Seven Devils (Ship of Nails, Part 10)
Oct. 18th, 2020 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coldsong“Don’t mistake me,” Loki says. “Time travel or not, if you go into this thinking of it as a continuation of the last battle, you will lose. That die has been cast and the consequences cannot be undone.”
“You just said that other Thor and the others brought everyone back in their world,” Banner says, and he’s frowning, mildly impatient, but trying to understand. “So what are you trying to tell us to do, here?”
Nearly all of the faces around the table are hostile. Loki rarely minds that, but for some reason this has given him a mild attack of nerves. Maybe it’s because he’s in Jotun form. He feels naked in the blue skin, even with the layers of clothing he wears. He glances over to where Thor stands in the corner, fidgeting with the frayed ends of his sleeves. If it weren’t Loki here, his last family, the Trickster is convinced he would not have come.
“He’s talkin’ about the people, not the fight,” says Rocket, and he looks no less sullen and wary than those who know Loki better, but apparently he’s capable of picking through the silver-tongued semantics. Or maybe he’s just more accustomed to collaborating with hostile and/or amoral forces. Space does that, Loki knows. “You can’t un-lose a war.”
“But you can travel through time and resurrect the dead?” Natasha’s voice is like steel. It’s a challenge, not a question.
“Yeah,” Tony pipes up, “sorry, but multiversal dimensional hub aside, you’re not offering us much proof to back you up on this. If Cap didn’t have the same ‘Nexus’ story, I wouldn’t believe anything coming out of your mouth right now.”
“It, uh…it is kind of a hard sell,” Bruce agrees quietly.
“It’s not like we have a ton of alternative suggestions, though,” Rocket puts in.
“Which is why you have not yet turned me over to the United Nations to be tried for war crimes, yes, I understand.” Loki folds his arms across his chest. “Please, you may find my explanation unsatisfying and perhaps vague, but follow it to the end. The Infinity Stones are exactly what they purport to be. Some legends claim they burst into being at the birth of the universe. Others say they were…some sort of anomaly, a set of singularities that pre-existed creation itself, but were tamed and shaped into gems by cosmic entities after the universe formed. I cannot tell you how true any of that is. The entities may exist or they may be mere symbols of forces we cannot fully comprehend: Death, Entropy, Infinity, and Eternity.”
“Four horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Bucky mutters under his breath.
“The point of the matter is that the Stones are as they are labeled. They are infinite forces bound into finite shapes.”
Steve clears his throat, glances at Thor for a fraction of a second, and says, “But they were destroyed. He…we already tried to get a hold of them ourselves—"
No one misses the way Thor seems to shrink within his own skin. Bucky casually pushes his chair back from the table and goes to stand next to the god.
“I’m aware,” Loki says. “But destroying the Time stone did not destroy Time. The Tesseract, the Space Stone, controls and personifies physical space and movement through it, but we can still walk across the room or launch a ship toward the moon. What was destroyed was the physical, finite representation of forces that have existed, and will continue to exist, until existence itself unravels.”
There’s a momentary silence, which Tony breaks. “I’d call that pretty vague and unsatisfying. Is there more?”
Loki makes an irritated noise in the back of his throat, but his gaze strays toward where his brother is standing, with Bucky close by, leaning casually against the wall so his shoulder touches Thor’s. “I need you to look outside a mortal perspective for a moment. I mean no insult, this time—we are all mortal here, to one degree or another. We each have a timeline, a story, and each of us is the hero of our own tale. But the Infinity Stones are immortal in the truest sense. They are not bound to time or space, to mind or power or reality, or soul. They are not a part of our stories. We are a part of theirs.”
“Their forms were shattered, but infinity is unbreakable, a story without end. This chapter, that of Life, has been forcibly closed, but we may re-enter the story and write a new chapter.”
“You have lost this battle, this War, but there is a chance that a new action may succeed.”
Several people begin to speak at once.
“Okay, so, great talk, but I got things to do,” Rocket says.
“Yeah, no, that’s a pretty good philosophical point, but I’m not seeing how to put it into action…” Banner trails off uncertainly.
“I’m gonna need to see the math on this one,” Tony puts in.
And Natasha leans forward, fixing a calm gaze on Loki and murmurs, “I want to know what you think you have to gain by this.”
“Hey!” Steve’s voice cuts through the chatter. “Shut up a second.” It’s hard to tell who he’s addressing, but habits evidently die hard. All the Avengers fall silent, Rocket pauses in his tracks, and even Loki goes still to look at him.
“Tony,” Steve says. “You think you can repair the PINpoint, right?”
“Sure, it’ll be a cakewalk. You want to go talk to this other Thor?”
“No, but we already know the PINpoint can bring a person through space and time, and across dimensions. If what Loki says is true, and this parallel world retrieved the stones from the past, there’s no reason we can’t do the same thing with the technology we have in front of us.”
“I think the ‘if’ is what we’re mostly having trouble with,” Tony says. “It’s not risk-free, is the thing. If we alter the past, best case scenario is we create a whole new branching timeline.”
“Which is why it must be done carefully,” Loki says. “By deceiving your past selves. Did I gain the reputation I possess by being a deceiver or not?”
“And you want us to believe your idea isn’t to set yourself up with all the Gems, or kill us, or take over the planet.” Natasha’s voice is neutral this time.
“Honestly. the thought did cross my mind,” he tells her. “But now that I’m here, I find what I want most is to return to my children. I don’t plan to make any more grandiose attempts to rule the universe at least until they’ve all graduated from school.”
That’s far more tongue-in-cheek from his perspective than it sounds from theirs, alas, but if it does the job, it doesn’t matter how psychotic they believe him to be.
“Can you tell us, in detail, exactly what the other Avengers did?” Bruce asks.
Loki hesitates. “I deliberately avoided learning some of the details, myself. And others I know, but telling you them creates risks. What I can say, is that the surviving Avengers separated into several groups to retrieve the gems from the past. All were successful, but not all came back alive. And afterward, after the mission succeeded, there was another battle, with…several casualties.”
“Thanos returned,” Thor says so suddenly everyone in the room starts a little. He sounds wrecked, distraught, but also focused, in a way that he hasn’t for some time. “That’s what happened, isn’t it, Brother? He returned from death?”
Loki draws in his breath in a soft hiss and lets it out again. “Not quite. I know not how, but he was alerted at some point in the past, and brought himself to the present to fight once more.”
“So, we time travel to defeat him, then he time travels to defeat us…what stops this from becoming a thing that we keep doing forever?” Rocket is standing against the wall now, a few feet from Bucky, arms crossed.
Loki says, “Would you stand against successive versions of him, for eternity, if need be? For Life’s sake? For the sake of your loved ones? This is why I say you must look at it as a new fight, not a chance to win the last one. There is no promised happy ending. He may be defeated and never return. He may win, and you may yet find a way to fight once more. He may die and another version may return again, but to him it will always be the same battle, because all he has had for a long, long time is obsession.”
“It does not have to be you. Any of you. But you’ve fought for Life’s sake before, have you not?”
“I’m in.” It should be of surprise to no one that Steve Rogers is the first to speak up, to commit in the face of unending battle with limited chance of success. I can do this all day.
“It has to be enough,” he adds, when the others look at him. “Win or lose, live or die, it has to be enough to stand up, for the sake of being one of the ones standing.”
Tony’s frowning, but the quirk of his brow as he eyes Steve isn’t as cold as it was a few days ago. “This far and no further?” he asks.
Something flickers in Steve’s face; he looks awkward, almost apologetic, but then he nods.
“So we’re going into this fight braced to lose?” Rocket says. “Seems like a stupid plan, but that’s on-brand, I guess.”
“That means you’re in, I take it?” Loki manages not to smile at him.
“Nothin’ better to do.” Rocket shrugs his furry shoulders.
“What you’re actually saying,” Tony suggests, “is that we’re not fighting a war here. We’re fighting for survival.”
There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence, then Thor speaks up. “The world is dying. I can feel it. It will be slow…maybe some of you would not live to see the final act, if you live out a normal lifespan for your kind, but the ecosystem of this world is too damaged to recover. Some planets may fare better, but others may already be dead. H-his calculus…it was wrong. Horribly wrong.”
His voice shakes, but when Bucky puts a hand on his shoulder he clears his throat and takes a breath, adding: “I’ve been trying. With as much power as I can. It’s not enough.”
“Wait…you’ve been trying…what?” Banner looks like he wants to stand up and go to Thor, himself, but nerves or shyness holds him back.
“Thor is a fertility god,” Loki says. “Not just a god of war.”
“Perhaps if I had attended Mother’s lessons the way you did,” Thor begins, but Loki makes a soft shushing noise and says, “That past is another battle you cannot keep fighting.”
“So we don’t really have a choice here,” Natasha says grimly.
“Oh, you have all the choice in the world,” Loki says with a weak smile. “It’s just that none of the options are favorable.”
“Okay.” Tony says. “Double or nothing. Count me in.”
In the end, everyone else makes the same decision.
-------
“I need you to take this.” As the meeting disperses, Loki presses a device into Bruce’s hand.
“A flash drive?” He turns it in his fingers. “What’s on it?”
“A program. Spreadsheets. Algorithms. Mathematics beyond my comprehension, but not, I’m sure, beyond yours. I met a mathematician in the Nexus, told him our situation. He wrote this for me. There is a timeline. Potential ways to mitigate or slow the descent into extinction. Anything humanly possible has been taken into consideration, though I told him from the beginning I could not guarantee the parameters I gave him were accurate. And it will only apply to Earth-like worlds. Here, Alfheim, Vanaheim, a few others.”
“You didn’t mention this during the meeting.” He’s suspicious, and Loki supposes that’s fair.
“I didn’t know Thor was so keenly aware of what dire straits this planet is in. I was trying to spare him.”
“And you didn’t want us to choose this as an alternative to retrieving the Gems?”
“It isn’t an alternative. It’s triage, if our plans fail beyond recovery. That’s why I’m giving it to you. You have the intelligence to use it, and your alter ego is the most likely to survive if something goes wrong.”
Bruce stares at the device in his hand for a long moment, then says, “So, if the Universe goes completely to hell, what are the chances Hulk's last one standing?”
That’s a chilling thought. “I can’t answer that,” Loki says. “I truly don’t know. It might be best not to dwell on hypotheticals.”
“Yeah, everything’s hypothetical right now,” Banner gives him a look. “But I’ll try to keep my eye on the ball, not the looming existential horror.”
“That’s all anyone can ask.”
-------
“You didn’t ask where Barton was,” Natasha says when she catches Loki alone.
There’s a sting in his chest and he’s not sure why. Her tone isn’t even especially accusatory. Is it guilt, or a spider-bite?
“I have a guess,” he answers her quietly, and sits on the edge of the nearby steps to bring their heights closer to an even level.
“Maybe it’s better this way,” she says. “His wife and kids are gone, too.” She’s superlative at masking her emotions. He has no doubt she could smile and laugh convincingly right now if she had to, but all she’s showing him is an empty blank. Facts without sentiment.
He knows they were close. He wouldn’t have tried to use them against one another if they weren’t, way back when. She must be grieving beyond measure, but if he knows anything about her, he knows compassion from him would only bring her revulsion.
“To say I am sorry would merely desecrate his memory,” he says, careful to leech as much emotion and nuance from his own voice as he can. “But it gives me no joy to hear it.”
“Well. If this works and he comes back, he’s still going to want to kill you.”
“I’d prefer not to die, but I can’t begrudge him his hatred.”
She studies him a moment, then turns with a sigh. “I think I liked you better when you were taunting me from behind a cell wall.”
“Sorry,” he says with a smirk. “I try not to make the same mistake twice. There are so many new ones available to me, you see, and I have to try all of them.”
“No, I think it’s just the cell I miss,” she says.
“Ah, well I can’t accommodate you there, alas. You’ll just have to imagine it.”
There’s really nothing more to say, and she makes a move to leave. When she’s at the door, he makes a small sound in the back of his throat and says, “Agent Romanoff? Don’t go to Vormir.”
She doesn’t react, just leaves, but that may or may not mean she’s heard him. He’ll never know.
((Musical Inspiration))
“You just said that other Thor and the others brought everyone back in their world,” Banner says, and he’s frowning, mildly impatient, but trying to understand. “So what are you trying to tell us to do, here?”
Nearly all of the faces around the table are hostile. Loki rarely minds that, but for some reason this has given him a mild attack of nerves. Maybe it’s because he’s in Jotun form. He feels naked in the blue skin, even with the layers of clothing he wears. He glances over to where Thor stands in the corner, fidgeting with the frayed ends of his sleeves. If it weren’t Loki here, his last family, the Trickster is convinced he would not have come.
“He’s talkin’ about the people, not the fight,” says Rocket, and he looks no less sullen and wary than those who know Loki better, but apparently he’s capable of picking through the silver-tongued semantics. Or maybe he’s just more accustomed to collaborating with hostile and/or amoral forces. Space does that, Loki knows. “You can’t un-lose a war.”
“But you can travel through time and resurrect the dead?” Natasha’s voice is like steel. It’s a challenge, not a question.
“Yeah,” Tony pipes up, “sorry, but multiversal dimensional hub aside, you’re not offering us much proof to back you up on this. If Cap didn’t have the same ‘Nexus’ story, I wouldn’t believe anything coming out of your mouth right now.”
“It, uh…it is kind of a hard sell,” Bruce agrees quietly.
“It’s not like we have a ton of alternative suggestions, though,” Rocket puts in.
“Which is why you have not yet turned me over to the United Nations to be tried for war crimes, yes, I understand.” Loki folds his arms across his chest. “Please, you may find my explanation unsatisfying and perhaps vague, but follow it to the end. The Infinity Stones are exactly what they purport to be. Some legends claim they burst into being at the birth of the universe. Others say they were…some sort of anomaly, a set of singularities that pre-existed creation itself, but were tamed and shaped into gems by cosmic entities after the universe formed. I cannot tell you how true any of that is. The entities may exist or they may be mere symbols of forces we cannot fully comprehend: Death, Entropy, Infinity, and Eternity.”
“Four horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Bucky mutters under his breath.
“The point of the matter is that the Stones are as they are labeled. They are infinite forces bound into finite shapes.”
Steve clears his throat, glances at Thor for a fraction of a second, and says, “But they were destroyed. He…we already tried to get a hold of them ourselves—"
No one misses the way Thor seems to shrink within his own skin. Bucky casually pushes his chair back from the table and goes to stand next to the god.
“I’m aware,” Loki says. “But destroying the Time stone did not destroy Time. The Tesseract, the Space Stone, controls and personifies physical space and movement through it, but we can still walk across the room or launch a ship toward the moon. What was destroyed was the physical, finite representation of forces that have existed, and will continue to exist, until existence itself unravels.”
There’s a momentary silence, which Tony breaks. “I’d call that pretty vague and unsatisfying. Is there more?”
Loki makes an irritated noise in the back of his throat, but his gaze strays toward where his brother is standing, with Bucky close by, leaning casually against the wall so his shoulder touches Thor’s. “I need you to look outside a mortal perspective for a moment. I mean no insult, this time—we are all mortal here, to one degree or another. We each have a timeline, a story, and each of us is the hero of our own tale. But the Infinity Stones are immortal in the truest sense. They are not bound to time or space, to mind or power or reality, or soul. They are not a part of our stories. We are a part of theirs.”
“Their forms were shattered, but infinity is unbreakable, a story without end. This chapter, that of Life, has been forcibly closed, but we may re-enter the story and write a new chapter.”
“You have lost this battle, this War, but there is a chance that a new action may succeed.”
Several people begin to speak at once.
“Okay, so, great talk, but I got things to do,” Rocket says.
“Yeah, no, that’s a pretty good philosophical point, but I’m not seeing how to put it into action…” Banner trails off uncertainly.
“I’m gonna need to see the math on this one,” Tony puts in.
And Natasha leans forward, fixing a calm gaze on Loki and murmurs, “I want to know what you think you have to gain by this.”
“Hey!” Steve’s voice cuts through the chatter. “Shut up a second.” It’s hard to tell who he’s addressing, but habits evidently die hard. All the Avengers fall silent, Rocket pauses in his tracks, and even Loki goes still to look at him.
“Tony,” Steve says. “You think you can repair the PINpoint, right?”
“Sure, it’ll be a cakewalk. You want to go talk to this other Thor?”
“No, but we already know the PINpoint can bring a person through space and time, and across dimensions. If what Loki says is true, and this parallel world retrieved the stones from the past, there’s no reason we can’t do the same thing with the technology we have in front of us.”
“I think the ‘if’ is what we’re mostly having trouble with,” Tony says. “It’s not risk-free, is the thing. If we alter the past, best case scenario is we create a whole new branching timeline.”
“Which is why it must be done carefully,” Loki says. “By deceiving your past selves. Did I gain the reputation I possess by being a deceiver or not?”
“And you want us to believe your idea isn’t to set yourself up with all the Gems, or kill us, or take over the planet.” Natasha’s voice is neutral this time.
“Honestly. the thought did cross my mind,” he tells her. “But now that I’m here, I find what I want most is to return to my children. I don’t plan to make any more grandiose attempts to rule the universe at least until they’ve all graduated from school.”
That’s far more tongue-in-cheek from his perspective than it sounds from theirs, alas, but if it does the job, it doesn’t matter how psychotic they believe him to be.
“Can you tell us, in detail, exactly what the other Avengers did?” Bruce asks.
Loki hesitates. “I deliberately avoided learning some of the details, myself. And others I know, but telling you them creates risks. What I can say, is that the surviving Avengers separated into several groups to retrieve the gems from the past. All were successful, but not all came back alive. And afterward, after the mission succeeded, there was another battle, with…several casualties.”
“Thanos returned,” Thor says so suddenly everyone in the room starts a little. He sounds wrecked, distraught, but also focused, in a way that he hasn’t for some time. “That’s what happened, isn’t it, Brother? He returned from death?”
Loki draws in his breath in a soft hiss and lets it out again. “Not quite. I know not how, but he was alerted at some point in the past, and brought himself to the present to fight once more.”
“So, we time travel to defeat him, then he time travels to defeat us…what stops this from becoming a thing that we keep doing forever?” Rocket is standing against the wall now, a few feet from Bucky, arms crossed.
Loki says, “Would you stand against successive versions of him, for eternity, if need be? For Life’s sake? For the sake of your loved ones? This is why I say you must look at it as a new fight, not a chance to win the last one. There is no promised happy ending. He may be defeated and never return. He may win, and you may yet find a way to fight once more. He may die and another version may return again, but to him it will always be the same battle, because all he has had for a long, long time is obsession.”
“It does not have to be you. Any of you. But you’ve fought for Life’s sake before, have you not?”
“I’m in.” It should be of surprise to no one that Steve Rogers is the first to speak up, to commit in the face of unending battle with limited chance of success. I can do this all day.
“It has to be enough,” he adds, when the others look at him. “Win or lose, live or die, it has to be enough to stand up, for the sake of being one of the ones standing.”
Tony’s frowning, but the quirk of his brow as he eyes Steve isn’t as cold as it was a few days ago. “This far and no further?” he asks.
Something flickers in Steve’s face; he looks awkward, almost apologetic, but then he nods.
“So we’re going into this fight braced to lose?” Rocket says. “Seems like a stupid plan, but that’s on-brand, I guess.”
“That means you’re in, I take it?” Loki manages not to smile at him.
“Nothin’ better to do.” Rocket shrugs his furry shoulders.
“What you’re actually saying,” Tony suggests, “is that we’re not fighting a war here. We’re fighting for survival.”
There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence, then Thor speaks up. “The world is dying. I can feel it. It will be slow…maybe some of you would not live to see the final act, if you live out a normal lifespan for your kind, but the ecosystem of this world is too damaged to recover. Some planets may fare better, but others may already be dead. H-his calculus…it was wrong. Horribly wrong.”
His voice shakes, but when Bucky puts a hand on his shoulder he clears his throat and takes a breath, adding: “I’ve been trying. With as much power as I can. It’s not enough.”
“Wait…you’ve been trying…what?” Banner looks like he wants to stand up and go to Thor, himself, but nerves or shyness holds him back.
“Thor is a fertility god,” Loki says. “Not just a god of war.”
“Perhaps if I had attended Mother’s lessons the way you did,” Thor begins, but Loki makes a soft shushing noise and says, “That past is another battle you cannot keep fighting.”
“So we don’t really have a choice here,” Natasha says grimly.
“Oh, you have all the choice in the world,” Loki says with a weak smile. “It’s just that none of the options are favorable.”
“Okay.” Tony says. “Double or nothing. Count me in.”
In the end, everyone else makes the same decision.
-------
“I need you to take this.” As the meeting disperses, Loki presses a device into Bruce’s hand.
“A flash drive?” He turns it in his fingers. “What’s on it?”
“A program. Spreadsheets. Algorithms. Mathematics beyond my comprehension, but not, I’m sure, beyond yours. I met a mathematician in the Nexus, told him our situation. He wrote this for me. There is a timeline. Potential ways to mitigate or slow the descent into extinction. Anything humanly possible has been taken into consideration, though I told him from the beginning I could not guarantee the parameters I gave him were accurate. And it will only apply to Earth-like worlds. Here, Alfheim, Vanaheim, a few others.”
“You didn’t mention this during the meeting.” He’s suspicious, and Loki supposes that’s fair.
“I didn’t know Thor was so keenly aware of what dire straits this planet is in. I was trying to spare him.”
“And you didn’t want us to choose this as an alternative to retrieving the Gems?”
“It isn’t an alternative. It’s triage, if our plans fail beyond recovery. That’s why I’m giving it to you. You have the intelligence to use it, and your alter ego is the most likely to survive if something goes wrong.”
Bruce stares at the device in his hand for a long moment, then says, “So, if the Universe goes completely to hell, what are the chances Hulk's last one standing?”
That’s a chilling thought. “I can’t answer that,” Loki says. “I truly don’t know. It might be best not to dwell on hypotheticals.”
“Yeah, everything’s hypothetical right now,” Banner gives him a look. “But I’ll try to keep my eye on the ball, not the looming existential horror.”
“That’s all anyone can ask.”
-------
“You didn’t ask where Barton was,” Natasha says when she catches Loki alone.
There’s a sting in his chest and he’s not sure why. Her tone isn’t even especially accusatory. Is it guilt, or a spider-bite?
“I have a guess,” he answers her quietly, and sits on the edge of the nearby steps to bring their heights closer to an even level.
“Maybe it’s better this way,” she says. “His wife and kids are gone, too.” She’s superlative at masking her emotions. He has no doubt she could smile and laugh convincingly right now if she had to, but all she’s showing him is an empty blank. Facts without sentiment.
He knows they were close. He wouldn’t have tried to use them against one another if they weren’t, way back when. She must be grieving beyond measure, but if he knows anything about her, he knows compassion from him would only bring her revulsion.
“To say I am sorry would merely desecrate his memory,” he says, careful to leech as much emotion and nuance from his own voice as he can. “But it gives me no joy to hear it.”
“Well. If this works and he comes back, he’s still going to want to kill you.”
“I’d prefer not to die, but I can’t begrudge him his hatred.”
She studies him a moment, then turns with a sigh. “I think I liked you better when you were taunting me from behind a cell wall.”
“Sorry,” he says with a smirk. “I try not to make the same mistake twice. There are so many new ones available to me, you see, and I have to try all of them.”
“No, I think it’s just the cell I miss,” she says.
“Ah, well I can’t accommodate you there, alas. You’ll just have to imagine it.”
There’s really nothing more to say, and she makes a move to leave. When she’s at the door, he makes a small sound in the back of his throat and says, “Agent Romanoff? Don’t go to Vormir.”
She doesn’t react, just leaves, but that may or may not mean she’s heard him. He’ll never know.
((Musical Inspiration))