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Thor had touched down on Earth in the middle of a battle, and the chaos of clashing weapons that surrounded him had been almost a relief.
Of course he hoped to reach the planet before Thanos, to warn his allies and help them prepare. Anything else would be irresponsible.
But for the past few days he had been forced to bottle up his rage and pain, to construct a thin outer shell that was in control and to force the entirety of his being into that weak illusion. It suited him ill. His brother—and he could finally think of Loki now, there was an entire army here and he could finally lash out in his grief—always appeared collected, and how much had Thor missed because of that? But for Thor, holding his emotions in check didn't come easy. His joy demanded laughter and camaraderie, his sorrow gathered clouds overhead and darkened them, and his rage required smashing and shouting and brawling to be quieted.
Right now, his grief needed to howl itself to the open sky, to whip the clouds and the winds themselves into the frenzy of an unquiet sea, to build up behind his forehead and his fingertips and manifest as pure energy, to tear apart those who first tore him apart.
So he was seeking Thanos, but not trying particularly hard to limit casualties among the army of Earth's enemies, when the world shuddered to a stop.
Sound cut out first, like a door had been closed between him and the rest of the world, bringing with it a sense of dissociation. Everything went still, swinging weapons losing their momentum and slowing to a frozen stop in the air, war cries trailing off into silence, friends and enemies alike caught like figures in an elaborate dance.
Thor knew without trying that if he struck out at the figures around him he would be unable to reach them. This should have angered him, tore a cry of frustration from his lips, but there was a strange lassitude to this place, a calm familiarity that ached in his chest.
It reminded him of his last conversation with Odin, the one in the middle of his fight with Hela, though he hadn't been able to decide afterwards if that had actually happened or he'd imagined it. These weren't the cliffs of Norway, and he didn't see his father. Still, he felt as though he were caught in the quiet place between one second and the next, the space between heartbeats where the land of the dead reached out for the living.
He wasn't surprised, then, to see the quiet, dark form of his brother picking through the frozen battlefield, making his way towards Thor. His heart swelled, and he nearly choked on a sob in relief to see his brother looking alive and well, even if he didn't miss the dark purple bruises marring Loki's too-pale throat. He moved then, closing the distance between them with long, unhurried strides.
See, his traitorous heart whispered to him. You knew this was a trick. It's always a trick, but it's better this way, because if it's a trick it isn't real.
"Loki," he said, and if his voice was chiding, it was also fond. "You let me think you dead. Again. This is starting to get a little ridiculous, don't you think?"
He reached out to pull his brother into a hug, but Loki skittered back. "Don't," he said.
Thor's face fell, and he knew he must look miserable but didn't have it in him to care. "Really, brother? After everything, you won't even allow me this much?"
Loki looked solemn, and a touch regretful. "My touch would burn you," he said seriously.
"It never has before."
"I've never been dead before."
Thor stepped back, letting those words hang in the air even as his heart rejected them. A trick, it whispered, always a trick.
"You don't expect me to believe that, do you, brother?" He asked, hearing the broken edge to his own voice and not caring. "If you were dead," he insisted, "how would you be here?"
Loki smirked, one of his old, normal smirks, the smirk that a very much alive Loki would use. "I've never been much inclined to stay where I'm meant to be," he said simply. He smirked again over his shoulder before turning and walking off.
He walked for a bit, wandering around and settling, after a moment's deliberation, into a clearing very near the middle of the battlefield. Thor fell into step beside him, following but not talking, not touching.
Loki nodded to himself, as though pleased with his choice, and as abruptly as it had stopped the battle began again, the mingled cacophony of clashing weapons and shouting nearly startling him off his feet.
Loki simply stood in the middle of the battle, surveying and gathering himself as Thor had seen him do countless times before, when they were both young and alive and seeking adventure on other realms.
"What's he doing here," someone said, and Loki glanced up, fixing that unseen person with a narrowed gaze. Thor didn't turn to see who it was, didn't take his eyes off his brother.
Loki answered, keeping his chin raised even though doing so showed off the mess of his throat. "I am doing what I have always done. What Chaos must always do."
He stepped back to one knee and brought his arms up, palms upraised as though in supplication, but his bowed head strained with a familiar effort. A faint glow appeared over each shoulder, threaded through with cracks that ran like rivulets of black ink and golden sparks like distant stars.
The portals grew wide like blown pupils, impossibly dark and giving off light all at once.
"I am bringing War," he said, and though it wasn't especially loud, his voice carried over the grassland, sweeping to fill the silence that had crept in when Thor's own allies and Thanos' army had fallen still to watch. "And Death."
The portals stretched, and almost at the same instant two enormous mounts leapt out of their depths, sailing over his shoulders to land in the grass.
To the right was Sleipnir, every bit as magnificent as he had been before the fall of Asgard, his fur impossible void-dark and stretched tight over shifting muscle. He planted four enormous legs and reared up to paw at the sky with four more, sharp hooves moving as though to tear apart the very clouds.
Odin sat astride his war mount, but this was neither the tired old man he'd met on the cliffs of Norway nor the cruel two-eyed conqueror from Asgard's buried past. This Odin was at once more youthful and more ancient than the father Thor remembered, his face unlined and back unbent by years of responsibility that still darkened his one remaining eye. The helmet atop his head was made of the same shining gold as his armor, but something in the jagged shapes still called to mind Hela's dark blades. Taken together, they reminded Thor of his own lightning, and the raw power he felt crackling through the air when he took a step closer was not dissimilar to the wild magic surging through his own veins.
To Loki's left was the wolf from the bridge, Fenris, brought alive by the Eternal Flame but with the deep gravity of death still running underneath his fur. Hela herself perched astride him, dressed much as she had been when she had destroyed his people and his home, the black spires of her helmet reaching for the sky like broken arms raised in supplication. She had not changed at all, he thought, until she turned to meet his eye, one side of her lips quirking up into a smirk at his shock.
Only one side, for half of her face was gone, flesh burned to ash and the bone grey and sickly underneath. Ash drifted from the ruined flesh in little eddies, settling occasionally against the untouched ivory skin of her good side. Deep in the empty socket where her second eye should have been (and was this a family trait, now? Loki and his two functioning eyes had better watch out) burned a subtle green glow, the sickly green of mold or copper rust or the moss that slowly reclaims the ruins of a once-great city.
They touched down upon the grass of Wakanda together, the god of War and the goddess of Death, and the hush that had fallen over the battlefield strained and broke.
The creatures from Thanos' army, the Outriders, picked up the threads of their attack, and a horde bunched together to throw themselves towards the newcomers.
Loki took his upraised hands and thrust them apart, and the portals stretched wide as the armies of the dead poured forth.
The warriors of Valhalla leapt through the portal with savage cries, banging sharpened swords against golden shields in a savage, bloodthirsty glee.
The warriors of Hel were no less imposing. Like the edges of shadows, they were creatures created of contrast, the bleached white of corpse and bone against the startling black of dark leather.
A fierce cry sounded somewhere above him, and Thor looked up to see a flock of winged horses, their edges glowing in the sunlight. He had never thought to see the flight of the Valkyrie, not when he had thought the last of them had died before he was even born.
He searched for Brunnhilde among their number, but didn't find her.
The two armies of the dead fanned out around their commanders, growing steadily larger before charging to meet the approaching waves of Outriders, and growing still even as the front lines clashed.
Thor turned back away from the fighting to find his brother still on his knees, straining with visible effort to hold the portals as still more of Asgard's honorable and not-so honorable dead poured through.
Thor started towards him, but another figure reached Loki first, stepping through the rightmost portal with a sword held at the ready. Thor swallowed back a cry as the familiar figure dropped a comforting hand on his brother's shoulder, lending him solidity and strength, then turned, as though sensing his gaze, to meet Thor's eyes.
"Mother," he said, and her eyes sparkled. She was dead, he knew she was dead, but seeing her stand there well and strong, every inch the fierce woman who had raised them both, eased a hurt he hadn't realized he still held so close to the surface.
She squeezed Loki's shoulder—I've got him—and grinned at her elder son. "The axe suits you," she said, an undercurrent of humor running through the words, "but I mislike what you've done with your hair."
"Mother, I—"
"Go," she said. "We have the portals. They'll need you in the fight against Thanos."
She cast another look at Loki, this one fiercely protective, and met his eyes again, as though to say go, avenge your brother. He swallowed and nodded, then took a deep breath.
The fight with Thanos had already begun, somewhere at the edge of the clearing where the main battle was taking place. Thor could feel it in his bones, the sheer energy flowing from the fight, dragging at the very fabric of reality with its eddies and currents. He wondered briefly if the mortals felt it as he did, and what they thought of it if they could.
Thor hefted his axe and took off for the center of the disturbances at a sprint. All around him, the battle raged, Outlanders locked in combat with mortal fighters and immortal, undead ones. The dead fought with their bare hands as often as their weapons, their very touch searing flesh from alien bones. All around him, Thanos' army was falling, tumbling dead to the ground with screams of pain or, just as often, without a sound at all.
Far less often, one of the dead would perish again, a shower of golden sparks dispersing on the wind or a dark wisp of a shade sinking into the ground the only sign that these souls were not destroyed, only banished back to the realm from which they had come.
"Thor!" someone shouted, and he turned to see Fandral waving with one arm and expertly skewering an Outlander with the other, while Hogun and Volstagg fought as part of a tight-knit group beside him.
He nearly collided with Heimdall, the gatekeeper neatly separating an Outlander's head from its body with his oversized sword. His eyes, in the second they met Thor's, were a warm brown and not the rich gold he remembered.
The warrior fighting at his back looked familiar, and it took Thor a second to realize it was his grandfather Bor, a man he knew only from the enormous marble statues outside the palace. He and Loki had climbed them growing up, and gotten away with it several times before getting in massive amounts of trouble when Loki slid off Bor's shoulder and broke his arm.
The armies of Asgard surrounded him, more massive now than they had been even before Hela, and inexplicably, among these ghosts, a small part of Thor felt at home once again.
The energies were growing stronger now, tugging at his skin and his cape and rushing through the short bristles of his shorn hair, and when he reached the battle with Thanos they nearly pulled him to his knees.
Almost immediately he realized had never actually seen Hela truly fighting in her element, warring against an opponent as strong as she. They had fought her, the combined might of Asgard had banded together to stand against her, and still the best they had been able to do was hold her off, to be a distraction and pray their defeat would not be too swift.
She had fought Surtur, of course, but they hadn't exactly stayed to watch. They were too busy limping away with the rest of their survivors, survivors Thanos would slaughter not a day later.
She fought now with blades and magic, Loki's chaos and Thor's strength magnified on a deadly scale. Thanos was wielding the Space Stone to avoid her weapons and the Power Stone to deflect her magical attacks, and still he was barely staying ahead of her.
His father, he realized, he had never seen fight at all. If watching Hela was intimidating, Odin was terrifying, even if his role in the battle was not as visually obvious. The waves of force that buffeted Thor came from the Stones and from his father, his magic a steady force weighing down on the Titan, sapping his force and his will and his attention.
Odin himself flanked the Titan, driving forward with his spear whenever Hela's swords left an opening.
Watching the two of them together, it was not hard to imagine how entire realms had fallen before father and daughter.
Thanos was bleeding, and if none of the cuts they'd managed to inflict so far were serious, it was satisfying to see his vulnerability trickling down the sides of his armor.
Thor pushed against the waves of force, hefted the axe, and buried it deep in the Titan's chest.
The battle still raged around him, though it was winding down as Thanos' forces succumbed to an enemy they could never have prepared for, but Thor's world narrowed until there was nothing but Thanos and himself.
And Thanos was laughing.
It was a deep, throaty chuckle, pained and rueful and malicious. He leaned in, driving the axe deeper.
Thanos' voice rumbled almost beside his ear. "You should've gone for the head."
He lifted the hand with the gauntlet, eyes glowing triumphantly, only for Odin's spear to bury itself in his upper arm. The Titan's fingers went limp as his arm sagged.
A look of confusion spread over Thanos' face for only a second before one of Hela's daggers buried itself in his eye and he toppled backwards.
"Not bad, baby brother," she said, smiling in a way that her half-lips forced to become a smirk. She stepped forward and stomped, needlessly driving the dagger deeper.
She eyed the body impassively. "For someone who seemed so in love with death, we didn't really get along," she said, and when he met her eye she was fading, a wisp of black smoke disappearing into the breeze.
Thor whipped around to find his father, but Odin was already dissolving to golden dust, motes rising into air and dispersing like fireflies. Any last words he might have had for his son went unsaid.
Thor tracked the motes of light into the sky, desperately trying to call them back, but they mixed with others, floating together into a great cloud that made the daytime sky look like the starry night. When he dropped his eyes back to the earth, the armies of Hel and Valhalla had faded, leaving fields full of stunned, awed mortals and the twisted corpses of Thanos' army.
Clouds were starting to roll in, the sunlight fading and taking on an odd, shadowed cast.
He dropped his axe in the grass and sprinted to the last place he'd seen his brother.
He didn't know what he would have done if Loki'd already been gone, but when he made it back to where the portals had been—they were gone now, no sign on the clouded sky they'd ever existed—Loki was standing there with his hands by his side, alone, waiting.
Thor slid to a stop just shy of touching his brother, remembering the Outriders and burned flesh and wondering if it might still be worth it.
"This was your plan, wasn't it?" He heard his own voice say. "I think—a part of me really believed you had to be alive, because you always have a plan, but this was it."
Loki chuckled. "Yes, this was the plan. It wasn't my first choice, but options were limited. And you must admit," he gestured expansively to their surroundings, "it was rather spectacular. Lots of dramatic flair." He turned to look his brother straight in the eye. "If it doesn't get turned into a play at some point I will be sorely disappointed."
Thor couldn't find it in him to chuckle, not when watching the armies dissolve had felt too much like losing his home all over again.
Instead, what slipped out was the question he both most wanted and most dreaded to ask, the one whose answer he wasn't certain he could bear.
"Will you stay?"
Loki smiled, and for once it wasn't mocking. Thor would have preferred mockery to the soft pity that had taken its place.
"I'm dead, brother," Loki said, his voice hatefully gentle. "It is not for the dead to stay among the living."
Something inside him quivered and broke at those words. His voice was unsteady and his mortal friends, for all they pretended to focus elsewhere, could hear him, but he didn't care. "Please stay," he said, like a child begging not to be left alone after a nightmare.
Already though, Loki was looking less solid, less substantial, and the golden light filtering through the clouds seemed to fill him with a soft glow.
"This isn't forever, Thor. Our lives may be long but we are not immortal, and even a few thousand years are short in the shadow of infinity. You will join us at the end of your appointed path. We are content to wait for you until then."
"And if I'm not?" Tears made silent tracks down his cheeks, and his eyes and nose stung. Captain America stepped forward from somewhere behind him and moved as though to put a hand on his shoulder, as though the contact could tether him here to the land of the living, but he aborted the motion and let it drop.
"Courage, Thor." He tilted his head back to look at the gathering clouds. "I promised you once the sun would shine on us again. You may have much left to do before your thread is cut, but I did not lie to you, brother. Life cannot last forever, and we shall be together again soon enough."
His presence was fading, Thor could tell, even if he couldn't yet see through him. "And what if I don't die in battle?" Thor whispered. "What if the Halls of Valhalla will not have me?"
Loki reached out as though to brush his cheek with his fingertips, and stopped just short. Even so, the heat or the cold was nearly unbearable. "If the Norns should make such a foolish mistake as not to send you to us, then I would journey to Hel myself to fetch you. This I promise."
Thor believed him, and the weight of that one fear left his shoulders with a childlike sob.
Loki stepped back. "Find your way back to us, brother, but not too soon. Live while you are alive. Neither fear death nor court it. All things meet their appointed end in time." He smiled, gently, free of the mischief and malice that had haunted him in life.
"You will be fine," he said firmly, like a prophecy, as the first few raindrops sputtered to earth, falling against Thor's cheek, mixing with his tears.
Between one blink and the next, his brother was gone.
Thor wasn't sure how he ended up on the ground, whether he'd knelt down or his knees had given out underneath him, but he buried his hands in the dirt and his face in his arms and sobbed like it could dislodge the grief that hollowed out his chest.
The rain ran in rivulets over the land and over his skin as the clouds wept with him.
***
He didn't know how long he stayed there, sobbing his grief into the dirt, but when he came back to himself the rain, like his tears, seemed to have spent itself, and the wan light of morning pushed its way through pale grey clouds.
When he pushed himself to his feet the ache in his chest felt oddly tight and empty, as though he had been drained of more than just his tears.
He stepped out from beneath a canopy and looked out on the battlefield. The rain had left things surprisingly clean, washing away the dust and ashes and blood. Already, mortals were busy clearing away the bodies of the Outlanders, and it wouldn't be long, he thought, before this resilient little realm had rebuilt itself such that none could tell the difference.
And what was there left for him? Him, left without even the scraps of a life from which to rebuild?
He squinted up at the weak morning sun. It seemed like a heresy for it to shine on him alone.
"Hey, Thor, you all right?" A hand fell on his shoulder and shook him from his stupor. It didn't sound like the first time they'd asked.
He looked down at Banner, peering up at him with clear concern written across his features.
"I'm sorry, dumb question," he said. "What I meant was... I don't even know what to say, but we're here for you. Whatever you need."
"Thank you," he forced himself to say, but it felt empty. His friends were kind, but how much longer before he lost them too? The people of Earth were so fleeting, and now he had nothing eternal, nothing lasting to fall back on.
A new wave of grief twisted through him, aching like a blow to the stomach. He didn't know how he was going to endure another few thousand years of this. He didn't know how he was going to endure a few more days of this.
"Have you stayed with me this whole time?" he asked Banner, because it was easier than facing the silence.
"Well, Captain Rogers was with you for a while. He and his friend set up the tent. I took over earlier this morning and told him to get some rest."
"I see," Thor said. "Thank you."
He stared out at the clearing once again, telling himself he should help with the cleanup and failing to muster the energy.
After a short while the Black Widow jogged to meet them, and she seemed unhurt. A stab of guilt that he hadn't even thought to ask about the rest of their friends pierced him, but even if it had occurred to him to ask, he didn't think he could do it. He wasn't strong enough. One more piece of bad news might snap him like a matchstick, and he wasn't sure he could put himself back together one more time.
"There's another ship approaching," she said quietly, and he cursed the Norns. He was tired, too tired for another fight. He deserved to rest.
"More of Thanos' minions?" Bruce asked, and Thor saw some of his own weariness reflected in the other man's face.
"We don't think so," she said, searching Thor's face. "They hailed us. They said they're refugees from Asgard."
Thor squeezed his eyes shut. Valkyrie. He hadn't seen her with her sisters during the battle, he remembered, and she wouldn't have stayed behind. She must still be alive, her and the others they'd managed to herd into escape pods before Thanos' attack on the Statesman.
He hadn't dared to hope.
"Take me to them," he said, reaching out his hand and feeling his axe snap back into it.
They were remnants, true scraps, their numbers paltry even beside those they had originally escaped with from Asgard.
Nonetheless, they were his people, and they were not gone. A few remained, and they could rebuild.
Restoring a lost people would be difficult, but it was something to do for a few thousand years.
Maybe together they could even make a home. Not for him; Asgard was a people, not a place, and the people who would always be Asgard to him were already gone. But he could give this to those who remained, and he owed them that much.
Besides, no matter how long it took, his home would be waiting.
He looked to the sky once more, still coated in a grey layer of clouds, and told himself the sun would shine.
He could wait.