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“Almighty Thanos. I, Loki, Prince of Asgard…”
He hesitates.
Come now, make your last words count.
“... Odinson,” he says over the impossibly loud erratic thump of his pulse, “the rightful king of Jotunheim, God of Mischief… do hereby pledge to you, my undying fidelity.”
Loki stopped fearing death a long, long time ago.
And if this must be the time you die and stay dead, make it worth something, won't you?
The flash of his knife, the bright glow of the Space Stone taking its hold over him, and it's over before it began.
“Undying,” Thanos repeats, gazing down with a vaguely amused smile at where Loki stands, blade inches from Thanos’ throat, unable to move. “Hmm.”
This is alright, Loki thinks.
He's ready to die.
Usually his schemes don't include his own death, not his real, permanent death anyway, but this time it has to happen. If Thanos kills him, he may yet leave Thor alive. And Loki does not put much faith in Thanos ever losing this war of his, but if anyone can defeat him, it has to be Thor, doesn't it?
Loki waits.
But Thanos does not kill him.
Instead, he turns away.
Instead, he turns toward Thor.
No.
No, no, no, come back, don't go near him—
He can’t move. He can only watch as the metal encasing Thor falls away, as Thor stands on shaky legs and attempts to fight, as the Space Stone freezes him as well and prevents him from making a single move against his attacker.
“Undying,” Thanos says again, lifting Thor by the throat. “But I don't think undying is what you wanted, was it?”
Loki feels the tightening of Thanos’ grip as if it's his own throat being crushed—as it should have been, it was supposed to be him—and there is still not a single thing he can do about it, though he tries desperately to move, to shout, to do something.
“No, I don't think it was,” says Thanos, “but death is a mercy you don't deserve, Prince of Asgard.”
It's over quickly, too quickly.
Loki hardly notices as Thanos walks right past him, as he rejoins his Black Order, as bright violet fissures form in the walls of the Statesman. The Space Stone’s hold on him falls away when Thanos disappears and leaves them to die in the now crumbling spaceship, and Loki stumbles to his brother's side, his heart in his throat.
“No, no, no, Thor. Thor.”
His hands are on Thor’s chest—unmoving, too still, too damn still—and then he moves his shaking fingers up to Thor’s neck.
It's grotesque and graphic and so, so wrong how bruised and swollen the muscles are, how the veins show bold and dark against his jawline, how his one remaining eye stares up, bloodshot and blank and unseeing.
“Don’t—don't you dare,” he says, wisps of seiðr flowing from his fingertips to the torn muscles and fractured vertebrae and stalled blood vessels.
“Thor, please, don’t…”
But he already has.
The seiðr fades the bruising, mends the bones. And still, Thor does not wake.
No, no, no, not now.
It wasn't supposed to be you.
It was never supposed to be you.
“Thor…”
His voice cracks, a sob wrenched out from deep within him. The tears come whether he wills it or not—and who cares, now? Who is here to see him? What does it matter?
Still leaning over his brother, he looks around him at the crumbling structure of what had been Asgard for a few short days. Any second now, the Statesman will be nothing but debris floating in the unforgiving emptiness of space, and he knows in his gut that he isn't likely to survive this.
And as he lowers his head down onto Thor’s chest, fingers gripping the front of his leathers so tightly it hurts, he finds that he genuinely does not care.
-
Wake.
Consciousness all but slams into his being, a violent burst of awareness that sends him reeling and gasping and scrambling to his feet.
He becomes aware of his surroundings, slowly, by pieces. A metal wall, a machine he plants one hand on to right himself, a few oblong windows through which he can see only the distant pinprick of stars.
The presence of others, behind him, waiting.
He turns, unable to stop his own heavy breathing as his lungs struggle to take in as much oxygen as they can, and sees—a group of aliens staring back at him.
They're not Asgardian. Not a single one of them.
And why would you have thought that was possible?
Asgard is dead, along with their King.
He gulps, ignoring the feel of glass shards in his throat.
“Who the hell are all of you?”
-
For perhaps the first time in his life, Loki has absolutely no idea what to do. He sits with his elbows on his knees, staring down at his shaking hands as the idiots bicker back and forth around him.
The sun will shine on us again, he had said, eyes intent on his brother, hoping he would listen, hoping he would read between the lines. Thanos is too powerful to fight with just fists and lightning.
The sun will shine on us again.
Go to Nidavellir. Wake the sun.
But Thor did not live long enough to heed his advice, and Loki is not so foolish as to believe he would have the fortitude to wield a weapon forged in the heart of a dying star.
No one but Thor would.
And now, with Thor gone…
“—half the universe. And if he gets all the Infinity Stones, he can do it with a snap of his fingers,” he catches Gamora at the end of her monologue, and it pulls him from his thoughts. Snap. “Just like that.”
Loki has only been half paying attention, and now his brow creases.
“You seem to know an awful lot about him.”
His words bring about an uncomfortable shift in the room, impossible to miss. Drax and Rocket look at him. Groot and Mantis look to Gamora. Quill shifts just half a step closer to her, arms tense.
A beat of silence, and then Drax says, “Thanos is Gamora’s father.”
Ah, he thinks. Of course.
Loki’s gaze never leaves her, cool with anger. She closes her eyes. Her jaw tightens.
Thanos—her father—tortured him, twisted him when he was at his most vulnerable, drove madness into his mind and tore him away from any chance at redemption just six short years ago. He destroyed what little remained of Asgard. He stabbed Heimdall through the heart. He killed Thor.
“Uh… step-father, technically,” Quill says. “She hates him just as much as you do.”
“I very much doubt that.”
Loki waits until Gamora opens her eyes again, until she meets his gaze with a defiant stare of her own, and he shoves down the urge to kill her, here and now. There are more important matters at hand.
He maintains the staredown for a few more seconds before he looks away and shrugs one shoulder.
“But we don't choose our fathers, do we?”
-
After a bit of thought, Loki finds himself with two options. Midgard, or Knowhere.
There is a third option, technically, which is neither. He could fly off to… Sakaar, maybe, or any of a number of backwater planets where he can drink away his last remaining days before the annihilation of half the universe.
It is sorely tempting.
In the end, though, he takes the Guardians’ pod and punches in the coordinates for Midgard before he can change his mind. Or come to his senses.
“Go to Knowhere,” he tells them, one foot in the pod and one hand already on the door to pull it shut. “Find the Collector before Thanos does, and destroy the Reality Stone if you can. Steal it if you can’t.”
“You are going alone?”
Loki pauses, raising an eyebrow at Mantis. “Yes. Obviously.”
“I am Groot.”
He shoots a glare at the young Flora colossus, and he altogether ignores the way Quill is silently staring at him with his arms crossed and with hesitant concern in his eyes.
“I’ll manage just fine.”
A lie, naturally. In all honesty this probably amounts to suicide, going to Earth and allying himself with the side that's sure to fail. It's certainly not the most intelligent decision. It's not even a vaguely intelligent decision.
… But it's what Thor would have done.
And really, he thinks, what more can I lose?
-
In the silence of the cramped little pod when his thoughts are left to wander, Loki stares sightlessly out at the stars and wonders if he's too late to stop it. He wonders if it's even possible to defeat Thanos without Thor.
I thought we were going to fight side by side forever.
He clenches his jaw and ignores the burning in his eyes, the sharp ache at the center of his chest.
You’ll always be the God of Mischief.
But you could be more.
-
At first, the Outriders only know darkness.
Until, with a deep rumble of metal on metal, the huge door at the front of the ship begins to shudder open. Blinding white sunlight streams into the ship, a narrow strip that widens with each second. The Outriders within clamor and scream, climbing over and trampling one another, ready to claw their way out, aching to rip something apart.
But when the door opens, the Outrider at the very front of the pack halts in its tracks. Soon there is a cascade effect behind it, as more and more of them realize who is blocking their exit.
They pause, hesitant, confused.
Proxima Midnight levels them all with a fierce glare.
“Remain on the ship until instructed otherwise,” she orders. “Thanos has ordered half the ships to leave Earth and assist him in his own battle off-planet.”
The Outrider at the front heaves and pants, drool dangling from its gaping mouth, teeth bared.
It wants to disobey. It wants to kill.
But it knows who it serves.
It looks at her spear, then growls lowly from the back of its throat and takes a step back. The rest, after a moment of mild unrest, follow suit.
Proxima Midnight smiles. “Your cooperation is appreciated,” she says, and as the doors begin to rumble shut, she casually tosses a small metal orb into the ship. It rolls along the floor, emitting a soft beep as it goes, bumping against their feet.
As the last sliver of daylight shrinks away to nothing and envelopes them once again in total darkness, the frontmost Outrider tilts its head. It thought, for just a moment, that it saw something strange about Proxima Midnight.
… Like a faint green shimmer to her skin.
Half a second later, the soft beep from her little metal orb inexplicably stops, and a massive concussive blast rips through the interior of the ship.
Outside, the smile on Proxima Midnight’s face only widens.
-
“What—? Loki?”
“Captain.”
Rogers throws a series of punches at the nearest Outrider, slices through the thing’s throat with the sharp edge of his shield-like arm braces.
As the creature collapses to the ground Rogers asks, breathless and squinting against the sun, “This mean you're on our side now?”
The next Outrider doesn't get close. An emerald glow takes hold of it, sending it slowly hovering into the air and then hurtling impossibly fast across the battlefield, where it slams into another Outrider with the distant crunch of too-thick genetically engineered bone shattering.
“... Huh. Guess that’s a yes.”
-
It's not enough.
It was never going to be enough.
Proxima Midnight, Corvus Glaive, and Cull Obsidian are all dead. Ebony Maw is nowhere to be seen. The vast majority of the Outriders lie dead all around them, scattered across the battlefield like the cannon fodder they were.
And it was all for nothing.
As soon as Thanos appeared in the flesh, none of it mattered.
Loki watches as one soldier—Buck, the Captain calls him—takes a single step forward and collapses into a pile of ash before all of their eyes. He watches as the young girl with the impressive telekinetic skills, with tears still on her cheeks, begins to fade as well. The Wakandan King turns to dust as he reaches for the hand of one of his warriors. The man with the robotic wings vanishes mid-flight.
And Loki waits.
And waits.
But Thanos’ random thoughtless slaughter of trillions does not touch him.
Death is a mercy you don't deserve.
-
He stays on Earth.
He doesn't know why he does, but he's too numb to do much of anything else.
Three days after the battle, he sits on the cliffs just a few miles from the Wakandan palace, looking out at the sunset across vast rolling hills and distant mountains tinged with red.
It's not Asgard. It's not close. But this place has its own unique sort of beauty, he supposes, and the sunsets at least grant him a temporary almost-peace, an alien warmth that seeps into his bones and settles somewhere just below his sternum.
Soon, sooner than he would like, he hears someone approaching behind him. He doesn't have to turn to know who it is.
“Hello, Bruce.”
A sigh. Bruce stands behind him, making no move to sit.
“Hey, Loki.”
The two of them remain there, saying nothing else, staring out at the Midgardian sunset. The silence is, surprisingly enough, not as unbearable as Loki might have expected. It’s almost companionable.
It is several minutes before Bruce finally breaks it.
“Listen, Loki, I… I hate to bring this up, but…”
“You want to know what happened after your departure from the Statesman.”
His lack of an answer is answer enough.
“Thor is dead,” Loki tells him, because that's all that matters at this point, because Thor being dead implies all the rest, because even saying it as bluntly as possible can't drive the knife in any deeper than it already is.
Bruce lets out a shuddering breath.
“Yeah, I, uh… I thought he probably was. Hoped he wasn't, but…” he trails off, kicks at a loose rock. “Yeah. Jesus. I’m sorry, Loki.”
So am I, he almost says.
Again they lapse into silence, but this time Bruce slowly moves to sit beside him, wincing a bit as the movement pulls at injured muscles. He settles in, cross-legged in the dirt, and Loki casts him a sideways glance.
“I, uh… I’m gonna cut right to the chase,” Bruce says after a moment, looking down as he fidgets with his hands in his lap, and then squinting up at the setting sun. “The Princess—er, Queen—Shuri, she and I, we’ve been working on finding a way to undo what Thanos did."
“I’m aware.”
There's a pause, a beat of confusion. “You are?”
A nod is the only answer Loki gives.
“Uh… yeah,” Bruce says, clearing his throat and evidently deciding not to ask how he knew. “Okay. Well, see, the thing is, we thought about tracking down the stones again, you know, undoing the snap with another snap. But that's—”
“A terrible idea.”
Bruce lets out a huff, and out if the corner of his eye Loki sees a half-smile on his face. “Yeah. Too many variables. We don't know if everyone who disappeared is actually dead, or on some other plane, or what. And I’ve seen enough movies to know you can't bring the dead back to life without a whole new mess of problems. Plus we’d need someone to actually use that gauntlet the way Thanos did, and we're, uh… we're at a serious shortage of powerful beings these days. Actually, if it really came down to that, the vote was down to either you or Cap, if you… if you were curious.”
“The Infinity Gauntlet would kill me if I attempted anything of that scale. And it would kill your Captain Rogers even faster.”
“Yeah. I thought that might be the case,” Bruce says. “I mean, that idea’s out for a lot of other reasons anyway.”
Loki nods, but he doesn't interrupt. He knows there's more.
“But,” Bruce continues, “we are still gonna need your help, Loki.”
And there it is.
Loki sighs. He still doesn't put much, if any, faith in their ability to undo any of this, much less to defeat Thanos—the latter of which is all Loki can muster any kind of interest in, however impossible revenge may be.
He humors Bruce, though. “And why would you need me?”
“Because we’re not tracking down all the Infinity Stones,” says Bruce. “We just need one. The Time Stone.”
“I have no idea where the—”
“I know,” Bruce interrupts. “I know. None of us do. Shuri’s working on a way to track it down. And if anyone can figure out a way to find it, it's her, believe me.”
Loki turns to look directly at Bruce with an eyebrow raised. “So my question still stands.”
“Well… the idea is, if we can harness the Time Stone, we don't have to undo what happened. We can stop it from happening in the first place. We can bring the fight straight to Thanos before any of this even started.”
Loki blinks. He shakes his head, looking ahead toward the sunset again.
“That's… bold.”
“Bold’s about all we’ve got left to work with,” Bruce says. “Anyway, if it works, if we can do it, the best time to get to Thanos would be the last time he was in contact with Earth, which was—”
“Six years ago.”
Bruce nods. “Yeah.”
The pieces are falling into place.
Six years, well before Thanos descended upon their ship, before Asgard was ever on a ship in the first place, when Asgard was still whole and everyone was still alive. Thor, Heimdall, all of them. Even Odin. Even his mother.
It explains why they need him, anyway. Far easier to take down a tyrant when you have one of his pawns on your side.
Loki gulps.
“I take it there is a catch.”
Bruce hesitates. “You, uh… you want a list?”
-
The list is very, very long.
Bold was not quite the right word, Loki thinks.
Insane would probably fit better.
It takes them three months to track down the new location of the Time Stone, three months in which Queen Shuri prepares the absolutely absurd amount of safeguards and calculations and contraptions needed to actually use the damn thing. It takes yet another month of intergalactic travel before Stark returns with the tiny emerald Infinity Stone in hand.
Shuri shows them all of her calculations, all of her projections, shares with them every theory she has.
The Time Stone is not a time machine. It will not send them back as visitors from another time, so they will not be coming face-to-face with past versions of themselves. Instead they will be as they were at the time, fully immersed in their own pasts. So Stark will be missing all of his most recent technological advancements, putting him at a disadvantage. They also won't have the aid of Earth’s sorcerer or the Scarlet Witch, nor will they be able to enlist the help of Wakanda’s armies.
One risk is that it could not work at all. The stone has never, to any of their knowledge, been used for going back more than a few minutes.
If it does work, it could send them to the wrong day, the wrong month, the wrong year. They could be too late. They could be too early, and Loki could find himself back in the midst of his torture under Thanos.
Even if they arrive at the perfect moment, the strain from moving through time in the wrong direction could kill them all instantly.
And those are the milder outcomes. They could end up compressed and their consciousnesses scattered through the timestream, which none of their minds are equipped to handle without going mad. Even if they arrive completely unscathed, there’s the strain they may put on the timestream itself by accidentally changing fixed points.
“Focus on the objective at hand,” Shuri tells them for perhaps the millionth time as she makes the final preparations. “It will be tempting to change every terrible thing that has happened since then, but you must use restraint. Only go after Thanos. As for everything else, some changes are inevitable, but try to leave what you can untouched.”
It's absolutely insane. It's an insane, terrible, borderline idiotic idea, and he says as much, if only to be sure he's not the only one thinking it.
Romanov gives a tilt of her head in agreement.
Rogers shrugs, and he puts a hand on Loki’s shoulder like they've been allies for years, not just a few months.
“Maybe, but it's the only idea we’ve got.”
-
Everything is green, green, green as far as he can see.
His memory is utterly shot, his mind turned to putty. He has no recollection of how he got here, no understanding of anything but what he sees now—blurred images racing past, green, blue, green, orange, green, green, green, a stretching of his joints and muscles, a buzzing beneath his skin and then…
Solid ground rushes up to his feet. There is still a faint emerald tinge to everything around him, fading more slowly than he would like, but he starts to catch glimpses of his surroundings. There are trees, and bushes, and rocks.
Asgard?
No, no, that's not right. Why isn't that right?
It's dark, just past twilight, he thinks.
He’s walking without meaning to walk, marching up a rocky slope, moving as if being pulled by invisible strings.
“—worlds you've never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile!”
He hears the voice speaking before he realizes it's his own.
“I have seen the true power of the Tesseract,” he continues, barely thinking, just allowing the words to tumble from his lips without passing through his mind first, “and when I wield it…”
“Who showed you this power?”
His stomach lurches, and memories slam into his mind so quickly they seem to come all at once, too quickly to process, all out of order—so bad after all brother—a god, you dull creature—wouldn't want us to fight—answer to you, Lackey—birthright was to—realm no crevice no barren—saw you coming—mercy you don't deserve—
Thor stands in front of him, anger and betrayal rolling off of him in waves, but he’s whole and alive and why wouldn't he be alive?
Loki shakes his head, as if that will knock some of this whirlwind of memory back into place.
“Who controls the would-be King?”
Something in his chest tightens. He wants to vomit, or cry, or scream. Some instinct pulls at his throat, coaxes the words from him, and although the instinct is to shout it, spit the words in defiance, his voice is weak when it comes out, barely audible.
“I am a King.”
He hears the confusion in his voice, because that's not what he meant to say.
But he's finally starting to make sense of all this, finally starting to understand the memories dizzyingly racing through his consciousness.
This is Earth, not Asgard.
It’s six years into the past—his past.
The Time Stone brought him here. The Queen, Shuri, she got the calculation right. Almost to the hour.
At that moment Thor reaches for him, while his head is still spinning and he has no idea whether he's going to cry or faint, and suddenly there is a hand on the back of his neck, firm and grounding and familiar.
“Not here,” says Thor, quieter than Loki remembers, gentler, his eyes swimming with worry and there's two of them and his hair is still down to his shoulders and he's alive. “You give up the Tesseract, you give up this poisonous dream.”
Loki swallows the lump in his throat. He wants to interrupt, to tell Thor everything, but he can't make himself speak.
“You come home.”
He would have expected this to be more surreal, but it's not at all. It feels so real that it's almost overwhelming—because it is real, Thor is actually here, standing right in front of him, and Loki feels frozen in place with his heart ready to beat straight out of his chest.
You come home.
Loki forgets what he said to that, last time, and he has no idea whether he can trust his own voice. So he only nods.
Thor’s brow creases. He was not expecting acquiescence, at least not so quickly, but Loki can see the hope in his eyes, clear as day. A bit apprehensively he brings his other hand up to Loki’s shoulder and asks, “No tricks?”
Loki gulps again, and some more clear-headed part of him says that he really needs to sell this, really needs to convince Thor that he is not the enemy here, because as far as this Thor knows, he should be.
But he opens his mouth and finds himself unable to muster any clever words. His tongue feels like it's made of lead, his throat constricted, his eyes burning.
“Thor…”
And there must be something in his voice, something that triggers that ingrained brotherly instinct that Thor’s always had, because a second later Loki feels himself being tugged forward until Thor has both arms around him.
He can't help but tense up at the contact, but now not only can he see that Thor is alive but he can feel it, he can hear his heart thumping along, strong and steady, and Loki lets out a shaking breath and grips the back of Thor’s leathers.
“It’s alright,” says Thor, his voice quieter than the Thor of this time has any right to be.
Loki doesn’t say anything, he just tightens his hold and squeezes his eyes shut. He only needs a moment, he tells himself. The time travel was disorienting, and the sudden appearance of his dead brother was a bit much for him to handle all at once.
He just needs a moment.
“We will make this right, all of it. I promise,” Thor says, one hand on the back of Loki’s head now, readily assuming his role of older brother even though he has no idea what needs to be made right at all. “Norns, Loki, I truly thought you were dead.”
Loki almost laughs at the irony of that, but it comes out more like a choked off sob.
“I know,” he mumbles into Thor’s shoulder. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright,” Thor says again. “It’s fine. Let’s just… let’s just get you home.”
Home. The thought of Asgard—whole, untouched by Hela or by Surtur’s flames, even if it may still be destined to meet that fate in six years’ time—tugs at something within Loki and almost, for a moment, makes him forget everything. It almost makes him forget that they have other pressing matters to attend to.
He takes another slow breath to steel himself and finally pulls away, running a hand over his face to get some semblance of control over his own expression.
Then he plants both hands firmly on Thor’s shoulders, looking him in the eyes.
“We will,” he promises. “We will go home, I swear it. But not yet. First…”
And then he smiles, because finally, finally, he thinks this might actually be possible.
“First, we have a tyrant to kill.”