Chapter 3
Valkyrie had long since fallen asleep when she heard the door softly swish open again. Wincing at her sore joints after the few hours of lying on the floor, Valkyrie forced herself to sit up as heavy footsteps sounded at the entrance, closely followed by the noise of a heavy object being dragged. Peering through the darkness, Valkyrie managed to glimpse said object being dropped into a graceless heap on the floor.
Flinching as the door was crashed shut again, Valkyrie scrambled over to the crumpled Loki, who laid unmoving on the cold ground. His dark hair was splayed across his face, contrasting his pale lips and bloodless face. The only blooms of color were his wet eyelashes and two matching cuts, running from the edges of his eyebrows to his jaw and weeping crimson blood.
Valkyrie quickly checked the rest of his body, but besides his marked face and obvious unconsciousness, Loki seemed fine. She exhaled slightly and checked his pulse, which seemed normal. But he appeared all but dead, with nothing but the faint rise and fall of his chest to betray him.
“Is he alright?” A quiet voice behind Valkyrie made her jump. She turned to see a young woman sitting in the shadows. Valkyrie remembered seeing her on the ship at some point, but didn’t remember hearing her name.
“I think so,” Valkyrie replied, turning back to Loki. She shook him slightly, then added, “He won’t wake up, though.”
“May I see him?” The woman asked hesitantly. “I was… a somewhat amateur healer back on Asgard.” Her voice shook when she mentioned her old home, but she seemed confident, so Valkyrie stood back and let her look at the god of mischief.
“You’re right, he seems fine,” the woman told her. “I believe he has been put into an induced sleep. If I’m right, he’s probably enduring some sort of mental torture. Nightmares, probably. That sort of thing. The cuts on his face may have something to do with it. What they do, I don’t know.”
“So he’s being tortured as we speak?” Valkyrie asked, an odd feeling clutching at her chest. It was almost… almost pity. Maybe something else.
“Like I said, I can’t be sure,” the woman repeated. “It’s all speculation.”
“Thank you for your help,” Valkyrie said after a silence. “What’s your name?”
“Serlah, ma’am,” was the reply.
“Oh— there’s no need to call me that. Just call me Valkyrie. Everyone does,” Valkyrie told her, and yet— she remembered her name from long ago, before everyone simply called her “Valkyrie”. She remembered someone yelling it triumphantly, she remembered someone crying it in the night, and she remembered someone whispering it as the breath fell from their lips and the light faded from their eyes.
“Actually,” Valkyrie added abruptly, “call me Brunnhilde.” And just like that, she was Brunnhilde again.
=•=
Loki was dreaming.
He was dreaming of the end of the his world.
Not the end of the world. The end of his world.
Thor was dying, or dead, or— Loki didn’t know. The god of thunder was curled in a ball on the floor, blood streaming from too many wounds, his eye patch gone, his blood pale. Frigga was decapitated, her body sprawled on the floor and her head rolling to Loki’s feet. Odin was alive— but there was a chilling sneer on his face and a cold indifference in his as he spat “I don’t love you, Laufeyson. I never have.” Valkyrie (Why was Valkyrie here?) lay twitching on the blood-spatter ground, whimpering as pain gripped her body. In the background, somebody was yelling his name.
Loki was on his knees. The world spun around him. It never seemed to end. Every glimpse sent daggers shooting into his heart. Every word stung more than any wound could. “Stop,” he whispered, tears blurring his vision. “Please. Make it stop.”
“I could make it stop if you would just wake up, dammit!”
Loki’s eyes flew open. He was laying on the ground— no— on somebody’s lap. His mouth tasted like hell and his muscles groaned. His hair was tangled and his eyes complained every time he blinked, but he was alive. He hadn’t expected to be alive when he returned from Thanos’ chamber. He was… comfortable, more or less. Despite the dark images whirling in the back of his mind, he was okay for now.
Wait.
Valkyrie— lap? Lap— Loki was laying in Valkyrie’s lap.
He let out an odd noise somewhere between a yelp and a snarl and struggled to sit up. Valkyrie made an indignant noise and forced him down, only to be met with a growl and and a frown as Loki doubled his efforts. Gritting her teeth, Valkyrie abruptly stood up, and Loki fell gracelessly from her lap into a crumpled heap on the floor.
“I was just trying to be kind!” Valkyrie snapped. “A little thanks would go a long way, or at least a little gratitude!”
“Gratitude?” Loki scoffed as he massaged his jaw. “For what? Doting on me?”
“Yes!” Valkyrie flashed back. “I was making sure you were okay!”
“I was fine!” Loki hissed, and for a second, he could see Valkyrie laying in bloodied heap in the back of his mind. He fumbled for a moment, but quickly regained his composure. If Valkyrie noticed anything, she didn’t mention it.
“Great!” Valkyrie threw her hands up in exasperation. “I wonder why I even cared in the first place, Loki!”
“So do I, Valkyrie!”
Valkyrie glared at him for a moment, before turning away and mumbling something under her breath.
“What?”
“I said, my name is Brunnhilde,” she repeated, louder this time.
Loki gave her a weird look. “Brunnhilde?”
Valkyrie jutted her chin our defiantly. “Yeah. You really thought that back in the day, everyone just wandered around calling me ‘Valkyrie’ while there were hundreds of other valkyries?”
To be honest, Loki has never really considered it. He had never asked her name, actually— he knew her scrapper identification number and knew that Thor called her Valkyrie. He opened his mouth to respond, before finding he didn’t know how and closed it again. Valkyrie— or Brunnhilde (or something)— gave him one final baleful look before turning and storming away to attend to the refugees.
Loki watched her go. He wondered if he should try to help the Asgardians as she did. He tried to imagine himself in her place at the moment, kneeling next to a young woman and asking questions with genuine concern in her voice. He could have laughed. True, he had come a long way since his invasion of Earth, but that still didn’t mean he would be nominated for Best Person of the Year. He wouldn’t ever understand why people would care so much about complete strangers. Compassion, he guessed. Loki knew compassion. It was just… different to him. A concept. A stranger.
He wasn’t a bad person. At least, he wasn’t worse. But he wasn’t there yet. He wasn’t a good person. Privately, Loki wondered: would he ever be a good person?
The god of mischief laughed to himself, drawing alarmed looks from several refugees probably already questioning his sanity. Loki, a good person. What a strange idea.
=•=
“So, how exactly are we going to escape?” Brunnhilde asked after all the refugees were asleep.
Loki glanced up in confusion. “Escape?”
“Yeah. You know,” Brunnhilde rolled her eyes, “get out of here? Leave? Run away? Go somewhere that is anywhere but here?”
Loki gave a small chuckle, which annoyed Brunnhilde to no ends for little reason at all. “You don’t just ‘escape’ from Thanos, Val— Brunnhilde. He’s all-powerful—“
“Stop it!” Brunnhilde snapped. “No, he’s not! Nothing is all-powerful, not in my experience.”
“Thanos is,” Loki muttered.
Brunnhilde inhaled deeply, not allowing herself to succumb to the urge of smacking Loki until she knocked some sense into him. She searched her mind for some other subject besides smacking Loki.
“Tell me about Infinity Stones,” she commanded finally, sitting down next to him.
Loki gave her a look halfway between surprise and annoyance, then sighed and relented. “I don’t know everything about them. I know that there are six of them: Space, Reality, Time, Mind, Power, and Soul. They are… or were… entities of some sort. I’m not sure. They were powerful— the most powerful. Now, they’re scattered, but Thanos collecting them. His goal is to wield them in his Infinity Gauntlet.”
“And then what?” Brunnhilde prompted when he paused.
“Kill everyone, I suppose.” Loki shrugged. “He never told me his whole plan.”
“And why does he think we know where they are? Specifically the Space Stone?”
Loki was quiet for a moment. “When I was sent to Earth, I was sent to find the Tesseract, a… door maker, of sorts. Inside the Tesseract is the Space Stone. After I failed to acquire the stone for Thanos, I was sent with the Tesseract back to Asgard.”
“But Asgard’s gone,” Brunnhilde said with a frown. “Is the Tesseract gone, too?”
“Infinity Stones can’t be destroyed,” Loki explained carefully, an uncomfortable look spreading across his face. “But…”
“...but the Tesseract wasn’t in Asgard when it exploded, was it?” Brunnhilde said slowly, realization dawning. Loki shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“Oh, you son of a bitch!” Brunnhilde snarled, jerking away from Loki, sparks flaring from her eyes.
“It was just sitting there!” Loki desperately tried to defend himself.
“It doesn’t matter!” Brunnhilde spat. “You know what this means? This means that it was 100% your damn fault that Thanos found us and destroyed our ship! It’s your fault that over half our remaining population is now dead, and it’s your fault that we’re stuck in this prison with no knowledge of how long we’ll be here, where Thor is, or if we’ll ever get out of here!”
“Look, if I hadn’t grabbed it, Thanos would have found it in Asgard’s ruins by now, and he would have placed it on his gauntlet, and he would be one step closer to world destruction,” Loki growled, turning his back to her.
“You don’t even know if world destruction is what he wants!” Brunnhilde yelled.
“It’s Thanos! What else would he want besides world destruction?” Loki cried.
Brunnhilde and Loki were on their feet now, inches apart as the glared at each other. The Valkyrie was five seconds from skinning him, while the god gritted his teeth and narrowed his eyes.
“Where is it now?” Brunnhilde finally asked after several tense moments.
“I’m not telling you,” Loki sniffed.
Brunnhilde let out an animalistic snarl and her hands twitched for her daggers, painfully remembering that they were gone. “I don’t trust you period, so there is no way I’m going to trust you with an Infinity Stone. Where. Is. It?”
Loki didn’t reply.
“You do still have it, don’t you?”
“Of course I do!” Loki snapped. “If I didn’t, Thanos would have found it by now and killed us.”
“Killed us?” Brunnhilde repeated.
“He wouldn’t need us anymore, would he?” Loki pointed out. “No need for information on something you already have.”
“Well, if you do still have it, then why hasn’t Thanos taken it yet?” Brunnhilde demanded.
“Magic,” Loki said, like she was a small child that needed a simple matter explained to her. “I’ve put a spell on it.”
“A spell strong enough to fool Thanos?”
“Yes,” Loki confirmed, trying and failing to not sound pleased. “I still have the Tesseract, but it’s… disguised, in a way. Nobody can see it except for me. Only I know what it really is.”
“So tell me what you’ve disguised it as!”
“No!”
“You—“ Brunnhilde didn’t need knives to take her anger out. She grabbed Loki’s shoulders and thrusted him against the wall. She might’ve been shorter than him, but she still managed to be intimidating as stared into his eyes and hissed, “Tell me what it is. Now. If I’ve learned anything about you, it’s that you’re incompetent, weak, and selfish, and it is in everyone’s best interest if you hand over the Stone to someone who can handle it!”
Loki met her gaze evenly, a shadow of a grin on her face that made Brunnhilde want to scream. “I don’t trust you period, so there is no way I’m going to trust you with an Infinity Stone.”
Brunnhilde stared at him for a moment, her own words echoing back.
“Trust goes both ways,” Loki said quietly.
After several tense moments, Brunnhilde released her grip on Loki and took a few steps back. She realized she was breathing heavily and took a deep breath. Her face was flushed and her mouth dry. Stars, she wanted a drink. She was still staring at Loki. He was still looking in her eyes. Why wasn’t he looking away?
Angrily, Brunnhilde tore her gaze away, forcing her fists to unclench as she allowed Loki to slip past her. A few refugees were staring at them bewilderingly.
The refugees. Right. Brunnhilde did her best to return to tending to them, unable to answer most of their questions (Where is Thor? When will be fed? Will we be fed?) and unable to answer most of her own (Where is Thor? Where is Bruce? Why is Loki so infuriating? Was I standing too close to him? Why wouldn’t he stop looking after me?). Her thoughts ran into a vein mostly concerned with Loki before she felt her face warm and shook herself, and her questions would start over again. Somehow, they always ended up on Loki.