Chapter Text
***
Thor agrees to Stark’s plan without mentioning the finer points of the risks involved, and for once Steven is too preoccupied with other affairs to ask him about them. In truth, there’s no point; they are short on both time and options, and anyways he would go through with it regardless. Whatever personal danger he faces is his to worry about, and he won’t allow anyone to talk him out of it. (This is a lesson Sif and the Warriors Three have learned the hard way, and lectured him about at considerable length on numerous occasions, all to no avail.)
Stark has asked him to fuse the metal webbing the city’s underpinnings—vibranium, the humans call it—with lightning. This should push the vibranium into a more volatile and energetic state, allowing Stark to use it to shatter the city. However, this process will require a great deal of lightning, and since a storm would put Nick Fury’s flying vessel (and everyone on board it) at great risk he can’t summon one to ease the lightning’s formation. He’ll have to use Mjölnir and sheer willpower to drag all of the lightning out of the air. That will be the hard part.
He lands on the core and stretches his senses into the sky around them, searching for any and all eddies of natural force he can exploit. He pushes out, further and further, until the charge begins to build. Mjölnir thrums in his hand. There’s not much, but there’s enough.
“I’m ready Stark,” he shouts. He can barely hear himself speak over the howling wind as the city plummets back towards Midgard. Natural force claws at him. The atmosphere expects him to hand over what he’s promised.
He makes out only one word of Stark’s response, though it’s the only one he needs to hear. “Now.”
He gives and the sky takes. The leaders rush in from every direction, setting his skin to tingling when they make contact. He guides the power, gathering and channeling it as best he can (this is much more difficult than it would be with a storm’s own inclinations to harness), and after a short struggle it surges through him and Mjölnir and into the vibranium.
The tingling becomes searing fire. He can feel every last thread of lightning from its source in the skies around them to the exact molecule of metal it connects to. He’s the heart of a tenuous, burning construct spreading for thousands of leagues, and the slightest touch will rip him apart. He hovers like this for a handful of breathes, suspended and fragile and endless. Then the vibranium absorbs the power of the lightning and reacts to Stark’s machinations, shattering itself with enough force to rip Mjölnir from Thor’s hand and cast him from the sky.
He comes to mere moments later. Instinct tells him that he’s falling and seriously injured, yet he feels wholly disconnected from everything happening around him. He should stop his decent, he should summon Mjölnir, he should do something, but no part of him responds to his will. All he can do is watch the the ruins of the city and its foundations spread across the sky.
The force of his impact with the lake’s surface plunges him into darkness.
***
He sees the stones again: the red, writhing Aether; the sharp blue angles of the Tesseract; a bright purple spark hidden behind a honeycomb of gray; a yellow heart buried in a blue gem housed in a scepter.
He reaches for them and they scatter. The Aether slithers away into the eye socket of a golden-green skull tumbling through space. A metallic, orange and blue bird snatches up the purple spark and wings away over the horizon. The scepter breaks apart, releasing a bright yellow gem, and a humanoid shape in shades of green and red takes it up and considers it. And the Tesseract rockets to Asgard, guided by Muninn and Huginn through the towering spires and thundering waterfalls to the palace. There it lands in Odin’s outstretched hand.
No. Not Odin’s. This hand is too young, too long-fingered and fine-boned. This is a hand Thor has watched work illusions and wield short daggers.
He tries to cry out, and the lake fills his lungs.
***
He awakens coughing up water, and for a moment he panics and thinks he never made it out of the cave, that even now Erik is struggling to save him. Then he realizes this isn’t the Water of Sight; where that water had been metallic and rich, this is harsh and pure. The Water of Sight had clung to him, and this water is stripping him raw.
A bitterly cold and fierce wind roars in his ears and his injuries throb. Something is embedded in one of his legs, something else in the opposing shoulder. Taking his first clear breath sets his back to spasming. He catches a glimpse of a bright blue sky and looming white clouds and a familiar face (James Rhodes) saying something he can’t discern, and blacks out.
***
He gradually drifts into a state of disconnected awareness that he recognizes as the regenerative sleep. Mjölnir anchors him like it always does when he heals, and he draws reassurance from this familiar state of affairs. Given the extent of his injuries—though he can only sense them in a peripheral way they seem significant—he’ll be like this for some time, so he gives himself leave to relax.
Another source of power hovers nearby. It has the strange, prickly flavor of mind magic and is almost close enough to reach, but when he tries to touch it Mjölnir holds him back. The hammer radiates an intense reluctance to let him interact with this other power. That only makes him more curious, though not so curious as to disrupt his healing. He stops trying, and Mjölnir subsides.
Usually the sleep bleeds together into one long, quiet moment of waiting to exist again. This time, something is tugging at him like a gentle and insistent tide. Again he thinks of the Water of Sight, and again he tries to reject the notion out of hand. Isn’t he secure on Nick Fury’s vessel, or some similar safe location, resting after their hard-won and costly victory?
Try as he might, he can’t hold onto those thoughts long enough to reconcile their dissonance. They slip through his fingers like smoke, replaced by the sensation of numerous places in time coalescing into one instance. Memories belonging to other, long-dead Æsir seep into him, filling his mind’s eye.
He and Frigga are on a small outcropping jutting out from the side of the mountain which had been only a dark sentinel in the Water’s first vision. The jagged slopes just below them suggest it’s a young volcano, though old enough that brightly colored flowers of red, blue, purple, and gold and clumps of silver-leafed bushes have made a foothold in the landscape. The air is sharp and chill, and they’re both dressed for it in fur-lined leathers; hers, green and silver, his, red and gray. Fat, blue-gray clouds, heavy with snow or late autumn rain, meander by overhead.
Further down the mountainside flattens out into sharp cliffs covered in trees. Some are tall and majestic and stand aloof from one another, and have pale red or dusky brown needles, while others are clustered in compact groves, and bear coin-shaped, green-gold leaves that flash in the wind. Beyond the cliffs lies a black sand beach, which in turn gives way to the cold, blue ocean.
From their vantage point he can see a fair distance across the water. There are more islands all around them; a few sport tall mountains like this one, but others are broad and flat, with the suggestions of buildings crowding them.
“Why have we never rebuilt this?” he asks.
Frigga says, “Because it would be a an illusion. Better to build a monument to what was, than to recreate it in the vain hope it could ever compare.”
He spots a handful of ships carefully navigating the storm-rough seas. “We left so much behind when we departed,” he says, and wonders how he can feel loss for something he has never known. (That’s the Water’s doing, of course. He should have known using it would be double-edged in more ways than one.)
Frigga replies, “And yet not everything.” He looks askance at her; she’s watching the ships too. “So long as the Æsir remain, our home world will as well. We are a part of it, and it will ever be a part of us, in the same way Asgard is now.”
Thor frowns at her. She catches his look and turns to face him. “Tell me how we use magic.”
His reply is automatic, drilled into him by his teachers (her among them) from childhood. “We sense the deeper forces of the Universe, which allows us to control them and so effect change upon it.”
“And how do we control them?”
He hesitates. There is, of course, no explicitly correct answer to such a question. The very nature of magic is perception, and perceptions differ greatly across the whole of existence. He can feel, though, that she is trying to get at something specific. This has always been her manner when teaching him.
He considers the question very carefully, then says, “By giving over some control of ourselves.” She waits, and he says, “By surrendering of ourselves to it.”
She nods. “And when we do that, what happens?”
“There is the possibility, though not the certainty, that the forces will respond in kind.”
“The possibility, but not the certainty,” she echoes, and looks down at the beach below them. “Sometimes the tide casts back things it has claimed, and sometimes the oceans refuse to relinquish their hold on that which they take. So we too have left pieces of ourselves in the Universe, and carry some of it within us.” She looks at him again. “Our home world is gone as a place, yet fragments of it survive in our hearts and minds. You would never have been able to reach it within the Water of Sight otherwise.”
“But how am I here again, now? I am not in the Water of Sight.”
She gives him a sad smile. He knows the answer even as she says it. “The Water could not have given you anything if you were not willing to give a part of yourself to it.”
The wind blows harder and colder. Thor knows the moment has begun to unravel, and in seconds it will shred around him. He’s not sure what will happen then.
“Why am I here?”
“Because you must remember.”
“Remember what? What have I forgotten?”
Thick rain laden with ice starts to fall. She points down below them to the cliffs. There is a grove of trees with a small clearing dominated by a crater shaped roughly like a hand. The same flowers growing on the volcano line the crater. Blue, red, purple, and yellow flowers. The wind rises and tears them from the ground.
The rain turns to hail. Gently, sadly, Frigga says, “You must remember his nature.”
Thor reaches for her through the storm. “Mother—”
***
Mjölnir yanks him back hard enough that his regeneration ends abruptly. The sleep releases him, and his first truly conscious thought is that he will be stiff and sore for some time to come. His sense of permanence is especially tender, and small wonder. Seldom has he ever forced his magic to such an extent.
He hears Jane say, “Hey,” and opens his eyes. She leans forward from her chair and pushes his hair back from his face. He manages a small smile and glances around. He doesn’t recognize this healing ward; it’s not the one in Stark’s Tower, though the equipment is similar, and he can’t hear or feel the engines of Fury’s vessel. They are somewhere else, somewhere he hasn’t been before.
Jane must notice him looking around the room, because she says, “Apparently the Tower’s not a great place for you guys to hang out right now. This is a super-secret location of Nick’s, which he says you’re only allowed to stay at long enough to build yourselves something new and less out in the open.” She seems amused. “No more fans crowding the entrance and creating security problems when you guys come and go, I guess.”
Thor relaxes. It’s probably for the best, all things considered. He sees Jane has a tablet with her, and says, “I hope your work was not interrupted.” His voice sounds rough and scratchy to his own ears.
She shrugs and scoots the chair closer to the edge of his bed. “I’m between conferences and scope time.” She takes one of his hands in hers and smiles. The feel of her skin, just a fraction cooler than his, draws him closer to wakefulness. “You timed this just right.”
“Then it is your rest you have sacrificed.”
“Please. Like I do anything but work during my time off if you aren’t there to help Darcy make me relax.”
He nods, accepting her reassurance with equanimity. She rubs his hand, and her demeanor falters. “I saw everything on the news. Looks like it was pretty bad.”
He glances down at himself. There are bandages on his shoulder and leg. He shifts slightly, and finds the majority of the stiffness seems to be confined to his upper back. “It was,” he admits.
“And it’s all taken care of?”
The memory of a golden hand crushing all life in the Universe flits through his mind. He meets her eyes again. “Most of it. But...there is more for me to attend to.”
She swallows and looks down at their hands. “You mean on Asgard.”
“Yes.”
Jane takes in a deep breath and lets it out. When she looks up at him again she’s regained her composure. “How long do you think you’ll be gone?”
“As long as is required, and no longer.”
“But that could be a while,” she says, and Thor nods. She raises her eyebrows. “I don’t suppose there’s any possibility of me coming with you?”
She must see some manner of reaction from him to that question, since before he can respond her expression grows concerned. “Is it that bad?” she asks in a low voice.
“I will not know for certain until I am there and can investigate for myself.”
She gives him a look that’s equal parts fondness and exasperation, and gets up from her chair. “Scooch over.”
He does as she asks, and she tucks herself into the narrow space he’s made, careful to avoid his shoulder as she settles against him and rests her head on his chest. He breathes in the smell of her and tells himself he won’t be gone long.
“When are you leaving?”
“When I am fully healed and have had time to speak with the others.” He runs a finger along her cheek. “And after I have had a day of your company, if I may presume to request it.”
She’s quiet for a spell, then says, “So you can bid me a proper farewell?”
Her voice is taut, and he begins to worry he’s going about this all wrong. Despite knowing such a situation might arise sooner or later, they’ve never defined their relations in concrete terms, nor have they ever discussed something more permanent. Now, he’ll be leaving for a length of time which could exceed their expectations. He knows he has no right to ask her to wait for him, though he wants to desperately.
He strokes her arm. “So that I may convince you of my intent to return as quickly as possible.” It’s not quite asking her to wait. Not quite.
She sighs and squeezes him. Her breath on his skin is warm as she murmurs against chest, “Okay. But if I get that wormhole generator finished while you’re gone, I’m not waiting for you to come back before I try it out.”
Something which had begun to knot up inside him loosens. He kisses her hair. “Very little would please me more than to return and hear of your exploits.”
“We’ll see if you still feel that way when I cause an intergalactic diplomatic incident by showing up somewhere completely unannounced,” she mumbles, her tone wry, and he laughs quietly.
“I will gladly plead your case to whomever I must should such an event transpire.”
“I love you, but you really don’t strike me as the best negotiator.”
Doing his best to sound wounded, he says, “On the contrary. I have arbitrated numerous political disagreements over the centuries.”
Jane isn’t fooled. She humphs and pokes him in the side. “I don’t mean with the hammer.”
He smiles and closes his eyes. He’s already growing tired again. “Only some of them have required Mjölnir.”
“Well I’ll try not to make too much of a mess out of interstellar relations if you promise not to use Mjölnir to sort things out on my behalf.” When he makes no response she nudges him. “Deal?”
“Deal,” he murmurs, and succumbs to sleep.