A.N.: The Chaos Saga has officially surpassed 300 reviews and I could not be more shocked, awed or grateful. Thank you thank you thank you. I mean it when I say that every word you guys leave means so much! I've come to recognize so many of your user names and it's always a delight to see them over and over, and every new fave and follow just adds to it. THANK YOU. Now, onward to the next update, I wonder if you'll hate me ;)
With no sun or moon or even a view of the stars to help her track the passage of time, Kagome had no clue how long she'd been held in this cramped cell, and no idea how far she'd been taken from Asgard. She would guess it had been days at least, as they shut off all the lights in her part of the ship every so often to prompt her to sleep. Someone would come in to bring her food, which had so far all been unrecognizable but edible, and nothing had made her sick yet. Neither Nebula nor Gamora had come to 'visit' again, and she'd been left largely alone, and that was bad.
She was a social creature, and the isolation was giving her too much time to think and feel things. She'd swung wildly from mind curdling anger at what had happened to her, to soul crushing fear at what was still to come, until she finally settled at a cool, simmering resignation that made her feel like a match head stuck on the bottom of a shoe; any little instigation would shatter it and she'd blow sky high.
But she was resolved for now, and she was more sure than ever at her chosen path: She would not be a willing pawn for anyone. She would simply do what had to be done to survive and get back to her home, back to Loki.
That's all she wanted, so that's what she would do.
The door slid open, and in stepped Nebula, stalking in and gliding up to the cage door with a false confidence belied by the shaky uncertainty in her soul.
'She's really trying to prove something, but what?'
"Haven't seen you in a while. What's the occasion?"
Nebula paused, staring at her unblinking and motionless, no doubt to cause dread and tension, but Kagome just found it awkward. Finally she blinked and pulled out a key.
"Thanos wishes to speak to you. You will be taken to him today."
"Can't he just come see me? I don't really feel like moving around today." It was a lie, she'd love to get out of this cage, but she did not want to be taken somewhere unfamiliar to meet the person responsible for her kidnapping. Still, she held her hands out to be cuffed with no fight or complaint.
"No." Was all she got as her answer, so with a sigh of resignation, she followed Nebula deeper into the ship.
————————
"We've received the reports from the last search parties, Allfather. They don't hold much promise."
"I see. Yes well, when will they return?"
"In a fortnight."
"Have a new party made ready to leave the moment they return, and have the party currently on standby sent out at first light. I don't have to remind you how dangerous it would be for us all for the girl to fall into the wrong hands."
"Of course not. I'll get right to it, majesty."
When the door to the study closed tight and he knew he was alone, Loki allowed his Odin illusion to drop and rubbed at his eye.
'I don't know how he stands that damn metal eyepatch.' He thought as he took one more look over the plans he'd made to efficiently organize Asgard's troops into scheduled search parties. He' orchestrated a plan that would send out as many at a time as possible without over taxing the soldiers and causing any time wasting pauses for rest. There would always be someone out there looking for Kagome. Meanwhile, he would stay mostly on Asgard to keep his subjects from suspecting anything was wrong, and pave the way for his eventual return. He had to improve his public image so he wouldn't be shuffled off into that cell again, and he had to do it without ever technically being here. He wiped his hand down his face and then rubbed his temples, attempting to break up some of the stress building up into a steady thrum of pressure behind his eyes.
'Perhaps it's time for bed.'
Effortlessly he cast an invisibility illusion and slipped from Odin's study, making his way to the family wing and sneaking into his rooms. He waved and broke both the illusion he'd cast over himself, and the one he put on the bedroom to make it appear perfectly made and untouched. He didn't want any servants thinking it needed to be tended to.
The last thing he wanted yet was to have anything tampered with.
He stripped off his day clothes and slipped under the sheets, cold from a long day of being empty, but as his body warmed them they released the slowly fading scent of the soap Kagome always used in her hair. He pressed his face into her pillow where it was the strongest and wondered if she'd done the same after he'd fallen from the bifrost and she'd thought him dead.
He hoped with every thread of his soul that, like he had been, she was alive out there somewhere.
If she was, he would find her, if it was the very last thing he ever did.
———————————
Thanos sat on a floating throne in a large, open part of the center of the ship, surrounded by windows to the outside. Kagome couldn't help but ignore him in favor of whipping her head around at all the revealing glass. The endless black of deep space freckled with cold pinpoints of distant starlight and watercolor streaks of distant galaxies and nebulas threatened to smother her, to crush her from every side. Logically she'd known she'd been carried out into the universe but to see it this way, this undeniable proof that she wasn't really anywhere, just floating in a cage in the unending reaches of the cosmos inspired a fear she hadn't allowed herself to feel yet.
'I am... very very lost.'
"Hello my angel of purity, I hope your new accommodations are to your liking."
Finally focusing on this Thanos person who had taken her hostage, Kagome tried not to recoil at the sight of him. He'd apparently been to visit her once already, but she didn't remember much of that encounter, and what she was seeing of him now chilled her nerves down to the bottom of her soul.
His aura was a twisted, writing mess of complicated darkness, that kind that came from evil done with intentions perceived as justified, or even good. Naraku had housed a darkness very similar to this, though his was much darker, much more selfish. Thanos was apparently a being with a cause he believed to be righteous, and had chosen a dark path to achieve it. She shivered, already wanting to be out of his presence and back in her cage alone if it meant never being near him again.
"The cleaner cage is nice, but I'm no angel."
Thanos stood and dropped from the floating platform his chair rested on, landing easily on the floor and striding smoothly across the distance between them. He was tall, looming over her taller than even Loki did, causing her to crane her head back to see him. Her heart beat faster the closer he drew, and she feared he might try to touch her, might get so close she wouldn't be able to breath. Her reiki stirred up in response, lifting the ends of her hair, skipping over her skin, and he eyed her for a moment before pausing several steps away.
"Not an angel? The purest soul I've ever encountered, but not an angel. Imagine it."
She blinked, unsure how to reply, unsure she even should, and decided to let him have his villain monologue and get it over with if that's what he wanted to do.
'They always monologue at some point, right?'
"Some would call me an angel. An angel of mercy, an angel of death. I am the god that will bring balance back to this decaying universe and set it back to rights."
Kagome's brow furrowed a little as she searched his aura, finding no markers of divinity, no hallmarks of godhood.
"God?"
He gave the barest of shrugs, a wry little smirk.
"More or less. At least, I will be once I've rescued all of existence from its inevitable doom."
She glanced around awkwardly, waiting for him to finish. Gamora And Nebula stared blankly at her, but Gamora shifted and sighed with the slightest edge of annoyance. She looked back at Thanos who continued to stare silently down at her.
"Uh... alright I'll bite. What's the big plan?"
"Redemption through death and rebirth. Life, once it has been allowed to flourish for too long, is toxic. Resources are sapped, ecosystems are ravaged, climates are destroyed. Something must be done, and that something is me. There are stones, you see, ancient stones of immense power that will grant me the ability to set this imbalance to rights and restore the universe to its flourishing glory. When I possess them all I will use them to snuff out half of all the living beings in all the cosmos, and then healing can begin."
Kagome felt the blood drain from her face, the hope drain from her heart, and it took every ounce of concentration and strength to keep herself from falling to the floor in horror. This was so much worse than she'd ever been able to imagine. She'd assumed that, like Naraku and so many others like him, he wanted to amass power to rule some world somewhere. That would no doubt result in a lot of death, but what he was suggesting, killing half of all life in all the universe...
She couldn't fathom such endless devastation, and it caused an uncomfortable numbness to suffuse her spirit as her mind spun faster and faster to try and imagine the scale of that kind of evil.
"H-how-" she took a deep breath and swallowed the lump in her throat before trying again. Now was not the time to lose ground with these people, not now that she knew how depraved they were. "How am I supposed to be able to help? I'm not one of these stones."
"Indeed you are not, I'm afraid I was mistaken when I took you. But, Soul Stone or not, I know you are much, much more than you seem. You can do much to help me further my goals. You are touched by the divine, you are proof I am walking my destined path."
Reeling, Kagome forced herself to breath deep and clear through the clouds of panic thickening in her skull.
"I am not a goddess. I don't know-"
"It does you no good to lie. I may have been wrong about your status as the Soul Stone, but I am not wrong about this. I felt your divinity when you attempted to cleanse me with your power. You failed, and that only further proves to me that I am right. You are a gift, given to me to further my destiny."
Her eyes fluttered closed and she squeezed her hands into fists, anchoring herself to the pain of her nails digging into her skin.
"And if I refuse? I guess you kill me?"
Her eyes flew open at the sound of his darkly amused chuckle and she watched him begin to circle her slowly. She did not turn to follow his trajectory, but the smooth, clear tone of his voice was impossible to miss. Every word he spoke was a bullet straight through her mind.
"Do you know how I came to know of your existence, how I came to suspect you might be housing the Stone I so covet?"
She shook her head no at his pause, and dread bubbled up to fill all the spaces between her bones, making her shiver in cold fear.
"A few years ago I journeyed through a much more remote stretch of space, looking for my Stones, liberating parched planets from their overgrown populations, when I found something most curious. A prince, half mad, half dead, fell through an opening that appeared right before my stalled ship. I picked him up, offered him mercy, understanding, a chance to gain all that he wanted and in return, he would retrieve one of the stones for me. He failed, sadly, and he got away from me."
He finished his circuit around her, halting in front of her once more, gaze firm and impenetrable. Kagome knew she was being dangled over a dangerous precipice, but she leaned over anyway, desperate to see what waited at the bottom.
"That prince called himself Loki of Asgard. I know you were important to him, know he is important to you. If you don't help me in my endeavors... I will find him again, and I will break him."
Rage, scalding and sharp, sliced through her, sending a protective wave of reiki to out to glide over her skin.
"You wouldn't dare." She spat, hot tears threatening to spill from her eyes.
Thanos stepped closer and reached out, gently grasping her chin, dropping his hand when she wrenched her face away.
"But that's what you don't understand, little goddess. I already have."
The words dropped like stones straight to the bottom of her soul, but he kept going, shoveling the harsh, heavy truth over head mercilessly.
"He was already half broken when I found him, it took no prying at all to break through his mind and do and take what I wanted. My scepter was without fail, and it worked flawlessly on him. I found his memories of you that way, and I knew I'd found something worth retrieving. I was right. Now that you have the facts, little jewel, what do you say? Allies?"
Her world spun off its axis, her heart broke and fell into sharp, innumerable shards, and all her hope fled so fast she could barely breath.
This had just become the most perilous, precarious situation of her life. She stared up at Thanos, face slack and eyes wide with horror, drowning in all the terrible things she'd learned in such a short time, needing to run, hide, get far, far away from the madman forcing her hand and crushing her will.
Her soul cried, for herself, for the people she would no doubt see dying in the future, for Loki, who she now knew had been tortured by this very monster.
She was lost. Oh yes, she was lost, and now she didn't know if she'd ever be found again. Tears ran freely down her face, blessedly blurring the horrible sight of Thanos' face, and then she simply closed her eyes and attempted to find her strength.
'What do I do, what do I do, what do I-'
'You must tread carefully, for the fate of worlds is on your shoulders.' Hemdall's voice, deep and rich and laden with knowledge broke through her whirling thoughts and stilled her.
'Carefully. I must tread carefully.'
Killing Thanos was reckless. She could probably do it, but then what? She couldn't fly a ship and his daughters would no doubt retaliate and refuse to aid her. Allowing herself to die was also reckless. She had a role to play apparently, and while she had no desire to play along with fate's whims anymore, had no desire to be in instrument to save a bunch of worlds like she might once have, there was one world at least full of people she refused to let fall to this monster's darkness.
'Okay, maybe two worlds.' Asgard and earth would be just as affected as the rest of the universe, and if she was going to do anything to save them, she had to not die.
Especially since Loki was on Asgard still.
She would do anything to save him, to protect him.
And so she knew what she would do.
She would play the long game. She would gain Thanos' trust and keep her life and when the time came she would make sure he paid, somehow, someway, even if she only sabotaged his plans.
Scraping up her meager bits courage and lacing them with determination like steel, she opened her eyes and hardened her resolve, and victory lit up Thanos' face as she nodded once, accepting his imbalanced offer, like she imagined Loki had been forced to do only a small handful of years ago.
"Okay. Allies."