Chapter 5
Neither Loki nor Heimdall would speak to what had passed between them in that moment. Thor took it as a sign not to push, and to look with more gratitude on their ongoing civility. Even so, he put an end to the naming. "I'll do what I can," he said firmly, when Heimdall protested, "to encourage the bonds, and so forth. Let that be enough."
He renewed his attention to his people - the only downside was that his people, given the circumstances, were fine. No immediate needs to be met. No conflicts to be resolved. They were bored, yes, but they preferred Loki, for their minor wants, and Valkyrie, for stories of the old days. Thor was much in demand any time the power shorted out. Otherwise he was left to fill the majority of his day however he saw fit.
Valkyrie, though she still didn't want to spar with him, was more than happy to drink with him, and to drive him through workouts that left her with slightly hurried breath, and him sweat-drenched and gasping for air. Soon there wasn't an inch of the ship he hadn't climbed up or crawled through, or a movable object he hadn't lifted.
They would regularly see Bruce - voraciously reading, watching, and listening to everything he could pull from the Statesman's databases - or Hulk, who happily joined their exercises. Loki was rarely to be found unless he wished to be, and, having maintained his long-standing aversion to any physical activity which did not lead to immediate benefit, was actually never to be found when Thor went looking to recruit him.
Still, they would stumble across him in the strangest places. When taking advantage of the heat in the engine room to work up what Valkyrie, in a moment of supreme understatment, called "a good sweat," they disturbed the rest of a distinctive jewel-green snake curled on top of the warmest part of the engine. It hissed at them and disappeared under the machinery.
Increasingly, though, if they found him at all, they found him in silent communion with the stars. When that happened, no matter how loud they were, he would either ignore them, or only slowly turn his attention to them, as if waking from a sleep. One morning, as they climbed up the longest vertical access corridor in the ship, laden with weight, they came across him sitting cross-legged with his face almost against the narrow emergency window, staring with dreamy eyes, and muttering under his breath.
"Are we going to worry about that," Valkyrie said, frowning.
"Not today," Thor panted, and kept climbing.
*
Bruce and Hulk still weren't sparring, but nothing could have kept Bruce out of the room once he'd heard there was magic to be regularly observed and analyzed. "You've seen plenty of magic," Valkyrie had said, thinking back over the stories he and Thor liked tell about their misadventures on Midgard. "You must have."
"Yeah," he'd said, "but it's all been pointed at me! It's hard to collect good data when the data are trying to kill you."
That was a fair point, and it was pretty funny to watch him chase down the foxes and magpies that proliferated, meanly, when he would have had a much easier time observing something slower and human-sized.
Bizarrely, Bruce seemed to be enjoying himself. Having managed to catch one of the magpies, he held it up near his face, turning it this way and that, keeping his hands soft even as it pecked at his fingers. He threw a curious glance at Loki. "Can you feel it, when someone touches the copies?"
"No," Loki said, although she looked thoughtful after she said it, like maybe that was an idea worth exploring. Personally, Valkyrie could think of several useful applications for such a thing, several terrible ones, and at least three that overlapped.
Bruce put the magpie down. It hopped a few feet away, keeping a beady eye on him. "Can they be anything?"
Loki shrugged. "They can be anything that's me."
"Okay, okay," Bruce muttered, "anything that's you," making a note in his tablet. He turned and looked again at Loki, who raised her eyebrows at him. "And what are you?"
Loki laughed, full-throated. "Maybe you can tell me, once your analysis is complete. I'd love to know."
*
Bruce hadn't wanted to show Thor the visual files. That much was clear. His exploration of the Statesman's databases had been primarily for his own education, but also with an eye for anything useful for getting the Statesman safely to Earth.
"So, I don't really get everything that happened," he had said, fiddling with the controls on his console, "with Asgard, and your dad, and all that history. But it seems like you're trying to do things differently. And I figure that starts with transparency." He pointed Thor towards the relevant folders. "I just don't know enough to know what's useful. But just in case there's names, or places, or whatever, that could help... I just wanted to let you know they were there."
Thor had thanked him solemnly, and waited until he was in the privacy of his own room to begin a review. In truth, there wasn't anything helpful to be found. The videos were centuries old. Thor didn't recognize anyone in them, except for the Grandmaster.
So it was not any personal association with what he saw that brought Thor so low, which almost made it worse. It was an ocean of anonymous suffering. It was a nameless parade of misery and debasement, set to the music of the Grandmaster's narcissistic patter, spotlit by his cruel and wandering eye. How many souls had been brought to ruin over the millenia, as Asgard and Thor himself wheeled unheeding through their own dramas?
Thor felt the crushing weight of despair within his breast. What was the point of being a king, or of having one at all? To keep one's own home tidy, while filth proliferated outside the door? Why should Loki, or Valkyrie, or Heimdall, or Thor himself, be bound to such a doomed task? Was it purely that the alternative, to abandon their people to the whims of such vicious creatures as the Grandmaster, was worse?
Heart aching, Thor went down to where he knew Loki sat in the makeshift throne staring blindly out in the darkness, and rested his head upon his brother's knee, and wept.
*
He felt Loki coming back to him, by degrees, like a room brightening as the sun rose. Loki's hand, which had been dreamy and slow upon his shoulder, stilled, and then moved, to scratch lightly behind his ear. It tickled. Thor tossed his head, complaining, and Loki laughed. Then, perhaps feeling where Thor's tears had dried, he said, "Crying?"
"No," Thor said, resting his head again, and closing his eyes, "I'm done."
"All right." Loki did not press, but his touch became soothing again. After a little while, he said, "The citizens' council asked for space to start a garden."
Thor didn't know much about gardening, but he thought sunshine was a fairly critical component. "Will that work?"
"It won't be anything like what we're used to, but yes. I think so." Loki yawned and stretched, dislodging Thor as he did so. "It's something to do, anyway."
Thor stood, stretching his own hands high toward the ceiling. Sorrow still swirled in the back of his mind, but he could do something, at least, about the feeling of helplessness. So: a garden. Something living. Something beautiful. Something to care for, at the heart of things. It was a start.