#38

"We're listening," said Steve but the words that Thor wanted to give voice to, needed to give voice to, caught in his throat. He glanced at the destroyed machinery and then at Tony's hand, wrapped in a new bandage. He had inflicted so much damage upon them and he knew all too well that, since he could offer them nothing else, he at least owed them the truth. All the wars they had fought side by side, every victory that they had achieved with their blood and sweat, and every defeat they had suffered through together; everything came to nothing in this moment. Time was gaining upon him and if the Son of Odin did not figure out something very soon, the mortals he had sworn to protect with his last and every breath would be dead.

But how could he possibly tell them? Maybe he could tell them a half-truth, Thor thought with a twinge of panic, leaving out the atrocious parts, and then tell Loki the truth in secret, so that his trickster brother could figure out … By all the Realms! Thor glanced at Loki and, in a flash of sudden clarity, realized to his greatest dismay that he had never once thought of how his brother would react to the revelation even though his life was as much a part of the bargain as the lives of his friends. His stomach churned. Out of nowhere, Frigga's voice interrupted his thoughts from afar, soothing like the gurgle of a small stream on a warm spring day. You are a miserable liar, my love. He saw her tender smile in his mind's eye and almost felt the gentle touch of her warm hand caressing his cheek. Your heart is too good for lies and that is a wonderful thing. His mother was right. How could he ever expect to cut a better figure than his father had if he led his brother further down the same path of lies, neglect, deceit and pretense that had ripped apart their entire family? If he led his friends down with them? No, he could not do this, not anymore, not to any of them; especially not to Loki.

He would not take a single step further. Thor cleared his throat, apprehension clasping his heart like a jaw vise.

"Oh, come on, I know that you swore an oath to her," Loki said, and the expression on his face was almost pitiful. "Out with it, brother. What did you promise her in return for my life?"

Valkyrie's mouth had gaped open in surprise. "How did you," she mumbled to herself, leaving the rest unspoken.

"Figure it out?" Loki asked. "Well, I am smart."

"You bargained for his life?" Rocket exclaimed, shock flaring up in his rabbit eyes. "I thought you fought that bitch!" The others began to murmur to each other in low voices, glances of panic and confusion shooting across the room.

"Yes, I did," answered Thor, the words forming on his tongue still refusing to leave his mouth. "I mean, I fought her but …"

"Would it hurt you to hurry up with your confession a little?" Natasha asked, her brows drawing together in a frown. "Just in case you forgot, our friends are waiting for us to rescue them."

"I promised her," Thor began, Valkyrie's words clamoring through his head. You swore an oath to kill your own brother in order to free him from the claws of death? How paradoxical is that? "I promised her that I would return Loki to her—"

"Within four weeks, I should guess?" Loki interrupted him sourly, his eyes flickering. Yes, he was smart. He was too smart for his own damn good.

"Within four weeks, yes," Thor confirmed, drowning in the shame of his own foolishness. "I didn't think this through, okay?" he gasped, his voice beginning to tremble as the anxiety, which the healing spell had extinguished, creeped back up on him.

"Obviously," Loki hissed.

"That was in the beginning, though," Thor continued in a small voice, his chest tightening again. He gasped for breath and glanced around, feeling the confused, skeptical and fearful glances of his friends on his skin, torching it like fire. And then, before he could make any more excuses, he just blurted out the truth. "She came back to renegotiate when she sensed that we somehow disturbed the magic of the Infinity Stones on Hélgidomur and—"

"When?" Loki interrupted him once more.

"When you were resting on the ice floe out there," Valkyrie replied with a jerk of her head in the direction of the glass doors.

"I have twenty-four more hours to return you and the Infinity Stones to her in Niflheim," Thor concluded, his tongue going numb. "And if I fail to do what was promised, she will … come back here and claim all our souls. Yours, mine and those of my … mortal friends."

"Well, twenty-two hours and ten minutes," Valkyrie corrected him, her mouth standing slightly open in a pained grimace. "To be exact."

The entire room fell deathly silent except for the unspoken demands vibrating through the air. The consternation on his friend's faces felt like a knife slicing through the Thundergod's heart. Loki had gone stock-still. "And by return you mean—"

Thor gulped. "Kill you."

"What?" Bruce exclaimed, his face of a ghastly pallor.

"Why would she want you to kill me?" Loki whispered almost tonelessly.

"You mean, apart from the fact that she's a sadistic, murderous bitch who thrives off the suffering of others?" Valkyrie asked softly.

"She's been inside your head. She knows about …" Thor let his voice trail off and gestured towards himself and then to his brother with his hand. "She figured it would make for a great …" He indicated his head.

Loki snorted a maniacal laugh. "I think I understand."

The sentence hung in the air for a few heartbeats before the others recovered from their initial shock and the tension in the room erupted into a searing cacophony of accusations.

"How could you?" came from Natasha.

"How dare you?" came from Clint.

"We're all doomed," came from Wong.

"I don't believe this," came from Pepper.

"I can't believe you would do this us," came from Steve.

"How can we fix this?" came from Shuri.

"We cannot possibly fight her! We're gonna lose again," came from Bruce.

"We should have left your sorry ass rotting in space," came from Rocket.

"Loki?" came from Tony.

Thor immediately glanced at his brother, whose eyes had gone almost dead, and all of the Avengers lapsed into silence at once when they grasped the threat lurking in those eyes. Thor could almost hear the conclusions Loki was drawing in his conflicted mind. He had fought to overcome the darkness inside of him to help the Avengers to kill Thanos and retrieve the stones. He had healed them, possibly allowing himself to believe that he might finally have a chance at redemption, at forgiveness, only to learn that his own brother had never intended for him to live longer than a month. That his own brother had offered his soul back to the Goddess of Death as soon as all debts were paid. "Loki, please," Thor croaked but his voice failed him. "I thought I could …"

"Don't waste your breath," Loki said in a voice so alien that the blood in Thor's veins froze at the sound. "You made a bargain that results in my death whether you fulfil it or not." A maniacal grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. "You rescued me only to condemn me back to death while assuring me that you had something to make up for and all that." He cackled, a feral glint in his eye. "You fed me nothing but lies! I should have listened to—" He interrupted himself and turned away. "Never mind."

Thor winced at the accusations. "No, it wasn't like that!" He tried to lock eyes with Loki, silently pleading for his understanding. "The only reason I agreed was because I knew you would be able to trick her out of it!"

Loki laughed tonelessly and threw his hands up in the air. "That is so typical. Thor makes a mess and expects Loki to clean it up for him and if it goes awry, it will still be Loki's fault somehow because, well, everything is always Loki's fault! Is that not how all stories go? Is that not how Asgardian logic works?"

"Why are you talking about yourself in the third person?" Tony asked, alarmed.

"Because," Loki sneered at him, his eyes flickering madly, "I am a psychopath."

Pepper, Bruce and Rocket took an instinctive step backwards but Tony did not recoil. "Stop it. No one in this room blames you for this," the engineer said, locking eyes with Loki. He carefully raised his bandaged hand and when Loki merely stared at it in bewilderment, he stretched out his arm, his hand traveling to Loki's shoulder in slow motion.

Pepper held her breath as Tony stood next to Loki, his hand squeezing his shoulder. "Calm down, okay?" he whispered, and the height difference between them made the sight so outrageous that Thor felt a desperate laugh building up inside his chest.

"Can we for once just stop making everything about him?" Clint suddenly exclaimed in utter despair, destroying whatever chance Tony might have had to deescalate the situation. Thor knew that the other man did not mean it—that his bereavement was eating him alive and that the sight of wife and children tortured by the Soul Stone was slowly driving him mad—but Loki did not and he did not care. He jerked away from Tony and sprang forward, lunging at the archer. "How is this not about me?"

"Brother, stop!" Thor screamed as he took three giant steps forward, trying to pull him back.

"Because it's about us!" Clint yelled. "Thor brought you back to help us kill Thanos and retrieve the stones to rescue our people!"

"Which I did!" Loki screamed.

"At the price of our lives!" Natasha howled.

And my own, was what Thor expected Loki to reply but he did not. Instead, he lashed out. "Don't you fret, Miss Romanoff. You are the heroes. Is that not what you do? Make the sacrifice play and die so that the people you love can live? It is me who is new at this."

Natasha's lips gaped open in sheer consternation. From the corner of his eye, Thor saw Clint raising his hand but before his brain had time to grasp the implications of the movement, the archer sprang towards his brother, his hands slamming into the side of Loki's face. He howled in pain when the bones in his hand splintered against Loki's cheekbones.

"Clint!" yelled Natasha, her arm looping around his shoulder. "What happened?"

"He probably broke his wrist," Valkyrie explained flatly. "We are, well, Asgardians are very strong."

"And I will break a lot more than just his wrist," Loki hissed, his cheeks vibrating with the effort to stay calm, "if he does not stop making it sound as if it was in any way my fault that I just can't seem to die or that Thor has the intellectual capacity of a loaf of bread!"

"No one is saying that you had any part in this!" Valkyrie screamed, yanking Loki back by the shoulders, forcing him to look at her. "This is not on you! It is on us, okay?"

"She's right!" Steve shouted hoarsely when he realized what Valkyrie was and Tony had been trying to do, his eyes traveling from Thor to Clint. "This is not Loki's fault, Clint," he continued in a voice heavy with disappointment and disbelief. "It's Thor's and Thor's alone. He did this to us."

The words sucked all the air from Thor's lungs and the tightness in his chest almost drove him to his knees.

"Fine," Clint conceded with all the effort he could probably muster, forcing himself to look Loki in the eye. "It's not your fault."

Loki snorted, the fierce gleam in his eyes evidencing that his mind was working at the speed of lightning. "Even if you really meant that, which I very much doubt, by the way, I do not stand a chance, do I? An oath sworn to a God by a God is binding."

"Loki, I," Thor began, whatever he could have said dying on his tongue.

"But I have no plans to die again so soon, so, if you will all excuse me," Loki continued and then his form simply vanished from sight.

Rocket's snout gaped open. "What the …"

"Neither do we!" Tony shouted after him, his words surging against nothing but empty air. "If you don't come back here, we're all dead! Dead!"

"Tony," Valkyrie whispered.

"What? He just made himself invisible, right? He's still here, isn't he?" Tony gulped and a wave of distraught realization washed over Pepper's face when she caught on to all the different emotions resonating in the engineer's desperate words.

"No," said Wong. "His magical signature is gone."

Pepper sank against the wall and Tony was by her side in an instant, trying to comfort her, but she slapped his hand away.

"And so are the stones," Steve noted, his face paling when the full meaning behind those words registered with him. "Loki has all the stones!"

"Can't you just try to open the pocket dimensions again?" Valkyrie asked Wong, her voice rising in panic. "And get us the rest of the stones at least?"

"Pocket dimensions are nothing but magical bags of safekeeping," the wizard replied. "They are strapped to their creator, in a sense."

Steve shot him a puzzled glance.

"If Loki is gone, so are the dimensions," Wong elaborated grimly.

"So, we're fucked," concluded Rocket in that typically blunt, unadorned fashion of his. "Loki has all the stones and he's back on his crazy shit. Not to mention that the damn Aether is trying to take possession of him, which is probably gonna make him even more crazy, and that you"—he glowered at Thor—"no longer have any of the things your sister wants. Did I miss anything?"

"No," whispered Tony. "I think that's a pretty accurate summary."

Once more, the room fell silent and Thor tried to force some saliva down his numb throat. He should have anticipated this but, once again, he had fallen into old patterns. He had taken Loki's help for granted, not wasting a single Bor-damned thought on how his brother might feel about what he had done. And now, he was gone. Again. When Thor looked up, all eyes were resting upon him and the bewilderment combined with the silent accusations and the bottomless disgust that his friends' gazes articulated were near unbearable.

"So, where did he go?" asked Nebula. "How do we bring him back?"

Thor merely shrugged his shoulders in response and felt as pathetic as a worm.

"How could you," Natasha repeated.

"I-I know that there is no way ever to apologize or make amends," Thor whispered, "but I—"

"No, there's not," Clint interrupted him briskly. "You condemned us all to death!"

"And you have no idea how to fix it, do you?" asked Bruce.

Thor made another attempt to swallow but his chest was so tight, he could barely find the strength to breathe.

A desperate laugh escaped Shuri's lips. "I thought you were exaggerating when you said that everything we had to endure is their fault," she said to no one in particular. "But it just happened again, didn't it?" She focused Thor and he saw a coldness he had not known she was capable of in them that made him shudder. "It's because of your abusive relationship with your brother that all of us will die."

"You will not die," Thor brought himself to say even though he had no idea how to prevent that outcome now that Loki and his sly mind were gone.

"Yes, we will," stammered Pepper. "You sacrificed our souls for his … Do you even know …" Her voice trailed off.

"Do you even care?" asked Rocket, his voice as sharp as a scalpel.

When Thor only gasped in return, Natasha mumbled, "I can't believe you made that choice. You are an Avenger!"

"As if that still means anything," Tony grumbled.

"Well, technically, I was the one to make that choice," Valkyrie finally admitted, allowing Thor to release a breath.

"You?" asked Pepper, her face falling.

"Thor did not want to agree to the final bargain." She looked at him, her eyes so full of compassion that every fiber in his body began to ache for her touch. "He was well and painfully aware of what he had done and he would not have risked any more of your lives."

"Any more?" asked Steve. "Whose lives were part of the original bargain?"

"One mortal, human friend of mine," Thor conceded softly. "She wasn't specific about who, even though she mentioned your name and Tony's."

"So, you sold us out," Clint said to Valkyrie, his eyes narrowing to slits. "Why? What leverage does she have over you? Can't have been Loki's well-being."

Valkyrie's jaw worked and Thor knew how difficult it would be for her to admit to the truth. "Unfortunately, yes." She grimaced. "Hela was trying to torture him, giving him nightmares, and I couldn't bear to look, so I … I said we'd agree."

"You gave Thor permission to agree because Loki had a nightmare?" Natasha asked, sharply accentuating every single world.

"Look, I know how that sounds but I never heard anyone cry out in terror the way he did when Hela made him relive his greatest nightmares," Valkyrie said. "I know that he's an insufferable pain in the ass, who makes it near impossible to like him, but that doesn't mean that he deserved any of what he's been through. I just couldn't watch. If you'd been there, knowing what Hela is capable of, you wouldn't have been either."

"Not very likely," Clint snarled. "You Asgardians barged into our world with your Infinity Stones and your magic and your mind control and opened the doors for all kinds of aliens who destroyed our planet and killed the people we love and for what? For Loki," he spat. "You sacrificed the normal lives we had when you came here trying to stop that psychopath and now you sacrificed our actual lives for him too. It's not hard to guess that those lives mean nothing to you! So, why would Loki's life mean anything to me? I swear I would drive a dagger right through his heart if that undid the Snap!"

Thor felt the thunder crackling around his palms with angry hisses and Valkyrie instantly reached for it to calm him.

"Then how are you any different from Thor?" Nebula asked. She had not spoken much at all since his revelation but now she stepped forward, her enormous black eyes flickering intently. "You would make a pact with the devil if it brought your family back." Clint was about to protest but the cyborg spoke over him. "I can see it your in eyes. If you had been in Thor's position, you would have made the very same choice. If the Goddess of Death had offered you four more weeks with your family, you wouldn't have thought of anyone in this room and you wouldn't have thought about how insane this bargain was either."

The archer lowered his gaze and Steve too suddenly looked embarrassed even though the cyborg had not addressed him at all.

"I know I wouldn't have," Nebula continued quietly and Thor's anger died down when he saw the pain in her eyes. "I would have done the same for Gamora in a heartbeat."

"What do you mean, you 'would have the same for her'?" Tony asked incredulously. "Thor didn't exactly do Loki a favor. He swore an oath to kill him again within four weeks' time for whatever reason and didn't even bother to tell him!"

"Tony," Pepper asked warily, drawing out his name. "Are you alright?" She placed a hand on his cheek. "Did he …?"

"What?" Tony asked sharply.

Pepper swallowed. "Did he … brainwash you when he read your mind?" she asked as if he would be aware if that had indeed been the case.

Tony's brows drew together in a frown. "Why would you even say that?"

"Because you're so … concerned about him," Pepper whispered, her voice barely audible. "I mean, this is not about … I mean …"

"That is not what I meant," Nebula replied as if the exchange between Tony and Pepper had not taken place at all. "But I would not hesitate to give my life or any of yours for my sister's if that would allow me to say all those things that I never got to say to her." Tears pooled into her eyes once more and she wiped them away with her good hand before they had a chance to spill.

"That's reassuring, really," Bruce mumbled, a melancholic smile scurrying over his face. "You know, I remember a time when the Avengers had left their status of a chemical mixture ready to explode behind to become a group of friends who had each other's back. But it seems we're back to square one, where I might end up with a knife in my back any time."

"You've been gone a long time, Bruce," Steve answered grimly, a shadow of regret clouding his gaze.

"I have heard enough," said Shuri, turning towards Wong. "Can you open a portal to Wakanda for me, please? I want to go home."

"May I come with you?" asked Bruce with a disappointed glance at Thor and Valkyrie as the wizard complied and an orange mandala sparked to life from his palms.

Shuri nodded and, stepping into the courtyard of the Royal Palace, she said, "Everyone who would not condemn my soul to hell is still welcome in Wakanda," over her shoulder.

Wong himself walked after her even though he kept the portal open. Pepper drew a sharp breath and looked at Tony, who shook his head. "No, I'm gonna stay here."

Pepper exhaled a desperate laugh. "You think he's gonna come back," she mumbled, more to herself than to him. "You really do." She turned away, a tear spilling out of her eye. "I'm such a fool," she quietly berated herself as she stepped through the portal and then vanished from sight.

"Wh-what is happening?" asked Bruce with a confused glance after Pepper.

"I think they're breaking up," Rocket replied flatly.

"Rocket," Nebula hissed.

"Sorry." The rabbit made a grimace. "But you shouldn't," he yelled when Bruce made a move to step through the portal after her. "I mean, we shouldn't. The Avengers shouldn't. Last time, Thanos fucked us over real good after you split up and now that we have Hela against us, we'd better stick together. All of us!" He glanced up at Thor. "Even if it really hurts to be in your company right now."

Thor gulped and every second he waited for Bruce to make his decision felt like a new splinter of glass slicing into his intestines.

Author's Note:

You probably hate me now, which is okay. Just go ahead and say it.