The Last Ship (Ship of Nails, Part 14)
Mar. 22nd, 2021 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coldsongThe surface of the sea in Hel is eerie, as restless and wild as any worldly ocean, but the troughs of the waves are deep and pointed, and the peaks are rounded rolling hills. Far below, a thin grey light shimmers in the depths. It is as if, Loki realizes after several moments of staring, one is at the bottom of the water looking up, rather than on the surface looking down.
It isn’t as cold as he would have thought.
But he shivers anyway, as soon as he sees the figures standing on the shore, because he knows, without introduction, who they are. He’s seen them in the faces of two of his children. He’s heard their stories, not just in whispered memory from Sigrid and in Eindrid’s tears, but by asking questions of the other Aesir survivors, because he made it his business to learn everything he could about these two vital elements of his son and daughter’s past.
“Kåre,” he says. “The fisher. And Revna, the shipwright.”
The two shades are startled to be known at a glance, and there is visible hesitation as they look at him, their Jotun Prince, red-eyed and clad in ice. Even to the Aesir and Vanir most sympathetic to him, he is sure he is a frightening sight. He swallows down the pain that threatens to rise from his chest and into his throat, and says softly, “I know your children well.”
There’s a flare of hope in Revna’s eyes, and he can’t bear to look at it. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know, whether Sigrid and Eindrid are alive in this universe, or whether they perished like so many others in the attack on the Statesman, or in the Decimation afterward. But it’s clear they are not here. That could mean they live, adopted by other guardians, or it could mean they are at rest in Folkvangr.
“It’s complicated,” he says. But when he starts to explain the Nexus in halting, stilted words, Revna hushes him.
“You love them,” she says. “Keep loving them.”
“Until the stars die,” he promises, and means it more than anything he’s ever said.
------
In giant-wrath does the serpent writhe;
O'er the waves he twists, and the tawny eagle
Gnaws corpses screaming; Naglfar is loose.
“It’s not actually made of nails, is it?” He asks Revna as she leads him up the beach. The shape ahead is vast, glittering and ghostly, and he’s never seen anything that looked less like a ship. There are no sails; the prow is as thin as a knife’s edge, and it arcs upward into the darkness so far he can scarcely see the end. Lines of intricate arches and buttresses make up the hull; there are skeletal divots and jagged projections ; some of it seems barely to rest on the water at all. But at the stern, there are wings. Hundred upon hundreds of bony fingers stretched out behind the ship, radius and ulna and wrist bone melting into the pallor of the masts and rails and rigging, lacking nothing but muscle and skin and feathers.
“Naglfar,” she says, “is made mostly of will. There’s nothing else strong enough to work with here.”
She looks at her husband, and then to Loki, “I had meant for it to carry Kåre on these waters. Once a seaman, always a seaman. He’s restless.”
“As if I’d go anywhere without her,” the man smiles faintly. “But helping to build it has been an adventure.”
“The only thing is, it can’t be steered,” Revna says. “Not yet, at least. The wings have no feathers or membranes.”
Shimmering snow cloaks his skin, armor made with plate and boning of unbreakable ice. Loki holds out his arms and lets frost spiral forth from him in tumbling white ringlets, grey sheets, and blue, jagged points. “I think,” he says. “I can complete those details for you.”
O'er the sea from the north there sails a ship
With the people of Hel, at the helm stands Loki;
Stitch by stitch, drop by icy drop, strand by seidr strand. Loki will never be able to guess how long the work has taken, but he will remember every second as if it were a year. Did Ran know, he wonders, that his Jotun powers would be needed for this? Was her demand to hold his Aesir skin really a boon?
“It’s better not to ask those questions,” Heimdall tells him with a wry smile, though Loki hadn’t realized he spoke aloud just then. “Those secrets don’t come free. Not from a goddess.”
The shades come aboard. Faces he knows, faces he does not recognize. The dead from the Statesman, the dead who fell by Hela’s hand, the dead of centuries before who left the Realms with business incomplete.
Failures and fuck-ups, heartbroken and bitter, world-weary yet unable to let go. Unwilling to be defeated by fate. The weight of the vessel increases, and Loki feels every step on its deck.
There is pain, then, though he doesn’t stop his work. The ends of the feathers of ice on the ship’s wings are tinged red and indigo with his blood. They’re beautiful. The ship is beautiful. He is beautiful.
When Ebony Maw trained him, early on in his time with the Black Order, one of the things he did was to force surge after surge of magical energy through his body, pushing the limits of Loki’s ability to control and hold it. The pain was excruciating, but it was also strangely exhilarating, embracing the forces of creation even as they tore holes in his physical form. He knows now it was not meant as education so much as testing to see whether he could hold and wield the scepter containing the Mind Stone, whether he could physically lay hands on the Tesseract, whether his body could bear the stress of touching two Infinity Gems at once. He passed those tests. This is reminiscent; there is a roar of adrenaline in his ears as the wings stir and quiver at last. On the ship of the dead, he has never felt more alive.
------
Out in the night the nightmares ride;
And the nightmares’ hooves draw near.
Dead men pummel the panes outside,
And the living quake with fear.
Only when a person is wrenched apart, joint by joint, tendon by bloody, aching tendon, can they see the infinite stretch of stars between their bones; the Void exists within and without. Loki’s weakness is his strength. His death is his salvation. His failure is his triumph.
Every step is agony as he advances to the helm of the ship and puts his hands on the wheel. He’s smiling. “Heimdall,” he says softly, “I think I am ready, if you are.”
“Wait!” Revna comes to his side and presses something into his hand. It’s a small thing, a circle of bone carved with runes and the symbols of crashing waves. “Give this to my children. When they want Naglfar, it will belong to them.”
“The ones I’m raising are not from the same world you come from,” Loki tells her, gentle as he can be in the face of the screaming adrenaline. “Would you have me give this to them?”
“Yes,” she says. “They’ll need it, either way. Besides,” she smiles, “I can always build another, and another…as many more as they need, in any world they dwell in.”
“Eindrid will be the mariner,” he tells her, grateful to be able to pass this gift along. “This will mean everything to him. But Sigrid will hold it in trust until he’s old enough to have it. Or perhaps they will sail it together some day.”
And then he adds: “I promise you, I may fail everyone else, hurt everything else I touch, but I will always love and care for them.”
She puts her hand on his head, a benediction, and he’s reminded of his own mother. “I believe you,” she says. Later, he will recall those words and that gentleness, and cry.
But now, the mooring lines of the ship give way with a thunderous snap, and Hel itself lurches around them.
No other sound could be so deafening. Loki is sure of that. Chains clash and clang, ice wails and groans, and the razor prow of the ship cuts into the gloom, once, twice, again, again, until Hel bleeds light. Then, they are all one thing: Loki, and the ship, and the dead that ride her. They are an eldritch, many-eyed being straining with ferocious determination, hellbent on battle.
Loki can smell the ozone even before they pierce the spectral portal Heimdall etches in the air before them. The fight has begun, and Thor must be a part of it. Lightning splits the sky, illuminating Thanos’ hulking form, and Loki’s heart lurches into overdrive as the tableau on the battlefield below meets his eyes.
There are only three of them, the rest of the Avengers buried in rubble. Thor is crumpled between the debris, wounded, Stormbreaker just out of his reach. Bucky Barnes lies stunned nearby, arm twitching as he tries to force himself to rise. But the light--there is light crackling across the sky, and dancing around Mjolnir. Who knew a warhammmer could rise from the dead? But that is somehow less significant to Loki’s eyes than the small hand holding it.
It’s Rogers, but not as he last saw him. The man has lost nearly a foot in height, and almost all of his bulk. His jaw is narrower, limbs fine-boned and frail, back crooked and awkward, but he is on his feet, and he’s holding the hammer and the power within like he was born to it.
He’s going to die, Loki thinks as Thanos staggers to his feet and makes a lunge for Steve, leading with a massive blade, but whatever has happened to Captain America, he’s retained valuable body memory and battlefield instinct. He dodges, letting the hammer carry him, letting the lightning energy do the work that his small body could not do without shattering. He’s fast, and he doesn’t stop to rest for a split second, darting out of range of another swing, hitting back—it’s like watching a hummingbird attack a grizzly bear, and feeling that the hummingbird has a reasonable chance of winning due to sheer speed and bloody-mindedness.
But it can’t last. Rogers tires fast in his diminished form, too fast, and a blow from Thanos’ fist catches him in the right shoulder. The force must be shattering. He cannot hold onto the hammer; it drops, and Steve does too, curled around what must be a shoulder broken in a dozen places.
Thor and Bucky are recovering, the latter staggering forward as if prepared to tackle Thanos bodily to save his friend, despite whatever injury he may have taken himself, and Loki can taste the desperation on his tongue.
This is the trouble with heroism. You give and give until your body gives out beneath you, until you lie broken on the ground, and whether you are lauded or mourned or forgotten then is nothing more than cruel, nihilistic chance.
But they are through the portal now, the icy shape of Naglfar hanging in the sky, and the shadow passes over Thanos, dimming the edge of his upraised sword. He looks up, and his eyes go wide.
“HERE!” Loki shouts, and he is no Thor; his hand will never wield Mjolnir, but his voice splits the sky like a bolt, and in the breathless split-seconds that follow, the icy wings of the ship roar like thunder.
“HERE!” Skurge yells, echoing, raising his own blade, and the screams of the dead join his voice. They hiss and shriek and crash down around the Titan like an ocean overflowing its own shores. The shades pour from the ship, cascading from the sky into the fray, and the ghosts of the Valkyrior wheel overhead, diving to join them.
Shadow looms as Thanos’ forces rally around him, and then, at last, red-gold light bursts forth from all directions as portals open, and the rest of the heroes appear. The poetic last stand that Loki warned them was inevitable.
This, he thinks, is more like Ragnarok than Ragnarok was.
------
The shades leave the ship. Even Heimdall leaps clear and into the fray below, and Loki silently blesses him for it; he will stand by Thor, and his brother will be stronger for it. From where he stands, bound to Naglfar, he can see little of the battle below, himself, but here and there are flashes of familiar faces, the ring of voices he knows for good or ill. The Hulk. Peter Parker. Stark.
When the Leviathan wheel toward him, he braces himself, and the frozen wings of the ship rattle like those of a hawk threatening a rival. Though almost a living creature itself, Naglfar is not as maneuverable as these nightmare creatures. They come for him, and Loki’s best strategy is the reckless headlong aggression he used to criticize in Thor and in his former enemies who battle below. He clenches his hands on the helm and feeds seidr through every nail and bone, and dives.
The prow slices into the first beast. He can feel it severing metal , can feel the skull crack, the shower of ichor. When he was a boy, Thor and his friends used to laugh at his magic, his careful strategies that kept him out of the heart of a fight. Illusion. Bolts thrown from a distance. Tricks and spells. You fight without fighting, Fandral told him once.
It’s a good way to never lose, he’d countered.
It’s a good way to never win, either. He meant it as a joke, Loki thinks now. Fandral always joked and his jokes had barbs. At the time it felt a lot like being called a coward.
That was when he took up the daggers. More than any weapon with range, when you fight with short blades, there is a kind of intimacy with your enemy. You see their face. You feel their flesh part and tear when you cut them. You feel the jolt vibrate through metal and up your arm when you scrape against bone. It is utterly visceral; hard, then, to forget the feel of the person you’ve slain. Using daggers made him no less circumspect as a fighter when he was young, but centuries passing hardened him to the physicality of it. Now, as he feels the ship carve thorough alien flesh, he feels that dark intimacy all over again. He cannot stop.
But he is outnumbered. One monster falls. Another, a third, a fourth…but there are more, so many more, and it’s only a matter of time before two of them trap him between them, and then—then he can feel everything as their mouths close on him, as the weapons mounted on their backs fire into the wings of the ship. His ice tears; the hull of the ship cracks; the bloodied prow shatters, and it feels like his own body is torn limb from limb.
He falls. And he’s not sure how high he was, not sure how mortal he is any longer, not sure what will happen when pieces of him hit the ground—but there is light, light and ozone, a physical jolt and an arm around him. When the white haze of agony clears and he can see again, it’s Thor’s face that he sees, eyes wide with anxiety, his lips forming Loki’s name. Loki can’t hear his voice over the battle around them and the ringing in his ears, but he takes a breath and sits up and presses their foreheads together hard enough to bruise. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Go, they need you.”
There’s a movement to his left, and when he looks, Rogers is there, pale as milk, with an arm bound loosely to his side, but awake and speaking. This voice, Loki can hear: “I’ve got him.”
Thor nods, and goes, and it’s patently ridiculous that a small, wounded human thinks he can defend an injured god, but somehow Loki doesn’t doubt he’d try.
“You look different,” he tells Steve shakily.
“New haircut,” the man quips back.
“It suits you,” he says.
There’s a pause, like Steve isn’t sure how to take that, and then he asks: “Are you okay?”
“Always,” Loki tells him, although he’s not sure if he can get up quite yet. “I can’t die. Are you?”
“I won’t die,” Steve says.
“Good,” Loki says, and begins drawing seidr once again, through the pain of jarred bones and seared muscle. “Then we’re bound to win eventually.”
------
And they do. They do win. The price is high. Loki hangs back as the others bid their farewells to Stark. It’s all he can do for a man who never trusted him and had been given no solid reason to change his mind. It feels alienating. Sad in a strange, selfish way. He wishes he had the right to mourn with them.
“I know,” Heimdall says, and sits beside him, golden eyes glowing and casting strange shadows on the ice that covers Loki’s skin. “You don’t belong to this world any more. You’re feeling that.”
“I don’t think I ever belonged to their world,” he nods at the grieving Avengers.
“No. But it’s more than that now.”
Loki is silent for a moment, then asks, “How do we tell Thor that we cannot stay?”
“We came with the Shades of Hel. He knows.”
Loki turns and walks slowly away from the scene as he feels the last threads of life depart from Stark’s body, and Heimdall follows.
“The world of the living goes on without the dead,” Loki says. “Even with scars of loss and horror. I suppose that’s just the way things are.”
“Most of the time,” Heimdall shrugs. Then: “You wanted to strike that last blow yourself, didn’t you? At Thanos. You wanted vengeance.”
“I want a lot of things,” Loki answers. “There was a time I would have given anything for revenge. That time passed. And there are many, many others who deserved the final blow as much as I, or more. The important thing is that Thanos’ story is over.”
“You came a long way to play a small part in the end of this story,” Heimdall tells him. “What did you come for, if not retribution?”
There is a fragment of iced-over bone at Loki’s feet, and he crouches to pick it up. The energy thrums in the core of the bone, where the marrow would be, and he turns it in his fingers. Naglfar is shattered, but not destroyed. He’ll see it restored, for the sake of his children.
“Family,” he answers Heimdall belatedly. “I think.”
And he grows so busy then, eyes and energies searching the field for more pieces of the ship, that he doesn’t see the spirit smile.
[Musical Inspiration]
It isn’t as cold as he would have thought.
But he shivers anyway, as soon as he sees the figures standing on the shore, because he knows, without introduction, who they are. He’s seen them in the faces of two of his children. He’s heard their stories, not just in whispered memory from Sigrid and in Eindrid’s tears, but by asking questions of the other Aesir survivors, because he made it his business to learn everything he could about these two vital elements of his son and daughter’s past.
“Kåre,” he says. “The fisher. And Revna, the shipwright.”
The two shades are startled to be known at a glance, and there is visible hesitation as they look at him, their Jotun Prince, red-eyed and clad in ice. Even to the Aesir and Vanir most sympathetic to him, he is sure he is a frightening sight. He swallows down the pain that threatens to rise from his chest and into his throat, and says softly, “I know your children well.”
There’s a flare of hope in Revna’s eyes, and he can’t bear to look at it. He doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know, whether Sigrid and Eindrid are alive in this universe, or whether they perished like so many others in the attack on the Statesman, or in the Decimation afterward. But it’s clear they are not here. That could mean they live, adopted by other guardians, or it could mean they are at rest in Folkvangr.
“It’s complicated,” he says. But when he starts to explain the Nexus in halting, stilted words, Revna hushes him.
“You love them,” she says. “Keep loving them.”
“Until the stars die,” he promises, and means it more than anything he’s ever said.
------
O'er the waves he twists, and the tawny eagle
Gnaws corpses screaming; Naglfar is loose.
“It’s not actually made of nails, is it?” He asks Revna as she leads him up the beach. The shape ahead is vast, glittering and ghostly, and he’s never seen anything that looked less like a ship. There are no sails; the prow is as thin as a knife’s edge, and it arcs upward into the darkness so far he can scarcely see the end. Lines of intricate arches and buttresses make up the hull; there are skeletal divots and jagged projections ; some of it seems barely to rest on the water at all. But at the stern, there are wings. Hundred upon hundreds of bony fingers stretched out behind the ship, radius and ulna and wrist bone melting into the pallor of the masts and rails and rigging, lacking nothing but muscle and skin and feathers.
“Naglfar,” she says, “is made mostly of will. There’s nothing else strong enough to work with here.”
She looks at her husband, and then to Loki, “I had meant for it to carry Kåre on these waters. Once a seaman, always a seaman. He’s restless.”
“As if I’d go anywhere without her,” the man smiles faintly. “But helping to build it has been an adventure.”
“The only thing is, it can’t be steered,” Revna says. “Not yet, at least. The wings have no feathers or membranes.”
Shimmering snow cloaks his skin, armor made with plate and boning of unbreakable ice. Loki holds out his arms and lets frost spiral forth from him in tumbling white ringlets, grey sheets, and blue, jagged points. “I think,” he says. “I can complete those details for you.”
With the people of Hel, at the helm stands Loki;
Stitch by stitch, drop by icy drop, strand by seidr strand. Loki will never be able to guess how long the work has taken, but he will remember every second as if it were a year. Did Ran know, he wonders, that his Jotun powers would be needed for this? Was her demand to hold his Aesir skin really a boon?
“It’s better not to ask those questions,” Heimdall tells him with a wry smile, though Loki hadn’t realized he spoke aloud just then. “Those secrets don’t come free. Not from a goddess.”
The shades come aboard. Faces he knows, faces he does not recognize. The dead from the Statesman, the dead who fell by Hela’s hand, the dead of centuries before who left the Realms with business incomplete.
Failures and fuck-ups, heartbroken and bitter, world-weary yet unable to let go. Unwilling to be defeated by fate. The weight of the vessel increases, and Loki feels every step on its deck.
There is pain, then, though he doesn’t stop his work. The ends of the feathers of ice on the ship’s wings are tinged red and indigo with his blood. They’re beautiful. The ship is beautiful. He is beautiful.
When Ebony Maw trained him, early on in his time with the Black Order, one of the things he did was to force surge after surge of magical energy through his body, pushing the limits of Loki’s ability to control and hold it. The pain was excruciating, but it was also strangely exhilarating, embracing the forces of creation even as they tore holes in his physical form. He knows now it was not meant as education so much as testing to see whether he could hold and wield the scepter containing the Mind Stone, whether he could physically lay hands on the Tesseract, whether his body could bear the stress of touching two Infinity Gems at once. He passed those tests. This is reminiscent; there is a roar of adrenaline in his ears as the wings stir and quiver at last. On the ship of the dead, he has never felt more alive.
------
And the nightmares’ hooves draw near.
Dead men pummel the panes outside,
And the living quake with fear.
Only when a person is wrenched apart, joint by joint, tendon by bloody, aching tendon, can they see the infinite stretch of stars between their bones; the Void exists within and without. Loki’s weakness is his strength. His death is his salvation. His failure is his triumph.
Every step is agony as he advances to the helm of the ship and puts his hands on the wheel. He’s smiling. “Heimdall,” he says softly, “I think I am ready, if you are.”
“Wait!” Revna comes to his side and presses something into his hand. It’s a small thing, a circle of bone carved with runes and the symbols of crashing waves. “Give this to my children. When they want Naglfar, it will belong to them.”
“The ones I’m raising are not from the same world you come from,” Loki tells her, gentle as he can be in the face of the screaming adrenaline. “Would you have me give this to them?”
“Yes,” she says. “They’ll need it, either way. Besides,” she smiles, “I can always build another, and another…as many more as they need, in any world they dwell in.”
“Eindrid will be the mariner,” he tells her, grateful to be able to pass this gift along. “This will mean everything to him. But Sigrid will hold it in trust until he’s old enough to have it. Or perhaps they will sail it together some day.”
And then he adds: “I promise you, I may fail everyone else, hurt everything else I touch, but I will always love and care for them.”
She puts her hand on his head, a benediction, and he’s reminded of his own mother. “I believe you,” she says. Later, he will recall those words and that gentleness, and cry.
But now, the mooring lines of the ship give way with a thunderous snap, and Hel itself lurches around them.
No other sound could be so deafening. Loki is sure of that. Chains clash and clang, ice wails and groans, and the razor prow of the ship cuts into the gloom, once, twice, again, again, until Hel bleeds light. Then, they are all one thing: Loki, and the ship, and the dead that ride her. They are an eldritch, many-eyed being straining with ferocious determination, hellbent on battle.
Loki can smell the ozone even before they pierce the spectral portal Heimdall etches in the air before them. The fight has begun, and Thor must be a part of it. Lightning splits the sky, illuminating Thanos’ hulking form, and Loki’s heart lurches into overdrive as the tableau on the battlefield below meets his eyes.
There are only three of them, the rest of the Avengers buried in rubble. Thor is crumpled between the debris, wounded, Stormbreaker just out of his reach. Bucky Barnes lies stunned nearby, arm twitching as he tries to force himself to rise. But the light--there is light crackling across the sky, and dancing around Mjolnir. Who knew a warhammmer could rise from the dead? But that is somehow less significant to Loki’s eyes than the small hand holding it.
It’s Rogers, but not as he last saw him. The man has lost nearly a foot in height, and almost all of his bulk. His jaw is narrower, limbs fine-boned and frail, back crooked and awkward, but he is on his feet, and he’s holding the hammer and the power within like he was born to it.
He’s going to die, Loki thinks as Thanos staggers to his feet and makes a lunge for Steve, leading with a massive blade, but whatever has happened to Captain America, he’s retained valuable body memory and battlefield instinct. He dodges, letting the hammer carry him, letting the lightning energy do the work that his small body could not do without shattering. He’s fast, and he doesn’t stop to rest for a split second, darting out of range of another swing, hitting back—it’s like watching a hummingbird attack a grizzly bear, and feeling that the hummingbird has a reasonable chance of winning due to sheer speed and bloody-mindedness.
But it can’t last. Rogers tires fast in his diminished form, too fast, and a blow from Thanos’ fist catches him in the right shoulder. The force must be shattering. He cannot hold onto the hammer; it drops, and Steve does too, curled around what must be a shoulder broken in a dozen places.
Thor and Bucky are recovering, the latter staggering forward as if prepared to tackle Thanos bodily to save his friend, despite whatever injury he may have taken himself, and Loki can taste the desperation on his tongue.
This is the trouble with heroism. You give and give until your body gives out beneath you, until you lie broken on the ground, and whether you are lauded or mourned or forgotten then is nothing more than cruel, nihilistic chance.
But they are through the portal now, the icy shape of Naglfar hanging in the sky, and the shadow passes over Thanos, dimming the edge of his upraised sword. He looks up, and his eyes go wide.
“HERE!” Loki shouts, and he is no Thor; his hand will never wield Mjolnir, but his voice splits the sky like a bolt, and in the breathless split-seconds that follow, the icy wings of the ship roar like thunder.
“HERE!” Skurge yells, echoing, raising his own blade, and the screams of the dead join his voice. They hiss and shriek and crash down around the Titan like an ocean overflowing its own shores. The shades pour from the ship, cascading from the sky into the fray, and the ghosts of the Valkyrior wheel overhead, diving to join them.
Shadow looms as Thanos’ forces rally around him, and then, at last, red-gold light bursts forth from all directions as portals open, and the rest of the heroes appear. The poetic last stand that Loki warned them was inevitable.
This, he thinks, is more like Ragnarok than Ragnarok was.
------
The shades leave the ship. Even Heimdall leaps clear and into the fray below, and Loki silently blesses him for it; he will stand by Thor, and his brother will be stronger for it. From where he stands, bound to Naglfar, he can see little of the battle below, himself, but here and there are flashes of familiar faces, the ring of voices he knows for good or ill. The Hulk. Peter Parker. Stark.
When the Leviathan wheel toward him, he braces himself, and the frozen wings of the ship rattle like those of a hawk threatening a rival. Though almost a living creature itself, Naglfar is not as maneuverable as these nightmare creatures. They come for him, and Loki’s best strategy is the reckless headlong aggression he used to criticize in Thor and in his former enemies who battle below. He clenches his hands on the helm and feeds seidr through every nail and bone, and dives.
The prow slices into the first beast. He can feel it severing metal , can feel the skull crack, the shower of ichor. When he was a boy, Thor and his friends used to laugh at his magic, his careful strategies that kept him out of the heart of a fight. Illusion. Bolts thrown from a distance. Tricks and spells. You fight without fighting, Fandral told him once.
It’s a good way to never lose, he’d countered.
It’s a good way to never win, either. He meant it as a joke, Loki thinks now. Fandral always joked and his jokes had barbs. At the time it felt a lot like being called a coward.
That was when he took up the daggers. More than any weapon with range, when you fight with short blades, there is a kind of intimacy with your enemy. You see their face. You feel their flesh part and tear when you cut them. You feel the jolt vibrate through metal and up your arm when you scrape against bone. It is utterly visceral; hard, then, to forget the feel of the person you’ve slain. Using daggers made him no less circumspect as a fighter when he was young, but centuries passing hardened him to the physicality of it. Now, as he feels the ship carve thorough alien flesh, he feels that dark intimacy all over again. He cannot stop.
But he is outnumbered. One monster falls. Another, a third, a fourth…but there are more, so many more, and it’s only a matter of time before two of them trap him between them, and then—then he can feel everything as their mouths close on him, as the weapons mounted on their backs fire into the wings of the ship. His ice tears; the hull of the ship cracks; the bloodied prow shatters, and it feels like his own body is torn limb from limb.
He falls. And he’s not sure how high he was, not sure how mortal he is any longer, not sure what will happen when pieces of him hit the ground—but there is light, light and ozone, a physical jolt and an arm around him. When the white haze of agony clears and he can see again, it’s Thor’s face that he sees, eyes wide with anxiety, his lips forming Loki’s name. Loki can’t hear his voice over the battle around them and the ringing in his ears, but he takes a breath and sits up and presses their foreheads together hard enough to bruise. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Go, they need you.”
There’s a movement to his left, and when he looks, Rogers is there, pale as milk, with an arm bound loosely to his side, but awake and speaking. This voice, Loki can hear: “I’ve got him.”
Thor nods, and goes, and it’s patently ridiculous that a small, wounded human thinks he can defend an injured god, but somehow Loki doesn’t doubt he’d try.
“You look different,” he tells Steve shakily.
“New haircut,” the man quips back.
“It suits you,” he says.
There’s a pause, like Steve isn’t sure how to take that, and then he asks: “Are you okay?”
“Always,” Loki tells him, although he’s not sure if he can get up quite yet. “I can’t die. Are you?”
“I won’t die,” Steve says.
“Good,” Loki says, and begins drawing seidr once again, through the pain of jarred bones and seared muscle. “Then we’re bound to win eventually.”
------
And they do. They do win. The price is high. Loki hangs back as the others bid their farewells to Stark. It’s all he can do for a man who never trusted him and had been given no solid reason to change his mind. It feels alienating. Sad in a strange, selfish way. He wishes he had the right to mourn with them.
“I know,” Heimdall says, and sits beside him, golden eyes glowing and casting strange shadows on the ice that covers Loki’s skin. “You don’t belong to this world any more. You’re feeling that.”
“I don’t think I ever belonged to their world,” he nods at the grieving Avengers.
“No. But it’s more than that now.”
Loki is silent for a moment, then asks, “How do we tell Thor that we cannot stay?”
“We came with the Shades of Hel. He knows.”
Loki turns and walks slowly away from the scene as he feels the last threads of life depart from Stark’s body, and Heimdall follows.
“The world of the living goes on without the dead,” Loki says. “Even with scars of loss and horror. I suppose that’s just the way things are.”
“Most of the time,” Heimdall shrugs. Then: “You wanted to strike that last blow yourself, didn’t you? At Thanos. You wanted vengeance.”
“I want a lot of things,” Loki answers. “There was a time I would have given anything for revenge. That time passed. And there are many, many others who deserved the final blow as much as I, or more. The important thing is that Thanos’ story is over.”
“You came a long way to play a small part in the end of this story,” Heimdall tells him. “What did you come for, if not retribution?”
There is a fragment of iced-over bone at Loki’s feet, and he crouches to pick it up. The energy thrums in the core of the bone, where the marrow would be, and he turns it in his fingers. Naglfar is shattered, but not destroyed. He’ll see it restored, for the sake of his children.
“Family,” he answers Heimdall belatedly. “I think.”
And he grows so busy then, eyes and energies searching the field for more pieces of the ship, that he doesn’t see the spirit smile.
[Musical Inspiration]