In time now immemorial, Thanos, the Mad Titan, last of a nigh-forgotten race, penetrated the asteroid fields of the Chitauri, slaughtered half of the inhabitants single-handedly, and claimed the remainder as his serfs and their home as his Sanctuary. The Other no longer remembered the name he bore back then, but he fervently remembered his first encounter with the Titan. The Titan was the largest living being he had ever seen, his purple skin shaded to black with dark Chitauri blood. He was practically invisible to the naked eye in the jagged shadows of the asteroids, except in the lower-frequency spectrum of his body heat. That said, compared to the average cold-blooded Chitaurun, Thanos burned with inner light. This was a devouring fire that could and would consume them all if provoked. This was the being that had brought death to so many of his people. This was a being the likes of which the Chitauri had never encountered before. To Thanos, all the Chitauri were children, Imps. The survivors could do nought but kneel before his might.
The Chitauri were always a people of xenophobes, their culture given to marauding and filled with hate for anything "other." They had well over a hundred ways to describe that hate, in fact. Thanos was different, being the last of an alien kind, not its ambassador. To the Chitauri, Thanos was himself a god of destruction, and therefore worshipful. Thanos was death incarnate, the Inevitable One, a Messiah whose quest for power and genocide matched the Chitauri ideals as detailed in their sacraments perfectly. In the fullness of time, Thanos supplanted the old gods of the Chitauri. He was their one true god. Indeed, the Chitauri called him Bator, which means "The One."
In awe of The One, the Other took on his new name. He became that which was most despised, the dark echo of his god. As Thanos' power grew, the Other likewise grew into the role of vizier, issuing commands and meting out punishment in his lord's name. The Other had served the Mad Titan for a millennium. He remained devoted as ever to his god. He also remained fully aware that all his efforts to follow Thanos' magnificent example remained in vain. He would always be an inadequate shadow. Thanos was annihilation, and the Other was wasting. Thanos was cleansing fire, and the Other was senseless torment. Thanos was unique, and the Other was merely different. He remained useful to the Titan, but that was his only value to Thanos.
His god did not love him as he loved his newer, more favored servants, the ones he called his "children."
Thanos' six children had finally returned home to Sanctuary, to regroup in the wake of the disastrous invasion of Terra. As always, the children's arrival brought both pride and trepidation for the Other. He was afraid of the weapons he had wrought over the years. But he continued to make them in obeisance to his lord.
There were Thanos' three strong sons, Corvus, Cull, and Ebony. The one-time captives who had chosen the Titan as their lord and father. He had found and fought and defeated each of his sons in the early days of his quest. Then, Thanos had been a lonely warrior with only the Other and his Chitauri for help. At first, Thanos only rarely took captives on his frequent genocidal forays. He only saved those who were the strongest in their resistance, the ones who showed their mettle. Each of his sons had hated him in the beginning, but once he gave them over to the Other for breaking, there had grown a mutual admiration that finally blossomed into fierce loyalty for the father. Corvus was the first, and his bright spirit had been the hardest for the Other to break. The Other had worked on him for months, maybe years, in the darkness of Sanctuary before his victim had learned not to beg for reprieve: that, of course, was when Thanos finally granted that unspoken wish and raised his son out of the darkness and into his loving embrace. It was a moment of triumph for them both that the Other had never forgotten. Next came Ebony, and then Cull, their breaking much easier for the practice. Both were unique and beloved by the Titan in their own right, though neither had quite surpassed their brother in Thanos' eyes.
Then there was determined Proxima, daughter-by-marriage, bride of Corvus. She had first come to Sanctuary to rescue her captured lover, fighting her way past Cull and Ebony to reach the eldest brother. When Corvus then refused to be rescued, she submitted herself to the breaking willingly for his love; her strength in love and now in loyalty was astonishing as a result. Though Thanos sometimes dismissed her, she was the Other's favorite.
There were the Titan's other two beautiful daughters, his treasures, Nebula and Gamora, who he loved even more than Corvus. The Other remembered when he first met them, the children Thanos had chosen. It had been hard to hate them, despite the Chitauri creed. Gamora had been a starveling child of no more than six tender years, her green face grimy with the smoke of a dying world and streaked with tears. Nebula had been even younger, both abandoned by an overburdened population until Thanos found them. He had saved them from want and need, adopted them, trained them, burnished them to brightness. They were sworn to his purpose just like their older siblings, though young as they were, the Other had only been needed to correct their errors over the years, not remake them entirely. Now both rival sisters were strong and proud and wanted for nothing. They were Thanos' clear symbols of the righteousness of his cause.
Six children of Thanos, accomplished and deadly. The Other shrank as he watched Thanos greet and take unconscious comfort in them in the wake of losing his other almost-child, the Puppet. Or the Gift as Thanos had often called it, borne to him by dark Lady Death herself. The Other was an outsider to the family now, he realized, his presence not nearly so pleasurable, more disappointing.
"Your failure was costly," Corvus said as soon as he sat down, glaring at the Other. He was always keen to magnify the Other's defeat, ever since he had first graduated from the Other's brutal aegis.
For all his failures, the Other was effective, he reminded himself firmly. His was the labor that molded Thanos' children. Likewise, his was the labor that birthed the Puppet... but his had also been the errors that lost it forever. And lost Thanos the Mind Stone. Utter defeat spat out of the jaws of victory. The Other was not just a disappointment but an embarrassment and a stain on their glorious purpose.
He was losing his touch. If Thanos chose to spare him, he did not deserve it.
"Do not mourn," Ebony murmured. "It is in the nature of Death's gifts to be short-lived. She always takes them back." He grinned wickedly at the jest, and grinned all the wider as Thanos himself chuckled. "No, my friends. We should rejoice. We have the locations of four of the six stones. We have knowledge now of how they may be used. And this knowledge comes at the best possible time, for the Invisible Network is in flux. The phenomenon the Aesir call the Convergence will be upon us in less than a year, something we would not have predicted without the Lady's gift. When the Convergence is upon us, we can listen for the other stones as was impossible before and retrieve them in a day."
"We can?" Gamora asked dubiously.
"Your point is made. I can listen. You can retrieve," Ebony said smoothly.
"This is all news to me," Cull rumbled. He had been the last to return, arriving only hours before from a vicious raid in the Invisible Network. He had returned with three promising captives, a hundred stolen high-power weapons of various types, a death tally of several hundred enemy soldiers and civilians, and the welcome news that a war might now be brewing again between the Kree Empire and the Nova Corp of Xandar.
"You met the Puppet before you left, yes?" Proxima said impatiently. "It was sent to retrieve the Tesseract from Terra. The mission failed."
"It was mishandled," Corvus broke in.
"But we gained new intelligence from it before the connection was lost," Proxima continued.
"In addition to what we learned before it left here," Nebula added. She was still a little smug as the discoverer of the Puppet in the first place.
"We already knew of three stones, and had one," Cull said, unimpressed.
"Yes, the Puppet sensed the fourth on Terra but did nothing to retrieve it because it had no instruction to do so. We have confirmed the Mind Stone remains on Terra as well, so we can retrieve both at once when the time comes," Proxima said.
"And the Asgardian knew the method needed to retrieve the Soul Stone, so that can now be accomplished at our leisure... once we have the proper... accoutrements," Ebony finished vaguely.
The way Ebony eyed Corvus and Proxima with his last statement was not lost on the Other.
"Mmm... my children are so clever. You will be busy, Imp," Thanos rumbled.
"My lord?" The Other said, cautiously.
"You will have to share the knowledge you have gained from our Puppet with my children. You will need to work closely with Ebony so that when the time is right, we are prepared to handle each stone with all their peculiar dangers until they are united in my hand. You will open your mind to Ebony. He will share your experience with the Mind Stone and any relevant Asgardian lore of the other stones with the rest of my children, and with me." The Other visibly wilted under that pronouncement. The only one who appeared happy with the arrangement was Ebony Maw, in fact. Telepathy was only a pleasant experience for those with an inborn talent for it, after all.
"As my lord wills," came the reluctant reply.
"So mote it be," Ebony crooned as he slunk up behind the Other, pulled back his cowl, and wrapped long hands around his bony temples. The Other let loose a gasp of pain as dark magic flooded his mind, a potent scourge that scraped up memory and knowledge and speculation alike. He knew it lasted only a second, but it felt far, far longer.
"Interesting," Ebony said behind him, warm breath searing the back of his neck. A much gentler whisper of magic darted from Ebony to each of his siblings and to the Titan, sharing the Other's stolen thoughts.
"Again." The pain flooded in, and once more receded, taking with it another vast store of thoughts... not reading them but taking, he realized. With each touch of Ebony's dark magic on his mind, he would grow less. He could be dead within a matter of hours if Ebony was not careful. The Other met the eyes of his master. Thanos' expression was impassive, but all the Children of Thanos wore tight smiles as they watched Ebony caress his scalp. He recognized it then. The wheel had truly turned against him. The Children of Thanos were ascendant, and the Other was fallen. It was only right, he told himself. The young should replace the old. It was balance, that which was most sacred to the Black Order, to Thanos... He had been merciless in forging the Children of Thanos into the weapons of righteous war they were today. Now they had their revenge in stripping him down. He ignored the children, focusing on the father, The One, his One.
"Again," Ebony said, and the merciless pain returned.
"Again."
Author's Note: Plot plot. As I said, everything that happens is fallout from Loki's time in the Void. The plot will diverge significantly from canon. In case you are wondering, I took the Name "Bator" from the Basque word for "one," because the Basque language is so different from any other language. Just trivia.
Also, the title "The Stranger" is a reference to the eponymous Albert Camus novel. It's not entirely relevant, but the lack of empathy for others from the main character is certainly duplicated in the Chitauri and the Other's world view. Per the Sparknotes summary, "The Stranger, Camus's first novel, is both a brilliantly crafted story and an illustration of Camus's absurdist world view. Published in 1942, the novel tells the story of an emotionally detached, amoral young man named Meursault. He does not cry at his mother's funeral, does not believe in God, and kills a man he barely knows without any discernible motive. For his crime, Meursault is deemed a threat to society and sentenced to death. When he comes to accept the 'gentle indifference of the world,' he finds peace with himself and with the society that persecutes him."
Updates will be sporadic, due to the current pandemic... If you're antsy waiting, or bored in quarantine, you can always leave a review to egg me on, then maybe check out my other Loki fics. There are several...
