"The Tale of the Huntress"
CHAPTER TEN
Freya was crying. Sitting in her windowsill, one knee pulled up, hands clasped around it, her head back and her eyes closed. She was crying deeply, tears pouring down her face.
"Freya?" Thor said meekly.
She sucked in a breath and opened her eyes, wiping at her face. "What, Thor?"
"Are you okay?" he walked hesitantly forward, shuffling, wanting to help but not sure how. Maybe she was hurt. He cried when he got hurt, so did Loki. He could get her a bandage, or a pack of ice. "Did you get hurt?"
She smiled, but it was wrong, because a tear fell down her face and across her lips. "No." she said, "No, I'm not hurt."
"Then… why are you crying?"
Her lips pressed together hard, and he was afraid he'd made her angry, but she just held out her hands. Without another word he climbed into her lap, and laid his head on her shoulder, hugging her.
"I'm just sad." Freya murmured, her arms around him, warm and safe. "We caught Hela today. I stopped her. And Father… he put her in prison. Far away. Where she can't hurt anybody ever again."
Thor was quiet. He'd never liked their oldest sister. She'd always looked at him like he was little and stupid. Like she was angry with him. She hadn't liked him at all, he knew that, and he was glad she was hardly ever home. He also knew she'd done bad things, very bad things, and Father and Mother had been sad when they'd explained to them that they had to stop her.
The Valkyries had tried. But they were dead.
Freya had been gone for a whole week with Father.
"Did you have to hurt her?"
She made a little crying sound, and her arms tightened around him. "Yes." She whispered. "I had to let myself lose control. It was awful."
Thor pushed himself up, his little hands on her shoulders, and he looked at her eyes. They weren't glowing. They were just her normal, turquoise blue. "But you're better now, right?"
She nodded. "Yes. I am." He felt her fingers in his hair, pushing his unruly blond locks out of his eyes. "Father helped me."
He looked at her again, and wished she didn't look so sad. "I'm sorry." He said, and tried to wipe her cheeks clean. They were dirty and wet. He licked his fingers, like Mother did sometimes, and rubbed her skin, frowning with concentration. Freya sniffed, and then laughed.
"Am I very dirty?"
He nodded, licking his palm and smearing her cheek. The dirt spread and wiped, and he did it again. "It's okay." He said, tongue on his lip with focus. "I'm getting it."
She laughed again, wrinkling her nose, and then suddenly she was squeezing him and he squawked. "I love you!" she exclaimed, wiggling him, her arms tight around him.
"Squeeze hug! Squeeze hug!" he cried in dramatic dismay, giggling and pushing at her shoulders.
She let him go, laughing, and when he was done gasping for air he grabbed her face. "Now hold still!" he commanded, very slowly and seriously, just like he'd heard Father do. "Your face is still dirty."
Her eyes twinkled and her mouth pulled in amusement, but she pressed her lips and nodded. "Okay."
Thor opened his eyes. Lightning crackled through his veins, pounding with his heart, stinging behind his eyes with rage and grief. His head hurt as if Thanos had the stone pressed to his temple again, pulsing and pounding with every beat of his heart, sharp like Skadi's ice shards. Memories poured through him, free of their confines, and his fingers dug into the couch cushions, trying to hang on.
Freya lifting the boards for their tree fort and holding them in place with her mind while he and Loki hammered away, nailing them in place.
Freya reading bedtime stories to them, curled up with them on either side of her.
Freya, smelling better than any fire, smoky and spicy. Walking and making designs in the field as pretty as any Bifrost stamp.
Freya.
His sister.
"Don't move." Loki's voice was tight and sharp, his hand the same, fingers digging into Thor's shoulder. "Just breathe, Thor. Just breathe."
He was. He thought he was…
Oh, Norns, his head hurt!
Someone caught his desperate, blindly-reaching hand. Something cool and wet wiped his sweaty skin, pushing his damp hair from his forehead and cheeks.
"Loki…" he gasped.
"I'm here."
"Freya…" Oh, gods. He clenched his teeth, hissing. How could his thoughts be pulsing with his heart?
"Don't talk." Loki's voice was sharper, tighter, and his cool fingers pressed to Thor's head.
"Is he okay?"
Steve's voice. The sound of movement in the room… more than just Loki and Steve.
The cool, wet cloth wiped at his eyes and cheeks, at the tears that were in his ears. He had to fight this, had to open his eyes… because he remembered. He remembered her. He remembered losing her, losing his sister.
And now that woman with the bloody-red mouth, the cold creature from his nightmares, was back.
He wasn't going to lose Freya again.
He wasn't a child anymore, helpless and frightened. He was a man.
And his lightning crackled over his skin.
Thunder rumbled and boomed outside, making the walls shake. Everyone shifted and looked up uneasily, then back at the two brothers.
Thor opened his eyes, blinking, letting the lightning sear through him, burning away any ache, every pain, and he saw Loki's face above him. The green eyes were as hard and sharp as flint. "We've got to save her." He gasped, his voice hoarse.
Loki nodded. "We've found where she went."
The Bifrost carried them, singing and rushing at Thor's call, bursting upon the mountain side. The explosion gave way to others, Wolves and shards of ice and burning trees and gouged, canyoned earth and rocks bursting around them. Tony flew up, a red phoenix in the midst of the cold mountains of white ice, and Clint buried an arrow in the gullet of a wolf as it leapt, mouth gaping. Another careened off of Steve's shield, crashing and cracking into a stalagmite of ice. Hulk roared, and it echoed off of every mountain craig, shaking the air, a herald to every creature of their arrival. The response was instant, as Wolves turned and began to pour in from every direction.
The earth thundered and exploded in dirt and rocks a ways away, but they could not see through the mountainous ice shards. Knives glimmered in Loki's hands, and when one was lost in the hide of a Wolf another shimmered into being to take its place. He spun and leapt, a fluid, blinding, graceful dance, moving faster than the eye could follow.
His mother had taught him well.
Tony fought from the sky, flying here and there, darting between them, blasting the blue beasts and crashing into them, carrying them away and dropping them, impaled on poles of ice. Steve let the instincts of war thrum through his limbs, running and sliding beneath the sharp claws, his fists shattering jaws and his shield breaking limbs. Here and there a dark figure sprung and leapt, arrows flying fierce and true. The bodies began to pile up, feathered shafts buried deep.
Hulk smashed.
It had been a long time since the thunder and lightning had sung so in Thor's veins, but he did not let it go completely. Not yet. Stormbreaker was a force of its own, cleaving head and limbs, blood drenching its blade.
The creatures of his nightmares.
He remembered Asmund, the echo of his screams, and took his vengeance.
Ice rumbled and shrieked, stripping through in a million spikes, coming from far beyond. A moment later they shattered from the ground and sped back in the direction they had come from, and then a howl of wind colder than any polar gale blasted into them.
The mountainside caught fire.
One by one they heard the explosions of sap, flames rushing up, tree after tree torching.
The ice glittered around them, sharp and deadly, reaching for the sky. The ground was slick with blood and soft with the blue hides of mounded bodies.
They rushed forward, leaping from hide to hide, over the puddles, around the shards. The sky was broiling, swirling, flickering and shattering, the air shaking with rumbles. Together they all ran, spreading as they left the ice fields, circling instinctively.
The brothers did not speak, did not have to. Their legs churned the ground beneath them, running to their sister's aid, where she battled the demon of their past. Battled to protect and avenge them, as she had when they were children
But they were children no more.
The earth was cratered and blackened, glimmering with fiery coals and shards of ice. The trees were broken and flattened all around them, like grass from a great wind. Skadi swirled her snow in a terrifying tornado, round and round their sister, who was being drawn – inexorably – up into the maelstrom. Her crimson hair battered around her like flames, her eyes white and gone with power.
They had never seen her like this.
Even as she was torn up into the sky, even as the icy winds tried to toss her, a blast of force as great as any bomb poured from her hands, whining through the air, bursting and showering against the wall of ice Skadi threw up, straining and screaming.
Loki threw his blade at the same time Thor threw a lightning bolt, and the wall exploded and Skadi flew backwards.
The maelstrom snuffed out and Freya dropped, bleeding, skin purpled from a dozen wounds. Her glowing gaze turned on the fallen queen.
She was unearthly.
The earth erupted beneath Skadi, shoving her up, up, and then down again, crushing her beneath the rocks. A boulder rose up, fire from the trees pulled to it, encircled it, caught it.
Three knives sung through the air.
Lightning poured out of the sky.
The flaming boulder dropped.
Skadi swung her arm in an arc, and she was immediately encased in a solid, room-sized ball of ice.
There was an explosion, and they all fell back, skin slivered with frozen shards.
When the air stilled, the silence was just as deafening.
Thor rose to his knees, breathing heavily. He watched the crater.
Ice suddenly burst up from the ground, closing around them, lifting them high, freezing their limbs. Only their shoulders and heads remained free.
"The two princes." Her voice, weak and hoarse though it was, was mocking. She struggled to her feet, gasping for breath, hunching over her wounds, the burns and the blade buried deep in her ribs. "Odin's brats." She spat blood onto the snowy ground, and limped forward. "How I hate your family."
"Thor." Loki whispered, his skin brilliantly, deeply blue, the raised markings of his skin beginning to glow. He turned red eyes on his brother. "The Destroyer."
Thor remembered.
But he needed an arm free.
Lightning crackled along his skin, trapped beneath the ice, straining, burning, hissing. The ice began to crack.
A flattened tree rose in the air, zooming towards Skadi as she continued her painful, limping march towards them. She threw her hand back, spears of ice exploding through it. Wood splintered and sprayed everywhere.
Freya's eyes burned.
Tree after tree rose. Again and again. Shattering and splintering against the ice Skadi threw back.
A pike of ice found its mark.
They heard her scream.
Thor ground his teeth, straining. His lightning sizzled, cracked, sang, shattered…
He was free.
Stormbreaker was not Mjolnir. But the weapon had never been his power. He spun it, blurring the air, sucking it, spinning it. It whirled and whirled, stronger than any current, stronger even than Skadi's own maelstrom.
The other Avengers crouched and hid, weary from the last of the Wolves, the air pulling at even them. Hulk wrapped his arms around them and grabbed hold of a piece of the mountain itself, growling with effort, his knuckles whitening.
Skadi tumbled, twirling, scrabbling, throwing her power blindly, ice and snow going everywhere. Thor made a gesture, and the entire thing tightened and rose.
He saw a lean, muscled blue form rush past him, scarlet eyes glowing with all the force of the center of the earth, and he threw up his hand.
Every piece of ice shot towards his target, fusing in its flight, cutting through the force of Thor's storm, catching the blinding lightning and fusing around it.
The noise was so great it could not be heard. The explosion so white it cut out sight.
When they opened their eyes it could have been moments or years later. But it was still, ash and snow still fluttering down. The crater was molten and black, cooling. A bent silver mask lay to one side. Blood stained, charred bits of white fur and leather blew across the perimeter.
The bits that were left were charred almost beyond recognition. One could hardly even tell it was a skeleton, burned and scattered in the frozen center.
Freya landed on all fours, free of the ice. Everything floated in the sky around them. Rocks. Ice. Trees. Dirt. Suspended.
Waiting.
Thor and Loki glanced at each other, and then began to slowly step near. Loki slowly reached out, extending a blue hand, turning his palm towards her. "Freya?" he whispered, his eyes red like the gentle flames of a hearth.
Her blank, glowing eyes turned towards him. And crackled.