He stands like a god. The gauntlet is in tatters, only one stone firing at a time. All the vehemence he wields it with negates that.
Steve Rogers pesters him, a sleek dark hound against a raging boar. Stark swoops in like a sparrowhawk and blinds him with blue bursts of light. All about the mad Titan the team nips and bites. He ravages them in return.
Romanoff lays broken and breathing, Scott Lang trying his best to stabilize her, his suit no longer functioning. War Machine is down, a pile of twisted red-hot metal, the chest of the mech blasted open, Rhodes spilled out of it long ago. Rocket and Nebula trapped in some strange translucent sphere, the latter raving in a strange mechanical cant. Captain Marvel...she, the strongest, unable to move staring in space at some inner demon. Clint fires his last arrow, desperate enough now to pull the knives.
Thanos' army encircles them, his own wild wolves bringing them to bay. Hulk, Bruce Banner, a new made creature, can only hold them for so long. This wild hunt is at an end.
“Thor, strike NOW.” Tony's voice crackles in the static. He is struck before he can finish. Thanos looms over him, Captain America held by the arm like a doll. He is done playing games with them.
The largest of storms he summons, a hurricane like none before. The soldiers are innumerable. They pile on over the dead like ants. Thanos' baleful gaze, so pure in rage that it gives Thor pause, surveys them.
“You're fate is sealed, Asgardian,” his voice is a storm itself. He rests a claiming foot on Tony, the armor cracks “You should have let things be.”
The Norns weave everyone's fate. He knows what he must do.
As dark as the storm clouds he replies “You shouldn't have killed my brother.”
For one last time he brings the hammer down...
...For a moment he feels pain. But only for a moment.
***
Yggdrasil has many roots and many branches. It is the tree of life itself, and because of this it suffers much with us in all our paths.
The multitude of of its limbs spread in all directions. Some lead to death and some to life. Some make kings into thralls, some thralls into kings. Sometimes it gives second chances. Sometimes there are those who remember who they once were. Sometimes it lets them see through the lie of reality and look beyond.
It does this out of love.
***
A man sits by a fire pit. He wears layered jackets, his body trembling even still, a glance into his his inner thoughts. The sky is filled with embers that flourish into a royal blue night. The boy sits next to him, kicking his feet against the makeshift chair. A stump of an elm he watched the man fell. The man looked after him, all alone here in the timberline. The man tells him a story, which might be a lie. It is an old one, maybe not even from our time.
The gates of Valhalla are gold, they say.
They are gilded with the histories of the glorious dead. Above them a golden eagle hovers. To their sides, white wolves. If you are too stupefied to claim your place among the warriors at once, you can see the knots of heroes and beasts intertwining in everlasting movement, portending the theme within. There in that hall you slay and eat and fuck and you never tire. To enter there is to feel the burden of your shoulders lifted, to feel a completeness of purpose as you could never find living. To fight among your kith and kin is to live and die and live, and to go on in the true sense of existence. It is to feel complete.
That is what they say of Valhalla.
What they say of Hel is another matter.
And Thor is at its gates.
“Hell is real? Why are you going, can you get back? How—how the hell do you get to hell!?” Bruce shot off quickly and gauged him with uncomprehending eyes. This man of science was accepting that his friend, a god, was purposefully trying to enter a realm he had never considered had any basis in reality. Thor held no such delusions that legends were just that.
“You have to die first, for one. I did that a long time ago.” But his grim humor fell flat.
He had a choice; die in battle against a Mad Titan, an honorable death in defense of all Nine Realms, a try at revenge in the name of the fallen...
The gates are icy black, chains gleaming in the miserable oil of unfinished deeds and rank with the scent of old blood. Of the thief, the rapist, the murderer, the abuser, the negligent.
...or to sneak into Hel's hall, like a burglar, and coerce back the fallen to fight one last battle. And after that...
He will enter over the walls, Nágrindr. They are pale weaved bone, snakes cranking through the narrow tunnels they make, winding strange patterns through the final boarder between life and death.
The guardian, a hell-hound keens at him, picking up his living scent. He is a whisp of black mist with the force of a nightmare. Thor stands resolute, meeting his eyes-like-tracers with equal pride: Garm, hel-wolf. He inspects him with his singular canid mind. He can scent his soul:
“Odinson. You seek passage through a tricksome way. I will drag you backwards through the gates of the dead, pride of Asgard.”
Garm growls, half-moon canines flash. He despises the scent of life. Thor sneers back in challenge. His smile little more than a barring of teeth.
He has forded Gjöll, the river of blades, escaping its guardian with the slickness of an eel, fought past the undead army forever locked in battle, their weapons cutting rime frost across his living flesh, moved through mists and darkness that had blinded for numberless days. He scrambled by, a king without a crown in name only, more fit a thrall, his destination scorned by those with any pride. What pride does he retain but those scars he earned in life. Frigga and Odin, Loki and Asgard.
He rises into the still air of Hel, poised like an icon in halation. He is a winter storm shattering the darkness, pitiless and laughing. Humor is a memory of his summer left behind.
Garm eats his might with a jolt. It tastes of bitter ozone. He lies, steaming, pale eyes saucers, the color of a crushed firefly. Thor walks over him, neither contemptuous nor boastful. He jumps the up the first length of the wall.
Garm howls, later, ever-undead. It is not a warning nor is it defeat. It is something he cannot untangle in his toneless wolfish heart.
It says: The worthy one has cast himself down into Hel. Heed his sacrifice.
***************
“You're gathering an army...a dead one.” Bruce walked with him in the monastery, where that cursed Tesseract was once held long ago in a wooden mock up of the World Tree. Little did the mortals know it had been built by alien hands. It held another secret.
“Yes,you can't kill what's already dead. I must walk the Helvegr, the road to Hel itself.”“But you said you'd have to die,” his friend could still not accept his choice. His brown eyes failing to hold back his worry.Thor stopped. “I very well may. Have hope, Bruce. Hel is a place you can always come back from.” But the words were of his own private hell, and did not believe in them himself.
The other man gazed up at him a fierceness that made Thor second guess. “You better.”
The hoards of the dead are divided into great halls. The worst of the worst are beyond his reach. He's only here for the mild offenders.
The grounds are black and gray ash, sparks smoldering with each step he takes. Innards crawl up the walls like vines, black and secret, the carrion crow in endless appetite. The sky is featureless and cold. He glows here, the unseen sun itself.
He enters the hall, a warrior's laxity to his limbs, a stance of one with nothing left to fear.
Music, dark, frenzied: drums, rattles, pitched flutes and the drone of a horn. It is a melodious and dark tone, repeating forever. It hooks him further in; the dead shuffle and dance past. They are mangled Asgardians who were lost to the off disease, those who made it to old age unfulfilled, past the oath-breakers, the thieves, the neglectful the cowards. Past these he walks; their eyes yellowed and their skin scared with pain and they follow in his wake like dragged things. His celebrant congregation clings to him. The halls are filled with a florid light an oily heatless flame that is ever present. The stones bear a familiar cut, grimed as they are in bile...
He stops, the center of their universe.
“I will take you, oath-breakers, I will empty the halls of Hel. I have need of you in the realm of the living.” His voice finds the middle between the high of the flute and the lowing horn.
They do not answer.
“Where is your queen, Hela? I will break your bonds to her. You will be forgiven.”
They are dead things. Numb with apathy, numb with their continued existence of an unconscious self. He's shaking. He's tired.
“Hela, I will speak with you!” He wheels around, an untethered star among the detritus of Asgard's failures.
The music of Hel roars in the silence.
He runs. He pushes past them, cold flesh burning his, ale spilled out of uncaring hands, cataracted eyes following him for lack of anything better. Their laughter as self-controlled as murder follows him. He runs to the great flames in the center of the hall.
Around the heatless hearth. Heimdall.
He cannot accept this, he cannot even mouth the words. His eyes are white, sightless, his hair shorn in shame.
Around him are dead of the ship. Women, children...everyone.
He thinks he knows the answer: Valhalla is specific in whom it takes. He hopes, on his on blood he hopes he is wrong...
“You are a destroyer, Odinson,” Heimdall stands, no decorum, no respect as he swaggers to his former lord, gaze turned forever inward, “Or did you not think Valhalla was connected to Asgard in some way? The gates are sealed shut. Soon all that will be left is Helheim, and how it shall over flow.” He laughs. He is mad.
Thor is filled with shock and fury. He cannot give into despair, he cannot, they need him...
He steps back. Heimdall melts into the crowd. They laugh at him, catching it like a wildfire.
His beating heart collapses around the holes in it. They are scarred, familiar shapes. He's been deceiving himself all this time. Lying more than the God of Lies. He is not strong, he is the lie. He is the hammer that felled Asgard, he is the serpent, the wolf.
He is the crime that cannot be forgiven. What does he have to offer them.
His cries are answered by a voice he'd never thought he'd hear again. Who knows where the Jotun's afterlife leads.
“You yell loud enough to wake the dead, brother.”
**************
“I don't think the dead are going to follow you willy nilly, no offense. I'm pretty sure there's guard demons or something preventing them from returning.”
“You're right. You have to offer something in return. I have a plan. It's what all the dead wish for but can't have. A second chance.”Bruce never looked so anxious, and that was saying something.“Forgiveness.”
Loki is real. Thor holds him close enough to feel the sinews of his muscle through the fabric, the cold breath of his dead state on his neck. He can feel every confused twitch of his body settling down and responding with an equal guarantee that he his as he is.
He cannot speak his name. He weeps into his shoulder, semi-melted tears frosting into his brother's hair.
“...Thor,” the trickster says “You thought I lied when I said the sun would shine on us again.”
Thor pulls away. Every emotion is there at once. It has no name for him to call it by.
“There's no sun...” he starts, stumbles, but Loki shakes his head. His eyes are no longer that deep emerald, but they have not faded with intent.
“I was always one for metaphors, you know that.”
Around him Asgard gathers, an axis on which they spin. The sun in their night.
*****************************
“You can offer all you want but I know how these things go,” and he did, the one man who was two, “There's a price, there always is Thor, it's not going to work out!”
Thor pulls Bruce close and hugs him. He warm and full of human emotion. The god takes what he can as a staple. It may be the last he ever feels. He has to deliver, for him, for them all. “When isn't there one?”
“You died on purpose. I was mad with grief” Thor scolds. Loki has told him so, the truth, and how Thor cried even more at it. His heart fluttered in relief, in fury, but his brother was here, shade or not. That mischievous smile played on his lips, swiftly marching over his look of solace. Loki walks with him down a dark passage way. The dead hold back, aware even in their dim state that they should not interfere. “How did you know?”
“Because you're so predictable.”
He walks with the pace of a prince, hands behind his back, footfalls thoughtfully placed. Thor walks besides him with the stride of a warrior, a certain grace in readiness. They walked like this once in Asgard, the halls filled with music and the perfume of a peaceful court, the sky a sea of impossible colors fitting in the windows like vignettes. That was an age ago, and it never will be again.
“What is your plan?” Thor looks to the other, pallid but alive with an inner flame that Hel could not quench. He cannot break the habit of asking the question, not even in these halls where the familiar of the living world is not even a dream.
“I must speak with our sister. I have plotted long for this, Thor. I had to wait for you.”
Never there wasn't a plot he had that somehow involved him. Excitement lances his heart at once. He thought that sensation dead, but here it is, in the last place you'd look for something lost.
But it was the first place he would have searched for Loki.
“I have an offer. She needs to know that,” he grabs hold of his brothers hands, and the other sets his thin features in an uninterpretable expression.
They are still, quiet, facing each other at an angle and not making eye contact.
Both needn't say 'I may never have come' and the other 'I know'. They only had to see it in the other's face.
*********************
“What if you don't come back?”
He stood on the precipice of this world and beyond. What could be so bad there that they feared. Why did they all run from the inevitable. Why did he fight for them.
It was love.“I can't die. Not yet.”
“You called for me, brothers, and on your knees no less.”
Thor's answer to his earlier summons are before him. They take the form of a gracile woman, green and black like an ill wasp. Her antlered crown takes up all the high ceiling, with blades that carry sin in their tines. Poised she studies him. She smiles the smile of a knife.
They kneel before Hela. Her appellation did not lie. Thor was banking on it.
“Then you know why I'm here. Hela, I came here offering forgiveness, for you even. I know you have power beyond my own. Restore the gates of Valhalla with it, I will pardon you in the eyes of all Asgard. You know my word is true. I don't have it in my heart to deceive you.” His golden noble voice is tarnished from his ravaging quest.
“The answer is no. It will always be no. There is nothing you can do.” Hela says, flat and cold. She speaks with the simple authority of crushing reality.
“I say...it will be yes,” He moves to stand, but Loki holds him, calm.
Hela laughs. It would be pleasant if not for the throat it channeled itself from.
“Now we are so much like siblings! Thor, you're alive,” her smile fades “I'm dead. You can't kill me any more, not even with the humiliation of submitting to you. Thanos has a secret desire to please me, in Helheim and beyond, whether he knows it or not. What do you have to offer besides 'forgiveness' when I've done nothing wrong, acting according to my nature? Your last eye? The first wasn't enough for you? You will never have my people. Leave.” She sits back, hip at an angle from her shoulder, elbow bent, wrist leading to fingers set against teeth.
Thor doesn't make a move to stand, take it with grace like a defeated opponent, leave. He does not run up the stairs and futility attempt to kill her just for the act of it. He has no fight left, no thoughts beyond this point. There's always a price, but if you can't even pay...
Loki stands for him. He would.
“I sue for mercy--”
“Mercy,” she snaps at Loki, pushing herself off the throne, tines twitching, “That word is forbidden here, it reeks of hope, and you abandoned that at the gates. All roads lead here, Thor, all because of you.” She starts to rant, derision engraved in every syllable “You stole what was mine, you naughty boy. What a sight, Odin's son, his golden child cut off from him, as I was. Your despicable sister. You're a hypocrite and a coward just like him. Look at me, I'm a queen after all, and I have you to thank. You have nothing and will return to the living with nothing! Go on, boy, send me more tributes.”
She retakes her throne, claimed like a kill. She blends with it, black and sharp, honed like her cutting remarks.
“Leave us,” says Loki. For a breath Thor didn't know who it was he spoke to. He stands swiftly, automatically, his reaction to the words a reflex with no malice. He goes to the outer halls, a bitter cast in his pace. His thoughts are without purpose. He does not pay attention to the transition in between the room and the hearth.
In their own thoughtful fashion they surround him, silent in accounting. A people to their king. Their company suits him well. The abandoned. The unforgivable. The destroyers.
The liars.
He looks them in their eyes. He finds nothing there, they cast back a reflection of his empty self.
************************
“...Yeah, but you could.”
“I'm a god,” he replies brazenly, in what's meant to cast out doubt “We always come back, in one form or another.”He ran his hand over the woodwork.“Yggdrasil is a great tree. The branches may shake, but the roots run deep.”
Time did not pass. It simply happened that Loki was there.
He pulls him off to a corner. He's sucking on his lower lip, once and always a bad sign and a tell between themselves.
“Good news and bad news, I can tell you don't want either,”
Thor's thoughts crystallize and refocus. Loki carries him, his sanity.
“Valhalla can be reopened, and you may redeem the dead. But,” he looks up at Thor, iris' murky and false with death.
“The price.”
“Thor, if you die, you won't be going to Valhalla,...” he starts, hands splayed out in placation.
Thor's eyes widen on their own accord.
“What did you do?” He's been through much, so much, and now even the the thin promise of the afterlife is shattered. It was dangled before him and snatched away. This isn't happening, yet it is. But why not. Why can't it get worse.
“I had to broker a deal. In exchange, Hela...” and the words drip with the slowness of tar “...asked for your immortal soul when you die.” Loki looks up at him from his fingers, which he had weaved into one another. He looks like a beaten dog.
Thor cursorily glances around the room. He's finding he's in a desperate humor. Of course. There was no other way. Of course it was this, a king's path only ends in tragedy, betrayal. It's poetry. It's fate. He asked to be damned in his heart long ago. He asked for this. Begged for it.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“No, no,” says Thor, animated, contrary. He's felt reason slipping since the one before him died (and thought it would return, perhaps, once they were reunited). “I got what I wanted. It will work. In exchange I only have to serve our truly evil sister for the rest of forever. I'm fine with this, really. I just have to never, ever die, Loki. Never” The last words are strained in a sneer. He's trying to sort this all out very carefully. He must save his rage. He has to hold on to his spark of sanity he entrusted to Loki, unaware he bears it. He cannot think beyond this moment.
Loki gets that look in his pale eyes which suggests he'll be bolting as soon as possible. It is not something Thor likes.
“No, Thor, I mean...You'll be mortal. That was the condition,” he said quickly, backing up “For Hela to open the gates! The other was your soul in her service for the army when you die--”
Thor intended to back him against the wall. It sweated with an opaque liquid. The rage wants out. Now.
“Believe me when I say that was the last possible option. I tried everything else—I spoke with her before you even passed the walls. I tried to exchange myself, why do you think I let him kill me!?” His eyes ask many things. Did I not do right by you? Was my sacrifice not enough? Ever? Can you forgive me? His dead, pale eyes.
He stands his ground instead, inches from the stones, breath frosting the air between them.
He's grown.
And so has Thor.
Thor slaps a hand to his shoulder, destabilizing him. He jumps. The rage subsides. “Don't be. Don't be. You did what you had to. You can't help it, not even now. But it served a purpose. We're two liars, only one of us is honest that he is.” He squeezes his shoulder, a little too hard with a little too much emotion. He turns, leaving to collect his debt. He cannot stand to draw this out. But he cannot bear it to not look back. Sentiment can't burn in Hel, it turns out.
He has one foot on a step, half turned.
“I came here to save the living while offering redemption for the dead. I can't bring you back with me, can I?” his words carry a double edged sword, and it strikes his brother.
Loki does not have to shake his head. Thor inclines his, a sparing gesture of the residual fire in his eyes.
“I love them. It's a worthy sacrifice you chose for me. I made it for you many times, thinking that you would be something better. I made it out of the will that things would change because I was arrogant thinking I could alter fate. All this time, you were trying to tell me the truth. I am powerless, Loki. I always have been.”
The tears in Hel freeze. Private pain bared would be too much a comfort.
Loki speaks quietly. “I haven't. Even death hasn't changed me. I am a crime that cannot be forgiven, not even by you--”
Thor walks back to him, peace in every footfall.
“But this time you confessed.”
“Have I changed, truly?”
Thor stops before him, warm with love, with hope. Not even Hela can take that from him.
“I would know.”
Thor lies to himself, because the best lies are based on truth.
Loki is left in the corner. The warmth of their last embrace wicked off of him by the pitiless air. The music tries to seduce him back to the mindless dance which will soon cease once their living king steals away the participants. Hel will be emptied, but not forever. His plans will go well, he knows, because he's not a liar to himself: death is inevitable. But he will breath real, warm air once again. If it is a new Thor and a new Loki, he his content with that. Gods are creatures of metaphor and story, they can never really die. They aren't false like the Titan. But the Loki of now is left with a new sensation boiling in his mordant chest, and he can't make heads or tails of it. He feels genuine guilt for the first time in his life. Death. Both.
“For Asgard,” he whispers to Thor's retreating figure. “The sun will shine on us again.”
****************
The man finishes the story, no longer shivering. The boy rests his head against his arm. “Did he win?”
The man shrugs, running his hand over the boy's black hair.
“Depends on who you ask.”
The boy thinks he knows.
They watch the sun rise.