Chapter Text
“Order is important, stability is important. With the Avengers, we had an internal order, but nothing to direct our energies properly. Asgard long brought order to the Nine Realms, protecting them from chaos. I have seen the chaos and suffering that disorder brings, and I support the Sokovia Accords wholeheartedly.”
“What of the argument that some of the restrictions listed in the Accords are draconian, constituting cruel and unusual punishment for abilities that enhanced individuals cannot control-”
“If enhanced individuals cannot control their powers, then keeping them in a supervised, enclosed environment is not only the best thing for the general public, but for their own safety as well,” Ross interrupts before Thor could dwell on the question for too long. He falls silent, letting Tony take the next question, Ross the one after that. If the reporters at the press conference notice how quiet and sullen he seems, they do not call him out. It has been this way at others, no one ever comments.
“Have you had any leads as to the location of Captain-”
“If there are no more questions about the incident that occurred today in Central Park, or about how the new Avengers are being equipped to deal with these incidents, I think we can call it a day,” Ross says, rising from the table. “I for one have a very important dinner reservation and I might need to call out the Avengers to save me from my wife if I am late.” Titters rise from the gathered reports. “Thank you very much everyone, have a good night.” They leave the shimmering glass of the tower lobby behind, and go to a conference room. The jovial, relaxed performance dissipates. “Jesus Christ, Thor, you can’t even try to act like you’re not miserable.”
“That was not part of the deal. I come out, I defeat whatever enemy you point me at, I speak in favor of the Accords. I do not know what else you want from me.”
“I want you to at least pretend you’re not being dragged here kicking and screaming.”
“I am being dragged here.”
“Yes, that’s why I said pretend.” Ross sighs. “Look, it’s fine for now because no one has noticed, or at least no one’s commented. But if they start, you’re going to have to put in more effort.”
“Do tell me when they start and I’ll give it my best performance.” Thor turns his back then, crossing his arms over his chest and staring out the window at nothing.
“Fine. Your ride will be here in twenty minutes. They’ll escort you to the roof when its time to go home. Now I wasn’t kidding about my wife, she’ll kill me if I’m late again. I’ll see you later, Stark.” The room is left, very, very quiet, made more so by the silent fury streaming off of Thor.
“Are you going to talk to me this time?” Tony says quietly when he cannot take it any longer.
“No.”
“Look, Thor, I’m sorry-”
“You keep apologizing as though it is going to change anything.”
“I did what I had to do, to protect us, to protect Earth.”
“And I’ve said, a thousand times, you’re not paying attention. We are not the threat to the universe, it is Thanos-”
“We know. But there's no sign of him. And the danger is coming from us, from what we can do if we’re not careful. I spent most of my career destroying things, it’s finally time to be held accountable.”
Thor snorts. “Ah, so what you’re doing to us is accountability. I see. I have nothing more to say to you, Stark, so just leave me.”
“Okay. But I’m going to keep trying, big guy. I’m not going to give up on you.” Thor says nothing else. The door opens and closes and he is alone.
He does not move, looking out the window and thinking of nothing, until the guards knock.
“The plane is ready.” They escort him to the roof, where they board a sleek black jet. John, the supervising guard in charge of his imprisonment, is there waiting.
“It’s time.” Thor holds out his wrists and lets himself be handcuffed, then sits on the bench. “How’d it go?”
“Oh, you know,” He sighs. “Just a extra-dimensional sludge monster in the middle of New York. Then more reporters. The usual.”
“Ross said you behaved. So we’ll keep our promise.” Thor just nods.
The ride to the Raft is a quiet affair. When they finally disembark onto the prison, John asks him, “Do you want dinner, or to go down first?”
“Down.”
John hesitates, but calls the elevator. “I don’t know why you do this to yourself,” His guard says quietly as the descend. “I don’t know…if I could see someone I cared about like this.” Thor says nothing. He doesn’t know either. It’s hard, and every time they let him do this he returns to his cell swearing it’s going to be the last time. But every time they give him a new mission he inevitably says, “let me see him after.” The higher-ups put up with it; it’s an added insurance that Thor will return to the prison promptly and without struggle each time they let him out.
They reach the bottom floor, deep under the waves, and the alarm blares. There’s a curious, hesitant brush of Thor’s mind with magic. He struggles to keep his face neutral as his heart pounds with an odd mixture of fear and relief. John removes the cuffs and leads him to his brother’s cell, pressing his hand to the locking mechanism to let him in.
“Ten minutes,” He says. “Then it’s lights out.” The door slides shut behind him and the brothers are alone.
Loki’s head is down as he kneels, half suspended by the chains that secure him to the walls. Thor kneels before him and touches his neck. It’s awkward, trying to fit his hand in its familiar place around both the collar and the muzzle. Loki leans into the touch, quietly desperate for any contact.
“I’m back,” He says quietly. “Wasn’t too long this time.” Loki meets his eyes, his own wide and watery and shakes his head. “Someone called forward a sludge monster. Disgusting. Was easy enough to defeat.” He presses their foreheads together. Loki uses the contact to renew the connection between their magics, the only thing he could get around the bindings in the collar. Thor strokes his hair slowly, letting their magics mingle. The connection between them is unspoken because it doesn’t have to really be spoken anymore. Emotions, impressions, pass between them, Thor focusing on soothing.
Loki shivers, pressing closer. Thor embraces him around the chains, holding him with his nose buried in Loki’s hair as long as they will allow. Time is up, too fast.
“Okay, that’s it.”
Thor feels a spike of anxiety from Loki. “It’s alright, brother,” He whispers, squeezing him tight for a moment. “It’s alright.”
“Let’s go. Time for lights out.” The anxiety peaks into panic. Loki’s eyes grow wide and fearful and he whimpers, shaking his head. Thor forces himself to let him go. Loki strains for him, pulling against the chains. He just keeps shaking his head.
Thor can feel his heart racing. “It’s okay,” He says, pushing love and reassurance through their magic. “It’s okay.” They handcuff him and pull him away. John tries to hurry him along, but they don’t quite make it into the elevator before Loki’s guards cut the lights and the first panicked, muffled screams start.
“Shit, those assholes,” John mutters. “They always do that.” It wouldn’t have mattered, if they’d made it to the elevator before Loki was left wailing in the dark. Thor feels it in his bones, every single night.
“How long do you really think this can go on?” Thor says, a flash of anger burning through him. His voice is low, dangerous, and he has no doubt he’s being recorded in the elevator. But he can’t take it any more. John’s thin veneer of sympathy, the indignity of being bound and manipulated like this, in that moment all becomes too much. “How long do you really think you can hold us?” John says nothing. Thor spends the rest of the elevator ride back to the regular cells seething in fury, fantasizing about spattering blood and brains over the walls of this prison. He had not been one to indulge in such violent dreams, that was always the province of Loki’s imagination, but this caging is the final straw it seems.
He is returned to the small cell. A bed, a sink. The walls and ceiling and floor all painted the same dull grey, the fourth wall clear plexiglass through which he can see other, empty cells. He is utterly alone. He has been since he arrived, only ever seeing guards in the halls. He can hear things from above sometimes, loud crashes, possible inhuman screams, but he doesn’t dare ask. The months have passed, slowly, with a mind-numbing daily routine and occasional ventures out into the real world to fight off various Earthly threats.
There is no sign of Thanos. No one will believe his warnings.
When he dwells too long on the Titan, out there in the stars somewhere, he finds himself breaking into a cold sweat. So he pushes it aside, doesn’t think about it. He can do nothing about it, after all, not in here, so it’s no use to dwell.
He definitely, definitely doesn’t think of Heimdall, or the Valkyrie, or the remnant of his people. He simply cannot.
Across the tiny floor, Thor paces, working off the anger building since the press conference. He manages to compose himself enough to clear his mind, and allow Loki’s magic to draw them together. He feels, foremost, Loki’s fear of being blind and bound in the dark, and his own heartbeat increases in kind. Through the fog of panic, he pushes comfort and reassurance. He closes his eyes and tries to focus on a memory of their shared childhood. There’s a lullaby their mother used to sing to him that he’s forgotten half the words to, but he can remember the melody, the softness of the blankets under his cheek, and the warmth of the fire. It’s enough, with the magic and Loki’s own memories, to work without most of the lyrics. Loki’s panic settles after a while.
Thor lays on his back in the cell and hums the old lullaby to himself as he falls asleep.
Lightyears away, a woman drains the rest of a bottle of alcohol that burns her throat as it goes down. She tosses the bottle aside and cracks the next open.
“Brunnhilde.” She grunts in response. “You must stop doing this to yourself.”
She laughs. “Why should I? What else do I have left, Watcher?” The Valkyrie staggers to her feet, stumbling back. “I could just stay kneeling here, reciting the mourning prayer over and over and over again but I’ll never run out of people to mourn so why bother?” She kicks the empty bottle and feels a perverse satisfaction as it shatters against the wall.
“I watched the princes grow, I watched them from their first steps,” Heimdall says. “I know your pain.”
“Do you? Because I’ve endured this pain twice.” She laughs and it is bitter and jagged. “Lo, there I do see my sisters. Lo, there I do see my brothers.” Her breath hitches. “I’ve lost everything twice.”
“And lo, there I see my people, back to the beginning,” Heimdall continues. “There is still them.”
“Half an already decimated population, children and farmers and old women, the royal line obliterated. Our last mage, the last carrier of Asgard’s magic,” Her voice cracks. “Gone.”
“It’s not nothing. And Bruce is still alive.”
“You presume. You sent him to Earth, where Thanos could have picked him up, slaughtered him like he did…like he did…” Her voice breaks and she wavers on her feet. “Norns.”
Heimdall is patient. He sits with her as she drinks the rest of the bottle, as she begins to weep, watching her as she passes out on the floor.
In the morning, she gets up, vomits up the residual alcohol and stumbles back to her cold and silent room. In a few hours, she’ll get up and do the work of governing foisted on her by the deaths of the last authority figures Asgard had known. If she closes her eyes, head still spinning with the drink, she almost can hear the soft noises of Bruce snoring beside her, of Thor and Loki whispering to each other in the dark as they sometimes did.
Ghosts, all of them. Haunting her. The Valkyrie Queen of Asgard. The Valkyrie Queen of the Dead.
It’s time to rule.
There’s a group of old men in the corner, playing dominoes. Natasha keeps one eye on them, the other on the TV screen. Steve is entirely focused on the screen.
“…’I have seen the chaos that disorder brings, and I support the Accords wholeheartedly.’ Secretary Ross had no comment on the whereabouts of fugitive Steve Rogers, who has not been seen or heard from since the conflict that erupted between he and Iron Man in Germany last May…”
“I’ve seen enough,” Steve says and nods at the bartender. He switches it to a football game, the commentators speaking in rapid-fire Spanish. The old men are much more interested in the game than they had been in the news, and start chattering in Catalan.
“What do you think? You still think he’s faking it.”
“There’s no way Thor would give in to the Accords that easily. ‘The chaos that disorder brings,’ does that sound like him?”
“Steve, do you really believe that he wouldn’t take Tony’s side…or do you want to believe it?”
“Come on, Nat, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of us really knew Thor that well.”
“I did.”
“You thought you did. Thor is like 1500 years old, he was the crown prince of a realm that considered its kings on the level of gods. It would make sense that he would be pro-organized authority.”
“But why would he surrender that authority to a bunch of mortals? Like you said, they think their kings are gods, why would he surrender that to Ross?” Steve runs a hand through his hair. “Something just feels wrong about this, Nat.”
She sighs. “I know. What do you want us to do?”
“Can you get us tapped back into their communications?”
“I can. It will be easier the closer we are to Rota. Seville should be close enough.” Nat leans back against the bar and drains the rest of her beer. “There’s a bus that leaves at 6:30 tomorrow morning that will get us there in seven hours.”
Steve smiles. “And how did you already know that?”
“We’ve been on the run for a while now, Rogers, I know how you think.” She sighs. “I want you to be prepared for if Thor’s being genuine, if he truly signed the Accords. I don’t want you to feel betrayed.”
“I know. I don’t need you to protect me.”
“I know.” Natasha shrugs. “I want to.”
“Wanda and Sam-”
“Due back at midnight.”
“We have some time, if you want to…”
Natasha grins. “Sounds like a plan.”
They slip to a quiet warehouse on the edge of the city to spar until they’re both exhausted and bruised. Afterwards, Steve feels just a little better. Natasha seems unaffected.
“You’re sure about this?” She asks, sipping a bottle of water. “You’re sure you want to wade back in, for Thor?”
Steve sighs and looks out at the city.
“I can’t do anything else.”