two didn’t go for Loki as well. Maw was the only one that Natasha had never seen in person before, and that lack made her nervous. She had seen the footage from New York and talked to Tony about him a little, enough to know that, like Wanda and Loki, he had some kind of magic or psychic ability.
Loki had never talked about the Black Order at all.
“The Chitauri think you owe them a debt, little brother,” Proxima Midnight said. “You promised them victory and gave them only blood in exchange.”
Loki’s jaw worked again, but he didn’t say anything.
“You owe us a debt too,” she went on. “The Chitauri will have to get in line.”
“I owe the Chitauri nothing and I owe you less,” Loki said, his voice harsh. “Get off my planet, Proxima, before I make you.”
She grinned. “Make us, then.”
Loki spread his hands, empty and elaborately casual. “Fine.”
His magic lashed out in a glittering green whip that Proxima blocked with her trident. She knocked aside the spray of throwing knives he sent at her, rushing at him as he danced backwards, his hands bright with magic and knives in turn. He threw his forearms up to shield himself from her blow, his vambraces flaring white with energy when her trident struck the elaborately figured uru. Loki slammed a kick into her chest, then a hard backhand with an armored fist into her face. His cloak and the skirts of his hauberk and tunic whirled in a dizzying swirl of green, black, and gold as he spun to fling another blast of magic at Ebony Maw, who batted it aside with one sweeping hand.
Sif lunged for Cull Obsidian with a shout, metal clashing as her sword met his weapon. She looked absurdly small against his bulk, but only for an instant; Natasha was already throwing herself at Corvus Glaive and lost sight of both Sif and Loki as she slammed her borrowed shield into the alien’s face. Yelena shot him, looked annoyed when it had no effect, then hooked her toe under a fallen Asgardian spear and tossed it up into her hands. She swung it around as she ducked his polearm, the blade cutting a gleaming stripe across his torso armor.
Light flashed at the corners of Natasha’s vision – Loki’s green-gold magic and the flare of his vambraces each time he blocked one of Proxima’s blows. He didn’t seem to be able to get his hands back on Mistilteinn and was down to his magic and his knives.
Loki could take care of himself.
Natasha dropped low to slam the edge of her shield in the back of Corvus’s knees, then popped up like a cork from a bottle with her sword outstretched. Corvus caught it with the hook on the edge of his glaive and knocked it out of her hand, but turned into Yelena’s spear-thrust through his shoulder. The Asgardian metal sliced through his armor like it was cardboard, forcing his hand to open reflexively on his polearm and drop it. He backhanded Yelena with his other hand, sending her flying. Natasha ducked his next blow and came up with a kick to the jaw, then another strike to his weak arm with the shield.
But Natasha had been fighting for the past who-knew-how-long – she had lost all track of time – and fighting was the hardest work there was, especially for a human. Before that there had been the harsh emotions of the Infinity Gauntlet and the Time Heist, with a mostly sleepless night before. As she wound up for another hit, Corvus’s good hand shot out and closed around her throat, jerking her off her feet.
“Humans,” he snarled. “The most irritating of all the species in the cosmos.”
“Yeah,” Natasha croaked, scrabbling at his hand with the fingers of her free hand and trying to hit him with the shield on her other forearm or activate her widow’s bites, but the angle was wrong and he shook off her blows like they were insect bites, squeezing until her vision started to gray out. “We get – that – a lot. Should have – learned – your lesson – the first –”
His grip was like steel cables around her throat. She curled her legs up and tried to kick him, to twist her way free, but no matter how humanoid he looked his alien physiology seemed to keep him just out of reach. She couldn’t get the right angle to break his grip on her neck.
Relief came with a sharp crack that echoed through her body hard enough to jar her teeth in her skull.
Natasha hit the ground with the vague, with a little distant horror that the alien might have broken her neck even as she dragged in gasps of air. Then the roaring in her ears cleared enough that she heard someone saying, “Nat – Nat, hey, Nat – look at me, are you –”
“Hey,” she managed to rasp in response eventually as the blurriness in her vision faded. “Been – a while – Sam. You look – good.”
“You look like crap,” Sam said.
“Long day.” She rubbed at her throat, wincing, and Sam pulled her hand away. Heedless of her bruises, Natasha put her arms around him in a swift hug, then drew back to let him pull her to her feet. Behind him, Steve was slugging it out with Corvus Glaive; Sam must have carried him in and one of them had hit the alien hard enough to knock him back and make him drop Natasha, but not enough to break bones.
“I like the hair,” Sam added.
“Thanks,” Natasha said, leaning down to pick up the sword she had dropped. She looked worriedly around for Yelena and was relieved to see her back on her feet, warily circling Corvus and Steve with an Asgardian spear in her fist. Sif was still fighting Cull Obsidian; he was bleeding black blood from a dozen shallow wounds, none of them apparently enough to do more than annoy him.
She could see Mistilteinn on the ground, the bright uru of the blade gleaming even amidst the bloodied mud and rubble all around it. Ebony Maw and Proxima Midnight had kept Loki from being able to get to the weapon or call it to him, and fighting both of them – one with his magic alone, one with his knives and his bare hands – had kept him from getting an advantage over either. Natasha counted back the seconds and realized it had barely been more than a minute since the fight had started.
A Chitauri skiff went by overhead; Sam glanced up at it and said, “I should –”
“Go,” Natasha told him. “We got this.”
Sam’s gaze went to Loki as the Asgardian threw himself over Proxima’s trident and flung a brace of throwing knives at Maw in the same smooth motion, which Maw sent flying aside with a wave of his hand. The knives had been a feint, though: a slab of rubble slammed upward and struck Maw in the chest, throwing the tall alien backwards even as Loki came up in a spin kick to Proxima’s head. He’d had his cape ripped off at some point and the bright fabric was trampled into the bloody mud. Natasha couldn’t remember the last time she had seen his horned headpiece, but he wasn’t wearing it anymore.
“Good guy now, huh?” Sam said.
“Remind me to tell you about Disney World after all of this,” Natasha said.
“You took the guy who tried to take over the planet to Disney World?”
“No,” Natasha said, and managed to grin at him. “Disney invited him to come. I’ll tell you about it later. It’s a better story if you’re drunk.”
“Okay, now I gotta live through this,” Sam said.
“That was the plan!”
He winked at her, then unfolded his wings as he went straight up; the backdraft staggered Natasha for an instant. A trio of winged humanoids – two bat-winged women and a man with an osprey’s hooked back wings – swept towards him, making Sam bank warily.
“Well met, cousin!” said one of the women merrily; her accent sounded nearly, but not quite, Irish. “Will you join us in our harrying?”
“Uh,” Sam said. “Sure, why not?”
“There’s good hunting for us folk of the Air today,” the man said, grinning, and the three Light Elves shot away, Sam with them.
“That was new,” Natasha said out loud.
She hefted the sword she had picked up, testing its balance – perfect, of course – and went to go help her friends. She had taken about three steps before Cull Obsidian picked up Sif and threw her.
Natasha jerked to a halt as Sif struck Loki and both Asgardians went down in a tangle of limbs. Loki rolled free, coming up in a three-point crouch with his upraised hand glowing green, but a tangle of steel wires caught Sif and dragged her up into the air. She clawed at them, gasping, as Ebony Maw moved towards, them, stepping from one piece of floating rubble to another. There was blood on his face from one of Loki’s blows.
“Let her go!” Steve said. He had an arm around Corvus Glaive’s throat, the alien forced down to his knees; Yelena pressed the tip of her borrowed spear against his neck. Natasha could tell from the angle that Steve was holding his shield that he was ready to throw it as soon as he decided it was needed.
“Or he dies,” Yelena added, which saved Steve from having to say it. He didn’t look like he was particularly bothered by the prospect.
“Weak,” Proxima said, her voice disgusted. “Kill him if you like.”
“That’s cold, Proxima,” Loki said, coming warily upright as he rolled green fire between the fingers of his right hand, his gaze moving restlessly between Proxima, Maw, and Obsidian. “Even for you.”
She shrugged. “They’re humans. And it hardly matters anyway.” The smile she gave Loki was cruel. “I’ll have my baby brother back soon.”
He shook his head, a muscle working in his jaw. “That’s not going to happen.”
“That is not up to you,” Ebony Maw said, “brother.”
Loki licked his lips. “You should have listened to your father when he took me from you because he needed Loki of Asgard more than you wanted another sibling.”
Cull Obsidian snarled something in a language Natasha couldn’t understand, the words harsh and growling. Whatever he said made Loki’s face twist into a snarl, half-familiar but without the touch of madness Natasha remembered from the helicarrier.
“My father was Odin of Asgard,” he spat. “You would do well to remember it.”
“You were no one when you came to us!” Corvus snapped, heedless of the spear-point dimpling his flesh. “We gave you purpose!”
“You had no name,” said Ebony Maw, “and we gave you one.”
“You had nothing,” Proxima finished for the Black Order, “and we gave you a family, brother.”
“Yes,” Loki said. His gaze flickered upwards for a second, then went back to Proxima. “But I already have one of those.”
The world went white.
Thunder crashed overhead, deafeningly loud, and the scent of ozone overpowered the copper penny stench of blood. When Natasha finished blinking sparks out of her eyes, it was to find Thor standing beside Loki, lightning crawling all over him and glowing in his remaining eye. It dripped down the blade of the sword he was holding to fizzle into nothing on the ruined ground, making Proxima take a wary half-step back.
Thor said, “He’s not your brother.”
For an instant Loki looked like he was going to cry again, then he drew himself up to his full height, every inch a king. “I will give you this one chance to leave this field still among the living,” he said. “Walk away now or I give your heads and your hearts to the spirits of my people as a grave-offering.”
Even Thor flicked a quick sideways glance towards him at that, though Loki gave no sign he had seen it. His sharp features were harsh with sincerity.
There was a moment of silence that stretched out, as if Proxima and the other members of the Black Order were trying to decide whether or not to take him seriously. Then she said, “No.”
Loki’s smile was full of teeth. “Good. You owe my people a blood-debt that can never be repaid, but I’ll make a start on collecting.” His fist lashed out and a bolt of his green magic caught Proxima full in the face. As she stumbled back, Loki whirled towards Sif, shouting, “Steve!”
The shield was already in the air. Maw’s magic knocked it aside, but Loki must have been expecting that; he flung himself into the air and caught the shield on its downward swing, sliding his forearm through the leather straps even as he kept turning. The vibranium edge of the shield with all of his Asgardian strength behind it sliced through the steel cables holding Sif imprisoned as if they had been paper. She dropped to the ground in a roll, grabbing for her sword and shield as she came upright next to Loki.
Corvus Glaive died in a fountain of dark blood as Yelena’s spear went through his throat. Steve threw himself forwards in a roll and caught Mistilteinn with both hands, bringing the polearm up to block Cull Obsidian’s downward blow. The end of the polearm went down into the mud as he used the weapon to lever himself up in a kick to the alien’s face.
Lightning crashed all around them, half-blinding Natasha as Proxima shouted, “Kill them all, except my little brother! He comes back to Sanctuary with us!”
The ring of outwards-facing aliens turned inwards – Outriders and Chitauri and other creatures Natasha didn’t recognize. Over the sudden sound of their screeching, she heard Loki yell, “I’m not your fucking brother!”
Natasha slammed her shield into the face of the first alien to come at her, then slashed her sword across its neck, already turning to lunge at the next Outrider as the first keeled away with its spine cut through – whatever Asgardian metal the sword was made from was no joke, even with only Natasha’s human strength behind it. She fired her widow’s bites over the head of the fallen Outrider as it crumpled, then again before another bounced off her shield and fell back, shrieking as the metal flared white.
Over the screaming of battle-mad aliens and the sound of clashing metal, she could hear the constant rolling rumble of thunder, lightning occasionally sparkling at the edges of her vision. Yelena was at her side a few moments later, swinging the Asgardian spear like it was her staff and occasionally firing her widow’s bites.
“I like this thing!” she yelled at Natasha. “I’m keeping it!”
“I’m sure Loki won’t mind!” Natasha yelled back at her. “He probably wants that back though,” she said to Steve, who had appeared on her other side. Mistilteinn’s curved blade was dripping black blood.
“He can have it!” He grinned at Yelena and added politely, “I’m Steve Rogers.”
“I know who you are!” she said happily. “Alexei’s going to lose his mind!”
“He’s – he’s not here, is he?” Natasha demanded, shooting another Outrider in the face.
“I haven’t seen him or Melina but there are a lot of people here.” To Steve, she said, “I’m Yelena. I’m –”
“Nat’s sister. She told me about you.” Steve kicked a Chitauri back, then whipped Mistilteinn around to cave in the skull of some kind of tentacle-faced alien with an enormous gun. “I’m glad to meet you!”
Yelena’s face did something complicated but delighted, though she didn’t have time to say anything before the world suddenly lit up with bright blue bolts of energy. They were massive, man-wide, slashing down all around them without care for who they hit. Two feet away a clump of Outriders died in screaming agony, spraying Natasha with clods of dirt and worse things. Steve made a reflexive gesture as if to gather both women beneath a shield he didn’t have, then glared at Mistilteinn, before his gaze went upwards in horror. Natasha followed it to the massive spaceship above them and the guns belching out energy bolts without care for whether they struck friend or foe.
Loki’s voice rose in a rippling stream of Nordic-sounding Asgardian syllables – Natasha wasn’t certain if he was spellcasting or just cursing, since he had never needed to speak for his magic to work before – and everything went green. Magic rippled out in an upside-down bowl shape above them as the energy bolts continued to splash harmlessly off it. Natasha turned to see Loki standing with his arms upraised, his eyes glowing green and blood dripping from his nose; he had used enough magic in the past hour that this was costing him.
It was protecting friend and foe alike, and she saw the moment the Outriders and other aliens realized it. Thor and Sif were moving around Loki, killing anything that got near him as he poured all of his attention and energy into the magical shield. Natasha caught Steve’s eye and nodded at him; they and Yelena began to work their way backwards to the three Asgardians, cutting their way through the aliens that came rushing through the shield, as desperate for protection as they were to kill their enemies.
She almost tripped over Proxima Midnight’s body on the way there; Loki had gotten his wish, because her head was lying a few feet away.
“I like your hair!” Thor said to Natasha as they reached him.
“The haircut looks good!” she told him, and he grinned; there was lightning in his teeth.
“Notice you’ve copied my beard,” he told Steve, who let out a weary laugh and made a vague gesture towards his chin.
“Men,” Sif snorted, bashing an Outrider in the face with her shield.
“Oh, please,” Loki gasped. “Like you haven’t –”
“You’re wearing enough gold to pay for a warhorse, Loki, you don’t get to talk!”
Yelena just laughed.
The energy barrage ended as abruptly as it had begun. Loki held the shield a moment longer, then released it and staggered. Thor caught him, steadying his brother as Loki panted for breath.
Natasha looked upwards, trusting her companions to keep her from being killed in her moment of inattention. The guns on Thanos’s spaceship were turning upwards, blue bolts of energy shooting at something she couldn’t see. An instant a streak of brilliant light tore through the massive ship, looped around, and did it again.
“Took her long enough,” Loki said, wiping a hand beneath his nose and frowning at the blood on it in irritation. “No one told the damn wizards to get her?”
“Who?” Thor asked him.
It had to be Carol, who had been coordinating preparations for the Snap’s reversal among her allies in space. Natasha stared upwards in relief, then winced as the ship began to fall towards the lake. Well, there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
Loki levered himself upright with a hand on Thor’s shoulder. “You’re late,” he told his brother, then blinked as he realized he still had Steve’s shield. “Here –”
Steve tossed him Mistilteinn and caught the shield in response.
Thor’s gaze followed the exchange, then flickered to Natasha’s Asgardian shield and sword. His face did something complicated and confused. “I can’t believe you slept with my friends!”
“What – what?” Loki spluttered, jerking upright.
Steve’s face went bright red.
“Oh, god,” Natasha muttered, feeling her ears heat. She shot her widow’s bites at the nearest Chitauri to make herself feel better. She could deal with this from Clint and Tony, but Thor was something else.
“What – what is wrong with you?” Loki demanded. “I can’t believe you got murdered, how about that?”
Lightning cracked around them, half a dozen bolts striking downwards to take out a rush of Outriders.
“Now you know how it feels!” Thor yelled at his brother.
“Now I – I already know how it feels, Thor, I’ve been murdered before!” Loki shouted at him, Mistilteinn flashing in his hands as he beheaded an Outrider.
“To be the one left behind!”
“I’m sorry, brother, I didn’t realize we were in a competition!”
“I kind of missed this,” Sif said meditatively.
“What is wrong with you!” Loki yelled.
She didn’t get a chance to respond before a hoard of Outriders and other aliens came at them, racing across the corpse-covered battlefield as if it was a football field. Natasha braced herself with her shield in front of her, but before the aliens could reach them a wedge of yelling Asgardians hit them from the side. Energy flared white as the Outriders bounced off einherjar’s shields or fell under arrows; the mass of Asgardians was a mixture of the einherjar and ulfhednar Sif had brought from Vanaheim, the warriors who had come from New Asgard, and the snapped refugees the Valkyrie had gone to retrieve from deep space.
The Valkyrie herself cut through the Outriders, her spear whirling around her in a gleaming, deadly arc, and came to a stop in front of Loki and Thor as the rest of the Asgardians spread out to encircle them.
“I told you not to do anything stupid,” she said to Loki.
“I can’t believe you brought our people here from New Asgard!” he told her. “And you’re calling me stupid? Tell me at least that our healers and the noncombatants from the culling are out of the way!”
“Relax, your majesty,” she said casually, which made both Sif and Thor blink. “I don’t let human wizards tell me what to do. Our civilians are still on the ships with most of our Ravager escort, taking the long way back to Midgard. Eir was on the ship that went to the wreck site and I told them to pull back from the battlefield after she dropped your brother off so she and the healers that came with me can deal with our wounded and the human wounded afterwards.”
“Well, I’m glad someone was thinking,” Loki said through clenched teeth, “since no one bothered to ask me if I was all right bringing the last of our people to a killing ground –”
Thor and Sif were staring at him.
“What?” Loki demanded.
Thor shut his mouth. “Nothing,” he said eventually. “This is just very – I wasn’t expecting you to be –”
“I spent a thousand years being the sensible one, brother, I didn’t lose the knack for it just because I went mad for a few years or because you died,” Loki said, scowling. “I’m the king of Asgard, who else is supposed to see to our people if not me? Or did you forget that we both were raised and trained to be kings?”
The Valkyrie pressed her lips together and admitted, “I forgot how much they argued. I didn’t miss this part.”
“I did a little,” Sif said again. She looked at the Valkyrie with burgeoning hero worship in her eyes and Natasha resisted the urge to laugh; now wasn’t the time.
The Valkyrie turned towards her, apparently gauged her relationship with Thor and Loki at a glance, and said, “Were they always like this?”
“Well, Loki wasn’t always crazy –”
Loki rolled his eyes.
“– but more or less, yes,” Sif finished.
“I don’t think that’s accurate,” Thor said.
“You wouldn’t,” Loki muttered. His shoulders were tight when Natasha looked at him and there was something strange in his eyes, not just the uncomplicated love and grief she had seen when the younger Thor had confronted them back in the past. Loki adored his brother, she had no doubt about that, but there had been something harsh between them even before New York. Thor’s death had erased that, made it simple and easy in the way that only death could accomplish, but now that was gone.
And Loki was king. Natasha had no doubt that Loki was thinking about that now, even if Thor wasn’t.
Steve looked between the four Asgardians, his expression suggesting that he half-expected to get a hand bitten off, then said, “If you don’t mind, we’re kind of still in the middle of a fight here –”
Loki huffed. “You know, I remember when people on this planet used to be afraid of me.”
“That was before anyone on Earth with an internet connection could go on YouTube and watch you get wasted and talk about writing the Voynich Manuscript on Drunk History,” Natasha said.
“Or you and Captain America here read thirst tweets to each other,” Yelena put in.
Steve winced, going red again. Loki’s mouth twitched.
“You know what, let’s go back to fighting,” Thor said brightly.
“Thank you, brother, you’ve finally said something sensible,” Loki said, flicking Mistilteinn to one side with a sharp snap of his wrist to get the blood off the blade.
Thor’s one-eyed gaze followed the gesture with curiosity, presumably because he had never seen Mistilteinn before. Before he could ask about it, one of the Asgardians shoved their way through the perimeter surrounding them – from New Asgard, presumably, since he was carrying a war-axe and wearing battered leather armor rather than the einherjar’s plate or the ulfhednar’s elaborately-worked leather and suede.
“Your majesty,” he said.
Loki and Thor both turned towards him. The Asgardian looked at Thor, hesitated, then addressed Loki.
“Your majesty,” he said again, “Eir, Arnbjiorg, and Bek – from the Vanaheim garrison –” He waited for Loki to nod in recognition before he went on, “– have set up a triage area behind the Midgardian battle line, along with some of the Midgardian sorcerers. The Vanir, the Light Elves, the dwarves, and the frost giants also brought healers. And there’s a healer from Niflheim, a Dark Elf.”
“Look at that,” Loki said to Thor as they both took this last in, blinking and looking very similar as they did so, “you didn’t wipe the species out after all.”
“Why is Niflheim here, Loki?”
“Oh, shut up, Thor, I was improvising. We’re lucky anything happened.” He turned back to the other Asgardian before Thor could do anything other than make a pained expression. The man had been watching the two brothers with a slight frown, but his attention went to Loki again immediately as he said, “Our wounded?”
“With our healers, as best we were able –”
He stopped as Loki’s head snapped up with a clatter of the golden beads in his hair. Thor looked at him, worried. “Brother?”
“Get everyone back now.” Loki’s voice was utterly flat, but he motioned with both hands to indicate what he meant, a sweeping gesture back over each shoulder. “I don’t want any of our people mixed up in this.”
“Loki?” Steve said warily.
Loki wet his lips, but it was Thor who said, “He’s here.”
The brothers glanced at each other, wordless, then moved forward in perfect unison as a pathway opened in the Asgardian shield wall. The Asgardian warriors were pulling back, some of them reluctant in the face of Loki’s orders and waiting for Thor’s nod of confirmation, others without so much as a heartbeat of hesitation. Sif and the Valkyrie fell in on either side of the brothers, all four of the Asgardians as intent as hounds on a scent. Natasha and Yelena flanked Steve as they followed, circling a little so that they weren’t directly behind the Asgardians.
Without the protective circle of Asgardian warriors around them gone it was easier for Natasha to get a view of the rest of the battlefield. Whatever Carol had done to Thanos’s spaceship – just punched through it, probably; Carol Danvers didn’t have a lot of subtlety – had made it fall, and now one massive wing jutted out from what had been the lake, even larger than the biggest building in the compound. The sky was mostly clear except for the unfamiliar forms of circling dragons and the winged Light Elves that had come from Alfheim, along with a few Wakandan airships; all of Thanos’s aerial forces seemed to be down, to Natasha’s relief. There were still pockets of fighting – she could hear it even if she couldn’t see it – but the battle seemed to be on its downward swing.
They were winning.
Were winning didn’t mean had won, Natasha was very aware, and there was one big player left on the field. He came towards them slowly and deliberately, limping, and stopped facing the four Asgardians.
“Asgardian,” Thanos said, then, testing, “Frost giant.”
Loki’s smile was humorless. It was as though he had gone beyond fear to some other place and come away from it clear-eyed and cold instead of bright with the battle-fury he had had earlier. He leaned on Mistilteinn and said, “Yes. And yes.”
Thanos clearly hadn’t done well in the battle. His hands were still blackened and blistered from frostbite and most of the armor that hadn’t already shattered from Loki’s freezing spell was missing – Natasha was guessing that he had run into Wanda, and hoped that the other woman had survived the experience. He didn’t have his double-bladed sword anymore, either, and one arm hung limp and useless.
“You lied to me,” he said.
“I lie to everyone,” Loki said, “but in this case no, not about that. You just never asked. And you know that by then I would have told you anything as long as you asked.” He smiled again, not looking away from Thanos as Thor’s gaze cut sideways towards his brother. Loki was on his blind side; Thor had to turn his head to see him.
Thanos saw the movement and looked at Thor without recognition. “The brother, I assume. Not so dead, it seems.”
Loki shrugged as if Natasha had never seen him screaming in uncomprehending rage and grief after Thanos had snapped his fingers and left them all behind in Wakanda, as if he had known all along that under the right circumstances Thor would return to him. “The thing about killing Asgardians is that you have to make sure we’re actually dead first. I’d thought you would have learned that by now – by then, I suppose. My past, your future. But you never actually wanted me dead, did you? You needed a living son of Odin to get you into the Nine – the first time, at least. So you never had to learn that one.”
He smiled again, and there was genuine humor in it – not good humor, but humor nonetheless, a god’s amusement at a mortal’s failings. Despite Loki’s bruises and movie star good looks, there was nothing human about him at all now, nor in the thin smiles Thor and the two Asgardian women wore. Natasha felt Steve tense, unnerved. She couldn’t blame him; there was something strange in the air – magic, maybe, or what Loki had called orløg and drunkenly tried to explain to her as one of the Asgardian concepts of fate when they were all trying to drink themselves to death in Wakanda after the Snap. When she looked over her shoulder at the Asgardian troops, it was to find them all silent, watching the king of the gods and the man who had ravaged their people twice over.
“You won,” Loki went on. “You got what you wanted. The Infinity Stones and half of all life in the universe wiped out. You even got your vengeance on me.” The last words came out in a snarl.
“And yet here you are,” Thanos said, “like a bad luck piece back again to bring me grief.”
“I am the god of mischief,” Loki said. “It’s my nature. You never really understood that about the Aesir – that we are gods.”
“You godlings die like any other men,” Thanos said.
“Oh, yes,” Loki said. “We’ve never said otherwise. The people of this world who worshiped us in my youth understood that, as we always have. Every living thing must die, even the gods. Even stars burn out.” His smile grew. “Even you. Because you’ve lost. You won once upon a time – and now you’ve made it impossible. Your army is gone. Your Children are dead. Sanctuary is fallen. Wherever the Stones are now, they are beyond your reach and there is no going back to your own time to win the way you did before.”
Thanos’s face twisted in anger, but he didn’t deny it.
There was a heavy thud, and then two others; Thanos turned his head a little as Iron Man landed behind him, flanked by War Machine and Rescue. The Hulkbuster landed a little clumsily next to War Machine, his left arm torn off at the elbow, along with Spider-Man and a couple of the sorcerers. Sam touched down on Pepper’s other side, then Wanda as T’Challa and Okoye came up alongside her, M’Baku and Shuri following. Carol settled lightly next to the Wakandans, glowing like a sun. Bucky drifted up to insert himself between Yelena and Steve; Natasha’s sister gave him a startled look of recognition and took a wary step sideways to give him space.
On Natasha’s other side, there was the sudden sound of a bowstring being drawn taut; she turned her head and grinned in relief to see Clint there. His face was bruised and there was blood in his hair, but he was here. His gaze was grimly intent on Thanos.
Earth’s defenders weren’t the only ones encircling them. Rocket and his walking tree friend appeared with the other members of their crew, then Nebula and a green-skinned woman Natasha thought might be her sister Gamora. Three blue-skinned frost giants appeared, a woman whose sharp features were oddly familiar and two men in brief kilts. The two Vanir leaders rode up, with a train of their followers lingering behind, and the big dwarf with the metal hands. A fire giant arrived with a blast of heat that made the frost giants glare at him and the Asgardians hold their weapons more tightly. A clatter of wheels over the rubble heralded the arrival of the Light Elf queen in her polar bear-drawn chariot, with a group of what Natasha assumed were all elves, though none of them looked alike except for their ears – a cat-eyed man with tabby stripes in his hair, a bat-winged woman, a flock of glowing pixies, others. A few stray warriors stepped up to close the circle around Thanos – a scarred man with drooping mustaches who looked human or Asgardian, maybe; a dark-skinned humanoid with their hair in a long white braid down their back; a handful of Wakandans and Ravagers.
Loki didn’t look at any of them, though he tilted his head slightly in acknowledgment at their arrival. “So,” he said, his gaze intent on Thanos, “have you come here to die, then? At the hands of the gods?”
“Come to kill you,” Thanos said. He took a step forward and stumbled, falling to his knees. Loki just watched him, smiling, and Thanos glared at him. Even kneeling the Titan and the god were still at eyelevel with each other. “I should have left you where I found you, Asgardian, instead of wasting my coin.”
“Probably,” Loki agreed. “But here we are.” He ran his hand up Mistilteinn’s shaft, letting his thumb rest against the flat of the blade, then picked the polearm up and took a step forward.
“King Loki,” said one of the Vanir leaders, a woman whose lacquered armor was sticky with blood and who held a katana-like sword unsheathed in one hand.
Loki paused, looked at her. Thor and the other Asgardians tensed.
“Freyja,” Loki said, and to the Vanir man, whose face was near-identical to the woman’s, just a little harsher, “Frey.”
“You made us a promise, Loki,” said Freyja.
“Vengeance, King of Asgard,” said the Light Elf queen. “Blood for blood. Death for our sorrowing.”
The dwarf king, Eitri, said, “Asgard is not the only realm with blood-debts to pay our dead.” He shot a suspicious glare at the Vanir. “And Asgard is not the only realm whose dead will not return from beyond the black gate.”
The fire giant said something that Natasha couldn’t understand; his words sounded like the crackle of dry flames in her ears, making her wince, and she saw all of the humans and some the aliens flinch.
“You swore we would have vengeance in return for our aid, Odin’s son,” said the frost giantess. “Will you keep that oath, Loki Jotun-born? Or will you be Odin Oathbreaker’s heir in that as well?”
There was a rumble of rage from the listening Asgardians. Thor opened his mouth to protest before the Valkyrie leaned over and put a hand on his arm, shaking her head.
Loki hesitated, then nodded slowly. He turned to look from Tony to Natasha to Steve, pivoting as he let his gaze travel across the circle of Earth’s defenders and giving the impression he was meeting each person’s eyes in turn. “This is Midgard,” he said. “Is that what you want, Midgard’s wardens?”
Tony retracted his helmet and looked a little uneasy at the prospect, but it was Clint who spoke from beside Natasha, his voice harsh. “He’ll die?” he said.
Loki turned to look at him. “Yes,” he said. “He’ll die.”
“Then do it,” Clint said. Natasha nodded slowly, and agreement echoed among the other Avengers and Wakandans – some of it reluctant, some of it enthusiastic. A few people looked at their comrades uncertainly, but no one protested.
“Coward,” said Thanos. “You should do it yourself. Or are you too weak for that, Asgardian?”
Loki looked at him, a small smile playing over his sharp features. “I’ve had my vengeance,” he said. “I lost everything, and now so have you. That’s a sweeter wine to me than your blood could ever be.” He crouched down and picked up a clod of blood-muddied soil, touching it to his lips. “Earth must be fed.”
There was an echoing murmur from the Asgardians, the Vanir, and the dwarves.
Loki looked skywards as he rose again. “Allmother Frigga,” he said, “pour a cup for your sons in Valhalla and think of us kindly until we come to dine with you again, for even the gods must die. This blót is yours.” Mistilteinn lashed out, faster than Natasha’s eyes could follow, and when Loki turned away there was a fresh cut on Thanos’s face, bleeding purple blood down his cheek. The Titan touched his fingers to it and looked at them.
Loki flicked Mistilteinn sideways in a sharp motion to shed the blood from the blade. “Asgard’s wergild is paid,” he said, looking down at the Titan. “When you pass through the great void of Ginnungagap on your way to whatever hell will take you, bide a moment at the gate of Gnipahellir that guards the passage to Hel and tell my sister her brothers send their regards.”
He turned away and walked back to his brother as the other rulers of the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil closed in on Thanos, not once looking back. Thor put his arms around him as Loki let Mistilteinn stand upright beside them, curving a hand over the back of Loki’s neck and pulling him close. Loki leaned against him, his fists white-knuckled against Thor’s back and his face hidden in his brother’s shoulder.
Natasha looked away to give the two Asgardians some privacy. Clint let his bowstring go slack, lowering his bow with his gaze intent on Thanos and the rulers of Yggdrasil. He took Natasha’s hand when she offered it to him, relieved to feel his pulse beating beneath her fingers.
She made herself watch. Thanos fought, but not for long.
Chapter Text
Earth must be fed.
For a fleeting moment, Natasha thought she almost understood the Asgardians, then it was gone and she was left watching Thanos’s blood soak into the muddy dirt with all the rest of his army’s. She turned away, drawing Clint with her when he hesitated, and stuck her sword point-down in the ground before pulling him into a hug. He returned the embrace, the bow in his hand a hard line against her back and his breath warm against her cheek before he pulled back to check her over for injury.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine. I was mostly with Steve and Loki the whole time.” Natasha picked a piece of what she was pretty sure was alien viscera out of the end of her braid and flicked it away. “I need a shower,” she added wryly.
Clint made a disgusted expression of agreement and looked over at the ruins of the Avengers compound, where at least one Chitauri leviathan and a couple of spacecraft had crushed most of the structure that had survived the initial bombardment. “I think the shower’s toast.”
“Shit,” Natasha said, and resisted the urge to say, but all my things are there! After all this time she had gotten used to having an actual home and had made the mistake of getting attached, and look where that had gotten her. With a dead, time-displaced alien warlord blowing it all to hell. In fairness, even she couldn’t have predicted that. She hoped the ostensibly nuclear bomb-proof strongbox in the compound had protected the Fabergé egg Loki had given her.
“Where were you?” she asked Clint instead. “I didn’t see you earlier –”
“The floor collapsed when everything –” He made a “boom” gesture with his hands, “– and I ended up below the compound. With the damn gauntlet and a bunch of aliens chasing me.”
Natasha looked at him in alarm. “Where is it now?” Clearly Thanos hadn’t gotten his hands on it –
“With Scott and his girl and a couple of the wizards,” Clint said, and gave her the same longsuffering look he always wore when magic came up. Then he put his hand to his pocket like he expected to find his phone there and said, “Oh, god, I have to call Laura, I was on the phone when – she’s got to be freaking out –”
Natasha dug her phone out of a belt pouch, checked that it was still functional – the screen had gotten cracked at some point, but it still worked – and handed it to him. Clint took it with a nod of thanks and stepped aside to make his call as Yelena came up to Natasha and whispered in Russian, “Why is the Winter Soldier here?”
Her attempt to be clandestine might have worked better if Clint, Steve, and Bucky didn’t all speak Russian, if Clint hadn’t still been standing close enough to hear, and if Steve and Bucky didn’t both have serum-enhanced hearing. Clint just winced at the question and went back to reassuring his wife that he was still among the living and he hadn’t even gotten a little blown up – yeah, that had been an explosion, but he was fine and that was the important part –
Steve and Bucky, who had been hugging – Steve looked a little like he was trying not to cry and failing – both glanced over at Yelena’s words. Bucky’s shoulders went tight as he drew away from Steve. He said in English, “I’m not him anymore.”
Yelena registered his accent, blinked, then apparently accepted the words for what they were. “Okay,” she said, then added, “I’m Yelena. Natasha’s sister.”
Bucky’s eyebrows went up and Clint stopped mid-sentence to stare, then had to hastily tell Laura that everything was fine, that hadn’t been anything important. Natasha shrugged a little, but managed to keep her face neutral when Yelena turned to glare at her.
“James Buchanan Barnes,” Bucky said, when Yelena looked back at him. “Bucky.”
This time it was Yelena’s eyebrows that went up. She looked at Steve, looked at Bucky, looked at Natasha, and said, “Huh.”
The two former assassins regarded each other like wary dogs as Natasha rolled her eyes, a little relieved that they had both taken it so calmly. She was looking around to count her people as Steve stepped over and put a hand on her shoulder. Natasha leaned into his grip with relief, grateful for something solid and grounding amidst all the madness around them. Tony, not far away, had started to fold up and nearly sat down before Pepper and the Parker boy each put a shoulder under his; Rhodes made a gesture towards him but the War Machine armor – even in the Iron Patriot suit – wasn’t exactly meant for that kind of support. Wanda had sat down, looking overwhelmed at the mess of chaos and death and alien species around her. Sam was crouched down next to her, talking to her quietly.
Sitting down felt like a really good idea. Unlike some of the people on the battlefield, Natasha didn’t have superpowers, and she knew she was on her final reserves of energy. If she sat down, though, she wasn’t going to get up again – not to mention that she knew very well what edged weapons did to human (or alien) bodies and didn’t want to sit in the remains – and she was too proud to be carried off the battlefield when she wasn’t even injured.
Clint disconnected his call with a wistful goodbye to Laura and a “Nat’s fine, she’s right here,” and came back to return Natasha’s phone. He looked around and said, “So…aliens.”
“Aliens,” Steve said wearily. “On our side, though.”
Clint snorted. “That’s new.” He glanced over at Loki, who still had his face buried in Thor’s shoulder while Thor patted his back reassuringly, and added quietly, “So Thor’s – I thought Thor was dead, like, dead dead, not coming back dead.”
“I’m pretty sure Loki thought that too,” Natasha said. After a moment she punched Clint in the shoulder and added, “And I’m still mad at you for faking your death five years ago.”
“I – sorry.” Clint shifted a little and repeated, “I’m sorry, Nat. Steve.”
Over the past few weeks none of them had brought up the fact that Clint had faked his death during the initial Snap – well, “faked” might have been over-generous. He hadn’t answered any of Natasha’s frantic calls and by the time she and Rhodes had been able to get out to the farm – by unspoken mutual consent they hadn’t left Loki alone without someone at the compound who could probably go head to head with him for at least a few minutes, so Steve and Bruce had stayed behind – he had been long gone. It had taken her twenty minutes to do a fast onceover of the property and a little longer to do a more systematic one to be doubly certain that Clint’s bug-out gear was gone. That had been confirmation enough for her that he had survived. She still didn’t understand why he had never tried to come back until she had gone to Tokyo to get him. It wasn’t like the Avengers had been subtle about their return to polite company after the Snap.
“It’s okay,” Steve said. He put his hand on Clint’s shoulder, which might have been more reassuring if he hadn’t had alien blood caked into his knuckles, dyeing the worn brown leather of his fingerless gloves nearly black, but it was the thought that counted. Besides, Clint had seen worse.
They’d all seen worse.
Granted, Natasha wasn’t actually certain they had seen worse when it came to the sheer amount of blood and viscera a couple armies’ worth of aliens who still went to war with edged weapons could produce – they were lucky it was a cool day, but in a couple hours the smell would be overwhelming – but they had all seen worse. No matter what other horrible thing was coming down the line in the future, they had all seen worse.
She was gathering herself to go hug Wanda and Sam, and maybe introduce herself to some of the newcomers, when a flicker of movement caught her eye. Natasha turned before she was even certain what she had seen, wincing as the movement jarred muscles that were starting to stiffen up now that the adrenaline of the fight had worn off.
It was Loki, of course; two years of having to ride herd on him every time he left New Asgard and three more of having to escort him every time he went somewhere other than Scandinavia or a few of the other northern European countries who had gotten accustomed to his presence had left its mark. Steve was turning too, with the same honed instincts – it had usually been them with Loki, rather than Rhodes, since War Machine wasn’t exactly inconspicuous and Steve didn’t need a suit of armor to go a few rounds with Loki. Or any of the several groups who had tried to kill him.
Loki pulled warily back from his brother’s embrace to watch the frost giants approaching them. He had been crying; tear-tracks cut through the dirt and grime on his face, and he wiped a hand beneath his eyes to dash the last of his tears away. Thor made a motion like he meant to get between Loki and the frost giants, but stopped when Loki stepped in front of him. He had also been crying, Natasha saw. It made her feel both a little embarrassed to see and a little annoyed at the interruption; they should have had the time to themselves.
She glanced at Steve to find him already looking at her; Natasha picked up her sword again and without a word they both moved to back up Loki and Thor if the Asgardians needed it, though Sif and the Valkyrie had joined the two men and were watching the frost giants uneasily. She felt rather than saw Yelena, Bucky, and Clint following them. Another flicker of movement at the corner of her vision showed her Sam and Wanda coming to join them, with Tony limping over with most of his weight on Rhodes – they had apparently found an angle that worked for them. Parker trailed behind, his helmet retracted and his eyes bright with interest; Pepper, apparently convinced that Tony wasn’t about to keel over and die on the spot, had her cell phone out and was probably doing something useful that didn’t involve aliens.
The tightness in Loki’s shoulders eased a little at their approach, though he didn’t look at them, his attention on the frost giants.
“Queen Farbauti,” Loki said, twisting his fingers together like he wanted Mistilteinn for something to hold, but knew better than to reach for the polearm. Cautiously, he added, “I’m grateful for your aid here. And – surprised, I admit.”
There was something eerily familiar about the Jotun queen’s sharp features, like Natasha had seen them before, but she couldn’t think where; she had never seen a frost giant before today. The woman stood a good three and a half feet taller even than Loki’s six foot and change, blue-skinned and dark-haired with raised markings tracing patterns across her face, bare arms, and one exposed shoulder; she wore a arisaid-like garment that fell past her knees and a lot of ivory and leather jewelry, with a crown-like headpiece that looked like it was made out of ice. The two frost giants that had followed her – there were more hanging back, exchanging wary, hostile looks with the Asgardian warriors – were both male, bare-chested and wearing only brief kilts and jewelry.
There was purple blood drying on the end of the staff the queen was holding.
She tilted her head to the side as she peered down at Loki, like a curious bird seeing something new. Loki stood his ground, but there was an uneasy look in his pale eyes, and when Thor put a hand on his shoulder he leaned into it, just enough for Natasha to notice.
“Funny,” said the frost giantess eventually.
“I beg your pardon?” Loki said.
“I can see all four of your parents in you, but your father more than the others. You look like Odin when he was young, millennia ago. And Frigga too, a little. Something about the eyes. Certainly you look more like Odin than your brother does. He takes after Frigga.”
“It’s – it’s my face,” Loki said uneasily. “I’d rather not think too closely about it.”
“We’ve always been like that,” Thor said, his gaze intent on the frost giantess. “Since we were in the cradle. Everybody’s always said so.”
The woman nodded without surprise. “I’ve heard. Old One-eye was proud of his sons.”
Loki flinched like he had been struck, and Thor’s hand tightened on his shoulder.
The queen cocked a dark eyebrow at that and Natasha thought, I know that gesture, I’ve seen it before, but couldn’t work out where. “The past makes the present, Odin’s son, but it does not unmake the past that came before.”
Loki opened his mouth, clearly about to argue, then thought about it for a moment longer and didn’t say anything. It was Thor who said, “As my brother said, we’re grateful for your aid, your majesty.”
Farbauti leaned on her staff, considering the two Asgardians as she nodded. Eventually, she said, “Your crimes are not forgiven, Odin’s son. Odin’s sons.”
Loki shut his eyes briefly before opening them again. “I can offer you neither vengeance nor justice,” he said. “I have my own people to see to.”
“You hold your throne by virtue of your brother’s death, Loki Jotun-born,” said the queen, “and yet here now stands the first son of Odin.”
Loki’s eyes widened and he went a shade paler. Thor started to say something in protest before Loki silenced him with a glare. He looked back at the giantess and said, “Is that what you want, Farbauti Naldottir? My head as wergild for Laufey and for those who died at Utgard twelve years ago?”
“Is it not what we are owed?”
“What happened at Utgard was my doing, not my brother’s,” Thor said. “If it’s vengeance you want, take it out on me.”
“That isn’t going to happen –” Steve started to say, taking a step forward.
“That is not strictly true –” Loki began.
The Valkyrie’s voice cut over all three of them. “Loki is king of Asgard by acclaim of the Althing, not by blood-right alone. Thor’s return doesn’t change that.”
There was a murmur of agreement from slightly more than half of the watching Asgardians, and some extremely dubious looks – though no outright protests – from the others. Natasha tested her grip on her sword and thought that no matter how surprised the returned Asgardians were by this news, at least no one was stupid enough to try and start a civil war just at the moment. She suspected that they were waiting until they didn’t have an audience that included their old enemies, which from what Loki had said included most of the Nine Realms.
Queen Farbauti put her head a little to the side and considered the two brothers again. She let the uneasy silence between them stretch out before she said, “You and your companions returned my children to me, Odin’s son. That debt is paid.”
“What?” Loki blurted out. From his expression, he had been expecting either a fight or a summary execution.
Farbauti gestured at the two male frost giants behind her. “The culling took my sons, which I’m sure you knew already, as you always seem to know a great deal about the state of the Nine despite rusticating on Midgard. So now I have my children and the half of my people who were taken in the culling and our vengeance on the monster that stole them. Your crimes against my people are not forgiven, Odin’s son, but I consider their price paid in full.”
Loki’s mouth worked silently. Eventually he just nodded, apparently at a loss for words.
The queen reached out and put one hand beneath his chin, tipping his face up towards hers. Loki flinched and the Asgardians all tensed, Thor making a reflexive move forwards before he stopped at the hand Loki put out to him.
Loki shut his eyes. There was blue spreading up his skin from where the queen was touching him, slithering up his throat and across his face, the bones of his skull shifting just enough to notice.
The watching Asgardians were utterly silent.
“Look at me, Loki Odinson, King of Asgard,” the queen said, her voice even but cold.
When Loki opened his eyes to obey, they were as red as fresh blood, and the sharp angles of his face were very like the queen’s as she bent her head to his. Her voice was pitched to carry to the watchers as well as to him and to Thor at his side.
“I will give you this one warning, in payment for my vengeance and my children, for the rightful sons of Laufey and Farbauti,” the Jotun queen said. “Do not conjure with Jotunheim’s name again, son of Odin and Frigga. By our laws and Asgard’s you have no claim to it and have not for ten and one half centuries, not since the hour of your ill-omened birth when Asgardian swords first spilled Jotun blood across our ice. That choice was made long ago and is not unmade now.”
Loki made a small sound, like he had been punched in the gut. He tried to pull back, but the queen’s hand was hard on his chin, keeping him from moving. Thor took a step forwards, Sif and the Valkyrie both reaching for their weapons, before Loki put his empty hands out to stop them. Natasha could see him shaking.
“Do you understand me, Asgardian?”
“Yes,” Loki said, his voice barely more than a whisper.
“Good.” Farbauti released him with a jerk and Loki stumbled backwards, the blue already melting away from his skin like he couldn’t maintain it without an outside impetus.
Thor caught him in an embrace and drew him close as Loki stood gasping, pulling his brother’s head against his shoulder as if to shield him from the frost giants. Loki didn’t fight him, just leaned heavily against Thor with his hands opening and closing uselessly at his sides. Sif and the Valkyrie came up to flank them, both women’s expressions wary.
“I think you’ve said enough, your majesty,” Thor told the queen coldly, keeping a soothing hand on the back of Loki’s head and his other hand on Loki’s shoulders. “I’m sure you have many things to see to back in Utgard. Asgard and Midgard are grateful for Jotunheim’s aid in this battle, but you have your own people to see to, as Asgard has ours. By your own words before witnesses from the Nine, you have no claim to wergild from Asgard or to my brother.”
“No,” said Farbauti. “Jotunheim wants nothing from Asgard – not that Asgard has very much to offer these days. Jotunheim is well satisfied in that, even if it was no doing of ours.” She smiled a little as the watching Asgardians bristled, most of them with their hands on their weapons. “I think we will not meet again, Odin’s sons, though whom among us can say what web the Norns might weave? The divine Aesir and the Jotnar alike walk each step of our wyrd, whatever it might be.”
She turned and strode away without waiting for a response. Her sons followed her, though one looked back briefly at Thor and Loki. There was a glimmer of magic, blue-silver, like glittering frost, and a sound like a door opening, before the frost giants vanished from the battlefield.
Natasha felt her shoulders relax.
“Shit,” Bucky said, sounding somewhere between impressed and horrified. “What just happened?”
“Adopted,” Natasha said quietly, because Steve looked too gobsmacked to answer immediately and while she was certain he remembered that particular detail, she was also pretty certain he was too polite to say it out loud.
“Oh,” Yelena said, the single syllable harsh with understanding. Her hand crept out for Natasha’s, callused fingers curling around hers; Natasha squeezed back before Yelena released her.
“Christ, that was his mom?” Clint said, with genuine horror that Natasha could see echoed on Tony’s face; Tony was looking around to make sure that Pepper hadn’t heard, his expression relieved to find her out of earshot.
Loki finally pulled back from Thor, his face so stark it looked like it had been carved from marble. He leaned a shoulder against his brother’s and swiped his hand across his face; Natasha didn’t think he had been crying, but his expression suggested he wasn’t certain one way or another. He looked at the Valkyrie and said, “If you wanted to revisit the question of who’ll sit on the throne of Asgard, now would probably be the time. I think there are enough Aesir here for a quorum of the Althing.”
“Brother –” Thor began.
“No,” the Valkyrie said flatly. She leaned on her spear and said, “It’s not a quorum, and even if it was, our laws forbid the Althing from being made up solely of warriors. The rest of our people –” Your supporters, her expression said clearly, “– are back in New Asgard or on the rescue ships on their way here, and at the moment we’ve got no idea how many there are. If you really want to put it to the vote, Loki, you’ll have to wait until we can do a census. Not that even our laws were really made to deal with this sort of thing.”
“Okay, wait, hang on,” Rhodes said, apparently unable to help himself. “You guys have a democracy?”
Loki looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “No.”
“The Althing affirms the king’s choice of successor from among his heirs,” Thor explained. “It’s a formality from our past –”
“It helps when there’s still actually a king to make that choice,” the Valkyrie said dryly. “At least these days. From what my mother used to say, Bor cheated the Althing out of the choice by naming Odin as king in his place when he went into the Borsleep for the first time, so when he died a few millennia later, it was just a formality, never mind there were other heirs who could have been chosen. Odin did the same thing with Hela and then everything went to Hel in a handbasket when she decided not to wait and tried to seize power anyway.” She cocked an eye at Thor. “It’s not supposed to be a formality. There were still people in Asgard annoyed about that when I was a girl.”
Thor looked a little shocked, but Loki just shook his head, weary.
“Elective monarchy,” Natasha said to Clint, who looked like he was trying to put what the Valkyrie had just said together with what he already knew about Asgard. “The whole ‘name a co-king to get out of the elective part’ is how a lot of the Roman emperors used to do it.”
He made a face. “Sounds complicated.”
She shrugged. “You’ve seen the U.S. government, right?”
“Oh, god,” Tony said. “You guys aren’t about to have an Asgardian constitutional crisis, are you?”
“Of course not,” Loki said. “We don’t have a constitution.”
“I thought this was an oldest gets the throne sort of thing – which of you is older, by the way?”
“Me,” Thor said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Loki said. “Asgard’s never had primogeniture.”
“I’m still older,” Thor said.
“We’re twins,” Loki said, apparently on reflex. “It doesn’t matter!”
“You’re what?” the Valkyrie burst out.
“Oh my god, he’s literally your evil twin,” Tony said, and at Loki’s raised eyebrows added, “Well, I mean, not evil –”
Loki crossed his arms and looked annoyed at himself for having said anything at all. “Well, clearly we’re not actually twins, as I believe was just made exquisitely clear to everyone here.”
“You didn’t know?” Sif said to the Valkyrie. “It’s a very famous story.”
“Yes,” Loki said, “as in ‘story,’ as in ‘fictional,’ as in ‘Odin made it all up.’” He ground his teeth and looked irritated.
“What story?” the Valkyrie said pointedly.
Sif shot a glance at Thor and Loki, then explained, “About Odin’s sons being born at the beginning and end of the Battle of Jotunheim. There’s supposed to be a prophecy – Odin’s sons, battle-born –”
Loki ran a hand over his face. “Which is clearly nonsense –”
“Actually,” Thor said thoughtfully, “from what –” He glanced at his brother before he went on. “If you were born when the fighting started, then we really did come into this world together.” He grinned, pleased at the revelation; Natasha got the sudden impression that it was something that had been bothering him for a while. He added cheerfully, “Though I’m still older, because everyone says I was born when Asgard arrived on Jotunheim, before the fighting started.”
“You’ve been dead for five years, Thor, whatever order we were born in I’m definitely older now,” Loki said, bumping a shoulder against his brother’s. A little of his tension seemed to have eased with Thor’s words, as if he had gotten something back that had been lost some time ago.
Thor made a pained face. “I don’t think that counts –”
Natasha turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, wary after the unpleasantness with the frost giants. She could see faint glimmers of magic across the battlefield, doorways in space-time held open either by the original magic of Loki’s summoning or by the sorcerers who had come with the Yggdrasil troops. A number of them had left, like the frost giants had; Natasha was both faintly relieved and a little disappointed to see the dragons gone. All of the remaining leaders were still here, either with their own forces or exchanging a few tense words with each other, most of them clearly waiting for the opportunity to speak to the Asgardians. Small groups of soldiers – Sif and the Valkyrie had designated a couple of Asgardian units to join them – were moving across the battlefield, recovering their dead and wounded and killing any of Thanos’s surviving forces. Natasha tried to make herself care about the latter and couldn’t; none of them could be allowed to live. She hoped that there was a way to take care of the horrendous mass of bodies and that she wouldn’t be the person who had to come up with one.
“Thor!” bellowed the newcomer. “What did you do to my hammer?”
“Eitri!” Thor said, looking relieved at the interruption. “I – what happened to your hands?”
The dwarf king held them up as he stomped over. They were beautifully articulated metal, each digit graven with runes too tiny to make out in any detail – not that Natasha expected to be able to read them, anyway. “What do you think? That purple smear feeding the good land-mother Jǫrð over there.” He tapped a finger to his lips in an abbreviated version of the Asgardians’ earlier reverence, some form of which Natasha guessed the dwarves shared with them. “That was well done, lad,” he added to Loki. “Odin himself could have done no better, nor would he have.”
Loki’s face did something strange, but Eitri went back to haranguing Thor before he could respond. “Now, where’s my hammer, Thor? Why are you using a sword? Loki said something about that witch of a sister breaking Mjolnir when he showed up at the forge-ring five years ago, but he wasn’t exactly in his right mind –”
“Thanks, Eitri,” Loki said brightly. “Though there are a number of people who would say I haven’t been in my right mind for quite some time.”
“Or ever,” Sif said, but it was fond.
Eitri waved that aside. “The boy’s always been more sensible than most of you Asgardians. All hack and slash, you are, no appreciation for fine artistry. Now, about my hammer –”
“It hasn’t been your hammer for five thousand years,” Thor protested.
“And it should have lasted for five thousand more!”
Loki was listening to them bicker with a small smile on his face when his gaze went to something over Natasha’s shoulder and went cold.
Natasha turned, stumbling a little with weariness before Yelena put a hand under her elbow, then relaxed when she saw that it was Nebula and the green-skinned woman who had been with her earlier. Then she tensed again when Clint reached warily back over his shoulder for an arrow before he paused and said, “No – it’s the right one.”
“The right what?” Steve said, sounding as tired as Natasha felt.
“Gamora,” Loki said cautiously, suddenly on Clint’s other side. “I thought –” He paused and frowned at Nebula, who looked like she hadn’t been having a particularly good time in the battle – she was missing the coppery metal plate on her head and all the metallic pseudo-flesh had burned off her left arm, revealing the skeletal armature beneath.
“Is that your brother?” Nebula asked, looking over his shoulder at Thor, who was still talking to the dwarf king.
Loki nodded, but his gaze had already gone back to the green woman. His expression was very wary.
“Ember –” she began, and he flinched backwards. Nebula shook her head a little, and Gamora hesitated before she went on apologetically, “I never heard your real name before he took you from the Black Order and gave you to the Chitauri, just the one Proxima and the Maw gave you.”
Clint looked sharply at Loki, who was still watching Gamora.
“I’m Loki of Asgard,” he said quietly, “son of Odin.”
She nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” Loki said, with a small, tight smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. After a moment, he said, “You’re not – you’re not the same Gamora I met with the Guardians five years ago, are you? You came with Th – with him?”
“Loki –” Nebula began
“It’s all right,” Gamora told her. She looked back at Loki. “Yes, I came here with him. And Nebula – my Nebula.”
Loki frowned briefly, then his eyes widened. His glance back over his shoulder at Thor was so fleeting that Natasha might not have noticed if she hadn’t already been watching him. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Nebula shrugged a little, her expression resigned. Gamora looked down.
“We missed something somewhere, didn’t we?” Steve said. Natasha didn’t think he was following the half-unspoken conversation any better than she was, but that part was easy enough to figure out.
“You didn’t,” Nebula said. “I did.” She looked at Clint. “Where is it?”
“Safe.” They eyed each other the same way Yelena and Bucky had a few minutes earlier, like two wary dogs deciding whether to make friends or fight. There was a soft sound from Steve’s other side that might have been Bucky muffling laughter.
Steve and Loki exchanged a look across the top of her head that almost made Natasha laugh, out of sheer battle-weariness trending into near-hysteria. The two of them were the only people in the small group who weren’t trained assassins, not that it made them any less dangerous. She knew they had both done black ops and wetwork before, but it was neither their preference nor their training. Having just seen Loki in battle with the rest of the Asgardians, she knew it really wasn’t his training, though he, like her, would rather kill one man from behind than a dozen on the battlefield.
Nebula’s lips twitched a little in an almost-smile, then she nodded solemnly to them and made a gesture towards Gamora to get the other woman’s attention. “Come and meet my friends,” she said, nodding in Tony and Rhodey’s direction.
Natasha didn’t miss Gamora’s very slight double-take. She also didn’t miss that Loki didn’t relax until the two women were out of earshot, then he pressed his fingers to his forehead, looking weary.
“You all right?” Steve asked him.
“I’ve had a very long day,” Loki said.
“Yeah,” Clint snorted. “Tell me about it.” He slipped his bow back over his shoulder into the carrying loops alongside his quiver and started to rub his hands over his face before remembering they were filthy.
Natasha put a hand briefly on Loki’s arm, meaning to finally go and hug Wanda and maybe actually introduce herself to Peter Parker. He caught her sleeve before she could turn away and she looked up at him, raising her eyebrows.
He let go of her immediately, then glanced around to make sure that the others knew he was talking to them as well. “Please don’t tell my brother what you just heard,” he said, a little apologetically. “I’m sure he’s guessed some of it, but – he doesn’t know that part.”
Bucky nodded without hesitation, though Natasha was pretty sure he had next to no idea who Loki was in the first place. With his background – and hers and Yelena’s – you didn’t need to know details to guess what all that had meant, though. Some things were the same no matter where they happened.
“Thor doesn’t know?” Clint asked, frowning.
“Aside from the dead the only people who know any of it are Gamora and Nebula,” Loki said, his mouth tight. “And before today it was just Nebula, and she didn’t know all that much. Neither does Gamora, to be honest, but it’s still –” He shook his head, then glanced around as if he needed a distraction. “You shouldn’t walk around with an unsheathed blade,” he said to Natasha. “In this company someone will take it for an invitation.”
Green-gold glimmered briefly on his fingertips before he handed the sword belt and sheath he had conjured to Natasha, then he winced and wiped away a drop of blood from his nose; apparently he had been using too much magic today for it to have fully regenerated yet, however that worked. He had tried to explain it once. Natasha wasn’t fully certain she had understood.
Yelena held the sword for her while she buckled the belt on, then Natasha dug out one of the cloths she used to clean her knives to get the alien blood off the sword; human blood was hard enough on steel and she had no idea what Outrider and Chitauri blood would do to a perfectly good weapon, no matter what kind of metal Asgardian swords were made from. She swung the wolf’s head shield over her back onto her baton harness and wondered where her batons had gone and if it was worth looking.
“Can I keep this?” Yelena asked, indicating the spear she was still holding.
Loki raised an eyebrow. “Of course. You’ve more than earned it.”
“Might be a little hard to travel with,” Bucky said; the spear was eight feet long counting the blade.
“I’ll work something out,” Yelena said.
“They fold down,” Loki said mildly, and showed her what to do in order to compress the spear down to a three-foot staff of finely-graven metal, with no sign of the foot-long spear point.
Clint watched this with an expression of poorly-concealed disbelief, even though he had living in relatively close company with Loki for the better part of a month now. Natasha didn’t think he was actually trying to conceal it, after a moment’s thought; he just couldn’t believe it.
The Valkyrie drifted up to them and said to Loki, “That dwarf’s still yelling at Thor like what happened with Hela was his fault. To the hammer, not Asgard.” Her lips twitched in amusement. “Says it was some of his best work and then Odin ruined it by putting some stupid enchantment on it.”
Loki smiled a little to himself. “It was a stupid enchantment.”
“Wait –” Clint said. “The whole ‘whosoever be worthy’ thing?”
“That’s the one.”
“He thinks Odin weakened the forge-spells on it by adding his own magic to it and tying it all up with Thor’s,” the Valkyrie said. “I think I heard the words ‘it’s not my fault!’ come out of Thor’s mouth. A couple of times.”
“You know, it was his fault,” Loki said thoughtfully. “Not the enchantment, obviously, but what led to our father placing it on Mjolnir in the first place. Well, my fault too. Mostly my fault. But Thor didn’t have to do anything about it. The Jotuns didn’t either.” His mouth went hard and he looked down.
The Valkyrie nudged him with a shoulder. “That ship’s sailed, your majesty.”
Loki glanced at her. “I wouldn’t get too comfortable calling me that now that Thor’s back.”
“Leave it until the Althing meets, if you’re that determined about it.”
“After what just happened with – with –” He couldn’t say the Jotun queen’s name. “It won’t be any contest.”
“You’re king now, majesty,” the Valkyrie said pointedly.
Something about the way she said it seemed to steady him. Loki passed a hand over his face, then straightened upright and said, “All right. Find out how many of our people are here in the first place so no one’s left behind when we go back to New Asgard, dead or living – I won’t leave any of our fallen here. And someone find out where the damn gauntlet is.”
“Scott and his girl and that wizard with the fancy cloak had it last I saw,” Clint said after a moment as the Valkyrie moved away to obey the first command.
Loki looked irritated. “Strange?”
“I mean, yeah, wizards are pretty strange,” Clint said.
Steve grinned tiredly. “That’s his name. Stephen Strange.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s weird.”
Loki rolled his eyes and nodded to himself before he turned to Steve and Natasha. They both looked at him inquisitively.
“You need to decide what we’re to do with the gauntlet until we can return the Stones to their proper times,” Loki said. “If not for –” His gesture encompassed the ruined compound, “– I would advise keeping it here, but as it is there are only a limited number of options.”
Steve grimaced, but nodded in agreement. “What do you suggest? Wakanda, maybe, but I don’t want to saddle T’Challa with that when he just came back, especially since we weren’t telling Queen Ramonda or Okoye any of the details in the first place –”
“Wong’s going to argue for Kamar-Taj,” Natasha said; she liked Wong well enough, even if she didn’t know Stephen Strange at all, but she didn’t think that would be wise. She had a pretty good idea what Loki was going to say next.
“I don’t want the damn thing anywhere near me, my brother, or my people,” Loki said unhappily, “but the safest place is probably New Asgard, at least for a short time. Our vault isn’t equal to my father’s, but it’s better than anything else on Midgard, and it will have me, my brother, the Valkyrie, and all of the einherjar and ulfhednar sitting on top of it. And I assure you I want nothing to do with it, so you needn’t be concerned about that.”
Steve raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t.”
Loki looked a little surprised, the way he always did when Steve or Natasha or one of the other Avengers said something like that.
“Tony might argue about it,” Natasha said, shifting a little just to get herself used to the unfamiliar weight of the sword on her hip, “but he’s not going to want it anywhere near Pepper or Morgan, so he’ll come around. Yeah, that’s best. We’ll deal with Wong. And Strange, I guess.”
She sighed and looked over the ruins of the compound again, with god, where am I even going to sleep tonight? suddenly at the forefront of her mind. As such things went it was far from the worst problem she would be dealing with today – or for the foreseeable future, in all likelihood – but it didn’t make it any better, either.
Loki followed her gaze, then said quietly and calmly, “You and the Avengers gave me a place to stay when I had nothing and no one. In return, I offer you and your friends the hospitality of New Asgard for as long as you need it.”
Dealing with the immediate aftermath of the battle took the better part of an hour, most of which Loki spent alternately seeing to the Asgardians and engaged in thinly-veiled threats-cum-diplomacy with the other rulers of Yggdrasil, the bulk of whom were clearly waiting to see whether Loki or Thor would end up on the throne of Asgard, such as it was. Natasha and Steve accompanied Loki to most of the latter, since the last thing they wanted was for the rest of the Nine Realms to think that Earth was weak in any way. Thor, showing more political savvy than Natasha had expected, prudently stayed away from most of it, though his one-eyed gaze followed his brother as though constantly checking that Loki was still there. Rhodes and Tony were already on a call with Ross and a couple of his cronies, looking like they wished the dragons were still around so they could feed the politicos to them. Rhodey waved Natasha off when she went to join them, probably because adding her or Steve to the mix would antagonize Ross even further.
Not long after that, Natasha had to politely make her excuses to the Light Elf queen, who was easily the most terrifying person she had ever met, and step aside to answer her buzzing phone.
“What the hell, Romanoff?” Nick Fury said.
Natasha couldn’t help her grin. “Good to hear your voice, sir,” she said, then had to give an abbreviated explanation of the Snap and the past five years, which resulted in having to pull her phone away before Fury blew out an eardrum yelling about letting Loki, of all people, settle on Earth.
“Honestly, he’s not that bad once you get to know him,” Natasha said, thanking her lucky stars that Fury wasn’t here in person. Yet. There were things that he would figure out after one look at them and she was too tired to deal with that.
Fury made an annoyed sound. “Romanoff –”
Natasha eventually got out of the conversation by sending him a picture of the battlefield and the handful of aliens who were still hanging around – just the dwarves at this point, whose relationship with the Asgardians was such that it was more good-natured joshing than the verbal fencing most of the others had been. When they finally vanished through another door in space-time – part of the original magic of the summoning, apparently, rather than something new and terrifying to be worried about – Loki leaned heavily on Mistilteinn, looking exhausted. Thor, who had joined his brother, Steve, and the dwarves, put a hand on his shoulder and said something to him. Loki nodded back, his gaze a little wary.
Dealing with the sorcerers took a little longer. T’Challa had been happy enough to leave the whole affair to the Avengers and the Asgardians, though he had listened gravely to their arguments before agreeing. Scott had stubbornly hung onto the gauntlet ever since Clint had passed it to him, despite Stephen Strange’s attempts to get him to hand it over. He and Hope van Dyne stared at the gruesome spectacle of the battlefield while Steve, Tony, and Loki argued with Strange and Wong over who was best suited to take care of the Infinity Stones until someone could return them to their own times.
“That will probably be us,” Hope told Natasha; she was a strong-featured woman with her dark hair pulled practically back from her face. “Because I think Hank is going to kill Scott for letting a Stark anywhere near his tech otherwise. He might anyway.”
Scott nodded with a woebegone expression. “I’d say you should talk to him, but I kind of think he hates the Avengers almost as much as the Stark family.”
“That’s fair,” Natasha admitted; she had never met Howard Stark, but she had heard plenty of stories about him. Steve’s tended to be good-natured – they had been friends, and though Steve had never said as much, she suspected he had gotten along better with Howard than he did with Tony – but the bulk of the others weren’t. And Hank Pym had good reason not to like the Avengers, either, not that Natasha had ever met him in person.
“Enough,” Wong finally told Strange. “New Asgard is well-equipped to handle the Stones for a few days. Better them than us if something should happen. Besides, Loki’s a friend.”
“Yes, listen to your Sorcerer Supreme, Strange,” Loki said, smirking. As Strange sputtered and Wong tried to explain with something that included the words you missed a lot, he added magnanimously, “You’re welcome to inspect our vault if it will ease your mind. After all, someone is going to have to transport us all to New Asgard and since you’ve already volunteered as a taxi service, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be you.”
Strange and Wong turned to look at the mass of Asgardians waiting on their king, the dead and wounded laid out on knock-down stretchers. There weren’t too many of the latter; Asgardian regeneration was already doing its work on shallow injuries and the very badly-wounded had been transferred to the starships the unsnapped refugees had arrived on, where the healers were busy. Other sorcerers moved across the battlefield, disposing of the dead aliens – thank God, Natasha frankly didn’t care what they did with the bodies as long as she wasn’t the one who had to deal with it – or creating portals for the varied peoples who had defended Earth against Thanos.
Loki grinned like a shark, all teeth. “Since you went to the trouble of bringing my people here in the first place, regardless of our situation. You can also bring the rest of my people through from space. You owe us, sorcerer.”
Strange and Wong conferred in a silent exchange of sideways glances, then Strange said, “Fine. But I want to see the vault.”
“Of course,” Loki said graciously. “As I said. You’re welcome to both see it and test its defenses. I think you’ll find it formidable.”
“Oh, good,” Scott said, and finally handed the gauntlet to Natasha. It hummed uncomfortably against her fingers and she hastily passed it to Steve, who didn’t look any happier to be holding it. “Here. You take this. I gotta go get yelled at by Hank Pym. Or murdered. Maybe murdered. Probably murdered.”
“You just saved half the universe,” Steve said, handling the gauntlet gingerly.
“Believe me,” Scott sad, “he’s not going to care. Oh, I’m so dead. Okay, let’s get out of here.”
Hope mouthed he’ll be fine at Natasha before they stepped through the glittering portal Wong made for them, through which Natasha could see the brilliant blue sky of a San Francisco day. Just before the portal closed, she heard a man yell, “Scott! What the hell –”
Loki waved after them – he liked Scott – then turned back to Strange and Wong. “When you’re ready,” he said.
Natasha watched Thor as they stepped through the portal into New Asgard. So did Loki, his expression very anxious.
They came through on the big field just south of the settlement, alternately used for arms practice and some kind of stick-and-ball sport that, from what little Natasha had seen of it when she had been here before, was just as dangerous as arms practice. The settlement rose above the field, curving up the hill with most of it on the cliff side over the choppy waters of the Skagerrak – mostly elegant wooden structures which already looked like they had been here for centuries rather than a handful of years. Thor and the other newly-arrived Asgardians tipped their heads back to look at the settlement, a few of them exclaiming softly.
Those exclamations turned into cries of joy and relief as the Asgardians who had been waiting at the edge of the field came towards them, calling out to friends or relatives. Loki had used his amber orb to contact the settlement while they were still in New York, so their arrival wasn’t a surprise. Natasha was so tired that everything had taken on a bright, blurred edge and she was leaning against Steve as inconspicuously as she could manage, but she was aware enough to note the people in both parties searching for familiar faces – many of them finding who they were looking for, but others obviously disappointed. Loki, Thor, Sif, and the Valkyrie had been able to determine who had come through to the compound, but the Valkyrie hadn’t had time to do a full census of everyone recovered from deep space. And even five years later no one knew for sure who had been taken in the Snap and who had been killed during the attack on the Statesman.
Natasha had seen the look Loki and the Valkyrie had exchanged after the refugee ships came through the portals Wong and Strange made for them. They would be able to find out for certain now.
She watched Thor watch Loki as he talked to some of the Asgardians who had met them, a few men and women who had separated themselves from the crowd when they saw him – mostly women; she had noticed that there were about three Asgardian women to every one man, legacy of the twin massacres on Asgard and the Statesman. Without exception, everyone from New Asgard had checked for an instant when they saw Thor next to Loki, then gone to Loki anyway. Thor had regarded this with startled bemusement at first, then with his brows narrowed in thought.
“It’s beautiful,” Wanda said quietly from beside Natasha, looking around.
Natasha had to agree. To their left, a pathway led down to a stone quay where a few boats were tied up; the path was marked with waist-high pillars of alternating stone and wood, both elaborate carved with Asgardian-style knotwork and topped by the stylized heads of various animals. Another path led upwards from the field to the settlement, marked with more pillars and a railing at a steep point where steps had been built into the hill.
The houses on the slope of the hill were small, mostly, built in a style that Natasha thought of as typically Asgardian only because of what it wasn’t – not strange beyond any comprehension, but not what anyone on Earth would have designed, though there were bits and pieces that were almost, almost, familiar. From here you could see part of Iðavoll, the king’s hall and the tallest building in the settlement, though at this angle everything but the upper levels were hidden by a cluster of other buildings. The setting sun caught the glitter of gilding at the carved rafter-ends of Iðavoll’s tiered roofs, visible from here as nothing but a golden gleam.
It was all very beautiful and very peaceful and very, very alien in a way Natasha couldn’t quite articulate.
Thor put his hand on Loki’s shoulder and said something to him too quietly for Natasha to hear. Loki smiled at him, his expression still anxious, then settled his shoulders.
“Come on, brother,” he said. “Let me show you New Asgard.”
Notes:
Just a few notes: before the final chapter goes up I'm going to go back and rewrite the beginning of Chapter 1 to better match the later established worldbuilding about New Asgard and Loki's relationship with the Avengers -- not major changes, but enough to be noticeable.
Because I use the same backstory for every fic, I will also just borrow my author's note from Better in the Morning here: The films are a bit inconsistent on Thor's and Loki's ages in relation to each other, and I went with Thor's comment in Ragnarok about them "being eight at the time" (and thus the same age) and the estimate of Loki's age from the Battle of Jotunheim from the first Thor film, rather than Thor's statement of his age as fifteen hundred from Infinity War.
Chapter Text
The great hall in the Asgardian royal house of Iðavoll that evening was a riot of light and sound, in sharp counterpoint to the stately emptiness it had had when Natasha had arrived all those weeks ago. Now it was full of delighted Asgardians – friends and family reunited with each other after a couple of Wong’s sorcerers had brought the rest of the refugee ships through to Earth and the einherjar and ulfhednar here from Vanaheim for the first time in years, all of them drunk on victory and vengeance and quite a lot of actual alcohol. She felt pleasantly floaty herself, though she had had to both pace herself and heavily water the too-strong Asgardian liquor or she would have ended up on the floor a couple of hours ago. Even Steve and Bucky were a little flushed; Sam was watering his liquor even more heavily than Natasha was, and Bruce and Wanda had switched to fruit juice or water after their first couple of sips of booze.
The six of them were the only Avengers there, not counting Thor and Loki. The Guardians of the Galaxy, despite Loki’s polite invitation, had opted to go celebrate with the Ravagers, the Wakandans had gone home, Clint had badgered Wong until he had sent Clint back to his farm to be with Laura and their kids, Tony and Pepper had gone home to see their daughter, Scott had gone back to San Francisco with Hope van Dyne in order to see his daughter and get reamed out by Hank Pym for letting a Stark fool around with his technology, and Rhodes had reluctantly volunteered to deal with the Earthside fallout from both the reversal of the Snap and the battle. Natasha probably should have backed him up, but she had justified going to New Asgard with the excuse that she and Steve had standing orders to keep an eye on Loki and the other Asgardians. Sam and Bucky weren’t leaving Steve any time soon, Bruce was catching up with old friends among the Asgardians, and Wanda didn’t have anywhere else to go. Yelena was around here somewhere too, as well as a couple of the sorcerers who had stuck around after they had watched Loki put the infinity gauntlet in Iðavoll’s vault, sunk deep into the rock below the settlement and apparently secure enough to satisfy them. Together, it was undoubtedly the largest number of humans whom Loki had ever allowed into New Asgard.
The party had filled the great hall and spilled out into the courtyard beyond the big doors, which had been flung open for the occasion. New Asgard’s small number of children and teenagers kept running back and forth between the courtyard and the great hall, as if afraid to miss anything happening in either space. Fires burned in big metal braziers in the courtyard, and more tables had been set up there with food and drink – a lot of both, Asgardians could really put it away. Natasha had known that since they had been hosting Loki at the dearly departed Avengers compound and Thor on and off years before that, but it was more impressive to see in bulk. There were musicians in a corner of the great hall and more out in the courtyard, mostly managing to coordinate with each other, or at least not to clash. A few times spontaneous dancing had broken out, alien and unfamiliar and utterly enchanting; Natasha had leaned forward to get a better view and was already wondering who the best person to ask to teach her was.
The Avengers were seated at the high table with Thor and Loki, though Bruce and Sam had both drifted down to the lower tables that lined the big room to talk with various Asgardians and Bucky had vanished from sight entirely, probably to the fresher air of the courtyard. Wanda was tucked comfortably against Natasha’s side at the end of the high table, a little intimidated by the Asgardians but clearly pleased by the celebration. Steve was on her other side, looking very much at home in his borrowed clothes amidst the Asgardian splendor, with Sif on his left and an empty chair between her and Thor. He and Loki sat next to each other; there was another empty chair to Loki’s left, then the Valkyrie and more empty chairs where the other Avengers had been.
Natasha had only the faintest idea of what Asgard had looked like before its destruction, but going by the faint gut-punch sound Thor had made when he had first seen Iðavoll, and again when they had walked into the great hall, Loki hadn’t done a bad job at recreating it in miniature. The whole room glittered with light and life, both from the flickering firelight thrown up by the firepit that ran down the center of the room and from the lights high up in the vaulted rafters – glowing glass-like balls that Loki had called vapor-lamps, which produced a soft but strong light. It made the carvings and inlay on the columns and rafters around the room glow, striking sparks from the shields and weapons hung around the walls – most battered from the fight they had just come from. Mistilteinn and Thor’s sword were hung behind the high table, along with Steve’s shield, Natasha’s and Sif’s swords and shields, Yelena’s and the Valkyrie’s spears, and even Bucky’s and Sam’s guns. The Earth weapons had been treated with as much solemnity as Mistilteinn and the other Asgardian arms.
Natasha was picking at the remains of some kind of Asgardian cake, honey-sweet and studded with nuts and dried berries and, unsurprisingly, drenched in some kind of alcohol, when she saw Loki lean over to say something to Thor. He waited until Thor had nodded before he signed a gesture that resulted in several Asgardians vanishing into the back room of the hall and returned a moment later with golden pitchers brimming with what was, unsurprisingly, more alcohol. They went around the room setting out the pitchers, then returned to their seats. Sif picked up the pitcher nearest her and filled her cup, then made a gesture for Steve’s, Natasha’s, and Wanda’s, filling them to the brim.
The music cut off with a final flourish at another gesture; Loki waited until as many people as possible could crowd in from the courtyard before he produced a new pair of cups with a flick of his fingers and filled them both full, handing one to Thor. Then the two brothers rose to their feet, looking suddenly very alike despite the difference in coloring.
Thor lifted his cup, which was something very like cut-crystal in a sheath of golden metal with figured gripping animal designs. “I drink to our glorious dead!” he said. “I drink to those who spilled their life’s blood out in Asgard’s name and for the defense of the Nine Realms, far from kith and kin and homeworld. They are feasting now in Valhalla with all our kin back to the beginning of time. Remember us kindly until we come to dine with you again, for even the gods must die.” He and Loki both turned to salute the empty chairs on either side of them. “Hail to the Æsir!”
“Hail!”
“Hail to the Ásynjur!”
“Hail!”
This time Natasha heard the very slight vowel shift – the difference between the divine living Aesir and the deified dead Æsir and Ásynjur, the female Asgardians. She lifted her cup with the Asgardians and drank, but not much – she had the feeling that there was going to be a lot more drinking to go.
Loki lifted his cup. “I drink to our living!” he said. “I drink to those who passed through the great void of Ginnungagap and returned to walk once more upon the branches of the World Tree. I drink to those who passed through the fires of Ragnarok and came out forged of uru to make new life in a new Asgard. I drink to those who joined us in battle to break their shields against the foe’s might and wet their spears in his blood. Hail to the Aesir!”
“Hail!”
“Hail to the Asynjur!”
“Hail!”
He and Thor – and many of the Asgardians – both drained their cups, then Thor poured again for both of them. They turned towards the three humans at the high table.
Natasha felt herself flush under that concentrated attention, though that might have been the alcohol. She grinned at them anyway, delighted herself to see them so happy.
“I drink to the Avengers!” Thor said. “I drink to our comrades in arms, to the friends of the Aesir, to the warriors who braved the roots of the great tree Mimameid that passes over all realms to set the working of the Norns right again. Drink hail!”
“Hail!”
“I drink to Midgard!” Loki said. “I drink to the realm that sheltered our people – with no love lost for me –” he added with a wry grin, “– and which gave us a place to build Asgard anew. Drink hail!”
“Hail!”
Steve whispered briefly to Sif, then got to his feet. Thor and Loki both grinned at him as he raised his cup. “I drink to Asgard!” he said, his soldier’s voice carrying easily through the hall. “I drink to our friends and our allies and to the defenders of Earth! Drink hail!”
“Hail!”
Natasha stood. “I drink to Asgard! I drink to sorrows shared and friendships made and to a strong right arm in battle! За нашу дружбу! Drink hail!”
“Hail!”
She and Steve both knocked back their glasses; he caught her with one hand under her elbow as she swayed, Wanda putting a hand on her hip to steady her. Natasha had a pretty good head for alcohol for an unenhanced human, but the Asgardian mead they were drinking left even vodka in the dust.
Thor and Loki had emptied their cups too. As Natasha sat down – very, very carefully, her head swimming – Loki poured for both of them again. He was looking around the room, clearly expecting someone else to start making toasts, when Thor turned to him and raised his cup. Loki’s eyes went wide and a little wary.
“I drink to my brother!” Thor said, grinning at him. “I drink to the son of Odin, to the Allfather of the Aesir, to the Shield of the Gods, whose work was the undoing of the goddess of death, who brought our people safe through fire and bloodshed and the doom of the gods, who made Asgard once more as a home for our people, who fought the warlord Thanos and called the Nine Realms together as one to defeat him on the battlefield. I drink to the King of Asgard! I drink to Loki!”
Loki made a small, gut-punched sound. Thor put a hand on the back of his neck and bent his forehead against his brother’s, whispering to him too softly for Natasha to make out over the roar of voices crying out.
After a moment Loki turned from Thor and raised his own cup, his face set in lines of steely determination. “I drink to my brother!” he said. “I drink to the son of Odin, to the Allfather of the Aesir, to the Hammer of the Gods, who challenged the goddess of death and won, who saved our people from extinction and the doom of Asgard-that-was, who gave his life’s blood to the tyrant Thanos to save our people, who passed through the void of Ginnungagap to return again to Asgard. I drink to the King of Asgard! I drink to Thor!”
There was another round of cheers, no less enthusiastic than the first, but a little more confused, Natasha thought.
After an instant of hesitation, Sif stood and raised her cup with a wry grin. “I drink to the sons of Odin!” she said, her voice pitched to carry. “I drink to the saviors of the gods, to the Allfathers of the Aesir, to the Kings of Asgard! I drink to Thor and Loki! Drink hail, Aesir! Drink hail, Asynjur!”
“Hail!”
Nearly everyone in the hall was on their feet, cups raised, a solid wall of sound aimed at the two men on the dais. Natasha found herself standing too, half-supported by Steve and Wanda as they all shouted.
Loki looked like he was about to cry. Thor was grinning, his cup raised in salute to the room and his arm still slung around his brother’s shoulders. After a moment of the roaring, delighted cheering, Loki got himself together and linked his arm with Thor’s. They both drank, laughing with it, until they turned their cups over to show that they were empty, then bent their heads together. Natasha couldn’t tell if they were saying anything or just hanging onto each other.
The Valkyrie stood, pouring herself another cup, and raised it. “I drink to the Aesir!” she cried. “I drink to a people too damn stubborn to die no matter how many times some murderous asshole tries to kill us! To the Kings of Asgard – to our kin feasting in Valhalla – to the Aesir and the Asynjur – drink hail!”
Despite the catnap Natasha had managed to take before the feast started, she was still so tired that everything had taken on a slight bright edge, not helped by the flickering firelight and the soft vapor-lamps that the Asgardians used instead of electric light. Wanda was asleep with her head pillowed on her arms; Sam and Bucky had reappeared and pulled a couple of chairs up to talk with Steve, who kept looking at them in shocked delight, like he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to have them both here. Natasha had kicked her borrowed shoes off and curled her legs up, leaning against the back of her chair with a cup of fruit juice between her palms, glad that the Asgardians apparently believed in not only having alcohol at a party.
Now that the feasting and the toasts were over, there was a slightly frantic edge to the celebration that Natasha could pick up on even in her exhausted state. There was going to be trouble later, she could tell, even if right now it seemed unlikely that Loki and Thor were going to fight over the throne. She could feel her training pushing at the back of her mind, both the Red Room’s and SHIELD’s, nudging her to look for the cracks in New Asgard – lingering resentment against the einherjar and ulfhednar who had stayed on Vanaheim, confusion and shock from the unsnapped refugees, a little bit of bitterness and betrayal from all parties where spouses had remarried or taken new lovers, the handful of children who didn’t remember their parents, grief at the realization. If the einherjar and ulfhednar stayed on Earth rather than returning to Vanaheim, then New Asgard’s population would triple rather than double, an unpleasant prospect for an Earth which hadn’t particularly wanted the Asgardians there in the first place. Natasha didn’t think that Ross or anyone else had really thought through the implications of real internal trouble amongst the Asgardians, just that he wanted them off the planet. She wasn’t going to be the one to help with that, though.
Loki was deep in conversation with the Valkyrie and a couple of the Asgardians from the settlement, but every now and then he glanced up and looked around the great hall, his gaze tracking his brother for an instant before he did a seemingly automatic onceover of the room in case of trouble. Natasha wondered briefly how the newly arrived Asgardians would respond to Loki vaulting the table to break up a fight, the way she had seen him do a few times back when Iðavoll had still been under construction and she had been spending most of her time here.
Thor, down at one of the main tables with Sif, Bruce, and a couple of the einherjar, kept doing the same thing, like he was checking that Loki hadn’t run off somewhere. So far they hadn’t done it at the same time, so Natasha wasn’t certain if either brother was aware that the other was doing it. It was kind of funny, in a way. She knew what her training said about that – that it was a potential sign of discord amongst the Asgardians – and kept shoving the thought aside every time it popped up.
Sif said something to Thor, laughing, and Bruce made an expression of disbelief. “You don’t,” he said; with the noise in the hall what it was Natasha couldn’t hear him from here, but he was facing her and she could read his lips. “That’s insane!”
Thor waved his hands in a no, no kind of way, and the einherjar – who had shed their armor and yellow cloaks, but were still recognizably in something like a uniform – made gestures of agreement.
Sif said something in response and Thor started to nod before he stopped abruptly. She looked at him inquisitively as he swung his long legs over the side of the bench and stood up, heading for the open space at the center of the big room. “Loki!”
Loki paused with his wineglass halfway to his lips and looked over at him. “What?”
Thor grinned up at him, clearly delighted. “Let’s dance the blades.”
“Oh, this I gotta see,” the Valkyrie said.
Loki made a rude gesture in her direction, then knocked back the rest of his wineglass and set it down. He kicked his chair back, put a hand down flat on the table, and vaulted it to land easily on the floor alongside Thor. He pointed at his brother. “If you cut a limb off and I have to spend a week regenerating a hand, you’re running the government.”
“What if I have to spend a week regenerating a limb?” Thor protested.
Loki spread his hands. “I was already running the government!”
“You’ve been in America doing some time travel bullshit for the past month,” the Valkyrie said. “I’ve been running the government.”
“I don’t think that’s how our monarchy works,” Loki said over his shoulder to her.
“This conversation’s kind of freaking me out,” Sam confessed. “What the hell are they talking about? Also, can they really regrow limbs?”
Steve looked at Natasha, who shrugged.
There were excited whispers moving through the great hall as word of whatever the hell they were doing spread. Sif had gone over to the musicians and was talking to them; someone else ran out the open doors to tell everyone in the courtyard what was going on.
Thor made a beckoning gesture at the einherjar he had been talking to, who took down a pair of the eight-foot battle spears racked on the wall and tossed them to him. Thor caught them easily as Loki made a similar gesture to a pair of ulfhednar on the opposite side of the hall and got a pair of swords in return. He laid them down on the floor, caught the axes someone else tossed him, and put those down on the floor too so that the four weapons formed a square before straightening up to catch the spear Thor threw him.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Bucky said.
“This is making me very uncomfortable,” Sam said.
Thor made a couple of testing passes with his spear, while Loki spun his between his hands, then tossed it up and caught it again. Both had the effect of making the watching crowd edge back, giving them enough clearance that they could both extend the eight-foot war spears at full lunge without running into anyone or the firepit in the center of the room. More Asgardians pushed in through the open doors to get a look at the show.
Loki set the butt of his spear against the floor, then kicked it up with the toe of one boot, spinning it one-handed in whirling arcs on either side of his body like a baton-twirler. He smirked at his brother and said, “Sure you remember how to do this? It’s been a while since you used anything but Mjolnir.”
“Oh, I remember,” Thor said. “It’s only been five years for you, remember, brother?”
Loki pursed his lips in a silent whistle, but his eyes were bright with amusement. “Well, then, let’s not keep everyone waiting.” He raised his free hand and made a circling gesture.
The musicians had been conferring while Thor and Loki had been warming up. Now a steady drumbeat began, the ivory tipper some Asgardian had brought all the way from his homeworld unhurried but rapid against the taut skin of the drumhead, a double-beat every three strokes. Thor and Loki began to twirl their spears as they circled the square of weapons laid out on the floor, the bright metal of the razor-sharp blades glittering in the firelight. The spears went faster and faster as the drumbeat intensified, until they were blinding arcs of alien metal passing in figure-eights from one side of each man to the other.
Then the Asgardian stringed instruments came in together and both Loki and Thor lunged forwards, spears at full extension and with those deadly blades passing a hair’s breadth from each other. They drew back in a sideways sweep of the weapons, moving faster now, intent on each other and the music and the pattern of the dance. Their spears met just below the foot-long points in a ringing crash that made Natasha jump, disengaged, swept past each other again, flipped up and over so that the next time they met it was with the shafts held parallel to each other. They struck against each other, a one two three solid thunk before they disengaged, swept outwards in whirling arcs, back again with another crash. The whole time Thor and Loki kept moving, their eyes fixed on each other, tracing a pattern around and through the square of weapons on the floor.
After today, Natasha had a very good idea of exactly how sharp those Asgardian weapons were, and even watching the blade dance left her cold. She trusted both Asgardians; she couldn’t bring herself to blink, let alone look away, in case in that instant one of them moved wrong. Not to mention they had both been drinking all night.
The music rose in a sudden skirl of strings as the drum matched it and with a stamp of booted feet Loki and Thor threw their spears upwards towards the rafters. They were still airborne, blades glittering in the firelight, when Loki and Thor each got a foot under the axes on the floor and tossed them up, catching them easily. They met in another clash of metal, axe shafts sliding against each other until the sharply curved heads caught against each other, then broke apart, free hands coming up to catch the spears as they came down.
They moved faster and faster as the music hastened, with no other sound but the stamp of their feet on the wooden floor, their harsh breathing, the clatter of the beads in Loki’s hair, and the clash of metal on metal as the weapons met. Another wild skirl of music and the spears went up again; this time it was the swords they tossed up into their hands.
“Is it weird that I’m a little turned on right now?” Bucky said, his voice barely more than a whisper, like he was afraid to distract the dancers.
“No,” Steve said without looking at him.
Bucky blinked, glanced over, and said, “Jesus Christ, Steve.”
“Pretty sure he’s not in the building full of Norse gods, buddy,” Sam said.
Steve’s ears were red. Natasha elbowed him gently, grinning, but didn’t take her eyes off Loki and Thor.
The blade dance was a third juggling now, first the spears rising upwards, then the axes, then the spears again, then the swords. It went faster and faster, each movement perfectly mirrored, the blades passing within a hair’s breadth of doing real damage. One of Thor’s spear-thrusts did catch one of Loki’s long braids, the foot-long blade slicing cleanly through the finger-width of hair and sending it flicking aside without so much as a pause. Neither man stopped, not with two and a half feet of edged metal each in the air above them.
The music changed again and so did Loki’s and Thor’s movements. Natasha couldn’t quite see what they did, but as the axes were whirling upwards their swords went down onto the floor in the same position they had started. The axes followed a few passes later while their spears were in the air, then Loki quirked an eyebrow at Thor as he caught his spear, still moving light-footed around the weapons laid on the floor around them and the spear spinning in his experienced hands. Thor grinned back.
When the brothers thrust next – a near twelve-foot reach at full extension – Loki’s spear-point came back trailing green fire.
Thor’s trailed lightning.
There was a collective if muted oooh from the watching Asgardians. The brothers were in the end-stages of the dance now, each movement slower and more deliberate, with showy flourishes accentuated by their magic. The spears snapped sideways and upright as the final movement ended with a last trailing glitter of green and white light, Thor and Loki facing each other and breathing hard.
“Holy shit,” Sam said reverently, the words almost lost in the whooping of the audience.
After a moment Thor and Loki handed the spears to an einheri who came forward to collect them and the other weapons. Thor slung an arm around Loki’s shoulders as Loki flicked his hair out of his face with a snap of his head, reaching up to finger the shorn braid. Natasha couldn’t hear what he said to his brother, but Thor grinned and squeezed his shoulders before turning to take the cups Sif brought them.
He handed one to Loki, who lifted it towards his brother in a salute that Thor returned, then they linked arms and drank, neck muscles working.
“Okay, I get why you slept with him,” Bucky said to Steve.
Steve put a hand over his face. “Buck…”
“Yeah?” Bucky said brightly.
“Shut up.”
Bucky laughed and slapped him on the back, which made Steve grin at him in unguarded affection.
Thor came back to the high table and reached across it to find an empty cup and a pitcher of water. “I don’t think I’ve done that in a century,” he admitted, pouring the cup full and then splashing its contents in his face. “Not the full thing.”
“That was impressive,” Natasha said, feeling a little breathless herself. The amount of practice it took to do something like that with live steel – “So how many times did you concuss yourself, learning?”
Thor laughed, poured himself another cup of water, and drank that down in one gulp. “Many. We don’t learn with blades at first, of course, but blade dances are a mark of skill among the einherjar and ulfhednar.”
“The ulfhednar have a different version,” Loki said, joining them and scrubbing at his sweat-streaked face with a towel someone had handed him. “This one is showing off, really.”
“I didn’t notice you protesting,” Thor said.
“Well, everyone knows I like showing off,” Loki said. “On the other hand –” He flicked the cut end of his braid at Thor; the spear-point had taken off about eight inches of hair.
Thor looked at him solemnly. “You need a haircut anyway.”
“What, like that?” Loki poked a finger at the side of Thor’s head. “No, thank you, I’m quite happy with my hair at the moment.”
“This was not my fault!” Thor protested. “A creepy old man cut it off,” he added in response to Steve’s bemused headtilt, which as far as Natasha was concerned didn’t actually explain anything.
Loki snickered and winked at Bruce, who had followed Thor over. “And then the Hulk smashed him.”
“You laughed.”
“Turnabout’s fair play, brother.”
“That’s different,” Thor protested, though he flicked a worried glance at Bruce, who seemed to have decided to be amused by the conversation. “You deserved it.” He stopped almost as soon as the words were out, clearly remembering what had passed between Loki and Thanos earlier that day.
Loki pretended not to see it, snagging his wineglass and another pitcher. “Still funny,” he said. He smirked at his brother. “Come now, it was five years ago: get over it.”
“Five years for you, maybe,” Thor grumbled. “Last week for me. And when you put it like that it sounds like you’re the one dwelling on the past. Even for me, New York was still six years ago, nearly seven.”
“That’s different,” Loki said brightly. “That’s me.”
“You wouldn’t be saying that if it had been you in the ring,” Thor said.
“Oh, it has been me,” Loki said, tossing back his glass of wine and pouring himself some more. “But this time it was you and it was less than a day and it was just the Hulk, so it’s funny.”
Thor frowned. “What?”
“Did I stutter? If it had been more than a day or anything worse than fighting the Hulk, it wouldn’t have been funny and I would have had to do something drastic, but that was all it was, so it’s funny.”
“Not on Sakaar it wasn’t you,” the Valkyrie said, making them all jump; even Natasha hadn’t noticed her approach.
Loki blinked at her, frowning, then visibly ran back what he had just said and shut his eyes in resignation. “Damn,” he said softly, and emptied his wineglass. “Well, it was some years ago and I’d rather not revisit it.”
“Loki –”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it, Thor.” From Loki’s expression, he was considering taking the wine and leaving, but apparently he decided against it, just leaned against the high table and glared at them. He did pour himself another glass of wine.
You bought me like so much chattel, Loki had said to Thanos, when there was no one but Natasha to hear him. But everyone had heard Thanos tell him he had wasted his money on him.
After a moment, Loki said, “Sakaar isn’t the only place lost things fall to, brother. I didn’t bounce off Sanctuary’s hull, you know, and even if I had the Titan would hardly leave the choice of his Children to random chance.”
Thor fought a short but winning battle with himself against asking more and finally just slung an arm around Loki’s shoulders. Loki tensed, wary, but when Thor didn’t say anything he relaxed a little. His eyes were still uncertain, though.
Steve shifted a little, clearly unhappy with this line of conversation; he might not know the details but it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out from context. His sideways twitch towards Bucky made it clear what he was thinking. Bucky nudged him gently and mouthed I’m fine when Steve glanced at him, and Steve managed a slight smile in response.
Loki drained his wineglass and set it aside, shrugging his way out from under Thor’s arm. “I can’t believe we did that inside,” he said, his voice deliberately light. “Do you realize how long it took to get the hall looking like this? Sam here could have been flying up to pull spears out of the rafters right now.”
Sam looked slightly surprised that Loki had any idea what his name was – they had never actually been introduced – but cocked an experienced eye at the ceiling anyway. “A little low for me,” he said. “I’d get a look at those carvings, though.”
They all peered upwards.
“Sigurd and Fafnir?” Thor said to Loki and the Valkyrie. The intricate detail work was too far away for human eyes to make out – at least for human eyes that weren’t serum-enhanced; from Steve’s intent expression, he could see them just fine – but were apparently visible to Asgardians.
He tipped a finger at the Valkyrie. “Her idea. You know I’ve always thought the First Hero sounded absolutely insufferable.”
“That’s because you’re a snob,” the Valkyrie told him.
“I prefer to think of it as having taste. Though for all I know, he’s an ex-lover of yours –”
“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, majesty, I’m old but I’m not that old –”
Natasha smiled a little at their bickering. Thor looked a little surprised – at the Valkyrie more than at his brother, she thought, and tried to remember how long they might have known each other before Thanos’s attack. Not long, maybe.
“I’m going to get some air,” she said to Steve, leaning down to pull her shoes back on. Loki flicked a glance at her as she left, but didn’t say anything.
The kitchens were fairly quiet when she went through them on her way to the back door, though not completely deserted; there were a few people there washing dishes or just eating or drinking in a less chaotic setting than the great hall or the courtyard. To this day Natasha still had no idea whether New Asgard had servants or not; when she had been here before Loki had done some but not all of his own cooking and cleaning. The great hall could and did feed the entire population of New Asgard, though in the past few years it had apparently grown less common to do so as people got settled in their own homes with friends or family groups. Loki still hosted whoever wanted to turn up to Iðavoll four days out of every seven, or at least he had the last time Natasha had been here.
The Asgardians in the kitchen nodded politely to her as she passed through, indicating the plates of food and pitchers of various alcohols and fruit juices inquisitively. Natasha smiled but shook her head; if she ate or drank anything else she would probably explode.
The kitchen’s back door let out onto the colonnaded back of the building, with the Residency’s bathhouse a shadowed hump off to her left. A few lights gleamed overhead among the vines covering the entablature; Natasha peered up at them, curious, and saw that they were softly glowing balls of something that looked like but probably wasn’t glass, maybe the same thing that lit the great hall. The vines were nothing she had ever seen on Earth before, either, with a few delicate white blossoms just opening. The columns of the colonnade were as finely carved as everything else in the great hall, though already a little worn by exposure to the sea air and winter snows.
She could still hear music from the courtyard at the front of the great hall, a little muted by the bulk of the building between them. From the sound of it, the celebration was going to keep going for a while; New Asgard badly needed something to celebrate. She hoped that the rest of the world was just as happy, though she suspected that there was a lot of chaos as a result of the Snap’s reverse. That was something for her to deal with tomorrow or the day after, though. Today she was happy to bask in New Asgard’s joy.
Natasha leaned against one of the engraved columns and breathed in salt air of the sea coast, listening to the Skagerrak’s waves crashing against the cliffs below the settlement, just as they had done for a thousand years before and would continue to do for a thousand years after. She had been standing out there for a while when the door opened behind her.
She flicked a glance over her shoulder and smiled to see Thor there.
“Too loud for you too?”
“Not at all,” he said, coming up beside her and running a hand over the carvings on the column nearest him. He smiled as he did so, tracing the intricate knotwork and its gripping beasts with his fingers. “It’s very good to see my people so happy. We have much to celebrate and to mourn, but on Asgard we mourn death with life.”
His face clouded for a moment; for him and for half the people back in the great hall Ragnarok would have only been a handful of days previous.
What a mess, Natasha thought. Out loud, she said, “This must be difficult for you.”
He made an expression of agreement. “There are worse things. And at least when we got here this time it was to a home and our own people, not something that had to be begged and bartered for from strangers. I admit, I wasn’t looking forward to that.”
Natasha nodded. “Loki had a pretty tough time of it, but he is one stubborn bastard.”
Thor grinned. “He is.” He traced a single line of carving with his thumbnail until it dead-ended as some kind of elaborately stylized animal with horns and a lot of teeth, then looked at her and said, “I wanted to thank you for what you did for my brother. Considering what he’s done in the past, it would have been understandable if you had imprisoned him. Or –” He shrugged, uncomfortable. “Bruce told me what happened in Wakanda and afterwards, before the Valkyrie and the remainder of our people arrived.”
“What Loki did in Wakanda was the difference between a lot of people dying and not dying,” Natasha said. “Probably including a bunch of us. And dying in that fight was not something any of us were going to come back from, not like the Snap.” She shrugged. “You were in Sokovia. You probably know about Clint’s little talk with Wanda.”
Thor smiled. “I’ve heard the story. You walk out that door, you’re an Avenger,” he quoted. “I’m guessing you didn’t tell Loki that.”
“Didn’t really have the opportunity at the time,” Natasha agreed. She picked at a torn nail and said, “After the Sokovia Accords – you missed those – I figured something out. There are some things you don’t compromise on, not ever. Your own people are one of them. After Wakanda, he was one of us. Admittedly, I don’t think he knew that then.”
“And you helped with New Asgard,” Thor said.
“Mostly Steve and Bruce and Rhodey and I just backed Loki up while he was arguing with the UN. All of this –” She gestured to indicate the elegant bulk of Iðavoll above them, as well as the rest of the settlement, “– was him.”
Thor’s smile grew, but there was a little bit of awe in it too. “Loki made this,” he said. “There was nothing here before and he made this, he built this, made a home for our people, made Asgard. This could be one of our thorps back home.”
“Loki and the Asgardians lived in their ships and in tents for weeks while they built Iðavoll and Gimlé,” Natasha said; Gimlé was the hall where the Althing met and which was used for any community event that the great hall couldn’t host for whatever reason. On Ross’s orders and as part of what she suspected he had considered punishment detail, she and Steve had essentially been living in New Asgard for the better part of half a year. Bruce too, mostly to get away from Ross, who hadn’t greeted his return with anything like joy. Rhodes had been in and out, doing the work of six people as the Avengers tried to keep up with the avalanche of catastrophes the Snap had caused. “Then they lived in the great hall – the upper levels weren’t built for another year – and in Gimlé until there were enough houses built that they didn’t all have to stay there. But there were still people sleeping in Iðavoll well into year three. Besides Loki and the Valkyrie, I mean, after the Residency was built.”
Thor nodded in approval and understanding. “It’s a king’s duty to shelter his people.”
Natasha thought that it had taken a long time for some of the more traumatized Asgardians to trust that they might be safe away from the immediate protection of the king, even though the settlement wasn’t large. There had been a lot of nightmares those nights she had been sleeping in Iðavoll’s great hall with the Asgardians – not that she had been immune to nightmares herself. She wasn’t about to tell Thor any of that, though.
Instead, she said, “After Loki finally convinced the UN to let the Asgardians stay, they wanted to split everyone up – place them all over the world with whoever would take them.”
Thor winced. “Loki didn’t take that well?”
“He just told them to do better.” Natasha had never thought of Loki, of all people, as having iron self-control until he had heard that suggestion and hadn’t responded with attempted murder, just a slight tightening of his jaw before he had gone back into the room to start arguing again. “At one point he told the committee that he was going to live at least another six thousand years and he was perfectly willing to keep arguing until they all died of old age, but he wasn’t going to back down and the only people on Earth with a chance of making him back down were on his side.”
That got another smile from Thor. “Thank you,” he said again. “You’ve no idea how much it means to me that you stood by him and my people.”
“He made a lot of compromises,” Natasha said after a moment. “About himself, not Asgard. But he got everything he wanted in the end. Almost everything.” She tapped a foot against the smooth paving stones they were standing on when Thor looked worried. “He wanted them to sign over the land and all rights permanently. It ended up being a thousand-year – well, nine hundred and ninety-nine year – lease, which nobody was happy about either, since that’s a pretty absurd amount of time for humans but apparently not all that long for Asgardians.” She quirked an eyebrow at Thor, who shrugged.
“Most of my lifetime,” he said. “And Loki’s.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll ask Loki later, but – I’m assuming he argued for our sovereignty.”
“For about two weeks straight,” Natasha said. “I know. I was there.” She curled the end of her braid around her fingers, thinking. “New Asgard is sovereign within its own territory – you’d have to ask Loki exactly how many square miles that is, but it is a pretty substantial chunk of land, plus part of the Skagerrak that borders the coastline. Water rights, mineral rights, airspace, all the good stuff. Everything else around here is still part of Norway and New Asgard has some kind of relationship with them – I know they send a representative to the Storting, but I don’t think they have a vote. And Loki’s been invited to a lot of dinners with the royal family, since they had to make up numbers after the Snap, I guess. Steve and I had to go too, at least the first few times, because having supervision was one of the compromises he made.”
Thor winced.
“Honestly, a lot of countries got better about it after the first couple years,” Natasha said. “Not all – not even most – but we haven’t had to play babysitter for a while.”
“He must have hated that,” Thor murmured; Natasha didn’t think she was meant to hear it. After a moment, he said in a normal tone, “He’s always been very stubborn. I don’t know that I could have done half so well. And then, to build all of this –”
“I think he thought he had something to prove,” Natasha said, but that came dangerously close to giving away some of Loki’s secrets to Thor, and she liked him too much to do that.
Thor’s fingers found another beast carving, this one identifiably a wolf. “I can see that,” he admitted. “But the Althing acclaimed him king. Then, and now.”
“Does that –” She made a vague motion back in the direction of the great hall. “Does that count as the Althing, or are you going to have to do this again when everyone’s sober?”
Thor snorted. “We’re Asgardians. Sobriety’s optional. And yes, since that was most – all – of the adult population of Asgard –” He looked briefly pained, but continued, “– it counts. I suppose Loki might make them vote on it again when they’re sober and without us actually there; he seems to have gotten very law-abiding lately.” He sighed, and admitted, “I’d hoped that more of our people had survived Thanos’s massacre. And I’d hoped – I didn’t realize that the garrison might not believe the truth about Ragnarok.”
“Well,” Natasha said, “it does sound pretty unbelievable. We got it from Bruce, mostly – Loki wasn’t talking a lot in Wakanda.”
He made an unhappy sound. “I suppose. Loki said he had trouble with the Vanaheim garrison. I’d hoped that more of the ulfhednar at least would have believed him – he used to command them for a time.”
“He said something about getting shot in the face once when he was with the ulfhednar on Alfheim,” Natasha said.
“That was mostly my fault,” Thor said, but he was smiling when he said it. After a moment he returned to the original subject and went on, “I love my brother more than anything else in this life or any other, no matter how hard the last few years have been for us. It means more to me than I can say that you protected him and stood by him when you had no reason to do so and every reason not to. Neither of us will ever be able to repay that debt.”
“It’s not a debt,” Natasha said gently; for some reason she heard Loki saying, I have, perhaps, too much red in my ledger to wipe out. “It’s what friends are for. And teammates.” She smiled. “Family.”
Thor smiled back. “I’m glad, too, that you were able to meet the brother I remember.”
She shrugged. “Loki’s not that bad once you get to know him. I mean, he can still be an asshole a lot of the time, but so am I, so is Steve, Clint – and, I mean, you’ve met Tony, so –”
His wry grin was answer enough to that.
“He’s a good friend,” Natasha said.
Thor smirked. “Friend?”
“Friend with benefits,” Natasha grinned, but felt a little heat in her cheeks as his smirk broadened. “The benefits being that because part of the Asgardian Accords involve him being an Avenger, occasionally I have to call him up to come and hit something really hard that Steve or Rhodey can’t knock out.” Not that there had been many of those, since the hassle it took to get diplomatic permission for Loki to enter most countries usually wasn’t compatible with what tended to be time-sensitive Avenger emergencies. Except that when you needed a super-powered god with anger issues to punch something – especially when the Hulk had still been out of commission – you really needed it. “Or turn it into a frog,” she added to be fair to Loki, since on one of those few occasions his magic had solved the problem.
“He did that to me once,” Thor said musingly.
Natasha raised her eyebrows. “I know he’s rung your bell a couple of times.”
He waved that aside. “Turned me into a frog, I mean. I was furious. We were –” He thought about it. “Ten, maybe? It was a few years after the snake thing.”
“How long did it last?” Natasha asked.
“About a week. He hadn’t learned the spell to take it off before he put it on me and our mother was away,” Thor said, his eye twinkling. “I thought Father was going to die laughing. He wouldn’t help, either.” His expression turned melancholy and Natasha remembered that for him it had only been a week since Odin’s death.
She was out of practice talking to Thor. Her exhausted mind stuttered for a moment too long, uncertain what to distract him with.
“What he – Thanos – what he did to me was for Loki, you know,” Thor said, his voice heavy. “And all three of us knew it. Everyone there knew it – the Black Order, I mean. He had the woman and the man – the one Steve and your sister killed today?”
“Corvus Glaive,” Natasha said, a little surprised he didn’t know their names. “And Proxima Midnight.”
Thor nodded. “Thanos had them hold Loki while he –” He touched his throat, where beneath his open-necked shirt there was still a little bruising visible; the damage had been so bad that even Asgardian healing hadn’t done all its work yet. “– and Loki screamed for me the whole time. I have held my brother when he died – or both of us thought him dying – and it was terrible, but at least that was clean battle. This…wasn’t.”
He touched his throat again, then took his hand away very quickly. “He begged,” he said. “I’ve never heard Loki – and it was the last thing I remember before I woke on the ship today. My brother pleading for my life and being denied.” He looked down, swallowing convulsively.
Natasha put a hand on his arm, and when Thor turned towards her, she leaned up and hugged him. She had to stand on her toes to do so, but Thor’s arms went back around her with the ease for whom affection came easily.
“I’ve had an odd day,” he said, his voice a little wry, though there was still a note of stunned shock in it. For him Thanos’s massacre on the Statesman was only hours old, not to mention his own murder. At least he had missed the Snap entirely.
Natasha hugged him again, then drew back in case he needed the space to himself. She thought maybe he did; there was a distant look in his remaining eye, as though it had all just caught up with him. He put his hand on the nearest of the carved columns, tracing the form of what she was fairly certain was a raven. “This is a good place,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “Loki built it strong. And the dead are feasting with all our kin in Valhalla, where the brave shall live forever –”
He had to stop, pressing his hands to his face and breathing hard.
Natasha touched his arm again. “Thor, you don’t have to be all right,” she said. “Nobody is expecting you to be and – and no one else is, either. I don’t think anyone is going to be okay for a long time.”
Thor’s smile was weary and crooked and very sad. “And let my brother bear the entirety of this burden for another day longer? No. We’ll do so together, as we always should have.”
“I don’t think Loki’s all right either,” Natasha said gently. “He’s just…had more time to get used to it.”
Thor shook his head wearily. “It’s different for him. He – he was able to pick up the pieces, but I was the one who broke them in the first place. We’ve been doing that all our lives, until these past few years when we changed places. And I’m not certain that that change ever came naturally to either of us.” He brushed a hand over his face; in the soft light of the vapor-lamps the wetness on his fingers gleamed. “It was my idea, you know. I gave the order.”
“What do you mean?” Natasha asked.
“Ragnarok,” he said as if it was obvious. “Loki or the Valkyrie haven’t spoken of it to you? Or Bruce?”
“Only a little,” Natasha said cautiously.
Thor made a gesture like he was about to scrub his hands back through his hair and seemed surprised to find it too short for the purpose. “Before Hela – you know about Hela?” When Natasha nodded, he went on, “Before Hela escaped her prison, I dreamed about Ragnarok. I thought I could keep it from coming to pass by defeating Surtur on Muspelheim and bringing his crown – the source of his power – to Asgard. If I hadn’t done that –” He sighed. “If I hadn’t done that then Hela might have won.”
“I don’t understand,” Natasha said. Loki had barely talked about Ragnarok even when he was drunk; the Valkyrie even less; Bruce didn’t remember much, since he had been the Hulk at the time. She had picked up bits and pieces from other Asgardians, but not enough to assemble an entire picture, and all Loki had said about it when he had been bargaining for Asgard’s refuge were the bits that might be believed by the very commonsense members of the United Nations committee that had to deal with him.
“Hela drew her power from Asgard – old magic, older than mine or Loki’s,” Thor said after a moment of thought. “I think – Loki and Heimdall and I talked about it a little afterwards – that because she is, was – is – the goddess of death, she could draw her power from our people’s past, deep in the bones of our realm. It’s just a guess, there’s no way to be certain now. The only way I could think of to stop her was to cut her off from Asgard – we couldn’t kill her. So I gave the command to unleash Surtur. Loki did it, but it was my command. I did that. I destroyed Asgard.”
“Thor…”
He rested a hand on the column again and tipped his face upwards towards the vines and lights in the entablature above them. “Loki made this,” he said, and there was awe in his voice. “I destroyed Asgard and Loki made a new Asgard for our people. I’ve – I’ve had very little reason to think well of my brother these past few years and if you had asked me yesterday – this morning, even – if I thought he could do this – that he would do this – I would have said no. And I would have been wrong.”
Natasha struggled for something to say to that. If she hadn’t lived through the past five years, she probably would have thought so too. For Thor it had to be worse; it must seem like his brother had hijacked his life.
“Loki –” Thor said slowly, as if he had to think about every word. “Loki has always had a very strong sense of responsibility – more so than me, perhaps. Maybe it comes from being a second son.” His jaw twitched a little in response to something that Natasha couldn’t identify. “Or maybe it’s just Loki. But after – everything, I thought that it had gone. Burned away in the Void. And then he brought the Statesman back to Asgard. And now he’s made this. All of this. And – what he did today, on the battlefield and with the Avengers and just now, in the great hall. Do you know that we’ve never actually fought over the throne?”
The apparent non sequitur took Natasha by surprise. “I thought you had?”
Thor shook his head. “Our father was still alive, and then – Hela –” He sighed. “I wasn’t particularly looking forward to starting that fight now. These are Loki’s people now, this is his place. He made this.”
“I didn’t make it for me, brother,” Loki said quietly from behind them as the door opened, letting out warm light from the kitchen and a burst of muffled sound from the great hall beyond before he closed it again. “I made it for Asgard, for our people.”
Green gleamed at his fingertips for an instant before it jumped to the nearest of the braziers lining the colonnade, where it flared up briefly before turning to normal flame. Loki looked apologetically at Natasha and said, “I’m sorry. I thought you’d gone to bed.”
She covered a yawn with her hand; she could tell when to get out of the way. “I am going to bed. It’s been a long day, and I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
She leaned up to hug Thor again, pressing a kiss to his cheek, a little scratchy with his beard. Up close, the scarring around his eyepatch was shocking, the first real scar she had ever seen on an Asgardian. “It’ll be okay,” she told him as he hugged her back. “I promise. And you’ve got us.”
“I know,” Thor said, trying to smile and almost managing it. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Natasha hugged Loki too, which was pleasantly familiar, and kissed his cheek before she yawned again, which made Loki laugh. Thor looked like he had just walked into a parallel universe and wasn’t certain whether he was enjoying the experience or just stunned by it. She waved a brief “good night” to them and left them alone to talk; Natasha didn’t think they had gotten a chance to do so yet. All she wanted was the soft bed in the guest bedroom upstairs.
I wish I was on Asgard now
No matter why, no matter how
But here I’ll sit and cry and cry
As the years go by and by and by
The party was still going on when Natasha woke hours later, though from the sound of the music it had taken a melancholy turn. There was a little light filtering into the room from the open door before it shut again and everything went blissfully dark, though she could still hear the distant sound of alien music from below. She had a hand beneath her pillow for a knife before she realized what had disturbed her was Yelena flopping onto the bed beside her.
“Scoot over,” Yelena said, kicking her lightly in the calf.
Natasha rolled onto her back to give her some room. “Ugh,” she said, half-awake. “You’re lucky there’s no one else in here. Steve was a while ago.” She could vaguely remember him getting up to go back to the party; he didn’t need as much sleep as an unenhanced human, while after the fight and the celebration and enough alcohol to fell a horse Natasha had only woken enough to make space for him when he had come up for a catnap. Admittedly, if it had been anyone else she probably would have stabbed them, but she had shared a bed with Steve often enough that his arrival had barely registered.
Yelena’s breath was heavy with the honeyed mead and various fruit liquors the Asgardians had been drinking all night. “He seems like a gentleman, I’m sure he’d sleep on the floor.”
Natasha didn’t even bother trying to open her eyes, since she could tell both that it was still dark and that she was going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning. “We weren’t sleeping.”
“You – ” Yelena sat upright, dragging the blankets off Natasha. “Did you have sex in this bed?”
Natasha grabbed for the blankets, despite the fact that the temperature in the room was comfortably warm. “Don’t be ridiculous. We didn’t make it to the bed.” She was awake enough to grin at the horrified sound that Yelena made before she added, “I’m joking. We were sleeping.”
“Don’t do that to me, I think I lost a year off my life,” Yelena protested, but straightened the blankets out fussily and curled up alongside Natasha.
“Hey,” Natasha said, already drifting off again to the distant sound of Asgardian voices, but she found her sister’s hand first and squeezed it. “I’m glad you’re here.”
She was almost asleep again when Yelena said, “I get it now.”
“Mmm?”
“Why you do this. The Red Room – that was easy to understand, and obviously if there’s someone trying to kill you then you kill them first, if you can.”
“Thanks,” Natasha said sleepily. “I can usually remember that one.”
“Stop that!” Yelena said, elbowing her and making her wince. “I’m trying to be serious.”
“Okay, okay, I’m listening,” Natasha said, opening her eyes in an attempt to keep herself from dropping off, at least for a few minutes. A little light filtered into the room from the edges of the closed door and moonlight from the curtains covering the window – which was an actual window, with real glass (or whatever) in it, instead of the open windows the Asgardians used in some of their buildings. Even as slight as it was the light caught the wooden inlay of various carvings all around the rooms, making the lighter-colored wood seem to glow. “Also those were my bruises.”
“Sorry,” Yelena said, sounding sincere about it. She was quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts, and Natasha stared at the carving of a herd of galloping horses on the lintel and willed herself not to fall back asleep just yet.
“It was…nice,” Yelena said eventually.
“Being ankle-deep in alien blood was nice?” Natasha said. “You have got to get out more.”
“Not like that.” Yelena hesitated, then said, “We kind of saved the world today, didn’t we?”
“The universe,” Natasha said, and smiled a little to herself. “It is nice, isn’t it?”
She felt Yelena nod. “And being…part of something. I missed that.”
“Yeah,” Natasha said softly. “It’s nice.” She hesitated, then admitted, “I was tired of doing the spy thing, the shadow thing, even for SHIELD. I wasn’t actually supposed to be part of the Avengers Initiative originally.”
“No?” Yelena said curiously. “That’s not what all the news articles say.”
“Well, they leave out a lot. Fury brought me in because of Clint and – well, Loki, originally, back then. I think he was also curious about how Steve would react to a pretty face.”
Yelena snorted. “He seems like the kind of man who likes women who can beat him up, superpowers or not.”
Natasha decided not to dignify that with a response. “Anyway, when he and Tony figured out that Loki was headed for New York, Steve came to me because I was the only SHIELD agent he knew besides Fury and Hill.” And Coulson, but that was too much to explain just now. “So Clint and I went to New York with him.”
“I know, I’ve seen the footage,” Yelena said. “Fighting aliens.”
“Yeah, the first time.” Natasha tapped her fingers thoughtfully against the mattress before she went on. “It’s…different, when you’re just fighting, you know? When I was with the Red Room – or the KGB, SHIELD, any of the alphabet agencies – I was doing it in the dark, alone, for a lot of different reasons.”
“Yeah,” Yelena said quietly.
“When you’re doing it because you’re putting yourself between civilians and an enemy – between your world and an enemy – it’s different. And I liked that. I still like it. It felt…honest, in a way I didn’t know it could feel. After that I didn’t want to go back to doing the other thing again.”
“Yeah,” Yelena said again. “Yeah. Like that.” She shrugged a little. “I don’t think it bothers me as much as it did you, but…yeah. I liked it.” She tipped the side of her head against Natasha’s shoulder for an instant. “So you can call me the next time you fight aliens or killer robots or mutated rhinoceroses or something.”
Natasha grinned. “Yeah, okay.”
“Promise.”
“I promise,” Natasha said, turning her head to press her lips briefly to Yelena’s hair. “Now please let me go to sleep, I also traveled through time today.”
“Call me if you get to do that again too.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Natasha said, and shut her eyes. Down below, the Asgardians were still singing.
And here I am and here I’ll stay
For Asgard’s lost and gone away
Yet Iðavoll is great and grand
So here I stay and here I’ll stand
When she woke again the next time, it was probably actually morning, maybe even closer to noon. The room was full of people – Yelena asleep on one side of Natasha, Wanda curled up on the other, Sam and Steve and Bucky with a couple of blankets and pillows on the floor. Natasha rubbed at her scratchy eyes and climbed gingerly out of the crowded bed, unable to help her grin as Yelena immediately rolled into her vacated spot. Bucky opened an eye as she edged past the tangle of men on the floor; Steve was sacked out with his head on Bucky’s shoulder, and Sam was in a tight knot that reminded her of nothing so much as a bird with its head under its wing.
“Just me,” Natasha mouthed at Bucky, who nodded and dropped off again immediately.
She was already wearing the borrowed shirt she had worn to sleep in, but took a minute to get her bra on, as well as a pair of pants and soft-soled Asgardian boots. They would go back to New York today or tomorrow to dig out what remained of the compound, but until then it was borrowed clothes for most of them – Natasha knew that she and Steve, at least, had a couple of drop points with stashed clothes in Europe and the Americas, if push came to shove.
She made her way out of the crowded room and to the hallway beyond, warmly-lit with an open window at either end and bright with carved and polished wood – the Asgardians seemed to decorate everything. In winter the windows were covered with some kind of force field to keep out the cold, but just now they let in the cool morning air, damp and salty with the sea beyond the cliffs.
There were only three rooms and a bathroom on this level of Iðavoll, with one higher level above it that hadn’t been used for anything the last time she was here. She passed the other bedroom on her way to the bathroom; the open door revealed Thor, Sif, the Valkyrie, and Bruce all sleeping heavily on either the floor or the big bed. The Valkyrie had her own rooms in one of the lower levels of Iðavoll, but presumably had either given them over to some of the unsnapped refugees or just couldn’t be bothered to go there once she was up here.
Natasha stopped in the compact bathroom to use the facilities and splash water on her face. There was a shower in here, or at least something that resembled a shower, though apparently Asgardians didn’t go in for water pressure and from experience it felt like standing in pouring rain, just hot. There was a private bathhouse downstairs at the back of the building, in what Natasha thought of as a Japanese style though it had a couple of differences, and a bigger public bathhouse elsewhere in the settlement that had a series of soaking pools of different temperatures, along with a steam room. A long soak before the feast last night had gone a way towards soothing her various aches and pains, though she had fallen asleep and had to be woken up by a bemused Wanda and Yelena before she drowned.
She felt marginally more alive when she stepped out of the bathroom, finger-combing her hair and pulling it back into a braid as she put her head into the remaining room on this floor. It was Loki’s study and looked comfortable and lived in, the walls covered by bookshelves and a couple of weapons racks, with a balcony that looked out over the sea. He wasn’t in it, but the doors to the balcony were open and Natasha wandered into the room, listening for a moment before she stepped out onto the balcony. It took her only a few moments to pull herself up with the handholds built into the elaborate carvings along the walls, until she was standing on the narrow widow’s walk Loki had built around the peaked roof of the building, shivering in the sudden coolness of the wind off the Skagerrak.
Loki raised an eyebrow at her, bemused by her sudden appearance. He was barefoot and in shirtsleeves, the wind whipping his long hair out of its braids. “Hungover?” he asked.
Natasha shaded her eyes with one hand. “A little.”
He crooked a green-glowing finger at her, and when Natasha joined him, tapped her forehead lightly with it. She sighed in relief as warmth spread through her, chasing away the lingering aches and pains and the pounding in her head. “Thanks.”
“Of course.”
They stood in silence for a few minutes, looking out over the ocean to one side of them, the settlement to the other. Most of New Asgard still seemed to be recovering from the previous night’s bacchanal, but there were people moving around in the streets and a few children playing. Natasha looked up at Loki in time to see him smile.
“You did it,” she told him. “You saved them.”
“We did it,” he corrected. “I played only a very small part, and it was, after all, your mad notion.”
“Not mine,” Natasha said. “Not personally.”
“You humans –” he hesitated for a moment, searching for words, then finally said, “You’re very optimistic. You fight to win, always, even when it means undoing the web of wyrd. We don’t often think like that in Asgard – Thor did. Does. But he spent a lot of time here. We believe –” He frowned, like he had to think of a way to translate from Asgardian into English – not a problem he usually had because of the Allspeak, but some concepts just didn’t transfer well from one culture to another. Natasha knew that in her bones, though it wasn’t as much of a problem now as it had been when she had been younger.
She waited patiently, enjoying the fresh scent of the ocean and the wind in her face. She had felt something like a mushroom these last five years, rooted in one place; it had its benefits, but it wasn’t something she was always sure she enjoyed. It was nice to be somewhere different.
“I don’t know that there’s a way to say it that a mortal would understand,” he said finally. “Once the pattern is set, the loom strung, the foundations laid – so it goes. We fight, always, because despair is its own curse and we believe in meeting our fate with our eyes open, unflinching, but we believe that once a thing is done, it cannot be undone. A path, once walked, can never be untrodden again. We try, sometimes, but such stories never end favorably. Thus – Ragnarok. We ride out to meet our end, but we know that we will meet it.”
“Even the gods must die,” Natasha said, remembering what he had said to the previous day.
“Yes.” He turned his face up into the wind. “Even stars burn out. But you don’t think like that and because of you, I have my people, and my vengeance, and my brother, all of which I thought far beyond my reach in this life. It is a debt I can never repay.”
“No debt,” Natasha said. “It was – it was what we had to do.” She smiled wryly. “It’s in our nature.”
Loki looked down at her and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I saw that in you a thousand years ago, when Thor and I first came to this realm – to these shores, to walk among the peoples who lived here, the Northmen who sailed their dragon-ships through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat and across the North Sea. And eleven years ago, when the Mad Titan sent me here for the Tesseract. I’m grateful for it now, even if I wasn’t then.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “I truly believed Thor was dead.”
“I know,” Natasha said, and when he arched an eyebrow, she added, “I was in Wakanda, remember? I saw you go after Thanos there.”
Screaming, battle-mad, reckless to the point of suicidal, barely aware of the rest of them – all down, at that point, and Thanos with all six Infinity Stones in the gauntlet. He had almost managed it, even after Thanos had ripped Mistilteinn from his hands. Almost. Natasha still didn’t think he had really ever registered that the Snap had happened until the remaining Asgardians had limped to Earth.
Loki looked down at his hands and turned them palm-up, flexing his fingers. “I saw him die. I heard his neck break. I held his body. I was so sure.” He looked out to sea again, but whatever he saw, it wasn’t the Skagerrak.
“We came into this world together,” he said softly, “by blood or not. All our lives we have been in each other’s orbit, like binary stars. We shared everything, almost to the end, when our father finally decided to set us apart, and that broke us. But even when I was half a universe away from him – when I had nothing, not even my name – when I hated him and our parents and Asgard and all the Nine – I knew that we still shared this world, and it was a comfort as much as a curse, no matter how much of it had been a lie. And then –” He flexed his hands again. “And then.”
Natasha put a hand on his arm, and felt corded muscle beneath the thin fabric of his silk shirt.
He turned and smiled at her. “I have,” he added wryly, “somewhat more sympathy for Thor now – after he left me on Svartalfheim ten years ago, I mean. And before, after the bridge. I was so certain.”
“He was snapped,” Natasha said. She and Thor hadn’t talked about that, but it was the only thing that could have happened.
Loki nodded. “He told me that he never regained consciousness between –” He touched his fingers to his throat, “– and then waking up on the rescue ship yesterday. We do that if we’re very badly injured – a healing coma, it’s called sometimes. He never knew. Maybe that’s for the best. It’s – it’s terrible, being in space alone, with no veil between you and the Void. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I certainly wouldn’t wish it on my brother.”
He tipped his head back into the strong, salt-smelling breeze, his eyes slanting closed before he looked around again. His gaze traveled over New Asgard, over the world he had built through stubbornness and pride and months of hard-fought argument and concessions with the various governments of Earth. Natasha had been present for most of it, she and Steve, because Earth had treated Loki like a rabid dog and he had borne it unflinchingly every minute of every hour of every day until he had gotten what he wanted, no matter how much of himself he had to sell to do it. The only concession he had never bargained with was his own freedom; his people needed a king and he was the one saddled with the job.
Natasha wasn’t certain that Thor could have done it. She was certain that Steve couldn’t, and less sure of herself. But Loki had done it, had made all of this from nothing, and had expected to lose it to his brother. He would have given it up, she thought – had been braced to do so.
His gaze slid towards her as if he had heard the thought. “I never wanted the throne,” he said. “Not really, not for its own sake. Our father dangled it before us all our lives, the one thing that would set us apart – at the time, you understand, we both thought – I didn’t know what I was, then. Thor was older by a handful of hours, but the law gave us equal claim to it, and Odin made certain we knew it.”
Loki turned his left hand palm-up, magic pooling above it before the green glitter solidified into a mass of elaborately figured gold – a throne, one which presumably no longer existed. He looked at it for a moment before he closed his fist on it. “I have been king of Asgard three times,” he said, “and the first two brought us nothing but ruin. This time…”
“It’s legal?” Natasha asked when he didn’t go on. “For Asgard, I mean.”
“Oh, yes. I looked it up once, centuries ago. The law allows more than one monarch to share the throne, if the Althing acclaims two heirs equally. It hasn’t been done in many tens of thousands of years, but it’s legal. I told my father that after I looked it up.” His mouth went tight. “We were twins. We shared everything. But he said we would never share that.” Loki turned his left hand over, inspecting the pale skin as if he expected to see something else.
Maybe he did. Natasha remembered most of the battle yesterday in bits and pieces, fragmented memory that she was glad not to be forced to hold onto – your mind protected you from things like that, though she knew from experience that she would probably wake up for years with one awful memory or another forcing its way to the surface. But she remembered blue spreading across Loki’s skin like spilled paint.
Loki closed his fist. “My father said a lot of things. Some of them were even true.” There was no bitterness in his voice, just weary resignation. “I was angry for a very long time – I will probably always be angry. But if there’s one thing I know now, it’s that there are far worse things in the universe than the things Odin of Asgard did for love.”
“That doesn’t change the way you feel,” Natasha said.
He shrugged. “After a time even my rage burns down to coals.”
Natasha moved to the edge of the widow’s walk, wary of the moisture-slick wood beneath her feet, and rested her hand on one of the carved animal heads at the end of the railing. She didn’t recognize the animal from this angle, but it could have just been highly stylized – a wolf, maybe, or a dragon, something with a long snout and a lot of teeth. Or something that had only lived on Asgard and had gone extinct when the planet was destroyed, which hurt to think about.
Loki followed her and let his hand trail over another animal head, his fingers moving lovingly over the deep lines of carving, gilded but already worn by five years of rain and wind and the salt-spray that Natasha could feel in her face despite their height. She could hear waves crashing against the cliff-face far below them.
Somewhere in the distance she heard a ship’s horn blowing, tinny over the long distance of the water and lost in the fog that still lay heavy on it, some fisherman’s boat or cargo vessel making its way through the Skagerrak the way ships had done since they were the dragon-ships whose captains had made sacrifice to Loki and Thor and their kin. You could forget, sometimes, that New Asgard wasn’t as isolated as both Earth and the Asgardians liked to pretend it was.
Below them, the settlement was coming to life. Smoke rose in steady plumes from the chimneys of the bathhouse down the street from Iðavoll; somewhere a rooster crowed and a dog barked in response; there was a burble of laughter whose source Natasha couldn’t identify. Korg staggered out of a nearby building, raising a hand in greeting to one of the Asgardian women who had just opened her front door, and was neatly sick in the gutter, to the woman’s visible disgust. Children ran shouting down the street with a pack of long-legged hounds and a couple of fluffy cats, all of them chasing a silvery ball which zipped ahead of them and occasionally split off into a dozen smaller shapes before reforming into one again. Music rose suddenly from the courtyard outside the great hall, a burst of unfamiliar song on some kind of stringed instrument and a woman’s voice rising with it – the Valkyrie’s, Natasha realized with bemused delight; she wouldn’t have expected it from her.
Loki listened for a moment, then tipped his head back and joined the song, Nordic-sounding syllables carrying clearly. “Falla forsar, flýgr örn yfir; sá er á fjalli fiska veiðir.”
There was a curse from down below and the music stilled, shocked by the sudden accompaniment. Loki laughed, but it was good-humored.
“It’s not over,” Natasha said, after the music had begun again; some old Asgardian song whose words the Allspeak couldn’t translate for her. “It’s just starting.”
“Yes,” Loki said. “Here, elsewhere on Earth, throughout the Nine, further still across all the cosmos.” He didn’t seem bothered by the notion. “With the culling undone, there will be chaos. Some will take it as an opportunity to wreak havoc. And we need to discover who was released from Niflheim. That will likely be trouble as well.”
Natasha grinned. “That’s what we’re here for,” she said. She turned her face towards the sea. “There was an idea,” she said, “to bring together a group of remarkable people.”
Loki snorted, but by now he knew the quote. “A team to fight the battles that no one else could.”
Natasha tapped her knuckles against his. “It’s gonna be fun.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“Loki!” Thor’s voice was a bellow with the rumble of thunder behind it. They both peered over the railing to see him on the balcony below looking up at them, with a yawning Steve beside him. He winked at Natasha when he saw her beside Loki.
“Trying to wake the dead, brother?” Loki called down.
Thor grinned up at him. “I think that’s your job. Get down here and stop lurking like Viðopnir on the crown of the World Tree. There’s work to be done.”
Loki grinned back. “So there is,” he said. “So there is.” He turned to smile at Natasha. “Should be fun.”
Notes:
For those who have been reading this story as a serial, Chapter 1 has been revised so that it more closely matches the other chapters; this mostly has to do with some of the New Asgard worldbuilding and Loki's history with the Avengers in the first few scenes, but there are a few other changes throughout the chapter as well.
The line that Loki sings in the last scene is from the Völuspá in the Poetic Edda, as are the names of Iðavoll and Gimlé; all from the section about the new, post-Ragnarok world; I've taken liberties with the latter two.
Thank you to everyone who has been reading this story from the beginning, who has joined along the way, or is reading it now for the first time. I read every comment and they have brought me a lot of joy, as has writing this story.
I've learned not to make promises about potential sequels, so I won't even dare to say whether or not I'll revisit this universe; there is however one other fic set in this 'verse that is in progress.
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