#41

Loki was leaning against the banister overlooking the Royal Court of the Wakandan Palace when Thor caught up with him. His brother's arms were crossed but despite the fact that his face still looked rather haggard, his hollow cheeks bearing witness to what he had endured after his death, he seemed to be an entirely different person than the one who had fled the Avengers compound in a fit of madness a few hours earlier. If anything, he seemed almost serene and the sight of his younger brother so at peace with the world and himself was so unusual that Thor did not know how to react to it. "Brother, I …"

"I need to know what Hela said to you," Loki demanded as if he had not spoken at all. "Everything could be relevant."

"What do you mean 'everything'?" Thor asked, his heart stumbling in his chest when he recalled the two scathing conversations with his half-sister that he would have loved to forget as soon as possible.

"I need to know everything you talked about," Loki specified and a flicker of annoyance in his green eyes belied his calm composure. "I need to prepare."

Thor harrumphed. "Are you sure this is—" Necessary, he wanted to add but felt foolish enough to stop himself before he could utter the adjective.

"Despite your state of grueling desperation," Loki began and Thor winced at the merciless assessment, "I am sure it will not have slipped your attention that the success of my plan to pull all of our butts out of the fire depends on me having any additional information about Hela at my disposal that you alone can give me. So, if it is not too much trouble for you?" Loki continued, leaving the rest of the question implicit as he stretched out his hand, palm outward, a pretentious smile plastered on his face.

Thor nodded with a gulp before he lunged into the tale of how they had come to agree upon the initial bargain after Hela had told him that Loki's soul was so valuable to her because it was so wonderfully full of agony and pain. His brother did not as much as flinch and so Thor continued with how Hela had appeared once again to remind him that he did not have what it took to be King of Asgard because of his soft spot for Loki and then to claim the Infinity Stones because they were enraging the magic that kept the universe alive.

"Soft spot," Loki echoed as he was pondering on his brother's words, his teeth pulling at his lower lip. "What exactly did she say about the stones?" he asked at last.

"That we were disrupting the order of the universe by trying to right an intergalactic wrong," Thor recited, "and that our tampering with the Infinity Stones was going to bring forth Ragnarok and that that there was more to Ragnarok than the destruction of Asgard, which we foolishly assumed to be the extent of the prophecy."

Loki's brilliant green eyes lit up when he heard this, the shadow of a smirk playing on his thin lips.

"What?" Thor asked but Loki did not pay heed to his question. "Did you have the impression that she knows everything there is to know about the stones and Nemesis?" he asked instead.

Thor's shoulders sank. "How am I supposed to know what she knows? She seemed taken aback when I first asked her if she knew what that stone was but then she went on to explain to me that it hosted a larger realm and … " Thor's voice trailed off as a wave of realization washed over him with such a force that his knees almost buckled.

"What?" Loki asked and even though Thor felt the juvenile urge to disregard his brother's question as he had disregarded his, he continued all the same. "I asked her what kind of realm it was and she basically asked me if I couldn't figure it out, with her being the Goddess of Death and all."

Loki gave a tiny, hardly perceptible nod.

"But ... I mean," Thor stammered, words failing him. Loki merely raised a brow at him in response and the arrogance in that look caused the words tumble out of his mouth of their own accord. "Do we even have enough knowledge to determine what any Asgardian knew about the Infinity Stones after everything Father has kept from us?"

Loki took his time to reply and when he did, he merely said, "I know everything I need to know."

Thor swallowed. "Which is?"

"Nothing you need to concern yourself with right now," Loki replied. The answer had sounded harsh but his brother's expression softened when he saw the look of distress on Thor's face. "You are in no condition to save anything right now, brother," Loki whispered. "Just trust me to do it this time and I promise you, everything is going to work out fine."

Thor huffed a mirthless laugh at the damnable sequence of words that he had spoken to Loki just before Thanos had attacked them and that Valkyrie had spoken to him when she had tried to comfort him after Hela's second appearance. "You do remember what happened after I said that to you, right?" he whispered, tears welling into his eyes without warning as it finally sank in with an overwhelming clarity that there would be no tomorrow for either of them if they failed this time.

Loki's features softened. He closed the distance between them and gently placed both hands on his shoulders, looking him straight in the eye. "I know you are fraught with doubt, brother. I understand. You have lost so many parts of yourself that you fear you might never come out whole again. I know what that feels like, believe me." Loki smiled but it did not reach his eyes. "Over the course of the last years, I have left so many pieces of my mind here and there that there is no way I can be sure there are enough pieces left to stay sane. Yet, at the same time, I know that this is all I have now and that I must try to live with it. And so must you. You must try to live with your failures. There is no other way. We must try to live on, Thor."

All the pain and guilt he had tried so hard to suppress chewed through his intestines and Thor could not swallow.

"Don't you understand?" Loki continued solemnly. "King of Asgard, Protector of the Realms, Guardian of the Bifrost? This is all you now. Everyone else is … dead. You are Asgard. Well, we are Asgard. Our parents are not coming back. There is no one left but us. We must rise above ourselves because we are the only ones left." Loki jerked his head in the direction of the others. "Well, you and me and your beloved."

"She is not my …" Thor's voice trailed off once more. "What happened to you? Why are you so …" Sanguine? Unruffled? Optimistic?

"Remember when you hoped I was going to have an epiphany of some sort in Norway?" A smile tugged at the corners of Loki's lips. "Turns out that was not merely a fool's hope after all."

"You talked to her, didn't you?" Thor's breath hitched. "To Mother?"

"Yes," Loki whispered, reaching for his hand. "Here," he said as he put Thor's palm between both of his and closed his eyes. Thor felt a warmth stream into him and suddenly he saw Frigga standing right in front of him, her translucent frame enveloped in a soft orange glow. "There is so much you can do, so much that your brother can do, so much that you can do together, and yet you both still struggle to accept who you can be," his mother whispered. "I am proud of you. Both of you. It is about time that you have some faith in yourself."

Words failed Thor as he dropped to his knees.

"For some reason known only to Yggdrasil itself, she still believes in us," Loki whispered urgently. "And she is watching us, too. We had better not disappoint her, don't you think?"

"Better not," Thor agreed, a tear of joy spilling out of his left eye as he forced himself to rise to his feet again. "Thank you for this."

"Do not thank me just yet," said Loki.

Thor nodded. "Will you at least let me apologize? I mean, truly apologize?"

"The time for sentimentalities will come soon enough," Loki replied with a slick smile, "but it is not now." He motioned his head towards the room they had left earlier. "Shall we?"

Half an hour later, Thor stepped through a portal opened by Wong, walking right into the biting iciness of Niflheim flanked by Loki in his Jotun form and Iron Man on his right and Valkyrie and Captain America on his left side. Of course, neither of the others had been content to stay behind, especially not Clint and Natasha. They had voiced their disagreement in many ways and Shuri had even proposed to make the necessary adjustments to her new Black Panther suit but had understood soon enough that there was not enough time left to waste. Eventually, Loki had decided to compromise to appease their apprehension and had handed the Time Stone back to Wong with the words "If something should go awfully awry, you can simply turn back the clock," which had elicited a reluctant consent from the Avengers at last. Thor still felt uneasy with the knowledge that they had the artifact to reverse time in their possession when all of their nerves were that raw, but he tried to console himself with the fact that the wizard would never allow them to use it. Besides, he knew that he needed all of what was left of his mental energy to focus on the task before him.

"I never thought I would come here," Valkyrie was whispering, snowflakes whirling around her face as her gaze traveled up the walls of Hela's lair.

Tony gasped inside his iron helmet as he too gazed up at the massive stone fortress with its two black doors standing at least ten feet high, the motive of the head with its jagged antler pieces obscured by the heavy snowfall. Steve merely stared in awe, his mouth hanging slightly open as his brain seemingly tried to process the fact that the tales about Hel—or the underworld or whatever else the mortals had named it throughout the years—were real.

"Call her," Loki commanded him.

Thor cleared his throat and bellowed Hela's name, the deathly stillness around them swallowing the echo of his voice as it had done the last time when he had set foot in this nornforsaken part of the Realms.

"W-why is t-there no," Steve began but his teeth chattered too heavily and he could not finish the question.

Loki cast the other man a semi-reproachful glance. "Oh dear, I hope I was not wrong about your resilience."

"I-I am f-fine," Steve purported but his lips had already turned a dark shade of blue.

"I think I'm beginning to understand that everything in this place really is dead," mumbled Tony, his mechanical Iron Man voice vibrating not with cold but with fear.

"Hela!" Thor shouted again and, after a few more seconds, the doors creaked open, leaving a tiny crack for them to enter. Without wasting a single thought on it, Thor pushed through and stepped into the tremendous hallway lined with pillars of stone for the second time in only a few days, the others following him cautiously. In the distance, Thor could make out the faintly glimmering green light surrounding the glass coffins that imprisoned the dishonored dead in the throne room. Beside him, Steve was drawing a deep breath of the slightly warmer air inside the fortress.

"This is where you … were?" Tony asked Loki in an oddly creaking voice as his helmet disintegrated into thin air, exposing his bewildered expression, but Loki only gave a shrug in response. "It looks quite different when you are actually dead."

Before the engineer could reply to Loki's rather nonchalant answer, Hela stepped forth from the shadows, an expression of curiosity mixed with irritation and anger stamped across her alabaster face. Steve and Tony, whose helmet rematerialized instantly, froze where they stood. Thor half-expected them to stumble backwards. Valkyrie and Loki each released a taut, sharp breath.

"Are you really that obtuse?" Hela snapped at Thor before her icy stare swung towards Loki, who stood next to him with his back ramrod straight and his feet shoulder-width apart, his eyes glowing like two polished rubies in his sapphire face. "It is still alive." Loki's teeth clenched in rage in response to the vilification but he remained silent. Hela turned towards Steve and Tony, her eyes narrowing to slits. "So are they. This is not what you promised me."

Thor forced a confident smile onto his lips even though his heart was threatening to beat out of his chest. "Yeah, well, we have come to renegotiate."

"Renegotiate?" Hela echoed and her condescending laugh bounced off the walls. "Why would we—" She startled, her lips hanging slightly open as she focused on something that Thor could not see. Finally, her lips curled into a devious grin. "So, you did bring me the stones at least."

Loki had not moved as much as an inch but the dark magic of the Aether was crackling all around him now, casting a reddish glow upon his blue skin, answering to the invisible energies hissing through the air. Now that they were so close to each other, Thor figured, Nemesis was trying to summon her child.

"I will need that back, Laufeyscum," snarled Hela.

"Not a chance," Loki replied calmly. "The Infinity Stones are not part of the bargain." Hela's lips parted, dissent darkening her ice-blue eyes, but Loki continued before the Goddess of Death had a chance to voice her objections. "They never have been."

"No?" Hela laughed but there was an edge to the sound. "Why ever not?"

"Because I am relatively sure that, when Odin thought of that law, he imagined the bargaining parties to be in their right mind," Loki elaborated and the expression on his face was one of grim determination. "Which was clearly not the case. Therefore, the first bargain might still stand but the second one never stood. The Infinity Stones belong to the Avengers."

Hela shrieked with laughter. "You seek to prevail against me on mere technicalities? Don't you have anything else on offer?"

"I do, actually," Loki replied unperturbed and Thor felt as if someone had placed Mjölnir onto his chest when his brother continued. "Apart from that tiny little detail, Asgard is no more. The Realm Eternal vanished into dust. The Allfather is dead."

"We all know that," Hela commented, her voice dripping with arrogance.

"Of course we do," answered Loki cheerfully. "And I am sure all of us know too that the only reason Asgardian laws ever became effective was because Odin announced 'So be it!' in that self-regarding way of his at one point or the other." Hela's jaw worked but she said nothing and so Loki continued. "So, my dear, well, not-really-sister, what makes you think that the law declaring that an oath given to one God by another is binding is still effective now that he is gone? Now that the Odinforce has dispersed across the universe? Now that you are confined to this nornforsaken place because Surtur actually killed you and you are actually dead?"

His brother's words sounded so convincing that Thor was unable to tell whether they truly were a lie. Could he have actually worried over nothing? Could it be that Hela was not even in a position to claim what he had so foolishly promised her? His sister's black-painted eyes had narrowed to slits. "You might be smarter than him," she said, glowering at Thor, "which—and I think we can all agree here—is not that difficult because he truly is the dumbest God to ever walk the Realms." She chuckled. "Well, except for Idunn, maybe."

"Would it hurt you to focus?" Valkyrie interjected.

"But whatever it is you have planned to outwit me will fail," Hela spoke over her, "because, in case you forgot, I am in possession of the most powerful artifact in the universe. You could not hope to defeat me even if you besieged my kingdom with the most destructive army in existence!"

"Is that truly the case?" Loki asked, his lips curled into conceited smile.

"Is what truly the case?" Hela barked.

"That you are in possession of the most powerful artifact in the universe?" Loki took a step towards her and Hela's body strained as she poised to attack. "What makes you think that the stone you so desperately cling to really is that powerful?"

Hela's condescending laugh echoed through the room.

"I will tell you where your knowledge comes from," Loki continued. "It comes from Asgardian lore and since that is the case, you might want to reconsider if that is really what you want to rely on. After everything Odin did to deceive all of us, there is no way you can be sure that whatever you currently believe to be true about the universe is actually true."

"You seem to forget something, Laufeyscum," snarled Hela. "I have been inside your head. I know everything you know and there is nothing in that conflicted mind of yours that would allow you to trick me out of that bargain." She glanced from Loki to Thor and broke out into laughter. "To think that the two of you should have been allowed to call yourselves princes of Asgard." The Goddess of Death laughed again, a sound so ugly and so arrogant that it raised the hairs on the arms beneath Thor's armor. "I could crush all of you right here and you would not stand a chance."

"Yet for some reason you aren't doing that," Tony pointed out but Hela did not even acknowledge him.

"You will be surprised to hear that we know more than you think," Loki continued and his brother's words sent a wave of adrenaline surging through Thor's body. "That we actually know more than you do, I dare say."

"Oh, I doubt that," Hela snapped.

"Do you? Well, for once, we know that Odin was in possession of all the Infinity Stones at one point in Asgardian history," Loki began so casually as if this was shared knowledge among all the Aesir. Thor felt his jaw drop. "The evidence used to be everywhere, glaring in our faces for all of our lives. The Bifrost clearly is a culmination of their powers. Heimdall was able to take up his post as the Guardian of the Rainbow Bridge because he had absorbed the power of the Soul Stone. The magic of the Reality Stone was given to the sorcerers, amplifying the rune magic of old. Gungnir was forged for the sole purpose of harnessing the destructive force of the Power Stone inside of it and the list probably goes on."

Hela's eyes had narrowed in guarded suspicion. Besides Thor, Tony and Steve remained rooted to the spot; their eyes open wide as they tried to process the kind of information that would pose a threat to the sanity of any mortal mind.

"You really are a sly bastard," the Goddess of Death said at last, inspecting Loki curiously. "If you had not laid waste to Asgard and weren't so incredibly bothersome, I might even be inclined to like you." She nodded almost appreciatively. "How did you do that, hm? How did you shield all that knowledge that you possess about the Infinity Stones from me?"

"That is going to remain my secret," Loki replied with a shrug. "We also know that it was Odin who spread the rumor that there were only six stones while keeping the seventh sealed away," he continued, his red eyes seemingly ablaze, and Thor felt as stupid as everyone apparently thought him to be. "If I were to hazard I guess, I would say that he kept it sealed deep beneath the vaults of Asgard, hiding it beneath the Odinsword, and then invented the prophecy that so long as nobody moved the sword, the power balance of the universe would remain intact. If anyone were to move the Odinsword as much as half an inch, however, the power balance of the universe would begin to shift, creating cracks in the fabric of reality. Surtur would come and reclaim his blade, heralding the beginning of Ragnarok." He chuckled. "His allies would steal the sun and moon from the sky and devour them whole. Fimbulvetr would befall the Realms. Blah-blah."

Hela cackled. "You think these are all lies?"

"Oh, I know them to be lies," Loki answered. "Just in case you have not gathered as much from feasting on my memories, I earned the title God of Lies, among other things, which is to say I consider myself as some kind of expert on the matter."

Hela snorted a scornful laugh. "An expert on the matter?"

Loki flashed her an equally scornful grin in return. "All that our precious father ever did was to hold the blade of that accursed Odinsword in place by some kind of spell that was linked to his and, by extension, Asgard's life-force. Even if someone had tried to move it, they would not have been able to. But Odin's death and Asgard's destruction broke the spell, which means that after unleashing Surtur upon the Realm Eternal, we released the Seventh Stone, allowing you to have it; which, unfortunately, nurtured your delusions of grandeur."

"That is enough, you miserable Jotun worm!" Hela barked. A fifty-inch jagged blade shot out of the palm of her skin, gleaming like the fangs of a hungry dragon. "Your soul belongs to me and neither your wits nor your false tongue can protect you from the oath your brother so foolishly swore to me!" She examined the blade with a feral glint of anticipation in her icy eyes before she held it out to Thor. "Now, are you going to fulfill your end of the bargain to make him shut up or do I have to claim my prize?"

Author's Note:

~ In Norse mythology, Fimbulvetr is the cataclysmic winter that precedes Ragnarök because no sun ever shines for four complete seasons, bringing forth darkness, destruction and ruin.
~ In both the comics and the mythology, things come into existence when Odin announces that they be so, which is why I included that line here.
~ The significance of the Odinsword and its connection to Ragnarök is told in the 'Tales of Asgard' comics.
~ Oh, and I remember you, Akira, saying that you hoped this time it was going to be Loki encouraging Thor "to get up and face whatever threat they have to face". I hope that the first part of this chapter satisfied your expectations.
~ That said, see y'all later xx