Asleep

Thor POV

I made it two hours without drinking myself to incoherence. The house was too empty, the silence and darkness too loud to be drowned out by the TV. I never was that great at handling solitude. Having been surrounded by friends and family my entire life, it is a special kind of torture, being alone.

I'd tense, look around, thinking I heard something or someone. But who or what I thought I heard, I had no idea. The awful feeling of dejection afterwards only added to my misery.

Korg does not mind my clingy nature. In fact, he relishes in it, to the point I grew concerned and demanded he have a fun night at the bar instead of staying inside with me. We argued about it to the point that he relented, only to avoid a fight. The old fellow hates conflict.

He offered to let me come along. "You leave the house even less than I do."

Waving him off, I managed my old smile. "I'll clean the house, just you wait!"

He uneasily bid me goodbye. I locked the door, sighing in relief at the solitude.

In the rare times I am sober, I am forced to reckon with the remains of my mind. Though I have no medical knowledge, I know there is something seriously wrong with me. I have never spent days on end doing absolutely nothing, curled up in bed, staring at the ceiling, too weighed down by despair to motivate myself to accomplish anything.

This time, I stare out the window. Rolling hills, a cold ocean, and endless rain greet me. Everything gray, lifeless like the Norwegian tundra it is. It is borderline dystopian compared to where I grew up, the city of rainbows.

But perhaps due to my deteriorated state of mind, I find solace in the dreariness. I live in a little dwelling under falling blankets of gray, an insignificant creature burrowed under the dirt, protected from the cold by mud.

My mind had always been decidedly dark and morbid. Even as a child, hyper aware of the idea of death and war, I did not speak of things children should. Pair that with my childish optimism, and it made an eerie combination.

Now, I feel I cannot escape it. On the rare occasions I venture out, I often wander to the cliffs, stepping too close to the edge. Only one train of thought consistently crosses my mind: methods of death. Poison would be difficult to obtain. Jumping off the cliff could break my bones. And worst of all, I might end up surviving.

What if I died?

It crossed my mind constantly. I once expressed my curiosity to Korg on one drunken evening playing Fortnite. He put down his controller and paused the game. "It's too late now."

My mind was foggy from alcohol and hours spent staring at a screen. "Huh?"

He looked so sad as he replied, "You've already died inside. You're slowly dying every day, like we all are."

That should have made me feel something. But I had sunk so deep into apathy that all I did was bitterly laugh. "Too right you are."

Korg sadly shook his head, eyes closing in a sad manner. "You're not living. You're just existing."

I put my hand on the glass. A print appears once I remove it. The window is cold. On the other side, the ocean is pouring down on us, running in rivulets down the panes.

The air inside feels stiflingly warm, too dry, too stale. Standing up, I snatch my cloak from the table where it lays in a heap. Once the red fabric is secured around my neck, I vacate the little hut.

Within minutes, I am drenched. Of course, I have the ability to deflect rain from me. Hel, I could shield the entirety of Norway if I wanted to. But I no longer have the energy. I no longer care enough to put forth any of the effort required.

Brunnhilde and Heimdall are trying to shield me from the horrors of the snap. They don't fool me. I can see right through them. Every time I walk by when they happen to be discussing worldly events, they change the subject. I have become more than a liability. No-I am a ticking time bomb. They didn't want to hurt me. They don't recognize me.

Worthy.

The word never stops repeating in my brain. I have become a ceaseless broken record of empty, broken phrases. I mumble them under my breath, multiple times in a row in a dazed mantra. No wonder I see pity reflected in everyone's faces when they bother to look me in the eyes-there is nothing left in them.

I've been walking a long time. I'm mindlessly wandering. I should be heading home before it gets dark. It's much too cold, and I'm underdressed and intoxicated. But regards for my own safety and well-being are a million miles away. Maybe this time I will wake up shivering, blue, and covered in a thin layer of intricate snowflakes. Or maybe I'll stay asleep and never resurface from the snow. A peaceful death for a fallen warrior who succumbed to his own madness. Maybe they'll never find me.

"Thor..."

Someone is calling my name. I sink down onto a boulder, unaware that I'm being drenched in ocean spray, the rain soaking me through, my thin shoes being lowered into the frigid water below me. That is what I feel, what I sense.

But in reality, the rain is gone now, replaced by the smallest, slowest falling snowflakes, coating my blonde mess of dreads and matted braids. The waves are a still sheet of ice, an ocean frozen over, a sea that is deadly silent. A wall of falling snow fully obscures the horizon, fog gently enveloping it all in a snowy, sleepy haze. My entire body is numb.

"Thor..."

A shadow emerges from the snow and fog. A woman. She walks slowly, as if in a daze. The woman's brown hair softly blows in the wind. She wears all black, pants, a plain black coat, and a scarf.

The ice hisses and cracks under my feet as I rise on my unsteady legs, arm outstretched to her. She does the same, desperation in her eyes.

My lips are cracked, stinging in the brutally gelid gale blowing like a shower of silent bullets across the fjords.

"Thor..."

She's right in front of me. Jane Foster. She came back for me.

My hand finally finds hers. For one single minute, our eyes, our hands, touch. We're lost in time and space, only seeing each other's eyes, feeling each other's hands.

I move to draw her closer. Mine, mine forever. Take me back. Make me humbly yours for all of eternity, Jane Foster.

But when I look up from kissing her icy cold hands, all I see, all I feel, all I'm holding

is snow.

❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️

"Thor! ... Highness?! ...freeze to death!"

My arms crossed over my chest like a corpse, staring up at the sky through the ever falling snow. One last look before I let the curtains close on this world forever.

Scrape, scrape. Sharp blades on ice. Roller skates. What adventurous child strayed from their parents?

Scrape.

Scrape.

"Your Highness..."

The curtains close. And open again, for I know that voice. I know that face. It is right above me.

Brunnhilde is leaning over me, bundled up in a silver balaclava, robes of woolen fabric encasing her like a cocoon. Her cheeks are flushed with a certain glow of being out in the cold, from the exertion of skating. Dark hair freely falls in waves framing her face.

She is kneeling by me now. I just want to sleep. It is comfortable here. I have laid myself to rest. "...your lips are blue, your Majesty."

In a hoarse whisper, I respond, "My world is blue."

I draw the curtains on the audience watching. They're all watching. But I'm peacefully asleep, chest rising and falling, gradually slowing down as the cold sinks in. I'm being spirited away on a Bifröst that goes nowhere, only around and around in slow, elliptical circles.

Somehow, when I come to in an unfamiliar bed with too many blankets and worried faces piled on top of me, I'm not alarmed or scared. I merely stare at the ceiling, letting their whispers drift by me like flotsam. My attention is on the ceiling, the grayed and weathered wooden beams above me.

Herbs hang in dried bunches from the beams, lavender, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Above these layers of rough hewn wooden beams and logs, the snow still falls. The wind still blows.

A turn of my head informs me that only one small, simple window without panes adorns the space. The infirmary was never very cheerful to me. It's stuffy, dimly lit, and dry, so dry, drier than a matchstick.

I'm to stay in this room for an indeterminate amount of time, they whisper above me. Me, the king of Asgard, sentenced to bed rest for a little walk in the snow. No alcohol is brought near me.

Your Highness, they say so gently, so quietly as they grasp my hand as if I am a dying patient, not a mentally ill one. Your Highness, look who visited you today.

"Your Highness...please say

something..."

The window won't open. It's a single pane window, one single sheet of glass crusted over with frost on the other side. A world of blue is just beyond my reach, ice crystals weaving their story in an array of indecipherable hieroglyphics, dancing their own symphony I can only witness, and never understand.

Each night, I let the curtains close, and open them to the same stuffiness, the same gray. Each day, I stare out that window, wishing to feel anything but bedsheets. My fingers are desperate to touch something cold, to lose the feeling and become numb. It's cold. Outside is numb.

Outside is

free.