On Yonder Hill

The great hall in the Asgardian royal house of Iðavoll that evening was a riot of light and sound, in sharp counterpoint to the stately emptiness it had had when Natasha had arrived all those weeks ago. Now it was full of delighted Asgardians – friends and family reunited with each other after a couple of Wong’s sorcerers had brought the rest of the refugee ships through to Earth and the einherjar and ulfhednar here from Vanaheim for the first time in years, all of them drunk on victory and vengeance and quite a lot of actual alcohol. She felt pleasantly floaty herself, though she had had to both pace herself and heavily water the too-strong Asgardian liquor or she would have ended up on the floor a couple of hours ago. Even Steve and Bucky were a little flushed; Sam was watering his liquor even more heavily than Natasha was, and Bruce and Wanda had switched to fruit juice or water after their first couple of sips of booze.

The six of them were the only Avengers there, not counting Thor and Loki. The Guardians of the Galaxy, despite Loki’s polite invitation, had opted to go celebrate with the Ravagers, the Wakandans had gone home, Clint had badgered Wong until he had sent Clint back to his farm to be with Laura and their kids, Tony and Pepper had gone home to see their daughter, Scott had gone back to San Francisco with Hope van Dyne in order to see his daughter and get reamed out by Hank Pym for letting a Stark fool around with his technology, and Rhodes had reluctantly volunteered to deal with the Earthside fallout from both the reversal of the Snap and the battle. Natasha probably should have backed him up, but she had justified going to New Asgard with the excuse that she and Steve had standing orders to keep an eye on Loki and the other Asgardians. Sam and Bucky weren’t leaving Steve any time soon, Bruce was catching up with old friends among the Asgardians, and Wanda didn’t have anywhere else to go. Yelena was around here somewhere too, as well as a couple of the sorcerers who had stuck around after they had watched Loki put the infinity gauntlet in Iðavoll’s vault, sunk deep into the rock below the settlement and apparently secure enough to satisfy them. Together, it was undoubtedly the largest number of humans whom Loki had ever allowed into New Asgard.

The party had filled the great hall and spilled out into the courtyard beyond the big doors, which had been flung open for the occasion. New Asgard’s small number of children and teenagers kept running back and forth between the courtyard and the great hall, as if afraid to miss anything happening in either space. Fires burned in big metal braziers in the courtyard, and more tables had been set up there with food and drink – a lot of both, Asgardians could really put it away. Natasha had known that since they had been hosting Loki at the dearly departed Avengers compound and Thor on and off years before that, but it was more impressive to see in bulk. There were musicians in a corner of the great hall and more out in the courtyard, mostly managing to coordinate with each other, or at least not to clash. A few times spontaneous dancing had broken out, alien and unfamiliar and utterly enchanting; Natasha had leaned forward to get a better view and was already wondering who the best person to ask to teach her was.

The Avengers were seated at the high table with Thor and Loki, though Bruce and Sam had both drifted down to the lower tables that lined the big room to talk with various Asgardians and Bucky had vanished from sight entirely, probably to the fresher air of the courtyard. Wanda was tucked comfortably against Natasha’s side at the end of the high table, a little intimidated by the Asgardians but clearly pleased by the celebration. Steve was on her other side, looking very much at home in his borrowed clothes amidst the Asgardian splendor, with Sif on his left and an empty chair between her and Thor. He and Loki sat next to each other; there was another empty chair to Loki’s left, then the Valkyrie and more empty chairs where the other Avengers had been.

Natasha had only the faintest idea of what Asgard had looked like before its destruction, but going by the faint gut-punch sound Thor had made when he had first seen Iðavoll, and again when they had walked into the great hall, Loki hadn’t done a bad job at recreating it in miniature. The whole room glittered with light and life, both from the flickering firelight thrown up by the firepit that ran down the center of the room and from the lights high up in the vaulted rafters – glowing glass-like balls that Loki had called vapor-lamps, which produced a soft but strong light. It made the carvings and inlay on the columns and rafters around the room glow, striking sparks from the shields and weapons hung around the walls – most battered from the fight they had just come from. Mistilteinn and Thor’s sword were hung behind the high table, along with Steve’s shield, Natasha’s and Sif’s swords and shields, Yelena’s and the Valkyrie’s spears, and even Bucky’s and Sam’s guns. The Earth weapons had been treated with as much solemnity as Mistilteinn and the other Asgardian arms.

Natasha was picking at the remains of some kind of Asgardian cake, honey-sweet and studded with nuts and dried berries and, unsurprisingly, drenched in some kind of alcohol, when she saw Loki lean over to say something to Thor. He waited until Thor had nodded before he signed a gesture that resulted in several Asgardians vanishing into the back room of the hall and returned a moment later with golden pitchers brimming with what was, unsurprisingly, more alcohol. They went around the room setting out the pitchers, then returned to their seats. Sif picked up the pitcher nearest her and filled her cup, then made a gesture for Steve’s, Natasha’s, and Wanda’s, filling them to the brim.

The music cut off with a final flourish at another gesture; Loki waited until as many people as possible could crowd in from the courtyard before he produced a new pair of cups with a flick of his fingers and filled them both full, handing one to Thor. Then the two brothers rose to their feet, looking suddenly very alike despite the difference in coloring.

Thor lifted his cup, which was something very like cut-crystal in a sheath of golden metal with figured gripping animal designs. “I drink to our glorious dead!” he said. “I drink to those who spilled their life’s blood out in Asgard’s name and for the defense of the Nine Realms, far from kith and kin and homeworld. They are feasting now in Valhalla with all our kin back to the beginning of time. Remember us kindly until we come to dine with you again, for even the gods must die.” He and Loki both turned to salute the empty chairs on either side of them. “Hail to the Æsir!”

“Hail!”

“Hail to the Ásynjur!”

“Hail!”

This time Natasha heard the very slight vowel shift – the difference between the divine living Aesir and the deified dead Æsir and Ásynjur, the female Asgardians. She lifted her cup with the Asgardians and drank, but not much – she had the feeling that there was going to be a lot more drinking to go.

Loki lifted his cup. “I drink to our living!” he said. “I drink to those who passed through the great void of Ginnungagap and returned to walk once more upon the branches of the World Tree. I drink to those who passed through the fires of Ragnarok and came out forged of uru to make new life in a new Asgard. I drink to those who joined us in battle to break their shields against the foe’s might and wet their spears in his blood. Hail to the Aesir!”

“Hail!”

“Hail to the Asynjur!”

“Hail!”

He and Thor – and many of the Asgardians – both drained their cups, then Thor poured again for both of them. They turned towards the three humans at the high table.

Natasha felt herself flush under that concentrated attention, though that might have been the alcohol. She grinned at them anyway, delighted herself to see them so happy.

“I drink to the Avengers!” Thor said. “I drink to our comrades in arms, to the friends of the Aesir, to the warriors who braved the roots of the great tree Mimameid that passes over all realms to set the working of the Norns right again. Drink hail!”

“Hail!”

“I drink to Midgard!” Loki said. “I drink to the realm that sheltered our people – with no love lost for me –” he added with a wry grin, “– and which gave us a place to build Asgard anew. Drink hail!”

“Hail!”

Steve whispered briefly to Sif, then got to his feet. Thor and Loki both grinned at him as he raised his cup. “I drink to Asgard!” he said, his soldier’s voice carrying easily through the hall. “I drink to our friends and our allies and to the defenders of Earth! Drink hail!”

“Hail!”

Natasha stood. “I drink to Asgard! I drink to sorrows shared and friendships made and to a strong right arm in battle! За нашу дружбу! Drink hail!”

“Hail!”

She and Steve both knocked back their glasses; he caught her with one hand under her elbow as she swayed, Wanda putting a hand on her hip to steady her. Natasha had a pretty good head for alcohol for an unenhanced human, but the Asgardian mead they were drinking left even vodka in the dust.

Thor and Loki had emptied their cups too. As Natasha sat down – very, very carefully, her head swimming – Loki poured for both of them again. He was looking around the room, clearly expecting someone else to start making toasts, when Thor turned to him and raised his cup. Loki’s eyes went wide and a little wary.

“I drink to my brother!” Thor said, grinning at him. “I drink to the son of Odin, to the Allfather of the Aesir, to the Shield of the Gods, whose work was the undoing of the goddess of death, who brought our people safe through fire and bloodshed and the doom of the gods, who made Asgard once more as a home for our people, who fought the warlord Thanos and called the Nine Realms together as one to defeat him on the battlefield. I drink to the King of Asgard! I drink to Loki!”

Loki made a small, gut-punched sound. Thor put a hand on the back of his neck and bent his forehead against his brother’s, whispering to him too softly for Natasha to make out over the roar of voices crying out.

After a moment Loki turned from Thor and raised his own cup, his face set in lines of steely determination. “I drink to my brother!” he said. “I drink to the son of Odin, to the Allfather of the Aesir, to the Hammer of the Gods, who challenged the goddess of death and won, who saved our people from extinction and the doom of Asgard-that-was, who gave his life’s blood to the tyrant Thanos to save our people, who passed through the void of Ginnungagap to return again to Asgard. I drink to the King of Asgard! I drink to Thor!”

There was another round of cheers, no less enthusiastic than the first, but a little more confused, Natasha thought.

After an instant of hesitation, Sif stood and raised her cup with a wry grin. “I drink to the sons of Odin!” she said, her voice pitched to carry. “I drink to the saviors of the gods, to the Allfathers of the Aesir, to the Kings of Asgard! I drink to Thor and Loki! Drink hail, Aesir! Drink hail, Asynjur!”

“Hail!”

Nearly everyone in the hall was on their feet, cups raised, a solid wall of sound aimed at the two men on the dais. Natasha found herself standing too, half-supported by Steve and Wanda as they all shouted.

Loki looked like he was about to cry. Thor was grinning, his cup raised in salute to the room and his arm still slung around his brother’s shoulders. After a moment of the roaring, delighted cheering, Loki got himself together and linked his arm with Thor’s. They both drank, laughing with it, until they turned their cups over to show that they were empty, then bent their heads together. Natasha couldn’t tell if they were saying anything or just hanging onto each other.

The Valkyrie stood, pouring herself another cup, and raised it. “I drink to the Aesir!” she cried. “I drink to a people too damn stubborn to die no matter how many times some murderous asshole tries to kill us! To the Kings of Asgard – to our kin feasting in Valhalla – to the Aesir and the Asynjur – drink hail!”

Despite the catnap Natasha had managed to take before the feast started, she was still so tired that everything had taken on a slight bright edge, not helped by the flickering firelight and the soft vapor-lamps that the Asgardians used instead of electric light. Wanda was asleep with her head pillowed on her arms; Sam and Bucky had reappeared and pulled a couple of chairs up to talk with Steve, who kept looking at them in shocked delight, like he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to have them both here. Natasha had kicked her borrowed shoes off and curled her legs up, leaning against the back of her chair with a cup of fruit juice between her palms, glad that the Asgardians apparently believed in not only having alcohol at a party.

Now that the feasting and the toasts were over, there was a slightly frantic edge to the celebration that Natasha could pick up on even in her exhausted state. There was going to be trouble later, she could tell, even if right now it seemed unlikely that Loki and Thor were going to fight over the throne. She could feel her training pushing at the back of her mind, both the Red Room’s and SHIELD’s, nudging her to look for the cracks in New Asgard – lingering resentment against the einherjar and ulfhednar who had stayed on Vanaheim, confusion and shock from the unsnapped refugees, a little bit of bitterness and betrayal from all parties where spouses had remarried or taken new lovers, the handful of children who didn’t remember their parents, grief at the realization. If the einherjar and ulfhednar stayed on Earth rather than returning to Vanaheim, then New Asgard’s population would triple rather than double, an unpleasant prospect for an Earth which hadn’t particularly wanted the Asgardians there in the first place. Natasha didn’t think that Ross or anyone else had really thought through the implications of real internal trouble amongst the Asgardians, just that he wanted them off the planet. She wasn’t going to be the one to help with that, though.

Loki was deep in conversation with the Valkyrie and a couple of the Asgardians from the settlement, but every now and then he glanced up and looked around the great hall, his gaze tracking his brother for an instant before he did a seemingly automatic onceover of the room in case of trouble. Natasha wondered briefly how the newly arrived Asgardians would respond to Loki vaulting the table to break up a fight, the way she had seen him do a few times back when Iðavoll had still been under construction and she had been spending most of her time here.

Thor, down at one of the main tables with Sif, Bruce, and a couple of the einherjar, kept doing the same thing, like he was checking that Loki hadn’t run off somewhere. So far they hadn’t done it at the same time, so Natasha wasn’t certain if either brother was aware that the other was doing it. It was kind of funny, in a way. She knew what her training said about that – that it was a potential sign of discord amongst the Asgardians – and kept shoving the thought aside every time it popped up.

Sif said something to Thor, laughing, and Bruce made an expression of disbelief. “You don’t,” he said; with the noise in the hall what it was Natasha couldn’t hear him from here, but he was facing her and she could read his lips. “That’s insane!”

Thor waved his hands in a no, no kind of way, and the einherjar – who had shed their armor and yellow cloaks, but were still recognizably in something like a uniform – made gestures of agreement.

Sif said something in response and Thor started to nod before he stopped abruptly. She looked at him inquisitively as he swung his long legs over the side of the bench and stood up, heading for the open space at the center of the big room. “Loki!”

Loki paused with his wineglass halfway to his lips and looked over at him. “What?”

Thor grinned up at him, clearly delighted. “Let’s dance the blades.”

“Oh, this I gotta see,” the Valkyrie said.

Loki made a rude gesture in her direction, then knocked back the rest of his wineglass and set it down. He kicked his chair back, put a hand down flat on the table, and vaulted it to land easily on the floor alongside Thor. He pointed at his brother. “If you cut a limb off and I have to spend a week regenerating a hand, you’re running the government.”

“What if I have to spend a week regenerating a limb?” Thor protested.

Loki spread his hands. “I was already running the government!”

“You’ve been in America doing some time travel bullshit for the past month,” the Valkyrie said. “I’ve been running the government.”

“I don’t think that’s how our monarchy works,” Loki said over his shoulder to her.

“This conversation’s kind of freaking me out,” Sam confessed. “What the hell are they talking about? Also, can they really regrow limbs?”

Steve looked at Natasha, who shrugged.

There were excited whispers moving through the great hall as word of whatever the hell they were doing spread. Sif had gone over to the musicians and was talking to them; someone else ran out the open doors to tell everyone in the courtyard what was going on.

Thor made a beckoning gesture at the einherjar he had been talking to, who took down a pair of the eight-foot battle spears racked on the wall and tossed them to him. Thor caught them easily as Loki made a similar gesture to a pair of ulfhednar on the opposite side of the hall and got a pair of swords in return. He laid them down on the floor, caught the axes someone else tossed him, and put those down on the floor too so that the four weapons formed a square before straightening up to catch the spear Thor threw him.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Bucky said.

“This is making me very uncomfortable,” Sam said.

Thor made a couple of testing passes with his spear, while Loki spun his between his hands, then tossed it up and caught it again. Both had the effect of making the watching crowd edge back, giving them enough clearance that they could both extend the eight-foot war spears at full lunge without running into anyone or the firepit in the center of the room. More Asgardians pushed in through the open doors to get a look at the show.

Loki set the butt of his spear against the floor, then kicked it up with the toe of one boot, spinning it one-handed in whirling arcs on either side of his body like a baton-twirler. He smirked at his brother and said, “Sure you remember how to do this? It’s been a while since you used anything but Mjolnir.”

“Oh, I remember,” Thor said. “It’s only been five years for you, remember, brother?”

Loki pursed his lips in a silent whistle, but his eyes were bright with amusement. “Well, then, let’s not keep everyone waiting.” He raised his free hand and made a circling gesture.

The musicians had been conferring while Thor and Loki had been warming up. Now a steady drumbeat began, the ivory tipper some Asgardian had brought all the way from his homeworld unhurried but rapid against the taut skin of the drumhead, a double-beat every three strokes. Thor and Loki began to twirl their spears as they circled the square of weapons laid out on the floor, the bright metal of the razor-sharp blades glittering in the firelight. The spears went faster and faster as the drumbeat intensified, until they were blinding arcs of alien metal passing in figure-eights from one side of each man to the other.

Then the Asgardian stringed instruments came in together and both Loki and Thor lunged forwards, spears at full extension and with those deadly blades passing a hair’s breadth from each other. They drew back in a sideways sweep of the weapons, moving faster now, intent on each other and the music and the pattern of the dance. Their spears met just below the foot-long points in a ringing crash that made Natasha jump, disengaged, swept past each other again, flipped up and over so that the next time they met it was with the shafts held parallel to each other. They struck against each other, a one two three solid thunk before they disengaged, swept outwards in whirling arcs, back again with another crash. The whole time Thor and Loki kept moving, their eyes fixed on each other, tracing a pattern around and through the square of weapons on the floor.

After today, Natasha had a very good idea of exactly how sharp those Asgardian weapons were, and even watching the blade dance left her cold. She trusted both Asgardians; she couldn’t bring herself to blink, let alone look away, in case in that instant one of them moved wrong. Not to mention they had both been drinking all night.

The music rose in a sudden skirl of strings as the drum matched it and with a stamp of booted feet Loki and Thor threw their spears upwards towards the rafters. They were still airborne, blades glittering in the firelight, when Loki and Thor each got a foot under the axes on the floor and tossed them up, catching them easily. They met in another clash of metal, axe shafts sliding against each other until the sharply curved heads caught against each other, then broke apart, free hands coming up to catch the spears as they came down.

They moved faster and faster as the music hastened, with no other sound but the stamp of their feet on the wooden floor, their harsh breathing, the clatter of the beads in Loki’s hair, and the clash of metal on metal as the weapons met. Another wild skirl of music and the spears went up again; this time it was the swords they tossed up into their hands.

“Is it weird that I’m a little turned on right now?” Bucky said, his voice barely more than a whisper, like he was afraid to distract the dancers.

“No,” Steve said without looking at him.

Bucky blinked, glanced over, and said, “Jesus Christ, Steve.”

“Pretty sure he’s not in the building full of Norse gods, buddy,” Sam said.

Steve’s ears were red. Natasha elbowed him gently, grinning, but didn’t take her eyes off Loki and Thor.

The blade dance was a third juggling now, first the spears rising upwards, then the axes, then the spears again, then the swords. It went faster and faster, each movement perfectly mirrored, the blades passing within a hair’s breadth of doing real damage. One of Thor’s spear-thrusts did catch one of Loki’s long braids, the foot-long blade slicing cleanly through the finger-width of hair and sending it flicking aside without so much as a pause. Neither man stopped, not with two and a half feet of edged metal each in the air above them.

The music changed again and so did Loki’s and Thor’s movements. Natasha couldn’t quite see what they did, but as the axes were whirling upwards their swords went down onto the floor in the same position they had started. The axes followed a few passes later while their spears were in the air, then Loki quirked an eyebrow at Thor as he caught his spear, still moving light-footed around the weapons laid on the floor around them and the spear spinning in his experienced hands. Thor grinned back.

When the brothers thrust next – a near twelve-foot reach at full extension – Loki’s spear-point came back trailing green fire.

Thor’s trailed lightning.

There was a collective if muted oooh from the watching Asgardians. The brothers were in the end-stages of the dance now, each movement slower and more deliberate, with showy flourishes accentuated by their magic. The spears snapped sideways and upright as the final movement ended with a last trailing glitter of green and white light, Thor and Loki facing each other and breathing hard.

“Holy shit,” Sam said reverently, the words almost lost in the whooping of the audience.

After a moment Thor and Loki handed the spears to an einheri who came forward to collect them and the other weapons. Thor slung an arm around Loki’s shoulders as Loki flicked his hair out of his face with a snap of his head, reaching up to finger the shorn braid. Natasha couldn’t hear what he said to his brother, but Thor grinned and squeezed his shoulders before turning to take the cups Sif brought them.

He handed one to Loki, who lifted it towards his brother in a salute that Thor returned, then they linked arms and drank, neck muscles working.

“Okay, I get why you slept with him,” Bucky said to Steve.

Steve put a hand over his face. “Buck…”

“Yeah?” Bucky said brightly.

“Shut up.”

Bucky laughed and slapped him on the back, which made Steve grin at him in unguarded affection.

Thor came back to the high table and reached across it to find an empty cup and a pitcher of water. “I don’t think I’ve done that in a century,” he admitted, pouring the cup full and then splashing its contents in his face. “Not the full thing.”

“That was impressive,” Natasha said, feeling a little breathless herself. The amount of practice it took to do something like that with live steel – “So how many times did you concuss yourself, learning?”

Thor laughed, poured himself another cup of water, and drank that down in one gulp. “Many. We don’t learn with blades at first, of course, but blade dances are a mark of skill among the einherjar and ulfhednar.”

“The ulfhednar have a different version,” Loki said, joining them and scrubbing at his sweat-streaked face with a towel someone had handed him. “This one is showing off, really.”

“I didn’t notice you protesting,” Thor said.

“Well, everyone knows I like showing off,” Loki said. “On the other hand –” He flicked the cut end of his braid at Thor; the spear-point had taken off about eight inches of hair.

Thor looked at him solemnly. “You need a haircut anyway.”

“What, like that?” Loki poked a finger at the side of Thor’s head. “No, thank you, I’m quite happy with my hair at the moment.”

“This was not my fault!” Thor protested. “A creepy old man cut it off,” he added in response to Steve’s bemused headtilt, which as far as Natasha was concerned didn’t actually explain anything.

Loki snickered and winked at Bruce, who had followed Thor over. “And then the Hulk smashed him.”

“You laughed.”

“Turnabout’s fair play, brother.”

“That’s different,” Thor protested, though he flicked a worried glance at Bruce, who seemed to have decided to be amused by the conversation. “You deserved it.” He stopped almost as soon as the words were out, clearly remembering what had passed between Loki and Thanos earlier that day.

Loki pretended not to see it, snagging his wineglass and another pitcher. “Still funny,” he said. He smirked at his brother. “Come now, it was five years ago: get over it.”

“Five years for you, maybe,” Thor grumbled. “Last week for me. And when you put it like that it sounds like you’re the one dwelling on the past. Even for me, New York was still six years ago, nearly seven.”

“That’s different,” Loki said brightly. “That’s me.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if it had been you in the ring,” Thor said.

“Oh, it has been me,” Loki said, tossing back his glass of wine and pouring himself some more. “But this time it was you and it was less than a day and it was just the Hulk, so it’s funny.”

Thor frowned. “What?”

“Did I stutter? If it had been more than a day or anything worse than fighting the Hulk, it wouldn’t have been funny and I would have had to do something drastic, but that was all it was, so it’s funny.”

“Not on Sakaar it wasn’t you,” the Valkyrie said, making them all jump; even Natasha hadn’t noticed her approach.

Loki blinked at her, frowning, then visibly ran back what he had just said and shut his eyes in resignation. “Damn,” he said softly, and emptied his wineglass. “Well, it was some years ago and I’d rather not revisit it.”

“Loki –”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it, Thor.” From Loki’s expression, he was considering taking the wine and leaving, but apparently he decided against it, just leaned against the high table and glared at them. He did pour himself another glass of wine.

You bought me like so much chattel, Loki had said to Thanos, when there was no one but Natasha to hear him. But everyone had heard Thanos tell him he had wasted his money on him.

After a moment, Loki said, “Sakaar isn’t the only place lost things fall to, brother. I didn’t bounce off Sanctuary’s hull, you know, and even if I had the Titan would hardly leave the choice of his Children to random chance.”

Thor fought a short but winning battle with himself against asking more and finally just slung an arm around Loki’s shoulders. Loki tensed, wary, but when Thor didn’t say anything he relaxed a little. His eyes were still uncertain, though.

Steve shifted a little, clearly unhappy with this line of conversation; he might not know the details but it wasn’t exactly hard to figure out from context. His sideways twitch towards Bucky made it clear what he was thinking. Bucky nudged him gently and mouthed I’m fine when Steve glanced at him, and Steve managed a slight smile in response.

Loki drained his wineglass and set it aside, shrugging his way out from under Thor’s arm. “I can’t believe we did that inside,” he said, his voice deliberately light. “Do you realize how long it took to get the hall looking like this? Sam here could have been flying up to pull spears out of the rafters right now.”

Sam looked slightly surprised that Loki had any idea what his name was – they had never actually been introduced – but cocked an experienced eye at the ceiling anyway. “A little low for me,” he said. “I’d get a look at those carvings, though.”

They all peered upwards.

“Sigurd and Fafnir?” Thor said to Loki and the Valkyrie. The intricate detail work was too far away for human eyes to make out – at least for human eyes that weren’t serum-enhanced; from Steve’s intent expression, he could see them just fine – but were apparently visible to Asgardians.

He tipped a finger at the Valkyrie. “Her idea. You know I’ve always thought the First Hero sounded absolutely insufferable.”

“That’s because you’re a snob,” the Valkyrie told him.

“I prefer to think of it as having taste. Though for all I know, he’s an ex-lover of yours –”

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, majesty, I’m old but I’m not that old –”

Natasha smiled a little at their bickering. Thor looked a little surprised – at the Valkyrie more than at his brother, she thought, and tried to remember how long they might have known each other before Thanos’s attack. Not long, maybe.

“I’m going to get some air,” she said to Steve, leaning down to pull her shoes back on. Loki flicked a glance at her as she left, but didn’t say anything.

The kitchens were fairly quiet when she went through them on her way to the back door, though not completely deserted; there were a few people there washing dishes or just eating or drinking in a less chaotic setting than the great hall or the courtyard. To this day Natasha still had no idea whether New Asgard had servants or not; when she had been here before Loki had done some but not all of his own cooking and cleaning. The great hall could and did feed the entire population of New Asgard, though in the past few years it had apparently grown less common to do so as people got settled in their own homes with friends or family groups. Loki still hosted whoever wanted to turn up to Iðavoll four days out of every seven, or at least he had the last time Natasha had been here.

The Asgardians in the kitchen nodded politely to her as she passed through, indicating the plates of food and pitchers of various alcohols and fruit juices inquisitively. Natasha smiled but shook her head; if she ate or drank anything else she would probably explode.

The kitchen’s back door let out onto the colonnaded back of the building, with the Residency’s bathhouse a shadowed hump off to her left. A few lights gleamed overhead among the vines covering the entablature; Natasha peered up at them, curious, and saw that they were softly glowing balls of something that looked like but probably wasn’t glass, maybe the same thing that lit the great hall. The vines were nothing she had ever seen on Earth before, either, with a few delicate white blossoms just opening. The columns of the colonnade were as finely carved as everything else in the great hall, though already a little worn by exposure to the sea air and winter snows.

She could still hear music from the courtyard at the front of the great hall, a little muted by the bulk of the building between them. From the sound of it, the celebration was going to keep going for a while; New Asgard badly needed something to celebrate. She hoped that the rest of the world was just as happy, though she suspected that there was a lot of chaos as a result of the Snap’s reverse. That was something for her to deal with tomorrow or the day after, though. Today she was happy to bask in New Asgard’s joy.

Natasha leaned against one of the engraved columns and breathed in salt air of the sea coast, listening to the Skagerrak’s waves crashing against the cliffs below the settlement, just as they had done for a thousand years before and would continue to do for a thousand years after. She had been standing out there for a while when the door opened behind her.

She flicked a glance over her shoulder and smiled to see Thor there.

“Too loud for you too?”

“Not at all,” he said, coming up beside her and running a hand over the carvings on the column nearest him. He smiled as he did so, tracing the intricate knotwork and its gripping beasts with his fingers. “It’s very good to see my people so happy. We have much to celebrate and to mourn, but on Asgard we mourn death with life.”

His face clouded for a moment; for him and for half the people back in the great hall Ragnarok would have only been a handful of days previous.

What a mess, Natasha thought. Out loud, she said, “This must be difficult for you.”

He made an expression of agreement. “There are worse things. And at least when we got here this time it was to a home and our own people, not something that had to be begged and bartered for from strangers. I admit, I wasn’t looking forward to that.”

Natasha nodded. “Loki had a pretty tough time of it, but he is one stubborn bastard.”

Thor grinned. “He is.” He traced a single line of carving with his thumbnail until it dead-ended as some kind of elaborately stylized animal with horns and a lot of teeth, then looked at her and said, “I wanted to thank you for what you did for my brother. Considering what he’s done in the past, it would have been understandable if you had imprisoned him. Or –” He shrugged, uncomfortable. “Bruce told me what happened in Wakanda and afterwards, before the Valkyrie and the remainder of our people arrived.”

“What Loki did in Wakanda was the difference between a lot of people dying and not dying,” Natasha said. “Probably including a bunch of us. And dying in that fight was not something any of us were going to come back from, not like the Snap.” She shrugged. “You were in Sokovia. You probably know about Clint’s little talk with Wanda.”

Thor smiled. “I’ve heard the story. You walk out that door, you’re an Avenger,” he quoted. “I’m guessing you didn’t tell Loki that.”

“Didn’t really have the opportunity at the time,” Natasha agreed. She picked at a torn nail and said, “After the Sokovia Accords – you missed those – I figured something out. There are some things you don’t compromise on, not ever. Your own people are one of them. After Wakanda, he was one of us. Admittedly, I don’t think he knew that then.”

“And you helped with New Asgard,” Thor said.

“Mostly Steve and Bruce and Rhodey and I just backed Loki up while he was arguing with the UN. All of this –” She gestured to indicate the elegant bulk of Iðavoll above them, as well as the rest of the settlement, “– was him.”

Thor’s smile grew, but there was a little bit of awe in it too. “Loki made this,” he said. “There was nothing here before and he made this, he built this, made a home for our people, made Asgard. This could be one of our thorps back home.”

“Loki and the Asgardians lived in their ships and in tents for weeks while they built Iðavoll and Gimlé,” Natasha said; Gimlé was the hall where the Althing met and which was used for any community event that the great hall couldn’t host for whatever reason. On Ross’s orders and as part of what she suspected he had considered punishment detail, she and Steve had essentially been living in New Asgard for the better part of half a year. Bruce too, mostly to get away from Ross, who hadn’t greeted his return with anything like joy. Rhodes had been in and out, doing the work of six people as the Avengers tried to keep up with the avalanche of catastrophes the Snap had caused. “Then they lived in the great hall – the upper levels weren’t built for another year – and in Gimlé until there were enough houses built that they didn’t all have to stay there. But there were still people sleeping in Iðavoll well into year three. Besides Loki and the Valkyrie, I mean, after the Residency was built.”

Thor nodded in approval and understanding. “It’s a king’s duty to shelter his people.”

Natasha thought that it had taken a long time for some of the more traumatized Asgardians to trust that they might be safe away from the immediate protection of the king, even though the settlement wasn’t large. There had been a lot of nightmares those nights she had been sleeping in Iðavoll’s great hall with the Asgardians – not that she had been immune to nightmares herself. She wasn’t about to tell Thor any of that, though.

Instead, she said, “After Loki finally convinced the UN to let the Asgardians stay, they wanted to split everyone up – place them all over the world with whoever would take them.”

Thor winced. “Loki didn’t take that well?”

“He just told them to do better.” Natasha had never thought of Loki, of all people, as having iron self-control until he had heard that suggestion and hadn’t responded with attempted murder, just a slight tightening of his jaw before he had gone back into the room to start arguing again. “At one point he told the committee that he was going to live at least another six thousand years and he was perfectly willing to keep arguing until they all died of old age, but he wasn’t going to back down and the only people on Earth with a chance of making him back down were on his side.”

That got another smile from Thor. “Thank you,” he said again. “You’ve no idea how much it means to me that you stood by him and my people.”

“He made a lot of compromises,” Natasha said after a moment. “About himself, not Asgard. But he got everything he wanted in the end. Almost everything.” She tapped a foot against the smooth paving stones they were standing on when Thor looked worried. “He wanted them to sign over the land and all rights permanently. It ended up being a thousand-year – well, nine hundred and ninety-nine year – lease, which nobody was happy about either, since that’s a pretty absurd amount of time for humans but apparently not all that long for Asgardians.” She quirked an eyebrow at Thor, who shrugged.

“Most of my lifetime,” he said. “And Loki’s.” He thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll ask Loki later, but – I’m assuming he argued for our sovereignty.”

“For about two weeks straight,” Natasha said. “I know. I was there.” She curled the end of her braid around her fingers, thinking. “New Asgard is sovereign within its own territory – you’d have to ask Loki exactly how many square miles that is, but it is a pretty substantial chunk of land, plus part of the Skagerrak that borders the coastline. Water rights, mineral rights, airspace, all the good stuff. Everything else around here is still part of Norway and New Asgard has some kind of relationship with them – I know they send a representative to the Storting, but I don’t think they have a vote. And Loki’s been invited to a lot of dinners with the royal family, since they had to make up numbers after the Snap, I guess. Steve and I had to go too, at least the first few times, because having supervision was one of the compromises he made.”

Thor winced.

“Honestly, a lot of countries got better about it after the first couple years,” Natasha said. “Not all – not even most – but we haven’t had to play babysitter for a while.”

“He must have hated that,” Thor murmured; Natasha didn’t think she was meant to hear it. After a moment, he said in a normal tone, “He’s always been very stubborn. I don’t know that I could have done half so well. And then, to build all of this –”

“I think he thought he had something to prove,” Natasha said, but that came dangerously close to giving away some of Loki’s secrets to Thor, and she liked him too much to do that.

Thor’s fingers found another beast carving, this one identifiably a wolf. “I can see that,” he admitted. “But the Althing acclaimed him king. Then, and now.”

“Does that –” She made a vague motion back in the direction of the great hall. “Does that count as the Althing, or are you going to have to do this again when everyone’s sober?”

Thor snorted. “We’re Asgardians. Sobriety’s optional. And yes, since that was most – all – of the adult population of Asgard –” He looked briefly pained, but continued, “– it counts. I suppose Loki might make them vote on it again when they’re sober and without us actually there; he seems to have gotten very law-abiding lately.” He sighed, and admitted, “I’d hoped that more of our people had survived Thanos’s massacre. And I’d hoped – I didn’t realize that the garrison might not believe the truth about Ragnarok.”

“Well,” Natasha said, “it does sound pretty unbelievable. We got it from Bruce, mostly – Loki wasn’t talking a lot in Wakanda.”

He made an unhappy sound. “I suppose. Loki said he had trouble with the Vanaheim garrison. I’d hoped that more of the ulfhednar at least would have believed him – he used to command them for a time.”

“He said something about getting shot in the face once when he was with the ulfhednar on Alfheim,” Natasha said.

“That was mostly my fault,” Thor said, but he was smiling when he said it. After a moment he returned to the original subject and went on, “I love my brother more than anything else in this life or any other, no matter how hard the last few years have been for us. It means more to me than I can say that you protected him and stood by him when you had no reason to do so and every reason not to. Neither of us will ever be able to repay that debt.”

“It’s not a debt,” Natasha said gently; for some reason she heard Loki saying, I have, perhaps, too much red in my ledger to wipe out. “It’s what friends are for. And teammates.” She smiled. “Family.”

Thor smiled back. “I’m glad, too, that you were able to meet the brother I remember.”

She shrugged. “Loki’s not that bad once you get to know him. I mean, he can still be an asshole a lot of the time, but so am I, so is Steve, Clint – and, I mean, you’ve met Tony, so –”

His wry grin was answer enough to that.

“He’s a good friend,” Natasha said.

Thor smirked. “Friend?”

“Friend with benefits,” Natasha grinned, but felt a little heat in her cheeks as his smirk broadened. “The benefits being that because part of the Asgardian Accords involve him being an Avenger, occasionally I have to call him up to come and hit something really hard that Steve or Rhodey can’t knock out.” Not that there had been many of those, since the hassle it took to get diplomatic permission for Loki to enter most countries usually wasn’t compatible with what tended to be time-sensitive Avenger emergencies. Except that when you needed a super-powered god with anger issues to punch something – especially when the Hulk had still been out of commission – you really needed it. “Or turn it into a frog,” she added to be fair to Loki, since on one of those few occasions his magic had solved the problem.

“He did that to me once,” Thor said musingly.

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “I know he’s rung your bell a couple of times.”

He waved that aside. “Turned me into a frog, I mean. I was furious. We were –” He thought about it. “Ten, maybe? It was a few years after the snake thing.”

“How long did it last?” Natasha asked.

“About a week. He hadn’t learned the spell to take it off before he put it on me and our mother was away,” Thor said, his eye twinkling. “I thought Father was going to die laughing. He wouldn’t help, either.” His expression turned melancholy and Natasha remembered that for him it had only been a week since Odin’s death.

She was out of practice talking to Thor. Her exhausted mind stuttered for a moment too long, uncertain what to distract him with.

“What he – Thanos – what he did to me was for Loki, you know,” Thor said, his voice heavy. “And all three of us knew it. Everyone there knew it – the Black Order, I mean. He had the woman and the man – the one Steve and your sister killed today?”

“Corvus Glaive,” Natasha said, a little surprised he didn’t know their names. “And Proxima Midnight.”

Thor nodded. “Thanos had them hold Loki while he –” He touched his throat, where beneath his open-necked shirt there was still a little bruising visible; the damage had been so bad that even Asgardian healing hadn’t done all its work yet. “– and Loki screamed for me the whole time. I have held my brother when he died – or both of us thought him dying – and it was terrible, but at least that was clean battle. This…wasn’t.”

He touched his throat again, then took his hand away very quickly. “He begged,” he said. “I’ve never heard Loki – and it was the last thing I remember before I woke on the ship today. My brother pleading for my life and being denied.” He looked down, swallowing convulsively.

Natasha put a hand on his arm, and when Thor turned towards her, she leaned up and hugged him. She had to stand on her toes to do so, but Thor’s arms went back around her with the ease for whom affection came easily.

“I’ve had an odd day,” he said, his voice a little wry, though there was still a note of stunned shock in it. For him Thanos’s massacre on the Statesman was only hours old, not to mention his own murder. At least he had missed the Snap entirely.

Natasha hugged him again, then drew back in case he needed the space to himself. She thought maybe he did; there was a distant look in his remaining eye, as though it had all just caught up with him. He put his hand on the nearest of the carved columns, tracing the form of what she was fairly certain was a raven. “This is a good place,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “Loki built it strong. And the dead are feasting with all our kin in Valhalla, where the brave shall live forever –”

He had to stop, pressing his hands to his face and breathing hard.

Natasha touched his arm again. “Thor, you don’t have to be all right,” she said. “Nobody is expecting you to be and – and no one else is, either. I don’t think anyone is going to be okay for a long time.”

Thor’s smile was weary and crooked and very sad. “And let my brother bear the entirety of this burden for another day longer? No. We’ll do so together, as we always should have.”

“I don’t think Loki’s all right either,” Natasha said gently. “He’s just…had more time to get used to it.”

Thor shook his head wearily. “It’s different for him. He – he was able to pick up the pieces, but I was the one who broke them in the first place. We’ve been doing that all our lives, until these past few years when we changed places. And I’m not certain that that change ever came naturally to either of us.” He brushed a hand over his face; in the soft light of the vapor-lamps the wetness on his fingers gleamed. “It was my idea, you know. I gave the order.”

“What do you mean?” Natasha asked.

“Ragnarok,” he said as if it was obvious. “Loki or the Valkyrie haven’t spoken of it to you? Or Bruce?”

“Only a little,” Natasha said cautiously.

Thor made a gesture like he was about to scrub his hands back through his hair and seemed surprised to find it too short for the purpose. “Before Hela – you know about Hela?” When Natasha nodded, he went on, “Before Hela escaped her prison, I dreamed about Ragnarok. I thought I could keep it from coming to pass by defeating Surtur on Muspelheim and bringing his crown – the source of his power – to Asgard. If I hadn’t done that –” He sighed. “If I hadn’t done that then Hela might have won.”

“I don’t understand,” Natasha said. Loki had barely talked about Ragnarok even when he was drunk; the Valkyrie even less; Bruce didn’t remember much, since he had been the Hulk at the time. She had picked up bits and pieces from other Asgardians, but not enough to assemble an entire picture, and all Loki had said about it when he had been bargaining for Asgard’s refuge were the bits that might be believed by the very commonsense members of the United Nations committee that had to deal with him.

“Hela drew her power from Asgard – old magic, older than mine or Loki’s,” Thor said after a moment of thought. “I think – Loki and Heimdall and I talked about it a little afterwards – that because she is, was – is – the goddess of death, she could draw her power from our people’s past, deep in the bones of our realm. It’s just a guess, there’s no way to be certain now. The only way I could think of to stop her was to cut her off from Asgard – we couldn’t kill her. So I gave the command to unleash Surtur. Loki did it, but it was my command. I did that. I destroyed Asgard.”

“Thor…”

He rested a hand on the column again and tipped his face upwards towards the vines and lights in the entablature above them. “Loki made this,” he said, and there was awe in his voice. “I destroyed Asgard and Loki made a new Asgard for our people. I’ve – I’ve had very little reason to think well of my brother these past few years and if you had asked me yesterday – this morning, even – if I thought he could do this – that he would do this – I would have said no. And I would have been wrong.”

Natasha struggled for something to say to that. If she hadn’t lived through the past five years, she probably would have thought so too. For Thor it had to be worse; it must seem like his brother had hijacked his life.

“Loki –” Thor said slowly, as if he had to think about every word. “Loki has always had a very strong sense of responsibility – more so than me, perhaps. Maybe it comes from being a second son.” His jaw twitched a little in response to something that Natasha couldn’t identify. “Or maybe it’s just Loki. But after – everything, I thought that it had gone. Burned away in the Void. And then he brought the Statesman back to Asgard. And now he’s made this. All of this. And – what he did today, on the battlefield and with the Avengers and just now, in the great hall. Do you know that we’ve never actually fought over the throne?”

The apparent non sequitur took Natasha by surprise. “I thought you had?”

Thor shook his head. “Our father was still alive, and then – Hela –” He sighed. “I wasn’t particularly looking forward to starting that fight now. These are Loki’s people now, this is his place. He made this.”

“I didn’t make it for me, brother,” Loki said quietly from behind them as the door opened, letting out warm light from the kitchen and a burst of muffled sound from the great hall beyond before he closed it again. “I made it for Asgard, for our people.”

Green gleamed at his fingertips for an instant before it jumped to the nearest of the braziers lining the colonnade, where it flared up briefly before turning to normal flame. Loki looked apologetically at Natasha and said, “I’m sorry. I thought you’d gone to bed.”

She covered a yawn with her hand; she could tell when to get out of the way. “I am going to bed. It’s been a long day, and I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

She leaned up to hug Thor again, pressing a kiss to his cheek, a little scratchy with his beard. Up close, the scarring around his eyepatch was shocking, the first real scar she had ever seen on an Asgardian. “It’ll be okay,” she told him as he hugged her back. “I promise. And you’ve got us.”

“I know,” Thor said, trying to smile and almost managing it. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Natasha hugged Loki too, which was pleasantly familiar, and kissed his cheek before she yawned again, which made Loki laugh. Thor looked like he had just walked into a parallel universe and wasn’t certain whether he was enjoying the experience or just stunned by it. She waved a brief “good night” to them and left them alone to talk; Natasha didn’t think they had gotten a chance to do so yet. All she wanted was the soft bed in the guest bedroom upstairs.

I wish I was on Asgard now
No matter why, no matter how
But here I’ll sit and cry and cry
As the years go by and by and by

The party was still going on when Natasha woke hours later, though from the sound of the music it had taken a melancholy turn. There was a little light filtering into the room from the open door before it shut again and everything went blissfully dark, though she could still hear the distant sound of alien music from below. She had a hand beneath her pillow for a knife before she realized what had disturbed her was Yelena flopping onto the bed beside her.

“Scoot over,” Yelena said, kicking her lightly in the calf.

Natasha rolled onto her back to give her some room. “Ugh,” she said, half-awake. “You’re lucky there’s no one else in here. Steve was a while ago.” She could vaguely remember him getting up to go back to the party; he didn’t need as much sleep as an unenhanced human, while after the fight and the celebration and enough alcohol to fell a horse Natasha had only woken enough to make space for him when he had come up for a catnap. Admittedly, if it had been anyone else she probably would have stabbed them, but she had shared a bed with Steve often enough that his arrival had barely registered.

Yelena’s breath was heavy with the honeyed mead and various fruit liquors the Asgardians had been drinking all night. “He seems like a gentleman, I’m sure he’d sleep on the floor.”

Natasha didn’t even bother trying to open her eyes, since she could tell both that it was still dark and that she was going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning. “We weren’t sleeping.”

“You – ” Yelena sat upright, dragging the blankets off Natasha. “Did you have sex in this bed?”

Natasha grabbed for the blankets, despite the fact that the temperature in the room was comfortably warm. “Don’t be ridiculous. We didn’t make it to the bed.” She was awake enough to grin at the horrified sound that Yelena made before she added, “I’m joking. We were sleeping.”

“Don’t do that to me, I think I lost a year off my life,” Yelena protested, but straightened the blankets out fussily and curled up alongside Natasha.

“Hey,” Natasha said, already drifting off again to the distant sound of Asgardian voices, but she found her sister’s hand first and squeezed it. “I’m glad you’re here.”

She was almost asleep again when Yelena said, “I get it now.”

“Mmm?”

“Why you do this. The Red Room – that was easy to understand, and obviously if there’s someone trying to kill you then you kill them first, if you can.”

“Thanks,” Natasha said sleepily. “I can usually remember that one.”

“Stop that!” Yelena said, elbowing her and making her wince. “I’m trying to be serious.”

“Okay, okay, I’m listening,” Natasha said, opening her eyes in an attempt to keep herself from dropping off, at least for a few minutes. A little light filtered into the room from the edges of the closed door and moonlight from the curtains covering the window – which was an actual window, with real glass (or whatever) in it, instead of the open windows the Asgardians used in some of their buildings. Even as slight as it was the light caught the wooden inlay of various carvings all around the rooms, making the lighter-colored wood seem to glow. “Also those were my bruises.”

“Sorry,” Yelena said, sounding sincere about it. She was quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts, and Natasha stared at the carving of a herd of galloping horses on the lintel and willed herself not to fall back asleep just yet.

“It was…nice,” Yelena said eventually.

“Being ankle-deep in alien blood was nice?” Natasha said. “You have got to get out more.”

“Not like that.” Yelena hesitated, then said, “We kind of saved the world today, didn’t we?”

“The universe,” Natasha said, and smiled a little to herself. “It is nice, isn’t it?”

She felt Yelena nod. “And being…part of something. I missed that.”

“Yeah,” Natasha said softly. “It’s nice.” She hesitated, then admitted, “I was tired of doing the spy thing, the shadow thing, even for SHIELD. I wasn’t actually supposed to be part of the Avengers Initiative originally.”

“No?” Yelena said curiously. “That’s not what all the news articles say.”

“Well, they leave out a lot. Fury brought me in because of Clint and – well, Loki, originally, back then. I think he was also curious about how Steve would react to a pretty face.”

Yelena snorted. “He seems like the kind of man who likes women who can beat him up, superpowers or not.”

Natasha decided not to dignify that with a response. “Anyway, when he and Tony figured out that Loki was headed for New York, Steve came to me because I was the only SHIELD agent he knew besides Fury and Hill.” And Coulson, but that was too much to explain just now. “So Clint and I went to New York with him.”

“I know, I’ve seen the footage,” Yelena said. “Fighting aliens.”

“Yeah, the first time.” Natasha tapped her fingers thoughtfully against the mattress before she went on. “It’s…different, when you’re just fighting, you know? When I was with the Red Room – or the KGB, SHIELD, any of the alphabet agencies – I was doing it in the dark, alone, for a lot of different reasons.”

“Yeah,” Yelena said quietly.

“When you’re doing it because you’re putting yourself between civilians and an enemy – between your world and an enemy – it’s different. And I liked that. I still like it. It felt…honest, in a way I didn’t know it could feel. After that I didn’t want to go back to doing the other thing again.”

“Yeah,” Yelena said again. “Yeah. Like that.” She shrugged a little. “I don’t think it bothers me as much as it did you, but…yeah. I liked it.” She tipped the side of her head against Natasha’s shoulder for an instant. “So you can call me the next time you fight aliens or killer robots or mutated rhinoceroses or something.”

Natasha grinned. “Yeah, okay.”

“Promise.”

“I promise,” Natasha said, turning her head to press her lips briefly to Yelena’s hair. “Now please let me go to sleep, I also traveled through time today.”

“Call me if you get to do that again too.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Natasha said, and shut her eyes. Down below, the Asgardians were still singing.

And here I am and here I’ll stay
For Asgard’s lost and gone away
Yet Iðavoll is great and grand
So here I stay and here I’ll stand

When she woke again the next time, it was probably actually morning, maybe even closer to noon. The room was full of people – Yelena asleep on one side of Natasha, Wanda curled up on the other, Sam and Steve and Bucky with a couple of blankets and pillows on the floor. Natasha rubbed at her scratchy eyes and climbed gingerly out of the crowded bed, unable to help her grin as Yelena immediately rolled into her vacated spot. Bucky opened an eye as she edged past the tangle of men on the floor; Steve was sacked out with his head on Bucky’s shoulder, and Sam was in a tight knot that reminded her of nothing so much as a bird with its head under its wing.

“Just me,” Natasha mouthed at Bucky, who nodded and dropped off again immediately.

She was already wearing the borrowed shirt she had worn to sleep in, but took a minute to get her bra on, as well as a pair of pants and soft-soled Asgardian boots. They would go back to New York today or tomorrow to dig out what remained of the compound, but until then it was borrowed clothes for most of them – Natasha knew that she and Steve, at least, had a couple of drop points with stashed clothes in Europe and the Americas, if push came to shove.

She made her way out of the crowded room and to the hallway beyond, warmly-lit with an open window at either end and bright with carved and polished wood – the Asgardians seemed to decorate everything. In winter the windows were covered with some kind of force field to keep out the cold, but just now they let in the cool morning air, damp and salty with the sea beyond the cliffs.

There were only three rooms and a bathroom on this level of Iðavoll, with one higher level above it that hadn’t been used for anything the last time she was here. She passed the other bedroom on her way to the bathroom; the open door revealed Thor, Sif, the Valkyrie, and Bruce all sleeping heavily on either the floor or the big bed. The Valkyrie had her own rooms in one of the lower levels of Iðavoll, but presumably had either given them over to some of the unsnapped refugees or just couldn’t be bothered to go there once she was up here.

Natasha stopped in the compact bathroom to use the facilities and splash water on her face. There was a shower in here, or at least something that resembled a shower, though apparently Asgardians didn’t go in for water pressure and from experience it felt like standing in pouring rain, just hot. There was a private bathhouse downstairs at the back of the building, in what Natasha thought of as a Japanese style though it had a couple of differences, and a bigger public bathhouse elsewhere in the settlement that had a series of soaking pools of different temperatures, along with a steam room. A long soak before the feast last night had gone a way towards soothing her various aches and pains, though she had fallen asleep and had to be woken up by a bemused Wanda and Yelena before she drowned.

She felt marginally more alive when she stepped out of the bathroom, finger-combing her hair and pulling it back into a braid as she put her head into the remaining room on this floor. It was Loki’s study and looked comfortable and lived in, the walls covered by bookshelves and a couple of weapons racks, with a balcony that looked out over the sea. He wasn’t in it, but the doors to the balcony were open and Natasha wandered into the room, listening for a moment before she stepped out onto the balcony. It took her only a few moments to pull herself up with the handholds built into the elaborate carvings along the walls, until she was standing on the narrow widow’s walk Loki had built around the peaked roof of the building, shivering in the sudden coolness of the wind off the Skagerrak.

Loki raised an eyebrow at her, bemused by her sudden appearance. He was barefoot and in shirtsleeves, the wind whipping his long hair out of its braids. “Hungover?” he asked.

Natasha shaded her eyes with one hand. “A little.”

He crooked a green-glowing finger at her, and when Natasha joined him, tapped her forehead lightly with it. She sighed in relief as warmth spread through her, chasing away the lingering aches and pains and the pounding in her head. “Thanks.”

“Of course.”

They stood in silence for a few minutes, looking out over the ocean to one side of them, the settlement to the other. Most of New Asgard still seemed to be recovering from the previous night’s bacchanal, but there were people moving around in the streets and a few children playing. Natasha looked up at Loki in time to see him smile.

“You did it,” she told him. “You saved them.”

“We did it,” he corrected. “I played only a very small part, and it was, after all, your mad notion.”

“Not mine,” Natasha said. “Not personally.”

“You humans –” he hesitated for a moment, searching for words, then finally said, “You’re very optimistic. You fight to win, always, even when it means undoing the web of wyrd. We don’t often think like that in Asgard – Thor did. Does. But he spent a lot of time here. We believe –” He frowned, like he had to think of a way to translate from Asgardian into English – not a problem he usually had because of the Allspeak, but some concepts just didn’t transfer well from one culture to another. Natasha knew that in her bones, though it wasn’t as much of a problem now as it had been when she had been younger.

She waited patiently, enjoying the fresh scent of the ocean and the wind in her face. She had felt something like a mushroom these last five years, rooted in one place; it had its benefits, but it wasn’t something she was always sure she enjoyed. It was nice to be somewhere different.

“I don’t know that there’s a way to say it that a mortal would understand,” he said finally. “Once the pattern is set, the loom strung, the foundations laid – so it goes. We fight, always, because despair is its own curse and we believe in meeting our fate with our eyes open, unflinching, but we believe that once a thing is done, it cannot be undone. A path, once walked, can never be untrodden again. We try, sometimes, but such stories never end favorably. Thus – Ragnarok. We ride out to meet our end, but we know that we will meet it.”

“Even the gods must die,” Natasha said, remembering what he had said to the previous day.

“Yes.” He turned his face up into the wind. “Even stars burn out. But you don’t think like that and because of you, I have my people, and my vengeance, and my brother, all of which I thought far beyond my reach in this life. It is a debt I can never repay.”

“No debt,” Natasha said. “It was – it was what we had to do.” She smiled wryly. “It’s in our nature.”

Loki looked down at her and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I saw that in you a thousand years ago, when Thor and I first came to this realm – to these shores, to walk among the peoples who lived here, the Northmen who sailed their dragon-ships through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat and across the North Sea. And eleven years ago, when the Mad Titan sent me here for the Tesseract. I’m grateful for it now, even if I wasn’t then.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “I truly believed Thor was dead.”

“I know,” Natasha said, and when he arched an eyebrow, she added, “I was in Wakanda, remember? I saw you go after Thanos there.”

Screaming, battle-mad, reckless to the point of suicidal, barely aware of the rest of them – all down, at that point, and Thanos with all six Infinity Stones in the gauntlet. He had almost managed it, even after Thanos had ripped Mistilteinn from his hands. Almost. Natasha still didn’t think he had really ever registered that the Snap had happened until the remaining Asgardians had limped to Earth.

Loki looked down at his hands and turned them palm-up, flexing his fingers. “I saw him die. I heard his neck break. I held his body. I was so sure.” He looked out to sea again, but whatever he saw, it wasn’t the Skagerrak.

“We came into this world together,” he said softly, “by blood or not. All our lives we have been in each other’s orbit, like binary stars. We shared everything, almost to the end, when our father finally decided to set us apart, and that broke us. But even when I was half a universe away from him – when I had nothing, not even my name – when I hated him and our parents and Asgard and all the Nine – I knew that we still shared this world, and it was a comfort as much as a curse, no matter how much of it had been a lie. And then –” He flexed his hands again. “And then.”

Natasha put a hand on his arm, and felt corded muscle beneath the thin fabric of his silk shirt.

He turned and smiled at her. “I have,” he added wryly, “somewhat more sympathy for Thor now – after he left me on Svartalfheim ten years ago, I mean. And before, after the bridge. I was so certain.”

“He was snapped,” Natasha said. She and Thor hadn’t talked about that, but it was the only thing that could have happened.

Loki nodded. “He told me that he never regained consciousness between –” He touched his fingers to his throat, “– and then waking up on the rescue ship yesterday. We do that if we’re very badly injured – a healing coma, it’s called sometimes. He never knew. Maybe that’s for the best. It’s – it’s terrible, being in space alone, with no veil between you and the Void. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I certainly wouldn’t wish it on my brother.”

He tipped his head back into the strong, salt-smelling breeze, his eyes slanting closed before he looked around again. His gaze traveled over New Asgard, over the world he had built through stubbornness and pride and months of hard-fought argument and concessions with the various governments of Earth. Natasha had been present for most of it, she and Steve, because Earth had treated Loki like a rabid dog and he had borne it unflinchingly every minute of every hour of every day until he had gotten what he wanted, no matter how much of himself he had to sell to do it. The only concession he had never bargained with was his own freedom; his people needed a king and he was the one saddled with the job.

Natasha wasn’t certain that Thor could have done it. She was certain that Steve couldn’t, and less sure of herself. But Loki had done it, had made all of this from nothing, and had expected to lose it to his brother. He would have given it up, she thought – had been braced to do so.

His gaze slid towards her as if he had heard the thought. “I never wanted the throne,” he said. “Not really, not for its own sake. Our father dangled it before us all our lives, the one thing that would set us apart – at the time, you understand, we both thought – I didn’t know what I was, then. Thor was older by a handful of hours, but the law gave us equal claim to it, and Odin made certain we knew it.”

Loki turned his left hand palm-up, magic pooling above it before the green glitter solidified into a mass of elaborately figured gold – a throne, one which presumably no longer existed. He looked at it for a moment before he closed his fist on it. “I have been king of Asgard three times,” he said, “and the first two brought us nothing but ruin. This time…”

“It’s legal?” Natasha asked when he didn’t go on. “For Asgard, I mean.”

“Oh, yes. I looked it up once, centuries ago. The law allows more than one monarch to share the throne, if the Althing acclaims two heirs equally. It hasn’t been done in many tens of thousands of years, but it’s legal. I told my father that after I looked it up.” His mouth went tight. “We were twins. We shared everything. But he said we would never share that.” Loki turned his left hand over, inspecting the pale skin as if he expected to see something else.

Maybe he did. Natasha remembered most of the battle yesterday in bits and pieces, fragmented memory that she was glad not to be forced to hold onto – your mind protected you from things like that, though she knew from experience that she would probably wake up for years with one awful memory or another forcing its way to the surface. But she remembered blue spreading across Loki’s skin like spilled paint.

Loki closed his fist. “My father said a lot of things. Some of them were even true.” There was no bitterness in his voice, just weary resignation. “I was angry for a very long time – I will probably always be angry. But if there’s one thing I know now, it’s that there are far worse things in the universe than the things Odin of Asgard did for love.”

“That doesn’t change the way you feel,” Natasha said.

He shrugged. “After a time even my rage burns down to coals.”

Natasha moved to the edge of the widow’s walk, wary of the moisture-slick wood beneath her feet, and rested her hand on one of the carved animal heads at the end of the railing. She didn’t recognize the animal from this angle, but it could have just been highly stylized – a wolf, maybe, or a dragon, something with a long snout and a lot of teeth. Or something that had only lived on Asgard and had gone extinct when the planet was destroyed, which hurt to think about.

Loki followed her and let his hand trail over another animal head, his fingers moving lovingly over the deep lines of carving, gilded but already worn by five years of rain and wind and the salt-spray that Natasha could feel in her face despite their height. She could hear waves crashing against the cliff-face far below them.

Somewhere in the distance she heard a ship’s horn blowing, tinny over the long distance of the water and lost in the fog that still lay heavy on it, some fisherman’s boat or cargo vessel making its way through the Skagerrak the way ships had done since they were the dragon-ships whose captains had made sacrifice to Loki and Thor and their kin. You could forget, sometimes, that New Asgard wasn’t as isolated as both Earth and the Asgardians liked to pretend it was.

Below them, the settlement was coming to life. Smoke rose in steady plumes from the chimneys of the bathhouse down the street from Iðavoll; somewhere a rooster crowed and a dog barked in response; there was a burble of laughter whose source Natasha couldn’t identify. Korg staggered out of a nearby building, raising a hand in greeting to one of the Asgardian women who had just opened her front door, and was neatly sick in the gutter, to the woman’s visible disgust. Children ran shouting down the street with a pack of long-legged hounds and a couple of fluffy cats, all of them chasing a silvery ball which zipped ahead of them and occasionally split off into a dozen smaller shapes before reforming into one again. Music rose suddenly from the courtyard outside the great hall, a burst of unfamiliar song on some kind of stringed instrument and a woman’s voice rising with it – the Valkyrie’s, Natasha realized with bemused delight; she wouldn’t have expected it from her.

Loki listened for a moment, then tipped his head back and joined the song, Nordic-sounding syllables carrying clearly. “Falla forsar, flýgr örn yfir; sá er á fjalli fiska veiðir.”

There was a curse from down below and the music stilled, shocked by the sudden accompaniment. Loki laughed, but it was good-humored.

“It’s not over,” Natasha said, after the music had begun again; some old Asgardian song whose words the Allspeak couldn’t translate for her. “It’s just starting.”

“Yes,” Loki said. “Here, elsewhere on Earth, throughout the Nine, further still across all the cosmos.” He didn’t seem bothered by the notion. “With the culling undone, there will be chaos. Some will take it as an opportunity to wreak havoc. And we need to discover who was released from Niflheim. That will likely be trouble as well.”

Natasha grinned. “That’s what we’re here for,” she said. She turned her face towards the sea. “There was an idea,” she said, “to bring together a group of remarkable people.”

Loki snorted, but by now he knew the quote. “A team to fight the battles that no one else could.”

Natasha tapped her knuckles against his. “It’s gonna be fun.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“Loki!” Thor’s voice was a bellow with the rumble of thunder behind it. They both peered over the railing to see him on the balcony below looking up at them, with a yawning Steve beside him. He winked at Natasha when he saw her beside Loki.

“Trying to wake the dead, brother?” Loki called down.

Thor grinned up at him. “I think that’s your job. Get down here and stop lurking like Viðopnir on the crown of the World Tree. There’s work to be done.”

Loki grinned back. “So there is,” he said. “So there is.” He turned to smile at Natasha. “Should be fun.”