Redshift

Jaqari’s was hardly the best establishment on Contraxia. Nestled in the shadow of the Sepulcherin Mountains, it was a dive which had few rules and even fewer patrons. Alcohol was one of many vices to be found on this planet, and Thor wasn’t picky about where he got a drink from. However, Jaqari’s had yet to throw him out and deny him reentry, so for that reason it was currently his preferred place on this icy helhole.

“Another.”

The bartender, a four-armed, blue-skinned Lascivian, poured a viscous, purple liquid into a short glass and slid it down the bar at him. Thor caught it without looking, picked it up, and effortlessly down the drink in one gulp.

There were few other patrons around tonight, but those who were there all gave him a wide berth. Even if he didn’t have Stormbreaker strapped to his back, Thor positively radiated a dark, sour aura. He folded his hands over one another, elbows resting on the bartop, and glowered at the bottles leaning on the back wall across from him.

“Another.”

This time the bartender stomped down the length of the bar and picked up the handful of glasses Thor had discarded. Using his multiple arms, he refilled one of the glasses while tossing the rest into a plastic bin. After setting down the drink in front of the Asgardian, he set the bin down in a grimy sink under the counter and began lazily scrubbing them with a dry sponge.

Thor downed this one just quickly as he had the others. The burn of the alcohol left a little trickle of warmth down his esophagus, but it wasn’t enough to warm him against the planet’s endless winter. There weren’t many types of drink left in the galaxy that could knock him off his feet. Earth’s selection was plentiful, and could get him sufficiently drunk if he imbibed a lot, but by and large they tasted like water. Sakaar’s stuff had been stronger, but there was no way he would go back there, even for that. This purple...whatever-it-was, it did the job.

“Another,” he called again, now a bit of slurring in his words.

However, when this glass was set down in front of him, it was immediately plucked from the bartop by a slender, red-gloved hand. He followed the hand to its owner, who had appeared suddenly at his left side.

“Thor,” Carol Danvers greeted neutrally, raising the glass toward him as if giving a toast.

He stared at her, dumbly, for a moment, then said, “You cut your hair.”

She shrugged one shoulder. “It was getting in the way.” A critical eye inspected his whole appearance—dirty clothes, Stormbreaker lashed to his back by a leather strap, and his own mane of golden blond hair which was back to its normal length. However, it needed a good wash. “You let yours grow.”

“I like mine this way.” He reached out for his drink, intending to take it from her, but Carol pulled it out of his reach. Then she knocked it back effortlessly and slipped onto the stool beside him.

“You know, considering how difficult it was to track you down, I expected you to be...somewhere more interesting,” she commented.

A dry, humorless chuckle escaped from his lips. He turned away from her, resuming his glaring at the wall. “What do you want?”

“I got a communication from Earth a few weeks ago.” She set down the glass, not looking away from him. He could feel her stare from the corner of his eyes. “I told Romanoff I would be out of contact for a while, so the fact that it reached me at all is surprising. I almost don’t want to know what favors she and Rocket had to call in to get it to me.”

Thor waved two fingers at the bartender, who shuffled over with another glass. “And how are things on Earth?” he asked dully.

“Good, as far as I can tell. Really good, actually. Your people are settling in nicely, in case you cared—”

Immediately Thor rounded on her, leaning in close, lip curled in a snarl.

Carol did not even blink or appear intimidated in the slightest. In fact, judging by the twitch of her lips, this reaction seemed to be her desired one. “What? You asked.”

“Do not—” He jabbed a finger in her face threateningly, swaying a little. “Do not question my concern for my people.”

Her eyes flicked back and forth across the bar around them. “You know that rings a little hollow when you’re halfway across the galaxy in a dump like this, right?”

For a moment, Thor seriously considered hitting her. It wouldn't be the first barfight he’d have started on Contraxia. But after a moment, all the fight drained out of him, and he slumped back in his seat. Guilt began to drip into his stomach. “I suppose. But at least they’re alive.”

When she frowned, he clarified, “Anyone who gets too close to me has died. Horribly. It’s safer if I stay away from what remains of Asgard.”

“Right,” Carol said, in a tone that clearly indicated she thought that was horseshit. “Why don’t you walk me through how you ended up here?”

He sighed, rubbing his eyes with one hand. Then, he picked up his glass. “I went looking for—for Thanos. I couldn’t find him. The end."

"Yeah, first you went to Titan," Carol said knowingly, with a nod. "Then Morag, Knowhere, Chandilar, Korbin, Tantus IV…"

"Followed by Kitson, Paramatar, and Contraxia," Thor finished for her. He looked up from his drink, his smile unfriendly. "Did you travel all this way just to make sure I couldn't drink in peace?"

"Actually, I'm here to bring you back."

He took a large swig from his glass, and laughed bitterly. "Then I wish you luck, Danvers."

She smirked, but did not rise to the bait. "Things have changed, Thor. I honestly didn't believe it at first, but we have a chance to fix what Thanos did five years ago. I've seen a lot, but this science is still way beyond me. Quantum stuff." She paused, tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Sometimes I think geniuses just like to put the word 'quantum' in front of any other word to make it sound cool."

Thor let out a noncommittal grunt.

“They’ve figured out how to travel through time, Thor. Without an Infinity Stone.”

That sobered him up—slightly—and made him turn his full attention on her for the first time since she’d entered the bar. “That is not a chance. It’s suicide.”

Carol shrugged. “I mean, yeah, there’s a risk, but they’ve—”

“No. Traveling through time is like traveling through realms,” Thor continued. He swayed a little in his seat, but managed to hold his posture straight. “Without a clear, well-defined path to follow, there can be no safety. It could rip a hole in reality. They could blink the Earth out of existence!”

With a roll of her eyes, Carol replied, “Okay, look, you’re not saying anything I haven’t already heard from Stark. But they’re doing this with or without you. And between you and me, they’ll have a better chance of pulling it off if you’re there.” She paused, then added in a lower voice, “You know, in all the time I’ve been out there in the universe, I’ve met a lot of people. They tell lots of stories about you. Not just people from Asgard or any of the other Nine Realms. The Thor that they knew, the Thor that I’ve heard so much about, he wouldn’t turn his back on a second chance. Not if it meant saving trillions of lives.”

Silence hung in the air between them. As the seconds ticked by, and Thor did not respond, Carol’s brow furrowed. She sighed and stood up, reaching into her pocket, and slapped a few dozen units onto the counter.

“This should cover your tab, plus one more. You want to grieve, fine. You want to feel sorry for yourself, go for it. I’m not going to pretend I understand what you’ve been through. But you weren’t the only one who failed that day, so what are you going to do if you’re the only one who doesn’t try to fix it?”

Then she turned on her heel and made for the door.

Thor scowled at the contents of his glass. There was no reflection to be found in the purple liquid, for which he was glad. He didn’t want to know what Carol had seen.

“Damn it.”

He cast the glass onto the counter with more force than necessary, causing it to topple and spill the drink. The bartender hurried over with a rag, yelling at him in an alien language, but Thor paid him no mind. He stood up and, after another brief hesitation, followed Carol out the door.

With Stormbreaker, returning to Earth, was a simple enough task. The power to open the Bifrost allowed Thor to channel himself and Carol across the galaxy in a heartbeat.

When he emerged from the pillar of light, and stepped onto solid ground, his mouth turned to ash.

The Wakandan plains looked almost the same as they had five years ago. The only difference was the lack of an encroaching alien army. The plains were quiet, deserted, save for a handful of what looked like civilians milling around a spot several yards ahead. The ground had been flattened and several stone slabs had been placed in a circle, all of them around the statue of a man and a woman—he wore a sleek, black suit with claws, and she had a pair of cannons on her forearms. 

A monument to the fallen. To the people he’d failed to save. It was hardly the first he’d seen in the past five years, but it still slipped a fresh knife between his ribs.

“Thor,” Carol said, stepping out of the Bifrost beside him. “Come on. Let’s go.”

She led him away from the plains, back toward the city of Birnin Zana. Under different circumstances, Thor would have been amazed by Wakanda—it was clearly the most advanced nation on Earth, so much that, in a way, it made him homesick for Asgard. The gleaming citadel reminded him of the palace he’d grown up in—though the aesthetics of Wakanda were entirely different from his home’s, the place radiated authority and unmatched supremacy. Except Thor had a feeling that, unlike Asgard, Wakanda had not achieved its prosperity through imperial conquest.

When they entered the citadel, and then the palace inside its walls, Thor expected to be stopped by the various guards posted around—fierce-looking women in red and silver armor. However, they did nothing.

“We’re expected,” Carol explained when he gave her a confused look.

She led him to an elevator, which they rode up in silence. When the doors opened, Carol stepped out first and faced him.

“I’ve got to go handle some stuff. You’ll find some of the others in the room beyond. You good here?”

He nodded. Evidently satisfied by this, Carol winked at him and strode off down an adjacent hallway. 

Thor took a deep breath and, exiting the elevator, pushed open the door ahead of him.

Whatever the room had once been, it was now clear of all obstacles, revealing a large amount of floor space. In the room’s center sat a large technological dais, in the shape of a hexagon. There were ramps extending up it from each side, and above hovered a series of dozens and dozens of glass lenses, curving in a convex shape across the entire platform. It appeared to be partially constructed of Wakandan tech, but the handiwork was decidedly different from the rest of the palace and strangely familiar...

As Thor stepped closer, a voice behind him said, “You’re drifting left.”

He glanced over his shoulder and stepped aside as none other than Tony Stark walked past, dragging a huge piece of rubber tubing over his shoulder. “One side there, Point Break,” he said with a sideways smirk. Then, as he approached the machine, he called out, “Ratchet, how’s it going?”

“It’s Rocket!” came a voice from underneath the platform. Thor had to crane his head, but he could make out a furry little shape hanging from a beam, fiddling with some electrical wiring. “Take it easy. You’re only a genius on Earth, pal.”

“Actually, I’ve been to space, so doesn’t that make me a genius in the rest of the universe as well?” Tony snarked back, dropping the tubing on the ground and dusting his hands off. 

“What is this?” Thor rumbled as he stopped a few feet from the machine.

“Uh, well, we don’t actually have a name for it yet,” Tony admitted, glancing at him and giving him a once-over. “Guess I owe Danvers five bucks.”

That stung a bit. “You bet that I would turn my back on you?”

“No, just that she’d have to at least punch you a few times first.” Tony seemed...remarkably at ease. He was a bit thinner, his hair several shades lighter, but if it weren’t for those things Thor would have considered him identical to the younger and more annoying version he’d met all those years ago.

“It doesn’t need a name,” Rocket snapped from his position out of sight. “It’s not a pet. It’s a giant shrink ray.”

Thor raised an eyebrow at Tony, who shrugged. “That’s an oversimplification, but he’s not actually wrong. We’ll give you the full scoop as soon as you shower and, uh, sleep off whatever’s on your breath. Cap’s one room over, he can show you where to go.”

Thor glanced down at himself—and privately admitted that a shower and a nap were probably overdue. “Very well.”

He turned to leave, only for Tony to grab his arm. “By the way, Thor? It’s good to see you again.”

He still wasn’t convinced that their plan wouldn’t doom everyone, but he had to admit that as he gave Tony a small smile and walked off, he felt little lighter than he had for the past five years.

Yet, after cleaning up a bit, Thor found himself too restless to sleep. Eventually, after several hours of politely exploring the palace and reacquainting with old friends, he found the one he’d been looking for most.

Bruce sat by a floor-to-ceiling window, going over data on a holographic touchpad in his hands. He was muttering to himself, brow slightly furrowed, and remained completely oblivious to Thor’s approach until he cleared his throat.

“Banner.”

Bruce jumped, immediately looking up and then scrambling to his feet. “Thor! It’s, uh...it’s good to see you.”

He smiled, but the air between them was stale and awkward. There were too many things Thor wanted to say.

“I...believe I owe you an apology.” He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling uncharacteristically sheepish.

Before he could continue, however, Bruce shook his head and stepped closer, waving away his words. “Stop, stop. You don’t owe me anything, Thor. You were in a rough spot. We all are. We still are. But you’re here now, and that’s all that matters.”

Thor blinked, taken aback.

“Come on,” Bruce said. He attempted to put an arm around Thor’s shoulder, but was too short and settled for giving him a pat on the back, gently steering him away. “Steve’s about to call a meeting. We should get going.”

The meeting, as it turned out, was in a common area under the palace, one floor above the science lab. As Thor and Bruce walked inside, they were joined by one of the guards—Okoye, he was pretty sure was her name. There was a large, circular sofa of black leather in the middle of the common room. Steve and Natasha were already there, pouring over what looked like handwritten notes scattered across a table in front of them.

“What are you doing?” he asked, causing the pair to look up.

“Going over strategy,” Natasha replied.

“Thanks for coming. I want to get us all on the same page,” Steve said, smiling slightly. “You’re not the only one with reservations.”

Thor hummed lowly. “Indeed.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later the others scattered around the palace began to converge on the sitting room. Thor recognized most of the people in attendance—everyone who had been present on the trip to the Garden five years ago, plus Tony. Clint, who now sported an undercut and a tattoo, had rejoined the team. Also present was a skinny little man Steve introduced as Scott.

“I think it’s time we break down our plan, here,” Steve began, as everyone took seats on the couch. It was just large enough to fit them all comfortably. “Some of you know more than others, but I’ll start from the beginning. About a month ago, Scott—” He gestured at the other man, who waved sheepishly. “—showed up on our doorstep. We thought he’d been a victim of Thanos, but it turns out he was trapped in another world. A quantum realm, it’s called.”

“Time doesn’t operate by the same laws as it does here,” Natasha continued, her eyes flicking over everyone’s faces. “Thanks to Tony, we’ve found a way to access this realm and carve a path through it. We can step through time. We think we can get the Stones and use them to bring everyone back.”

“Hang on.” Clint had his arms crossed, his posture tensed up. “If you’ve had this stuff for a month, why are we still here? Why haven’t we grabbed the Stones?”

Steve opened his mouth to reply, then seemed to consider it, and inclined his head to his left. “Tony?”

Tony leaned forward, elbows on his knees, threading his fingers together. “I should have made a recording of myself so I don’t have to keep saying it: time is highly sensitive and the science we’re dealing with is completely unknown and untested. There’s a thousand things we still don’t know, but what we do know is that right now no one outside this room and Queen Ramonda has any idea what we’re cooking up. As long as things stay that way, we have the time we need to make sure it’s all done right. There’s no reason to rush this. The Stones aren’t going anywhere.”

“Originally, I thought we could just pick a point in time and go collect them, one by one,” Steve said. “But it’s not as simple as that. Any changes we make to the past could destroy everything we’re trying to protect.”

Okoye’s nostrils flared. “Then what is the solution?”

“We gotta pick a point in time where the Stones won’t be missed. Where they can be removed from history without changing anything,” Tony explained, very seriously. “That means—”

“Thanos,” Thor finished for him, his voice deathly calm. “You’re talking about going after Thanos.”

Silence fell around the room, and when Tony didn’t correct Thor, all eyes turned to him.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” he protested, raising his hands in mock surrender. “Cap, you wanna explain your master plan?”

Now everyone turned to attention back to Steve, who exhaled loudly. He glanced down at his hands, then back up at them.

“There’s only one point in time where the Stones are all in the same place, and where they won’t be missed. That’s the moment Thanos obliterated them. When we found him, twenty-three days after he snapped his fingers, the Stones were already gone. But we know that he used them two days ago. Which means we have the exact date of their destruction.”

“Either way, the Stones end,” Tony clarified. “Whether they’re actually destroyed or we remove them from the timeline, there is no future for them beyond that day. Succeed or fail, everything else remains intact.”

“Except Thanos would know,” Nebula pointed out quietly. “We go back in time, we grab the Stones from him—assuming we don’t die in the process—but as long as he knows what we did, the entire timeline will still be at risk.”

“That, my lovely blue meanie, is why Thanos is never going to find out.”

Rocket was the first person to get Tony’s meaning. “So we’re supposed to steal the Infinity Stones from Thanos without him finding out, but also somehow convince him that he actually did destroy them?” When Tony nodded, he barked out a fake, derisive laugh. “I take what I said about you being a genius! You’re insane.”

“Again, not my plan.” Tony gestured back to Steve.

“Natasha, Bruce, Scott and I put our heads together and we think we’ve figured out a way to do it.” He reached forward and tapped the coffee table twice. A holographic image was projected straight from the center of the wood, depicting a familiar-looking savannah, as well as three figures Thor recognized instantly: Thanos, Vision, and Wanda.

“This is footage put together from the Hulkbuster and War Machine armors,” Steve explained. As he spoke, the video began. Wanda was pouring scarlet energy from her hands into Vision’s forehead. As Thanos approached from behind, she fired a separate torrent of power at him, slowing down his advance, until—

Vision exploded into a blast of yellow light, and when it faded, there was nothing left. He’d been completely atomized. There was no dialogue, for which Thor was selfishly grateful—he didn’t want to hear what had been said that day.

Thanos smacked aside Wanda, then reached out with the Infinity Gauntlet. A green mandala appeared around his wrist, and he turned his fist in a counter-clockwise motion. The Time Stone on his thumb glowed a bright green, and Vision was instantly reformed in a reverse playback of the explosion. Then, Thanos seized him by the throat and reached for his forehead—

The footage paused, and then the recording switched off.

Steve tapped the table again, and this time another image appeared—that of the Time Stone, surrounded by an aura of emerald energy.

“We don’t need all the Infinity Stones from Thanos. We just need one.”

Thor frowned. One Stone instead of six was hardly an improvement on their chances.

“Fortunately,” Tony cut in, before anyone could protest. “We’ve spent a lot of time around the Infinity Stones. Mostly the Space Stone, and then Mind Stone, but their readings are nearly identical.”

As he spoke, he reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked like a small ring box.

“I also happened to take several scans of the Time Stone before Strange gave it away. And with all that, I present to you...”

He opened the box, and held it out for everyone to see.

Nestled inside the little container was a green stone roughly the same size and shape of the Infinity Stones. It also radiated a green aura, although it was very slightly dimmer than the real thing.

“Stark.” Thor’s hand found Stormbreaker’s grip, and his fingers tightened around it. “What is that?”

Tony scoffed. “Just a little something I whipped up in the lab. You think it took me a month to build just a time machine? Please.”

“How did you do this?” Okoye asked. Clint reached out toward the stone, but Tony pulled it back and gave him a look.

“I went digging through a lot of my dad’s research. He studied the Space Stone for a long time, and next to S.H.I.E.L.D., he had the biggest collection of data on it. He even got Emmy Noether to take a look at it.” Evidently this was supposed to impress people, because when nobody reacted, Tony frowned. “She saved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity?”

“Tony,” Natasha warned.

“Right, right. So, the Stones operate in ways that we can’t quantify. But Noether’s theorem states that there is symmetry in all the Laws of Conservation. If I pick up a rock and drop it outside instead of inside, or tomorrow instead of today, it’s still going to fall to the ground. That’s what these Stones harness, at least partly, and it’s what I can replicate.”

Scott raised his hand, as if he were in a classroom. “And you used this to make...a fake Time Stone?”

“Yeah, along with a ton of tachyon particles, some vibranium, gamma radiation, a diamond core—”

Thor was unconvinced. The Time Stone was an incomprehensibly powerful artifact. He had seen Midgardian science do much in Tony’s hands, but replicating the power of an Infinity Stone was something that not even the greatest minds of Asgard could have been capable of. 

Evidently, Rocket had similar thoughts—his tail had begun to thrash agitatedly. “You expect to fool Thanos with a little glowing rock? The second he tries to use that he’s going to realize something’s up. And that’s assuming we even get the real one off his gauntlet.”

“This stone can mimic the Time Stone’s power for...maybe 60 seconds, max,” Tony said. “That’s enough time for Thanos to snap his fingers and trick him into thinking he blew it to hell with the rest of the Stones. When the coast is clear, we use the Time Stone to repair the other Stones, then get the hell out of dodge.”

“It’s not going to be easy,” Steve chimed in.

“Yeah, no kidding.”

“But we have the where and the when. We just need the how. That’s what everyone here is for.” He gestured to the assortment of people around him. “We need to do this right. We only have enough Pym Particles for one round trip.”

“Plus two test runs,” Scott added. “Which, I was thinking—we also need to test that this whole extraction theory actually works. Any ideas on that?”

“I’ll do it,” Clint volunteered.

Thor wasn’t quite sure why, but Tony, Natasha, Steve, and Rhodey all raised their eyebrows in surprise.

“I’m serious,” he continued, meeting their gazes defiantly. “Let’s do it.”

Bruce, Rhodey, Nebula, and Rocket all accompanied Clint. They didn’t protest when Thor tagged along. He wanted to see this time travel for himself.

“You’re still not convinced,” Bruce noted as they rode the elevator back to the palace’s above-ground floors.

Thor grunted. “Would you be, if you were me?”

“No, maybe not.”

As Nebula and Rocket pulled Clint aside to suit him up, the other three entered the large room with the time machine. Bruce hurried over to a series of holographic screens and began typing. There was a loud whirring sound as the machine hummed to life.

“Man, this Wakandan tech is something else,” Rhodey whistled, eyeing the machine. “Tony estimated it would have taken nearly three times as long to build this machine at the compound.”

“It would have gone even quicker if T’Challa’s sister were here,” Bruce commented. “But at least the queen allowed us to make use of her lab.”

The doors opened again, the other three. Clint had now been dressed up in a red and white nanotech suit, which reminded Thor of the Hulk’s bedroom back on Sakaar.

“Alright, Clint, you’re gonna feel a little discombobulated from the chronoshift, but that’s normal,” Bruce said. “You have a destination in mind? Somewhere familiar, like ho—”

“No.” There was the faintest crack in Clint’s voice, but his expression remained completely neutral. “No, I...I have someplace else in mind.”

Thor understood what he was feeling. If he had the opportunity to go back, to see his family...he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand it. He might not return.

Clint tapped at a screen on the forearm of his suit. As he did, a second screen appeared in front of Bruce, feeding him data. His eyebrows nearly disappeared into his hair.

“Are you sure?”

Clint held up a little triangular device—Thor wasn’t sure what it was. “We’ve got enough Pym Particles for another test run, right? One way in, one way out.”

“Yeah.”

“Then consider this two trial runs.” He walked up the ramp of the time machine, to the center. A helmet materialized around his head. “By the way, how quickly do you think you can get a medical team here?”

That wasn’t encouraging. Thor glanced at Rocket, who shrugged.

Bruce forced out a laugh. “Don’t worry, Clint, it’s completely safe. On three, two—”

“It’s not for me.”

“—one. Wait, what?”

Too late. There was an echoing boom as Clint’s entire form collapsed in on itself, shrinking at a high-speed rate until he had quite literally blinked out of existence, accompanied by a flash of light.

Approximately five seconds later, there was another burst as Clint returned. Thor threw up a hand to shield his eyes.

When he lowered it, his jaw dropped.

Another person had returned with Clint, wearing a quantum suit as well—evidently the one meant for a second trial. Clint was trying to support them, but the person was quite clearly dead weight.

“Help me!” he shouted, nearly dropping them.

Thor rushed over first, grabbing the newcomer up in his arms as easily as if they were a sack of feathers. Clint’s helmet retracted, and his nanotech suit disappeared into its housing unit. The stranger’s suit did the same, and Thor nearly dropped him.

In his arms, riddled with bullets, but somehow just barely alive, was Pietro Maximoff.