On Yonder Hill

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!”