Thor/Not Even a Good Lie
*
Sometimes, when Thor is on Asgard, he thinks that he won’t return to Earth. That getting caught up in the snarl of lives without being able to do anything about it is engulfing and worrisome and needlessly painful. The only way it all ends is with everyone he cares about burning themselves up in their haste.
But in the end, he goes back. Thor always goes back.
*
“Hold him! Jesus! I said hold him!”
“I am!” Tony snarls back before adding, in a poor attempt at lightheartedness, “And stop calling me ‘Jesus’.”
It had worried Thor how quiet Barton was upon waking, how still. The sightless staring and complete passivity as Bruce positioned him this way and that under the portable x-ray, the utter non-reaction as splints were applied, stitches sewn. That troubled Thor greatly, and he could tell it bothered the others too, so they’d all been pretty relieved when the archer suddenly sprang to life when Bruce announced that he wanted to run an MRI.
The relief was very short lived.
Now Clint’s nothing but kicking feet and clawed fingers, and he'd be inflicting some pretty hideous damage if the four other Avengers weren’t practically sitting on top of him.
“Watch it!” Bruce warns sharply as a knee misses connecting with Steve’s jaw by centimeters.
The captain firms his grip and maybe Clint’s reactive cry of pain is legitimate, but it’s more likely just another weapon in his escape arsenal, a calculated appeal to human empathy. And it works, Steve easing his hold immediately, afraid of hurting him further, and Barton capitalizes on the opening by throwing himself off the bed, bringing Tony and Bruce crashing down with him.
Then they’re all on the floor, and for one terrible moment there are too many arms and legs and dangerous people grappling in close proximity. Clint rolls under the bed to wedge himself up back against the wall while Steve winds his arms through Bruce’s, pulling him back and away from the tangle of men. Perhaps he even intends to drag Bruce all the way to the hallway, but JARVIS closes and locks the door, probably at the word of Tony, who’s blinking away a blow he took to the head and eyeing the situation sharply, trying to figure out the most pressing problem to solve. Thor remains on the floor, crossing his legs and settling in to sit sentry, though he isn’t quite sure if he’s preparing to catch Clint from scrambling out from under the bed or preventing the others from crashing in to retrieve him.
He ducks his head down to peer at Clint, who’s frantically fumbling to remove the splint from his arm, and the way the archer is completely thwarted by simple velcro straps makes something twist painfully in Thor’s chest.
“It’s alright,” he soothes, even though it isn’t.
“Fuck you, Thor.” The way words come out as thick and strangled instead of venomous hurts too, even more than the continued, ineffectual pawing at the splint. Then Clint cringes against some sort of pain, his eyes rolling up sickly, and groans, “I’m sorry. Just. Don’t. Okay? Don’t let them.”
“No,” Thor promises and moves closer, trying to fill Clint’s sightlines, to narrow down the world to the two of them, to get the archer to focus on him instead of whatever he’s frightened of, or whatever pain he’s in. “I won’t allow it.”
“It went wrong.” Clint glances on Thor briefly, then mournfully down at his own bare feet. “It was a bad shot and now my boots have brains on them.”
It’s either nonsensical or a reference to the mission or procedure, but it really doesn’t matter—only that Thor responds in some reassuring way. “That's over. Everything is better now.”
He hooks an arm under Clint’s knees, pulling carefully, sliding him out and lifting him back to the bed easily. The archer curls to his side, one arm circling around his head while the other sticks out at an odd angle, limited by the now crooked splint. Thor keeps one steadying hand on his back, ready to spring back into restraint if needed, but the fight has seemingly evaporated from Clint as quickly as it had arrived.
Not so for Bruce, who pulls away from Steve and immediately resumes declaring, “He needs an MRI”, despite this being the idea that caused all the commotion in the first place.
“No.”
Bruce makes an irritated sound, throwing Tony and Steve an eyeroll and incredulous Would you get a load of this guy expression. “Yes. He needs it!”
“He doesn’t.” Thor positions himself in front of the bed. He couldn't protect his friends before, when they were hurt and needed him, but he’s here now and can do this.
“As if you would know the first thing about—”
“Let’s hold off,” Steve suggests, striving for calm in the face of Bruce’s rising agitation. “It doesn't have to be done this very second, does it? Give everyone a chance to settle down and then—”
“He could have an aneurysm in there,” Bruce insists. “He could have damage. There’s no way to know exactly what they’ve done without—”
“No,” Thor says again, louder this time. He has only the vaguest idea of what an MRI is—something to do with brains—but he knows the most important thing perfectly well: “Clint doesn’t want it.”
“Yeah, well, he doesn’t know what’s in his own best interest right now,” Tony counters, jutting his chin toward the huddled figure on the bed. “I mean, look at him.”
“He said no.”
“Maybe they’re right.” And just like that Steve is already doubtful, because humans are so changeable, so unsure, allowing themselves to be convinced to see the world in too many shades of grey. “Maybe he does need our help to decide what’s—”
“He doesn’t want it,” Thor insists again, implacable.
“It doesn’t matter what he wants!” Bruce all but screams, his mouth clamping shut on the last word with an audible snap. Steve and Tony look away uncomfortably, and Thor doesn’t even need to say it, that such an idea had been the entire problem in the first place.
And because Bruce knows that perfectly well he looks sickly ashamed, but pushes past the others nonetheless, hellbent on this course of action. He grabs at Clint while Thor immediately rises to intercept, the proximity and roiling aggression throws everything immediately back into chaos. Clint’s reflexive hissed curse of “Cocksucker!”—which appears to be directed at everybody—transforms Steve’s chiding “Now, Bruce—” into a shocked “Clint Barton!” while Tony just starts laughing in gleeful exasperation, rubbing at his face.
Once Bruce is safely wrestled back to the other side of the room, Thor resumes his place near the bed, promising, “You are under my protection.” He tries to stroke Clint’s back, receiving an uncoordinated elbow to his side in return. It’s a glancing blow that doesn’t hurt at all, but the message is pretty clear. Even so, Thor keeps patting at him, unable to stop himself, needing to do something .
"Off. Get the fuck off. ” But Clint’s losing steam again, gripping his forehead so tightly that his fingers are bone white, moving them only far apart enough to glare balefully at Thor.
“You are under my protection” Thor says again, because maybe Clint will be comforted if he says it often enough.
“I said get the fuck off me,” Clint repeats, but quieter, and this time Thor does.
*
“You should have been there,” Tony insists. “It was all so ridiculous that I can’t even...you wouldn’t believe ...I mean—” He flaps a flustered hand toward the doorway where a terse meeting had ended hours ago. “Anyway, you should’ve been there.”
He’s rifling around in the kitchen, ostensibly attempting to make dinner, but Thor has seen this routine play out countless times—it will be mere minutes before Tony surrenders to a complete lack of usable ingredients and decides to order food instead. Why he always insists on going through the farce of searching first is anyone’s guess.
“I did not wish to be there.”
“How nice for you, that you get to decide that. We had to march our happy asses in there and listen to Fury rant, but you’ve got some sweet leverage that the rest of us don’t. The looming threat of interdimensional war makes even Nick Fury pucker up and fly straight.”
Thor shoots him a withering look, as if the very idea is beneath him, as though he isn’t keenly aware of the SHIELD Director’s careful diplomacy in their every conversation. Thor doesn’t regret skipping the meeting, wholly uninterested in hearing Fury’s further explanations and justifications of the terrible thing he’d done. There was nothing to be accomplished by it, only shouting and argument, and on the whole Thor finds the process of human quarreling wearily circular—points raised and settled only to immediately rise again, nobody ever seeming to realize that they’re just laboriously talking themselves into the loudest opinion.
“You ever consider declaring Earth unfit to manage itself?” Tony points at Thor with a can opener. “Saying that we’re unfit to act in our own best interests? That we’re in need of someone to come sort our shit out?” He scowls at the tool in his hand and throws it back into a drawer. “Because you wouldn’t be wrong.”
“It would take too strong a force to quell the impulse for self-destruction,” Thor points out. “Look at what you do to one another.”
“Yeah, humanity is off the chain,” Tony agrees, but there’s something unreadable in his expression as he opens and closes a few more cabinets. “We’re the most miserable species on the planet and it’s time to take us in hand, Thor. Step in and tell us how to...ah, screw this, there’s nothing here; I’m just gonna order in. You want anything?”
“No,” Thor says, but instead of telling JARVIS to call for food, Tony wheels around, suddenly furious.
“The flu. The flu. That’s what SHIELD tells people afterward, can you believe that? That they had the flu. That’s what Fury wanted today, why he really called that meeting—he wants us to tell them that, too. To be part of all this. And it isn’t even...it's...it’s not even a good lie!”
“They’ll know,” Thor agrees, because that’s inevitable—the agents are eerily perceptive and almost impossible to deceive.
Tony nods aggressively. “Of course they will. They’ll figure out that we’re lying, that SHIELD’s lying, and then they’ll be pissed. They’ll feel betrayed and this whole thing will turn into some big emotional dust-up, and you know what pisses me off the most? That they chose this. They signed that goddamned paper and gave their permission to be mindfucked . Now we’re all being forced to participate in the aftermath, and we aren’t allowed to be mad at them, because they won’t remember doing it. Instead they look pathetic, they look like hammered shit, and the whole thing is actually their own fucking fault!”
And there it is, poorly expressed perhaps, but the same thought that’s been gnawing in the back of Thor’s own mind all this time, as ceaseless as a human argument.
“They didn’t ask us for help,” Thor says, and Tony sighs loudly and looks away, deflating a little. “I don’t understand it. Why didn’t they try? They could have come to us; we would have protected them.”
This would have never happened if Thor had been called, because he is the strongest of any of them. And also because Fury is wary of him, and rightfully so—while Thor would never wage a war on this wonderful planet, he certainly isn’t beyond implying that he might, especially if it would have spared everyone this.
“Yeah. Well.” That seems to be the culmination of Tony’s argument, frustrated resignation in the face of something unanswerable. “I guess there’s not anything to do now but keep on keeping on.” He resumes digging through the empty cabinets, his shoulders held stiffly, and doesn’t turn around again.
*
Clint and Natasha had said nothing, for reasons that none of them will ever understand.
Thor knows a little about keeping quiet. He could tell his friends so very many things, but he doesn’t.
He’ll never tell anyone how it felt that morning at SHIELD, realizing that his friends had been hurt, realizing that it’d been done on purpose. Seeing his friends covered in wires and tubes, bathed in sterile, unpleasant lights that made even the healthy look sick. All of it so primitive and needlessly painful that Thor wanted nothing more in that moment than to tear it all down, to call down enough lightning to destroy the whole building, killing the innocent and guilty alike, because no such place should be allowed to stand.
And Thor will never, under any circumstances, recount the story of how he and JARVIS had tracked the fleeing Hulk afterward, searching for hundreds of miles before they were finally found. Both were unconscious, Banner laying in a shallow stream while Clint was sprawled facedown and bloody amongst the rocks, probably dropped there by the Hulk mid-transformation. Thor had carried them to a more peaceful place, out of the harsh midday sun, and used his cape to clean the both of them up. He took the truth and staged it into something better, something less painful for Bruce to awaken to. And someday, when Bruce can no longer resist and asks how they were found, Thor will tell him that it wasn’t so bad, that Clint had really been alright, that the Hulk had taken care of things the best that he could.
Nor does he tell Stark what he imagines is going on in the rooms where now no men are allowed, where even the eyes of JARVIS aren’t allowed. Pepper had arrived at Natasha’s apartment and kicked everyone out, and no one has seen Natasha since, not even a glimpse of her when delivering the supplies that Pepper occasionally requests.
Thor hands one box to Pepper, but the second is far heavier. Pepper allows him to set it down just inside the door before unceremoniously herding him out with her body, Thor allowing himself to be moved without protest. Pepper ignores Tony’s endless questions but gives him a brief, weary smile before slamming the door in both of their faces.
Tony swears at the closed door with admiration and irritation, and Thor could tell him things about women who heal and women who fight and how the action is often one and the same. But he doesn’t. Instead he says nothing, and they go back to disappoint Steve and Bruce, both so hopeful for an update on Natasha.
And finally, when Steve asks the next morning, Thor doesn’t tell him that Clint never slept, that instead he passed long hours panting and writhing and clutching his skull. Thor doesn’t recount his own helplessness in that face of that pain, how he longed to wrap his friend in his arms only to be repeatedly and aggressively rebuffed. The god of thunder was reduced to crooning “It will pass” over and over, as if saying it enough would make it so, as if it helped, as if the words were what ultimately brought comfort and sleep instead of Clint finally wearing himself so ragged that he lost consciousness.
Thor doesn’t tell Steve that. No one will ever know. Held only by Thor, that awful night will cease to exist.
“He was fine,” he says instead, and Steve looks so relieved that Thor knows he made the right decision.
JARVIS knows the truth, but he won’t speak it either, any more than he’ll ever correct the account of finding the Hulk. JARVIS is clear eyed in a way that none of them are, and, like Thor, could easily them all so many terrible, hurtful, and true things.
But he doesn’t.
*
Then Thor doesn’t have to lie at all, because Clint sleeps, really sleeps, and when he wakes again, the pain is gone.
“Why are you in my bedroom.”
The length of the sentence seems to wear the archer out, leaving not even enough energy to turn it into a question. It’s just a series of words strung together, just sounds.
“You are sick. I’m watching over you.” Thor adjusts the blankets to cover the worst of the bruising. Clint will notice it soon enough and start questioning—being sick doesn’t include injuries—and it’s kinder to buy him some peace for as long as possible.
And that’s the extent of their conversation before the others burst in, summoned by JARVIS, pushing past Thor filling up the room with bodies and thrumming, anxious energy. Steve readjusts the blanket fussily while Bruce hovers nervously, as if expecting Clint to look at him with sudden realization, to start pointing and accusing. Tony is clutching one of the dozens of cups of soup he’d ordered and keeps fiddling with the spoon as he glares at Clint in fuming worry, stirring and stirring and stirring.
“You look so much better!” Steve offers heartily at the same time Tony bites out “You ought to eat something”, but it’s Bruce’s “Are you hurting?” that rings through the clearest.
“Not really.” The statement is at odds with the way Clint looks—pale and listless, like he’s lost a dangerous amount of blood. His hair is sticking up in the back where it had pressed into the pillow, and Thor wants so badly smooth it down again. “My arm hurts,” Clint amends finally, but the words are remote, like they don’t really matter.
He doesn’t seem to notice Bruce’s pained expression, instead reaching for the spoon just as Tony, with a grudging solicitousness, attempts to stick it in his mouth. Both Bruce and Steve reach out instinctively and there’s a fumble of movement and hands, and the Styrofoam cup is upended in Barton’s lap to a layered chorus of dismayed groans. Clint doesn’t say anything, just blinks at a noodle stuck to his shirt. Thor picks it off carefully before taking his friend’s hand. It feels cold and too fragile inside his own.
“You had the flu.” Steve mops at Clint’s front with a blanket, pointedly ignoring Tony’s scowls of disapproval. “You and Nat were both terribly, terribly sick, but you’re better now, and—”
“Oh. Okay.”
“—pretty disoriented; you fell out of bed a few times,” Steve continues, as if helpless to stop, trying to weave the story into reality before anyone else can say otherwise. “We tried to catch you, but you hurt your—”
“Do you remember it?” Tony interrupts, drawing Clint’s eyes with his vehemence. “Do you remember what they did to you?”
“Who?”
“No one,” Steve answers quickly. “Nothing.”
Clint’s gaze moves again to his soup-covered clothes. To Thor’s hand holding his. To Tony’s angry face, to Steve and Bruce’s unhappy ones. And the blanket has shifted enough now that there’s no missing the black and purple bruising above the splint on his arm, bruising that could easily be something random or could also—if one knew to look for it—be a very large handprint.
“Okay,” Clint says finally. “Yeah. Okay.”
*
Thor thinks they probably aren’t caring for Barton as well as they should be.
Pepper, on the other hand, seems to have done a fine job.
“Over there,” she orders, pointing. The two women are bundled into Natasha’s bed, both in pajamas and working their way through pints of ice cream while Thor labors. “No, no, more to the left. Left! Left, Thor. No, your left!”
It started with Pepper wanting a big chair brought to the bedroom from the living room, then progressed to we also need the gray side table, followed by not that gray side table, the other gray side table, before finally culminating in Now bring the TV, too, it’s so boring in here. The whole thing teeters on the edge of being frustrating, especially now that the joke seems to be having him move the things he’s brought in, then moving them again, then moving them again.
But in the end Thor doesn’t care even if the women are poking fun at him, if he’s the butt of their shared joke. It’s too good to hear them laughing in the way that human women do when in pairs—teasing but not really, more enjoying one another’s company so much that they don’t care how they come across. It’s a delight to see Natasha awake and relatively clear-eyed, almost like her old self.
When they tire of the game, Pepper singsongs “Thank you, Thor!” and kisses his cheek in apology.
Natasha echoes “Thank you, Thor!” note for note, and when he smiles at her, she winks back.
*
He and Jane always speak at 7pm on Tuesday evening. It’s what she’s named a ‘standing date’ and Thor strives to honor it. He does this in spite of Steve’s constant accidental scheduling of team meetings at that time and the way Tony, in his odd way of jesting, unfailingly attempts to begin a long conversation every Tuesday at the precise moment that Thor excuses himself.
Thor sidesteps the latest attempt neatly, heading toward his apartment and ignoring Stark’s laughing “Wait, this is important!” and “Where’re you going? Thor! Thor!”, shutting the door to cut off the last “But I want to talk about rainbows and what’s on the other siiiiide!”
The conversations with Jane are largely repetitive, but there’s comfort in that. Thor will tell her that she looks beautiful, even if how she really looks is very tired, and she’ll teasingly chide him about sitting too close to the camera or accidentally covering up the microphone. He won’t tell her what has happened—not of that horrible day in the hospital and not of all the unhappy ones that followed. He won’t even attempt to spin the story of the flu, which Jane might respond to with an anecdote about someone she knows that was also sick, not understanding that their stories could never be comparable.
It’s better, in the end, to say nothing at all. To make Jane laugh and let her marvel over the heroic things instead of letting her catch a glimpse of the ugliness that lies under the veneer of his life on Earth, so often upsetting and confusing and needlessly fraught. Thor could ruin everything that Jane thinks she knows by telling her so many terrible and true things.
But he doesn’t.
“I love you,” he says instead, and Jane smiles and says, “Oh, I love you, too.”