Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Here’s the thing, right?

The Gods aren’t all-powerful.

No, really! It’s one of the best kept secrets of the Universe. But it’s also one of the most obvious when you really get down to it, isn’t it?

Credit where credit’s due, I know some of them are pretty damn close. Very nearly there, right? Some of them are so close to that true ideal of an all-powerful God that the distinction kind of ceases to matter. Some of them are so awesome—I mean that in the literal sense, awe-inspiring, you know—that it’s hard to imagine they’re not capable of literally anything they set their mind to.

But the thing is: They’re not. Not a single one of them. No, not even that one.

They’re not all-powerful, and they’re definitely not infallible.

And I mean, think about it: Isn’t that the highest testament to their fallibility in the first place? Doesn’t it prove how painfully, brokenly, and perfectly human they are? That any of them ever wanted us to believe otherwise?

It’s a shame, you know, ‘cause in a whole lot of cases, that’ll be what does them in, in the end.

NEW ASGARD, NORWAY
SPRING
FIVE YEARS FOLLOWING RAGNARÖK

It’s not all that unusual for someone to show up unannounced at Val’s door in the middle of the night.

She’s more or less the second in command around here, anyway, the stand-in King when the actual King’s out. It started as a bit of a de facto thing; Thor’s dealing with some Avengers-level threat on the other side of the planet, no one wants to bother Heimdall when he’s already busy watching over everyone day in and day out, not many want to approach Loki period—and he has a nasty habit of quite literally vanishing into thin air when they do—so that leaves Val.

Frankly, she was never sure why they trusted her judgement enough to ask her anything in the first place, but eventually, over the years, the people coming to her became commonplace enough that she stopped questioning it.

So, no, someone showing up unannounced at her door in the middle of the night isn’t all that unusual.

Thor’s ex, though.

That’s a new one.

Val hesitates with the doorknob still in her hand, her mouth open but the phrase what the hell is it hanging unspoken from her lips. Not necessarily because it’s Thor’s ex standing in the doorway.

More because she looks like absolute shit.

“Hi,” says the wildly underfed specter that might have once been Jane Foster, offering an awkward smile and a wave. The hand she uses to wave is half-hidden in the sleeve of her too-big hoodie, only four fingertips visible, nails adorned with chipped blue paint and bitten short. “I, uh— sorry, I didn’t know who I should… Actually, sorry, let me back up. You probably don’t even remember me. I’m—”

“Jane Foster,” Val says.

Because honestly, of course she remembers her. A bit hard to forget, wasn’t she? They’d been at the U.N. headquarters, in the middle of the absolute shitshow that was trying to get Asgard legally settled on Midgard, surrounded on all sides by bureaucrats and generals and politicians and kings and dictators (who could keep track of which was which, because Val certainly couldn’t) and a bunch of suits who were, apparently, the best experts in international law that Stark’s money could buy, when in walked this little unassuming Midgardian woman. She’d come to advocate for them, apparently, on behalf of the global scientific community. Something about collaborative opportunities with an advanced extraterrestrial society, or… something like that. She’d made it all sound very attractive to the lawyers, anyway.

Maybe it made a difference. Maybe it didn’t. Either way, the thought was nice. Less nice was the remarkably awkward conversation she’d had with Thor afterward, but…

Val shakes the thought away, and now she looks Jane up and down, frowning. In the years since Val last saw her, she’s lost quite a bit of weight that she hadn’t exactly had to spare. The eye bags are new, too, as well as the grey pallour to her skin. She looks, honestly, a bit like death.

“Are you alright?”

“I, uh… I think so?” Jane says right away, then backtracks. “I mean, no. I’m… technically— or, I guess objectively I’m not. But now… I don’t know, maybe I am?” She pauses, sucking on her bottom lip, and when Val does nothing but continue staring at her like she’s lost her mind, she seems to make a decision. Her shoulders straighten out. She sets her jaw. “Maybe I should just… show you. That might be easier.”

Val waves at her as if to say, by all means.

“Okay,” Jane nods.

She shakes out her hands, takes in a slow steadying breath, and puffs it all out at once. Then she lifts one hand, reaching straight out to her side like… well, sort of like she expects someone who’s not there to show up and hand her something. But who, and what, Val has no idea.

“What are you— fuck me!” Val shouts, stepping back as a bolt of lightning slams right into her doorway right where Jane Foster was just standing, complete with the accompanying BANG of thunder, harsher and more sudden than anything she’s ever heard from Thor— or from a real storm, for that matter. Chips of stone go flying up from the steps, and by the time Val’s blinked the afterimage of white light from her eyes, what’s left is…

“Huh,” she says, openly staring. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t suppose you were able to do that before, were you?”

The woman in her doorway is an inch or two taller now than she was a moment ago, broader in the shoulders, distinctly filled out in all the best places—sue her, it’s impossible not to notice it—and decked out from head to toe in a rather familiar set of Asgardian royal armour. She lifts up the hammer in her hand and nervously taps it against the opposite palm. There’s a healthy flush to her cheeks now, though that might be from embarrassment.

Quietly, she admits, “Not until about twenty minutes ago, no.”

“Does anyone else know about this?”

(By which, of course, she means does anyone other than Heimdall know about this, and she can only imagine what he’s thinking right now, seeing this unfold on Val’s doorstep.) 

Jane bites her lip and shakes her head.

“Shit,” Val breathes. Then she steps back from the doorway, gesturing with a tilt of her head toward the inside of her house. “Well, come on, then. Get inside before the whole damned neighborhood sees you. Do you want a drink? Because I’m gonna have a drink. I’m gonna have a few drinks.”

An hour or so later, Jane and her are sitting on the couch, facing each other with a nearly spent six-pack of ale from New Asgard’s best and only brewery sitting on the cushion between them. All of that was Val—she’s been trying to stick to the ales and away from the liquors these days—while Jane’s been nursing the same glass of soda since she got here. Apparently alcohol doesn’t mix well with the slurry of medications in her system.

Val swirls her sixth bottle around, frowning down at the last little bubbles popping at the bottom.

“And the medication kills you, too?”

Jane hums, nodding. “Hence the—” she waves, vaguely, at her entire body, the colourless skin and the thinning hair and all of it, and she shrugs. “It’s complicated. The biggest problem is that I caught it too late. By the time I thought to go see a doctor about the headaches, the cancer had already spread all over. And the medication, it goes through my whole body trying to kill all those cancer cells, but it can’t distinguish between the cells that are part of the cancer and the ones that are just… me.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because they’re almost exactly the same, most of the time,” Jane says. “The cancer cells all started off as just me, you know? And the chemo— I mean, it has to get every single cancer cell or else it’s pointless, right? Because even one left behind can just divide and divide and divide and then we’re back at square one, so the chemo goes after anything that even kind of acts like a cancer cell—”

“Scorched earth,” Val nods, wrinkling her nose.

“Yeah. Basically. And anything else it happens to kill is just collateral damage.”

God, Val hates that term. Collateral damage. She takes a last swig of her ale that’s long since gone flat.

“Hey,” Jane goes on in the silence, cracking a smile. “If you find something better, there’s about a bazillion dollars in research grant money in it for you.”

“Something better,” Val says, stretching out her leg to tap her toe against the hammer sitting on the floor. “What, like that?”

“That…” Jane pauses, drumming her fingers on her soda can. “That was a last resort kind of thing.”

“Hell of a back-up plan, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she huffs a laugh. “And I mean, I didn’t come here looking for that. Not specifically. I was just… I don’t know. My friend called it the ‘Viking magic’ card. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for when I came here, I just figured I’d know it when I saw it.”

“Hard to miss that. Damn near set my house on fire.”

There’s no bite behind it, though, and Jane can evidently tell. She laughs softly, smiling down at her drink.

But here’s the thing: It doesn’t take a genius scientist or an expert in so-called “Viking magic” to see that Thor’s old pieced-together hammer isn’t actually curing anything. The Jane Foster sitting in front of Val now looks exactly like the Jane Foster that knocked on her door an hour ago, all that plump healthy skin and vibrant energy syphoned right out of her the moment the hammer left her hands and thunked down onto Val’s floor.

She’s not cured, Val knows. She is still very much dying. Whatever the hammer’s doing to her doesn’t even look like it’s slowed anything down. If anything, it might even be making things worse.

But the thing is, for a few minutes there—

God, she was glowing.  

“Well, far as I can tell, that hammer’s well and truly yours,” Val tells her. “Pretty sure that’s how it works, anyway. Who-so-ever holds it, or whatever—”

“Whosoever holds what, exactly?”

Jane startles, letting out a gasp of fright and pulling the hammer straight into her palm with a crackle of lightning. Val, on the other hand, rolls her eyes and whips her empty bottle in the direction of that absolute pain in the ass—

The bottle passes straight through the illusion of Loki that’s now standing at the far end of her living room. It shatters against the wall and rains bits of glass down on the carpet. The illusion dissipates on contact, as they always do, gone as quickly as a bad hallucination.

“Was that—?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” Val breathes, squeezing her eyes shut and pressing a thumb to her temple. Then, louder, so he’ll know she’s addressing him: “Remind me: What exactly did I tell you was gonna happen the next time you did that?”

“Would you believe I don’t remember?” Loki says, rematerializing behind her couch and leaning forward between her and Jane, his elbows on the back of the couch and his fingers laced in front of him. “As creative as they are, I’m afraid the threats do begin to blend into one another after a while.”

Val levels a tired glare at him—or his new duplicate, anyway, because the upholstery of the couch doesn’t quite dip where his forearms are supposedly pressing into it.

“I hope you know you’re cleaning that up.”

“I already did,” Loki says, in a tone that says, honestly, how little do you think of me, which is one of his favorite tones, because he’s a vain prick. But true to his word, there’s that weird shimmery staticy feeling in the air for about half a second, and then the bottle is just suddenly in her hand again, unbroken, like she never threw it in the first place.

It’s one of his more interesting magic tricks. She still has no idea how he does it.

“And hello, Jane,” Loki says with a smile that’s positively vulpine, turning and inclining his head toward her like they’re old friends—which, judging by the wide-eyed look she’s still giving him, is certainly not the case. “You’re looking distinctly less Midgardian these days, aren’t you? New outfit? Haircut, maybe?” Then, turning back to Val, he says, “Tell me Thor hasn’t found out about this yet. I have got to see the look on his face when he does.”

“Why are you here? Did I invite you?” Val asks. “I don’t remember inviting you.”

“Oh! Right, nearly forgot,” Loki says. “We’re being attacked.”

“What?!”

“Sorry, we’re going to be attacked,” Loki corrects, but Val’s already leveraging herself off the couch with another roll of her eyes, swiping Dragonfang off the side table. “Heimdall saw them coming and he sent me to tell you, since I’m apparently his errand boy these days. Come to think of it, should we get him an errand boy? An apprentice? I’ve been saying for years—”

“Who is attacking us,” Val cuts him off. “And when.”

“Didn’t say who, exactly, just something about a very powerful sword and a deep disdain for Asgardians.”

“Really?” Jane finally speaks up, frowning at him. “Who has a problem with Asgardians?”

“Oh, that’s adorable,” Loki says, but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge the question. “As for when, Heimdall’s still keeping an eye on it, but I think at this point, we’ve got about—” he squints ahead at the clock on Val’s wall— “three and a half minutes?”

Val brings a thumb and finger to her mouth and whistles, loudly, and she’s answered by the sound of hooves touching down in the gravel just outside. Hooves, and the gentle swish of wings. She points her sword at Loki. “You make yourself useful and send out more of those illusions. Get every Asgardian awake and aware of what’s happening, but tell them to stay in their homes until we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with. I want zero casualties from whatever the hell this is. Understood?”

Loki offers an overdramatic and deeply sarcastic bow before the illusion in her living room dissipates. Whatever, she’ll take it.

Jane’s standing now, nervously fidgeting with the hammer. “Is that gonna work?”

“Almost certainly not,” Val says. “They’re Asgardians, they don’t know how to stay away from a fight if their lives depend on it. Especially if their lives depend on it. Can’t say I didn’t try, though, and it’s better than them being ambushed in their beds.”

“Oh,” Jane says. “So, uh. What about me? What do I do?”

“You? What do you think you do?” Val asks, grinning at her, and she heads for the front door to pull her boots on. She doesn’t have that hammer or Loki’s magic, so there won’t be any split second wardrobe changes for her—but screw it, she’s fought in worse than a pair of pajama shorts and an oversized Phantom of the Opera hoodie, and she’s always done just fine.

And besides, it’s probably better that she doesn’t have time to think. It’s far easier, at least, with the promise of battle fast hurdling over the horizon, to ignore that uncomfortable squirmy feeling that comes with having Thor’s ex standing in her living room looking as radiant as any goddess ever has. Radiant and glowing and filled out in all the right places, Gods help her.

The anticipation of a good fight will overshadow just about anything, though.

“You’re Asgardian now, too, aren’t you?” Val says, spinning her sword around as she stands and opens the door. She sends an encouraging smile over her shoulder. “You wager you can put that hammer to good use?”

“Oh, hell yes.”

Thor’s got a seven-foot-tall interdimensional tentacle monster in a headlock—or armlock, maybe, or tentacle lock, because he doesn’t actually know where this thing’s head is—when he feels Heimdall’s magic seep its way into his one remaining eye, and his vision goes blurry. He can still see, or at least he can still see as much as he ever can, given the blind spot. There’s still the creature flailing in his grip and half a dozen others around him closing in and Steve somewhere not far dealing with his own cluster of the disgusting beasts, but now he’s got double vision, a view of a darkened town square overlaid on everything else.

Not just any town square. Asgard.

“Heimdall?”

Thor. You’re needed.

He doesn’t need to be told twice. He’d been trying to be humane about his dealings with these creatures, but, well. A quick surge of lightning floods his vision, thunder rolls, and the one in his grip explodes in a burst of guts and meat—eugh—and a few of the closest ones are incinerated where they stand, too.

“Thor? You good?”

He pulls a face, shaking some of the viscera from his hands. “I have to go,” he calls back to Steve over the roaring of the rest of the creatures. “Asgard’s in danger.”

Steve curses under his breath, slamming his shield into one of the creatures and sending it flying up in an arc, fifty yards away and out of sight behind a row of cars on the street. “Go! We got this handled.”

“You’re sure?”

“Hell, yeah, he’s sure!” Sam Wilson’s voice crackles through the communicator in his ear. “We got this. Get outta here, man!”

“You want a lift, Point Break? Hey, Strange, you want to give him a lift?”

“I’m not a taxi service, Stark—”

“Eh? I’m pretty sure you owe us a portal or two after setting all these things loose—”

“Thank you, friends, but I will manage,” Thor says. “Heimdall, whenever you’re ready!”

There’s hardly a second’s delay. One moment he’s standing in the early-evening sunlight of New York City, and the next—once he’s blinked through the afterimage of the Bifrost’s shimmering array of colors—he’s standing in the middle of New Asgard’s town square in the middle of the night, where the only light is from the streetlights.

And where, of course, there’s a whole new horde of nightmare creatures running all about for him to deal with.

“Home sweet home,” Thor sighs, and he sends a bolt of lightning that rips through three, four, five of the monsters before smacking into a parked car on the side of the street, sending its engine into a fireball explosion that takes out a few of the others.

There’s dozens of them, though. More than dozens, in all manner of shapes and sizes. There’s spiders and oddly shaped bats and strange looking lobster things and what might be a dragon over around that far corner, all of them black as the night and crawling in and out of the shadows, all of them scurrying around an equally large number of armed and screaming Asgardians.

There’s a flicker of green light somewhere to his right, and Thor glances over just in time to see his brother bury a dagger into one of the beast’s skulls.

“Hey!” Thor calls out. “Who’d you piss off this time?”

“Me?”

There’s another burst of green light like a flashbang, and the creature Loki’s aiming for stumbles back like it’s been hit by something physical, just in time for it to take a thrown dagger between the eyes.

“For your information, I have no idea where these things came from,” Loki says, and then he does a double take at Thor, poorly holding back a snort of laughter. “And don’t you look lovely!”

“Alright, for your information, I was doing some very important Avengers stuff before I got here,” Thor says, turning around and grabbing the nearest monster by its throat. He tosses it up into the air and then fires a bolt of lightning strong enough to vaporize it midair.

“Oh, were you now? Is that why you smell like low tide?”

Before Thor can respond—or throw one of the beasts directly at his brother, which he’s honestly considering—he hears a sound that swiftly punts all thought from his head, a sound unlike anything he’s heard in years, a sound unlike anything he thought he’d ever hear again. It’s a sound he’d recognize anywhere, any time, instantly and without an ounce of uncertainty.

But it’s also completely impossible to be hearing that sound again.

Isn’t it?

“Do you…?” Thor starts to ask, throwing an elbow into one of the creatures bearing down on him, and he makes sure it’s hard enough to crack the thing’s skull so he doesn’t have to worry about it any longer. “Do you hear that?”

“Hm? Hear what?”

Loki is not subtle, which means he knows exactly what Thor’s talking about, which means he’s hearing it, too, which means Thor’s not losing his mind, which means…

“Mjolnir,” Thor breathes, hardly meaning to say anything at all, as he’s greeted with one of the most gorgeous sights he thinks he’s ever seen in all his life. Top five, at least: One of the largest creatures is scuttling toward him on a set of spidery legs, its maw open wide and saliva dripping past teeth like razors, a pair of sinewy wings spread as if it’s about to take flight— just before something opens the creature up from behind, piercing through flesh and bone and punching out through the other side in a crackle of white-blue lightning and a blur of sleek metallic silver.

It’s instinct. He can’t help it. Mjonir’s right there in front of him, somehow, and he can’t not reach out for it, waiting for the familiar weight of his hammer to land where it belongs in the palm of his hand—

But it doesn’t.

Mjolnir slows to a stop midair, then reverses course, heading straight back toward whoever threw it in the first place, sailing back over the limp body of the creature it just eviscerated and landing in the palm of someone else’s hand.

“Hey!” Thor shouts, moving forward and stepping over the dead thing, his attention set on this newcomer wielding his hammer and donning his armor. “I don’t know who you think you are, but that hammer belongs to—”

“Thor!” the person says, breathless with adrenaline, in a voice that pings recognition half a second before she reveals herself, the battle mask dematerializing from her face with nothing but a thought. Which, of course, makes it impossible to finish saying… whatever he’d been saying. What was he saying? He can’t remember. “Hey.”

Oh, good.

Sure, that’s alright. He wanted to feel like he just got punched in the gut today.

“Jane. You’re…?” Here. In Asgard. Wielding my hammer. “I— uh, you look—”

She spins around, driving the hammer down into another creature’s back so that it’s sent, limbs flailing, down into the dirt. “I know, right?!”

“But how?”

“Uh— shit, sorry, can we—?” she says as the creature rears back up, and she whips the hammer around and hits it in the side of its face, knocking it with a screech into one of its brethren. “Can we talk about this later?”

“Right. Yeah. Sure. Of course—”

“Awesome. It’s great seeing you!”

And just like that, she’s gone, spinning the hammer around and letting it pull her off into the night, toward another cluster of monsters that she promptly annihilates in a blast of lightning and a rumble of thunder.

What the hell?

Thor takes a second to regain his bearings, and when looks to his side, Loki’s still standing there, looking right at him.

“What, Loki?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to, it’s in your face.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, this is just my face.”

“Well, fix it.”

“Fix my face?”

A rift opens up in the air above them, and Val comes storming out of it on the back of her Pegasus, tossing her sword so that it impales one of the larger creatures against the ground—one that had been gearing up to dig its teeth into Loki’s shoulder while he had his guard down. Warsong’s hooves slam into the cobblestones, and Val’s bare thighs tense against her steed as she leans over to yank her sword out of the dead creature and slice through a second’s throat in the same movement.

“You boys having fun?” she asks, casting a smirk down at them. Warsong canters backward, keeping her steady. “Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there’s a battle on. Your Majesty.” She adds that last bit as a greeting, offering him a nod.

“Valkyrie,” Thor says, nodding back with a smile, all thoughts of his hammer and Jane and even the temptation of assaulting his brother easily set aside.

Right. Battle. Monsters. Asgardians in danger, though they all seem to be having a blast if he’s being honest—but of course they are, they’re Asgardians. They could be inches from death and still screaming in delight mid-battle.

“You’ve got a, uh…” Val says, wincing and gesturing at his right shoulder. “Tentacle…?”

Thor, suddenly acutely aware of the fact that he’s spattered in monster guts, shakes his shoulder, and the errant bit of bloodied tentacle slides off him and lands with a wet thwack on the ground. Behind him, it seems Loki’s already moved on elsewhere—judging by the lack of a laugh at his expense, anyway. Val laughs, probably not at his expense, flipping her sword around and impaling a spider-like thing that had been running up on her from Warsong’s other side. “Welcome back.”

“Good to be back,” he says, and he means it.

She moves on, Warsong galloping off into the fray and knocking monsters over with her wings, Val’s sword slicing through whatever’s left, and Thor shakes his head and rolls his shoulders. Right. Battle. Forget the ex-hammer and the ex-girlfriend. Battle. He’s a King, and these are his people, and they’re all under attack by… what are these things, exactly, anyway? He doesn’t think this has anything to do with the mess Strange caused over in New York a good six or seven time zones away—though he will be asking about it, if no other explanation presents itself any time soon—so what is this? Why now, out of nowhere? Why in the middle of the night? Who did the Asgardians piss off enough to warrant an attack like this?

The answer comes far sooner than he expects.

It’s a whisper, at first, soft enough that he only notices because it’s so different from all the ear-splitting chaos around him. Then it’s more than one whisper, a chorus of them, and something like dread coils low in Thor’s gut. He doesn’t even know why. Instinct, maybe. Intuition. But whatever it is, it’s annoying, a fear without cause that radiates out from that stone in his stomach and turns his veins to ice.

Thor turns, and he sees—something, someone, through the mess of Asgardian swords and monsters’ teeth—someone dark and shifting like smoke, someone with eyes that pierce through the night like lamplight, someone whose presence within Thor’s line of sight only seems to intensify those whispers and intensify the dread still vibrating through him.

Someone who, right now, is in the midst of combat with Heimdall.

Thor sprints at them, lightning already coursing through him and popping in arcs off his skin, and he closes the distance in less than a few seconds. He dives, slamming his shoulder into the attacker’s stomach.

Or attempting to, at any rate.

The person vanishes, sinks into the ground in the instant before Thor makes contact, so he’s forced to roll and scramble back up to his feet.

“Thor—”

“Where’d he go?” Thor asks, automatically putting himself back-to-back with Heimdall.

“Not far,” Heimdall says, and out of the corner of his eye Thor sees him slice through an errant monster that gets too close, swiftly decapitating it with his sword and falling back into a defensive stance. “He has the necrosword.”

“What? The necrosword? That’s supposed to be a story—”

“You know most stories turn out to be true,” Heimdall tells him, which is fair.

“Who is he?”

“Not sure,” Heimdall admits. “He didn’t catch my notice until he had the sword, and then he killed Rapu—”

“Rap-who?”

“Rapu, a god who watched over a few planets on the other side of the galaxy. Our friend here obtained the sword, killed a god, and then it seems Asgard became his next target. On your right!”

The man comes out of the shadows on Thor’s right and Heimdall’s left, but he’s aiming for Thor. The necrosword screams as it cuts through the air, met halfway with a deafening clang against Heimdall’s own sword, and Thor doesn’t waste time with thought—he just does the first thing that comes to him. He reaches for the man’s wrist, lightning crackling through him, enough that would burn any mortal being to a crisp, necrosword or no necrosword.

Again, the person vanishes. Heimdall staggers forward, having lost the counterweight against his sword, and Thor whirls around, searching for their opponent.

“Come out and show yourself!”

If you insist.

And oh, that voice is awful, overlaid with all those whispers and sending his heart up into his throat—a cheap trick—and moments later, the shadows beneath Thor’s feet begin to move.

He doesn’t have time to wonder what they’re doing. One moment the shadows are moving, and the next they’re solid, blackened arms reaching out of the ground—five, ten, two dozen of them, tearing at his legs and trying to pull him down. The next moment they’re coming out of the ground as fully formed people, silhouettes with claws for hands and eyes piercing through the darkness just as their creator’s did, and three or four or five of them grapple at his arms and yank him backward, pulling him down until his knees hit the cobblestones.

Their attacker is in front of him now, the necrosword loosely hanging from one hand.

“Cool sword,” Thor manages to say, even though one of the shadow creatures has its arm wrapped tight around his throat. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about it.”

“Then you know…” he says, and the whispers echo all around each of his words, you know you know you know know know, “that this is going to hurt—”

Behind him, Heimdall raises his sword, but the whispers ricocheting through Thor’s head intensify, and the man spins around, knocking Heimdall’s sword out of his grip and then taking him by the throat with his free hand.

“Hey!”

The man ignores Thor, speaking only to Heimdall now.

“I’d rather not kill you just yet, Watcher. This will be far easier if you—”

Finally, finally, Thor manages to land a hit on him.

Lightning scorches through all of the horrible creepy things holding him down, vaporizing every last one of them into ash, flooding his vision white. His fist meets fabric and then flesh, electricity crackling, thunder rumbling, and the man goes flying into a nearby building that’s currently engulfed in flames. He goes straight through a brick wall and disappears from sight.

But only for a second.

“Thor!”

Heimdall shouting is all the warning he gets, but it’s enough. He pivots, throwing out a bolt of lightning that’s just enough to deflect the necrosword coming from behind him, and then its wielder sinks into the shadows again.

It seems to be his favorite tactic, and he brings it out in full force now, vanishing and reappearing at will, always doing his damned best to slice Thor’s head off with that sword. Heimdall and Thor together aren’t even enough to land another hit on him, no matter how quickly they react, but at least they manage to move quickly enough to avoid taking a hit themselves.

… For a while, anyway.

At first, Thor doesn’t think it’s too bad. That much is just instinct from all the numerous sword fights and injuries he’s seen all throughout his life, so that when the necrosword swings around and slices through Heimdall’s side, Thor gives a sympathetic wince and thinks, ouch, but he’s not panicked over it. Not yet.

That part lasts about two seconds, before Heimdall collapses to one knee, and Thor realizes with a jolt exactly what sword just hit him.

“HEIMDALL!”

Thor sends out a radial blast of lightning, hitting everything around him in a fifty-meter wide circle except for the one spot where Heimdall’s kneeling now. Their attacker vanishes again, missing the brunt of the onslaught, but when he reappears—

Mjolnir sings through the air and very nearly takes the man’s head off his shoulders. Nearly, because he dodges it, and dodges it again when it barrels back toward Jane, who’s now approaching the fight and ready to back them up.

She’s not the only one. Beside her, Warsong lands on the ground, wings flaring, and Val’s sword is shimmering deadly in her grip. On Jane’s other side is Loki, a dagger in each hand, poised to throw. A few of the Asgardians have abandoned the shadowy monsters and chosen to come to their King’s aid as well, enough that the man with the necrosword—for the first time since Thor caught sight of him here—hesitates.

And then he vanishes, and with him, all of his shadow creatures vanish like smoke, too.

They’re gone. All of them, in the space of a heartbeat.

“Heimdall?” Val says, sliding off of her Pegasus and hastily sheathing her sword as she runs for him.

Thor’s way ahead of her, catching Heimdall just before he loses his balance and nearly collapses fully into the dirt. He kneels down with him, holding him as upright as he can.

“Hey, hey, hey, you’re fine,” Thor tells him, an arm around his waist and one hand on his chest, trying to steady him because, frankly, he looks like he’s about to be sick. Val stops just out of arm’s reach, staring wide-eyed at the blackened, smoking wound in the side of Heimdall’s armor. Behind her, Jane watches with equally worried eyes. Thor continues, “You’re fine. Hey. Can you walk? We’ll get you to the infirmary, and—”

“Get out of the way.”

Thor doesn’t have a chance to argue, because Loki doesn’t give him a chance. He’s suddenly right up in front of both of them, on one knee, shoving Thor’s arm out of his way so he can see what’s happened, green light already pulsing around both hands and all the way up to his elbows. He plants one palm flat over the wound in Heimdall’s side, and his other hand comes up to his shoulder—the one opposite where Thor’s still holding him up, both of them trying to keep him steady.

“Heimdall, look at me,” Loki says. “Do not close your eyes, do you understand me? Heimdall— shit—”

It’s instantly obvious why he’s cursing, because Heimdall’s eyes are already closed, and he’s slowly becoming a dead weight with his arm over Thor’s shoulders.

“Heimdall, hey,” Thor says, trying to coax him away from unconsciousness. He wants to shake him, but he worries that’ll mess up whatever Loki’s doing. “We need you awake.”

“Come on, come on—”

“Loki, what’s—?”

“It’s— the wound’s opening faster than I can close it, I can’t— I need help. Eir. Someone—”

Val turns around, shouting at the other Asgardians to find Eir, or any healer in the whole of New Asgard, and bring every last one of them here as fast as they possibly can. The cacophony of dozens of them running off all at once follows an instant later.

“Loki?”

“Shut up, Thor,” Loki grits out.

Green light flares from Heimdall’s side, bright enough that it hurts, and a strange numbing cold blooms out from the same spot as well. Some residual effect of the magic. Loki’s shoulders are heaving with his breath like he’s mid-sprint and not kneeling on the ground. His other hand is still tight on Heimdall’s shoulder, and for a moment, it looks as though he’s using Heimdall to keep himself upright every bit as much as the reverse.

“Come on, come on, come on…”

“Loki!”

He doesn’t have the same complaint when it’s Eir speaking to him rather than Thor. He doesn’t say anything at all actually, unmoving, magic still pulsing around his hands, and he still says nothing when Eir squeezes her way into their little group of three, eyes only on the wound that he’s feverishly trying to heal.

“Oh,” she murmurs, and then says something else, something in a long-forgotten language that Thor doesn’t understand. An incantation. Must be. Then she puts a hand on Loki’s shoulder. “Alright, you’ve done well so far, but now you’ll need to let go exactly when I say.”

“I can’t. If I—”

“I know, and yes, you can,” Eir insists with the kind of patience that only a woman who’s worked as a healer for three thousand years can have. “Now, let go on the count of three. One— two— three—”

A pained sound comes out of Loki when he releases the magic, and Eir’s fills the void so quickly that it’s as if there was no transition at all. First the magic’s green and concentrated on the wound, and then it’s a soft white-yellow, gently wrapping itself around Heimdall’s entire body, and Loki falls back to sit in the dirt, panting with exertion.

“Is he…?”

“Alive, yes,” Eir answers Thor, nodding. “For now. We need to get him to the infirmary. Now.”

Chapter Text

No sooner has Eir set foot out through the infirmary door than she is immediately accosted by Val and Thor at the same time, hardly giving her a moment’s peace after what must have been a very trying time to begin with. Val would almost feel bad about it, but she finds she doesn’t quite have the energy for sympathy—especially because the look on Eir’s face nearly sends Val’s heart plummeting down into her stomach.

Eir holds up a hand to stay the onslaught of questions, and she takes a breath. Then, quietly, she says, “He’s alive.”

Thor apparently sees through that reassurance exactly as well as Val does, because he asks, “Is he going to stay that way?”

“For as long as we keep him in stasis… yes.”

Val asks, “And when you take him out of stasis?”

Eir hesitates, glancing around at all four of them—at Thor and Val in front of her, at Loki sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, at Jane nervously pacing the length of the hallway and fidgeting with that hammer—before she explains, “That wound was killing him. Is killing him. Loki slowed the process, and I… I paused it. If I take him out of stasis now, without some other way to heal that wound…”

“How long would he have?” Thor asks, his voice low.

Eir frowns, sympathy written clear on her face. Sympathy, and grief. “I’m honestly not sure. It could be seconds.”

Fuck.

Fuck.

“What the hell happened?” Val says. “What kind of weapon takes down an Asgardian that quickly—?”

“The necrosword.”

She stops short, Thor’s answer thunking against her heart with a quiver of what she absolutely refuses to call fear. Eir looks at him with wide eyes. Jane stops her pacing and looks at him, too. Only Loki doesn’t react beyond going totally still, listening, looking down at his hands.

“The necrosword,” Eir repeats. “You’re certain.”

“That thing’s supposed to be a story,” Val says.

“Most stories turn out to be true,” Thor says. “I saw it myself. Heimdall saw it first, of course. He saw this… this person, whoever he is, obtaining the sword and then killing a god with it. Then he set his sights on Asgard.”

“Sorry,” Jane speaks up. “Necrosword?”

“It’s an ancient weapon that’s been passed from user to user for millenia,” Val answers. “It has the power to kill pretty much anything, supposedly—”

“—but it slowly corrupts and kills whoever wields it,” Thor finishes for her, and Val nods at him as if to say, yeah, exactly, what he said.

Jane asks, “Do we know anyone that’s survived getting cut by it?”

“I didn’t even think it was real until now,” Val admits. “So, no.”

“Okay,” Jane says, nodding, staring into space as she thinks. Then she turns to Eir. “Okay. So, what if we got you that sword?”

“I—” Eir blinks. “What? I’m sorry?”

“What if we got you the sword?” Jane repeats. “You said you can’t take him out of stasis unless you have some other way to heal the wound, right? And he got that wound from this creepy, magic… necrosword… thing. So if we got you the sword, could you… I don’t know, study it? Figure out how it works, and then use that to save him? I mean, you can’t figure out how to cure a disease without studying what causes it, right? It’s basic science.”

“This… isn’t exactly—”

“It’s not science, I know, I know, it’s magic,” Jane says, “but magic is just science we don’t understand yet. Or, you know, it’s science that I don’t understand yet, but you do.”

Val asks, “Is it possible that it’ll help?”

Eir hesitates, but Val can already tell she’s leaning in the direction of a yes, even before she cautiously admits, “It’s possible.”

“Great,” Val says, hands on her hips. “Then that’s what we’ll do. We need to find this… cursed shadow-zombie murderer, kill him, take the sword, and bring it back here to save Heimdall. Where do we start? Do we know where he’s headed?”

Finally, Loki speaks up. “If he’s out to kill gods, then that narrows it down quite a bit.”

“He wanted Heimdall, specifically,” Thor says. “He said he didn’t want to kill him—”

“Oh, well,” Val scoffs, “he’s done a great job of that—”

“— but that means he wanted him for a reason, doesn’t it?” Thor goes on. “Given that it’s Heimdall, he was probably planning on using his sight, or his ability to conjure the Bifrost. Or both.”

Val nods. “And now he doesn’t have Heimdall.”

“Which means he can only go to places that are known, places he can reach by conventional means,” Thor says. “So if he’s looking for gods, he’ll want to go somewhere he knows he’ll find gods, even without using Heimdall’s sight or the Bifrost.”

“Somewhere he knows he’ll find gods,” Val repeats. “Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

“I’m thinking it.”

“Oh, no,” Loki groans. “No. Tell me you’re both not—”

“Omnipotence City,” Thor says at the same time that Val does, and Loki sinks lower to the ground with a hand thrown over his eyes.

“Omnipotence City?” Jane asks.

“Omnipotence City,” Thor says again, and he’s got that look in his eye now, the one Val recognizes: He’s latched onto this plan with the sort of determined fervor that he only gets when he’s well and truly excited. The first time she saw that look, it was right before they drove the Grandmaster’s ship through the Devil’s Anus in a straight shot toward what honestly should have been all of their deaths. “It’s a win-win. That place is the gathering spot for all the most powerful gods in the Universe. This God-killer is just as likely to go there as he is anywhere else, and even if he’s not—”

“— we can get the word out,” Val says.

“And we can recruit reinforcements,” Thor adds. “Oh, we could pull together the greatest team ever.”

Val asks, “You think we’ll need that much help?”

“I think it couldn’t hurt, could it? We could recruit Ra, Hercules, Tūmatauenga… Quetzalcoatl, maybe? And— and—” he pauses here, smiling for the first time since Heimdall was hit— “Zeus, the oldest and wisest of them all.”

“Zeus,” Jane repeats, dripping skepticism. “As in… Zeus Zeus.”

“I don’t think he has a second name.”

“Yes, great,” Loki sighs. “Wonderful. Let’s bring the Zeus fanboy to Omnipotence City.”

“I am not a fanboy.”

“Right, and you weren’t a Valkyrie fanboy, either—”

“Look, do you have any better ideas?” Val asks, because no, they’re not going down that particular path, thank you very much. She raises an eyebrow down at Loki, and the look he returns with is a pretty definitive and defeated, no, I don’t have any better ideas. “Great. Omnipotence City. Killer shadow-zombie. Necrosword. Save Heimdall. What the hell are we even doing still standing here?”

Jane was expecting a spaceship. You know, given the whole hunting down a God-killer thing, and the fact that they’re supposedly heading to a place where Gods all come to gather, and the fact that the only Gods that Jane’s ever met all lived on another planet…

Yeah. Logically: Spaceship, right?

She steps up to the edge of the ramp, eyeing what looks like a huge, ancient, wooden Viking skiff, complete with a row of multicolored Viking shields displayed all along its side and a pair of carved dragon heads open-mouthed and silently roaring up at the front. Looks like an ancient Viking skiff, because there are a few key differences. One is the tiki hut covering nearly the entire back half of the boat—pretty sure the Vikings didn’t have tiki huts—and another is the bright purple neon sign that she can just barely see up above the tiki hut door. Then there’s the string lights running from the roof of that hut all the way across to the dragons’ heads, twinkling in the dim early morning haze.

The biggest difference, though, is that there’s no water. The whole thing’s floating a few inches above the ground, suspended by absolutely nothing. Jane even bends over to look, just to make sure she’s not imagining that, and she can see clear ahead to the other side of the boat, where a bunch of Asgardian feet are bustling back and forth.

“This boat is gonna get us to Omnipotent City?” Jane asks, looking up as Val sidles past her.

Val turns, balancing two crates of clinking bottles on her shoulder, one on top of the other. Then she follows Jane’s gaze to the boat.

“This? Oh, no, this boat’s not gonna get us to Omnipotent City. Warsong’s gonna get us to Omnipotent City,” she says, “but we can’t all fit on her back, so…”

She waves at the boat with her free hand, and it’s then that Jane notices the ropes tied up to the front of it, looped around the dragons’ necks and dangling way up front where she can’t quite see the rest of them.

Reins. Those are reins.

Jane blinks.

“Wait, she’s gonna pull this entire thing? Your—” Jane almost says horse, and then corrects— “Pegasus? All on her own?”

“Oh, sure,” Val shrugs her free shoulder, grinning. “She’s pulled much worse than one little rowboat through a couple rifts in space, believe me.”

And with that, Val spins on her heel and walks right up the ramp, bottles clinking away.

“Huh,” Jane says, still tracing her eyes along the boat’s edges, the string lights up above, the curve underneath its hull.

How’s the air gonna stay in it once they’re in space? Probably magic, technically, but she figures it’ll be something to do with electricity and magnetism, maybe, with the boat sort of generating its own magnetic field that holds everything in place, air molecules included. Could be something to do with gravitational force, too. If she had time, she might be able to work out the math into something that almost makes sense.

She’s still thinking about that when she starts making her way to the ramp—

And it’s because she’s so distracted with thoughts of gravity and magnetism of all things, that she nearly runs face-first into Thor.

“Oh!” she steps back, fiddling with the hammer. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Thor says back, and he points with a thumb at the boat. “Getting on the boat?”

“Yup.”

“Cool. Me, too.”

“Cool,” Jane says, and there’s a voice in her head right now that’s just… fully screaming, yelling at her for being so unbearably awkward, God-like powers or no God-like powers. She makes it about another three seconds standing face-to-face with her ex, both of them just standing there like a couple of idiots, before she blurts out, “This is weird, right?”

Immediately, he sags in relief, a puppet with the strings cut. “So weird.”

“Right?” she says. “Oh, my God.”

“Even without the hammer.”

She sputters a laugh. It is a relief, oddly enough, knowing that they’re sort of on equal footing here. She nods toward the boat, and they start heading up the ramp side-by-side.

“How are you, anyway?” she asks. “And not like, I’m asking because that’s something you’re supposed to ask when you haven’t seen someone in a long time. But like, actually, how are you? The whole rebuilding Asgard thing, that’s been going okay?”

“It’s been going great,” he shrugs, and by the easy smile on his face, it’s probably true. “Well. It’s a lot more meetings than I thought it would be. A lot of forms, too.”

“Oh, gosh,” she cringes. “Yeah, let me apologize on behalf of… I guess all of humanity for how much bureaucracy goes into everything we do. Science is exactly the same. You’d think it wouldn’t be, but it totally is.”

They get up to the top of the ramp, and this time Jane gets to appreciate the boat from the vantage point of its deck: It’s enormous, but she doesn’t try to guess how big it is in feet. She’s always been terrible at that. There are benches lined along the boat’s sides, plenty for a few dozen people to comfortably sit, if they wanted to. The tiki hut doesn’t have a door door so much as it has an open doorway, and that neon sign she’d caught a glimpse of from down on the ground reads Cocktails and Dreams in swirling purple font. Inside, she can see Val setting the crates of drinks down on a bartop, unloading the bottles onto shelves.

“What about you?”

Jane blinks, turning toward Thor, who’s leaning back against the outer railing with his arms crossed. It takes her a few seconds to realize what he means, and she gulps.

“I’m… great,” she finds herself saying, and there’s a beat of silence before she holds up Mjolnir as if to say, check it out, look how great I’m doing, I have a hammer and everything! She gives it a quick little up-and-down toss and says, “I have superpowers now, apparently.”

“What, you mean you couldn’t do that before?”

“No, no, believe it or not, I couldn’t,” she says. Then she looks down at the hammer, balancing it with one palm against the corner of its bulky metal end and the other palm gently pressed against the tip of its handle. It feels way more weightless than a thing this powerful ever should. “I don’t… I don’t know how I ended up here, actually. It’s just, I swear it was like Mjolnir was… calling to me? I know that’s gotta sound crazy, but I swear that really is what it felt like.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy.”

She looks up, and she can see in his face that he isn’t patronizing her. He knows exactly what she’s saying about Mjolnir—but come on, of course he does. Look who she’s talking to.

Jane lifts it up, gesturing that she’s about to pass it to him. When she does, it leaves her hand as easily as a baseball and thunks against his palm, and he grips it for a few seconds, just pensively looking down at it in his hand. Then he gives it a quick twirl—a real twirl, where the handle passes around the back of his knuckles and somehow the whole thing stays moving and upright, exactly where he wants it until it’s right back where it started—and without any fanfare whatsoever, he smiles and tosses it back to her.

“Mjolnir isn’t just a hammer, you know,” Thor says, and she nods, because she does know that much, at least. He hesitates there for some reason, though, with some other statement obviously just about halfway out of his mouth, and then he shakes his head. He leans back and crosses his arms again. “I think it probably was calling to you. Sensed it was needed, maybe.”

“Needed?” she asks, punctuating it with a nervous laugh. “I didn’t— I mean… Come on, if that’s the case, if Mjolnir can really sense when it’s needed, shouldn’t it have come back before now? I mean, didn’t you ever need it at any time in the last, what, five years?”

“What, me? Pfft, no,” Thor scoffs, overdramatic with it as always. “What am I? Thor, God of Hammers?”

“Okay,” she laughs again. “Fair.”

And again, here, he hesitates, like there’s something else he wants to say but he’s not sure how to say it. It’s an odd change of pace from the Thor she remembers. That Thor—the one who still had both his eyes, the one whose home still existed several thousand light years away, the one who wasn’t a King yet—he would always say exactly what he was thinking, pretty much every time, the moment the thought occurred to him.

Not this Thor, though.

Finally, he says, “I had Mjolnir when I needed Mjolnir. And I did, I really did need it, at the time. And now Mjolnir’s back, but it’s… not mine, really, not anymore. Nothing wrong with that.” He shrugs, arms still crossed, and gives her a half-smile. “Doesn’t mean I’m not very happy to see it again anyway, of course, because I am.”

Jane tries, and probably fails, to hold back a smile at that.

Alright, well, at least one thing hasn’t changed: He still doesn’t know how to do subtle.

“Right,” Jane says, nodding along. “Well, I’m sure Mjolnir—” she gives the name just the slightest bit of emphasis, lifting it up in demonstration as she does— “is just as happy to see you again, too.”

“I hope so.”

“Yes, yes—” comes a sudden third voice, and Jane jumps, spinning around to find Loki stalking up the ramp and past them with hardly a glance in their direction, another crate of bottles clinking in his arms, and an additional bottle hanging by its neck from one hand— “just refrain from pinning any doors shut with it, and we won’t have any problems, will we?”

Thor squints at him. “You know Val already brought drinks.”

“Which means she brought enough for herself, doesn’t it?” Loki says, and as he heads for the tiki hut, giving them his back, he switches the crate over to one arm so that he can wave the extra bottle over his head with his free hand. “And if I’m being forced to go back to Omnipotence City, I certainly will not be doing so sober.”

He ducks through the doorway into the tiki hut, and Jane waits a second before she asks, “Did he just say back to Omnipotence City?”

“He did, yeah.”

“You, uh… You happen to know anything about that?”

“Nope,” Thor says, popping the p when he says it.

“You gonna ask him?”

Thor shakes his head. “I’ve learned it’s often best not to.”

“Great,” Jane says, wincing. “Awesome.”

The journey to Omnipotence CIty is uneventful, and making their way into the famed Temple of the Gods, even more so. Not a soul accosts them or even really notices them, especially after the Valkyrie scrounges up a veritable mountain of fabric from somewhere—Loki has no idea where—to use as “disguises” while they lie low and slink their way into the arena. And in all that free time, neither Thor nor Jane nor the Valkyrie ever ask Loki what, specifically, he’d done that made him so reluctant to set foot in Omnipotence City again after centuries spent steadfastly avoiding the place.

Thank— well, no. Even saying thank the Norns feels in poor taste, doesn’t it?

Feels a bit too close to saying thank the Gods for his liking.

And what, after all, have the Norns ever done for any of them, anyway? What sets the Norns above any of the gaudy, gilded idiots strutting all around them at this very moment, swishing their colorful robes around and acting like their very presence is a blessing to all who behold them?

Nothing. Not a thing. The Norns didn’t step in when the Dark Elves descended upon Asgard, the Norns didn’t lift a finger when the entire Realm was reduced to nothing but cinders beneath Surtr’s sword, and the Norns certainly didn’t intervene when Asgard’s people were left adrift in the cosmos in the months that followed. And neither did a single soul in any of the other infinite pantheons, for that matter.

Anyway. He’s digressing.

The point is, he’s quite glad they don’t ask, because it’s an enormous relief to not have to get into it. 

He’s jarred out of his thoughts when a lightning bolt blasts through the arena—not Thor’s, it’s a bit too showy even for that—and slams straight down into the center of the stage floor. Jane jumps, startled by the sudden noise. The Valkyrie merely frowns, looking around for the lightning bolt’s source.

And Thor, naturally, lights up like a child.

“Oh, here he comes!” he says, and the Valkyrie offers him a that’s nice sort of smile that’s clearly only for his benefit.

And no sooner has he said that than the crowd catches on: The chant Zeus, Zeus, Zeus begins thrumming through every corner of the damned place, boots thundering against the stands, a few thousand hands clapping in time with the chant.

“The man, the myth, the legend,” Val murmurs.

“Oh, wow,” Jane says, genuinely awe-struck, wide-eyed as a new lightning bolt—curiously solid looking lightning bolt this time—zips around the circumference of the arena, once, twice, three and four and five and six times, gathering more and more speed with each lap. Zeus’ usual harem of gorgeous young men and women ride in on a literal flying chariot above the stands, circling in the opposite direction as the lightning but slower, steadier, like a bird of prey until the whole thing settles in its rightful place up on the pedestal where Zeus is set to make his first appearance.

Almost makes you wonder where Hera’s gone off to, Loki very nearly says aloud, but there’s not much time for snide comments. Half a second later the lightning bolt slams down into the center of the chariot, and in a flashing glimmer of sparks, the man and myth and legend himself is just suddenly there, arms thrown out wide, a delighted grin on his face. He is something of a spectacle, shimmering in all that golden sunlight streaming in from above, that thunderbolt continuously sizzling behind him, his nearly incalculable power rolling off of him in waves for those with the power to see it.

The effect is rather lost, of course, roughly five seconds after he opens his mouth.

Jane cringes at the mention of this year’s orgy said like it’s a matter of grave importance—which, of course, to someone like Zeus it certainly is—and she glances first at the Valkyrie on her left, then at Thor on her left, then all the way over at Loki on his left. When none of them say anything, she asks, “Is this guy for real?”

“Honestly, I’m not mad at it,” Val shrugs.

Thor hesitantly says, “Look, I’m sure he has a point, okay?”

“Does he, though?” Loki asks, squinting, just as Zeus begins announcing the awards for most human souls sacrificed in the name of a God, and in lieu of saying anything else, Loki simply waves in Zeus’ direction as if to say, See?

“Alright,” Thor concedes. “So maybe he’s not that great.”

Jane’s still cringing, shaking her head. “Oh, no, definitely not good.”

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s gonna get any better than this,” Val says, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her eyes directed straight ahead at the chariot. “Look, I think it’s pretty obvious that he isn’t gonna help us. That thunderbolt, though? That could be useful.”

Loki blinks. He hadn’t even considered that, but leave it to a Valkyrie to see a battle laid out in front of them and immediately pinpoint the one thing that’ll get them through it the fastest.

“Huh,” he says aloud, eyeing the thunderbolt in question. “You could be right.”

“I am right.”

“Yeah, I mean,” Jane shrugs, waving ahead. “Look at that thing. If anything can take down a God-killer, it’s gotta be that, isn’t it?”

Loki nods, making to stand up. “Right. Give me five minutes.”

“Absolutely not,” Thor interrupts him, one hand gripping tight to his upper arm before he can even think about conjuring up the illusion of himself and slipping away unnoticed.

“He’s right, you won’t be able to sneak past him with all these people watching,” Val says. “Direct approach is better. Jane, you go right. Loki, you go left. Thor and I will go center. We bumrush him, take the bolt, ding-dong—”

“No, no, no, no one’s bumrushing or ding-donging anything,” Thor hastily whispers. “You’re all impossible. This is Zeus. Come on. When the time is right, I’ll go up and talk to him, and I’ll—”

“Who is talking?”

“— shit,” Thor hisses, dropping himself so quickly it’s as if he hopes he can become one with the seat cushion beneath him. Loki ducks his face down so that his cloak is covering him enough to hide his identity before anyone’s attention is drawn to him. He manages to avoid detection, but Thor certainly doesn’t. Everyone in this row of the stands and a few rows forward and back all knew it was him talking, and every last one of their heads swivels toward him to the effect of something like fifty or sixty spotlights.

“Looks like the time’s right now,” Val says under her breath.

Down below, Zeus’ voice booms out: “You there! Did you have something to share with the group?”

“Better talk fast,” Valkyrie adds. “I’m bashing heads in sixty seconds.”

“Literally, heads will roll,” Jane agrees, and Loki has to cough into his hand to hide a laugh.

“Who are you two? Seriously,” Thor shakes his head, then stands, raising a hand toward Zeus and giving his best effort at a placating smile. “Almighty Zeus! Sorry about that. Let me just say, it’s an honor and a privilege to—”

“What is that?” Zeus cuts in. “I cannot hear you all the way up there. Why don’t you come down here and take the stage?”

“Oh, boy,” Loki mutters, sinking lower into his seat.

As Thor begins awkwardly bumping and weaving his way out of the stands to head down toward the stage—to a backdrop of snickers and whispers from the Gods all around them—Jane watches him go and says, “This isn’t gonna go well, is it?”

“It’s not going to go well, no,” Loki agrees.

“Shouldn’t we… I don’t know, go down there with him?”

“If you’d like to, please, be my guest.”

“Not now,” Val quietly cuts in. “Not yet. We’ll go on my signal.”

“Signal, yeah, okay,” Jane nods, and she’s nervously fidgeting with Mjolnir, clearly itching to rush down there and start cracking skulls at the first hint of trouble. Must be something innate to that hammer, Loki thinks. That, or Thor’s got a remarkably consistent type. “What’s the signal?”

“It’ll be ‘go.’”

“Awesome. Got it.”

Down below, Thor has already begun his attempts to call the many Gods to arms, and it’s going… actually, it’s not going terribly, if he’s being honest. Really, if Thor’s audience were just about anyone else, Loki imagines he might have even had a shot at pulling this off. Loki catches the tail end of a sentence about the God-killer and the threat he poses, about how he seeks to end the Gods all across the universe, before Zeus cuts him off.

“That guy, yes,” Zeus says from up on his pedestal, his voice conversational but still carrying easily across the width of the arena as if he’s speaking personally to each individual person in the stands. “Gorr, yes. The God Butcher, they are calling him, I know. But he only killed a couple of… very low-level God. Eh. Boo-hoo. Is not a concern here.”

Jane balks. “He knows?”

The Valkyrie lets out an annoyed sigh and shakes her head, apparently exactly as unsurprised as Loki is.

“Now, if that is all, pretty boy,” Zeus goes on, shooing Thor away with a flick of his hand. “You go back to your seat, and you be quiet. Yes?”

“You’re not hearing me,” Thor insists. “He’s murdering en masse. He attacked Asgard, and—”

Now, here, Thor makes one mistake: He steps forward, trying to get closer to Zeus, and in a blink, there are glowing electric shackles around each of his wrists, bolted to the floor, pinning him in place.

There’s a collective gasp and a few oohs from the crowd, none of them particularly shocked, simply enjoying the free entertainment. Zeus’ harem looks back and forth between them, waiting to see what happens next. Zeus himself stays exactly where he is for a moment, silently eyeing Thor down from up on that sunlit chariot.

And then, finally, he steps down onto the stage.

A low rumble accompanies each of Zeus’ steps—not thunder, not exactly, just a sort of hanging vibration in the air, but it’s enough. Enough to remind everyone who it is they’re looking at. Enough to remind Thor who it is he’s looking at.

“Asgard, eh?” Zeus says, stopping when he and Thor are nearly face-to-face. “Asgardians. Hm. Is funny, you know. I thought we’d seen the last of you when Odin died. But… tell me, is it true you all live on Earth now? Among the humans? How many of you are alive now, hm? A thousand? A hundred?” He leans in closer, waiting, but Thor doesn’t answer. “… Less?”

There’s a murmur that ripples through the crowd. A snicker here and there, but not clear enough for Loki to pinpoint where, or from whom.

“Zeus,” Thor says, and the fury is clear and present in his voice, though he makes a valiant show of squashing it down. “This is bigger than any of us. We have to—”

“Ah, ah. This is how you got in this predicament, yes?” Zeus says, gesturing at the shackles. At his will, apparently, the chains thrum and spark, tugging Thor a few inches lower. “You do not talk back to Zeus. Zeus does the talking. And this is what Zeus is saying. Are you listening now?” He pauses, then says, slowly, like he wants to make sure everyone in the arena hears every word perfectly: “Every God watches over their own peoples. Nothing more, nothing less. You know this. We all know this.”

He raises his arms out, turning in a slow circle to gesture at the crowd all around him before he returns to face Thor.

“Now, now, I know you want to do the right thing. I know. But Asgardian problems, they are Asgardian problems, yes?” Zeus goes on. “And this, this is Omnipotence City. We are safe here. You, my friend, you are safe here. This God Butcher, he will not come here, he will never reach Eternity, and he will not be problem for any G—”

It happens so quickly, so bizarrely, that Loki’s not even entirely sure he’s seeing it right. Not at first.

Midway through the word Gods, Zeus’ voice chokes off into silence. His eyes go very, very wide. Something extends out of his mouth, something long and sleek and black as the night—the business end of a sword that’s been shoved through his skull from behind, but with no swordsman on his other side, no hilt, no nothing.

It seems everyone else in the stands is in the same stunned not quite sure what’s just happened boat as Loki is. A second of pure, utter silence stretches through the entirety of the arena before Gorr finally materializes out of nothing behind Zeus, a black hole at the center of all that gilded gold. He yanks the sword back, and Zeus stays upright for the span of a heartbeat before his legs crumble beneath him.

And then, of course, the whole place goes dark.