Thor and Loki made their way up to the royal apartments near the top of the palace. They didn't exactly drag their feet, but neither did they make anything resembling haste. Every Odinsleep Thor could remember except one had ended in the same manner: with the whole family gathering together in the king's study to prepare for the following day, when Odin would resume the throne. The study was a far less formal setting than the throne room or the council chambers. It was large and circular. Braziers alternated with bookcases all along the walls, and endless knotwork intertwined across nearly every gilded surface. Opposite the door was a wide balcony that overlooked everything from the palace steps to Heimdall's Observatory, and on either side of the room were two spacious raised alcoves. The one on the left housed a hnefatafl table and a loom; the right, a massive desk heaped with books and loose parchment, where Odin did most of his work when he wasn't sitting on Hlidskjalf. At the center of the room was a sunken fire pit surrounded by a carpet of furs and four heavy, lavish sofas.
At the princes' entrance, Geri and Freki leapt up from where they had been curled on the furs and dashed over to greet them, ears perked up, tails wagging madly, and tongues lolling out. Even though Thor was now facing the most important conversation he would ever force his family to have, he couldn't help smiling at the wolves and scratching their ears, though they soon abandoned him for Loki, who had produced out of thin air several large pieces of meat still warm from the banquet hall.
Odin and Frigga stood on the balcony, and they turned as Thor and Loki approached and stopped a couple of the wide steps below them. "Your mother tells me much has happened while I slept," said Odin. "It must be true, for how else would the palace have acquired four mortals as guests?"
As with Heimdall, this was a better reaction than when Thor had brought Jane alone, though Odin did not sound exactly pleased—more that he was waiting to hear a very good explanation before he decided whether or not to be displeased. Perhaps mortals were only unwelcome when the Crown Prince was courting one.
"It is time for Asgard to expand its alliances," said Thor.
"Alliances?" said Odin. "Asgard has protected Midgard for millennia. What would be the value in any closer an alliance than that when there is nothing the humans can offer us?"
"I think they may surprise us, Father," said Loki. "One of the four we brought can match Thor in battle."
Odin raised his eyebrows.
"I would've won," Thor grumbled.
"Of course you would," said Loki.
"I was going easy on him!"
"Boys," said Frigga, looking amused.
"And what prompted this sudden desire for an alliance?" said Odin. "When last we spoke, Thor, you could do little but rage and storm about repaying the Jotnar for their supposed act of war."
"I have no quarrel with the Jotnar. I would have them for allies as well."
Both of his parents stared at him in blank shock, and he could feel the same reaction from his brother, even though this wasn't the first time Loki had heard him voice the idea.
"Can this be my son who speaks?" said Odin. His brow furrowed and his gaze grew more intent. "What has happened to you? You are not as you were."
"No, I am not," Thor agreed. "But before I tell you all, I would have you know that what I say is for the good of Asgard, the nine realms, and this family." He lifted Mjolnir off the hook at his side and held it out to his father, handle first. "There is a spell to prevent any from wielding Mjolnir who are not worthy of it. I want you to cast it."
"Thor," said Frigga. She stepped forward and clasped his arm. "You do not need to prove yourself to us."
"Thank you, Mother," said Thor, covering her fingers with his free hand, "but I would leave no room for doubt. What I have to say will not be easy to hear."
"Very well," said Odin. Frigga moved to stand by Loki's other side. Odin lifted a hand, and Mjolnir flew into his grasp. Without taking his eye from Thor, he held the hammer to his lips, and the swell of power emanating from him made all the fires in the study dim. "Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor."
He let Mjolnir fall onto the step between them with an echoing thud, a gleaming triquetra now emblazoned on its head.
As Thor bent down and reached for the handle, he had a moment to wonder if he had just doomed himself. Since he last wielded a Mjolnir enchanted with the worthiness spell, he had helped destroy Asgard and his sister and he had failed to save his brother, Heimdall, and half of his surviving people from Thanos. He closed his hand around it and lifted. When Mjolnir came up off the floor as easily as usual, he felt a surprising tightening in his throat. His eyes fell briefly closed. He was still worthy. He hooked the hammer back on his belt and resumed his place beside Loki.
"You could not have done that five days ago," said Odin.
"If you knew that, then why did you want to make me regent?" said Thor.
"I didn't," said Odin. "My misgivings were such that I put off the Odinsleep as long as I could. However, I came to hope the experience might do you more good than it would do Asgard harm, and I was reassured to know you would have had your mother and brother to intervene if you attempted anything truly foolish."
Thor felt Loki shift next to him. He suspected that Loki had thought Odin blind to his eldest son's faults, which was why he had resorted to such elaborate schemes to disrupt the coronation.
"Will you tell us now what has happened to you?" said Frigga.
"I will," said Thor. "Five days ago, I held the Time Stone in my hand, and it sent me eight years into the past, to the night of my coronation."
Frigga's hand flew to her mouth.
"Why would you do such a thing?" said Odin. He looked astonished. "Time is not to be meddled with lightly."
Thor shrugged. "I wasn't trying to come back, but I had nothing left to lose. I had already watched all three of you die and Asgard blasted into rubble." At this, Frigga clutched at Loki, who put an arm around her and murmured something reassuring in her ear. "There were perhaps two thousand Aesir left alive when I picked up the Stone."
"Then Ragnarok is upon us," breathed Odin. "How?"
"Ragnarok was not the problem," said Thor. "Loki and I had no choice but to unleash Surtur in order to defeat Hela."
"Hela?" said Frigga. She looked sharply at her husband. "When you came back from Niflheim, you told me she was dead. You promised me she would never escape to harm our sons!"
If Odin had not been fresh from the Odinsleep, Thor thought he might have collapsed where he stood. As it was, he still swayed a little and seemed to age visibly before Thor's eyes. "It was my intent to slay her. I could not do it. For all her crimes, she is still my daughter, Frigga, and I made her what she is."
"Then even Mother didn't know?" said Thor. "Why did you never tell us about her? She is so strong, and we had no time to prepare." Anger burned sudden and hot in his veins. The intensity of it surprised him. Dark clouds were even gathering outside, obscuring the stars. "Was she meant to remain locked up and forgotten forever, or have you always known that your death would release her, and didn't care because she would no longer be your problem?"
"You know not of what you speak," said Odin, bristling. "You haven't seen what I have. You don't—"
"I see with perfect clarity," Thor interrupted, his voice near shouting now, punctuated by a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder. "What makes that easier is that my sister hasn't yet had the chance to slash out one of my eyes!" This startled Odin enough that some of the anger left his face. "How were we supposed to stop her when you've pretended she doesn't exist for our entire lives?"
"I have pretended nothing."
"No? Then if I take Mjolnir to the throne room now and hurl it at the ceiling, I would not reveal images of an older, bloodier age beneath the paintings of a peaceful, benevolent Realm Eternal?"
"Asgard is not the same as it was then."
"You can't just paint over something you're ashamed of and pretend it never happened!" said Thor, flinging out his hands.
"And I have not. The new images are as true as the old, and they show what Asgard has become. For the better part of two millennia, Asgard has rebuilt many of the civilizations it destroyed during my father's reign and the first part of mine. We have only interfered where we were needed. We have built strong ties with former enemies—the Alfar, the Dvergar, the Vanir. And we even have alliances that extend beyond Yggdrasil, where once we thought to lead our conquering armies."
"That is all very well," said Thor, "but how did you expect us to rule justly and well if we only knew half of our own history?"
"Can you tell me honestly that I had no reason to fear that learning the truth of Asgard's conquest of the nine realms might have inspired more pride and battle-lust in you than humility and compassion?"
Thor had no response to this. Shame pooled within him at the memories of his thoughtless, warmongering youth. He could not say with confidence that growing up with Hela as a cautionary tale would have done him much good.
Odin turned to face the balcony and rested his hands on it. "After Hela slaughtered the Valkyrior," he said, "I went to Niflheim to end it once and for all, but I could not raise Gungnir against my own child. Instead, to curtail her power, I erased her from my people's memory. There were many on Asgard who recalled the age of conquest too fondly and awaited the day when I would restore their crown princess. Without their support, she has never been able to attempt escape again." He paused. "Perhaps it was fear, not wisdom, that led me to hide her even from you, but I hoped that if I raised you and your brother as differently as I could from how I raised Hela, it would be enough to keep you from becoming like her."
"Is that also why you've never given me full access to my power?"
"Yes," said Odin. The bald admission took Thor aback. "Power is a seductive thing, and you have more of it than most. My father raised me to believe that whoever had the most power deserved to rule over weaker creatures. It is difficult to see the evils of that reasoning when you have always always been the strongest. That is why I took steps to limit your abilities from an early age."
"What made you see?" said Loki. All three of them looked at him. He had listened silently for several minutes, and Thor's focus on Odin had blinded him to his brother's reactions to everything they said. He still had his arm around Frigga, and he looked paler than usual, but it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. "Why stop conquering?"
"It was the Aesir-Vanir war," said Frigga, glancing at Odin, who sighed heavily. "It is one thing to conquer alien realms, but it is another to turn around and conquer the very realm you came from a mere three generations ago."
"In the beginning," said Odin, "I believed it would be for the good of Vanaheim to come under Asgard's rule. We were bringing our cousins into our prosperity, and they would thank us for it." He laughed bitterly. "The Vanir disagreed, but it wasn't until I saw Hela using the same brutal tactics against them that she had against less ambiguous enemies that my confidence in the justice of our campaign began to waver. That was also when I met Frigga."
He smiled at her, and there was such adoration in his eye that Thor felt slightly embarrassed.
"King Fjorgynn sent her to negotiate with me, and her passionate arguments for her people built on my growing doubts until I could not pretend even to myself that Asgard was in the right. The war ended with our marriage, but Hela refused to accept it. When she realized that not only would we not be subjugating the Vanir, but we would not be moving forward with any more conquests for the foreseeable future, she tried to usurp me. She killed everyone in the palace that day. When she went for Frigga, I opened a gateway to Niflheim. There she has remained ever since. And yes, I did intend her to remain there after my death."
Thor's mind was reeling. All the pieces fit together, but they differed so much from what he had been taught since childhood. Common understanding of the Aesir-Vanir war was that it had been motivated mainly by disagreements over trade. Asgard had never been portrayed as blameless in his lessons, but their role had certainly been downplayed. He would need time to think about everything he had learned.
"You said you watched all three of us die," said Frigga, her eyes on Loki. "If Odin's death released Hela, then was it she who—"
"No," said Thor. Whatever remained of his anger drained away, replaced by old grief. "You were killed by a Dark Elf four years before Hela's return." At a noise of horrified outrage from Odin, he quickly elaborated. "I do not know whether Grandfather lied about their defeat or Malekith fooled him, but they have been lying in wait in their cloaked ships these five thousand years. They attacked when the Aether resurfaced. Loki nearly died avenging Mother, but it was the Mad Titan who killed him, mere weeks after we defeated Hela."
Odin walked to one of the sofas around the fire and sank onto it, running his hands over his face. Geri and Freki shuffled close to his feet, making soft whimpering sounds, but he ignored them. "Is this the legacy of Buri?" he asked. "Bor's greatest enemy still lives, the demon that slew Vili and Vé still lives, Hela's prison will fail, and Thanos returns." He looked up at Thor. "The Norns must have sent you back to punish me for my failures."
Thor held Odin's gaze. He did not want to offer his father any comfort. These were indeed grievous failings, and he had already lived through their consequences. Perhaps he was a fool, but he hated to see the man he had looked up to all his life so defeated. "Or they sent me back to a time before it was too late to stop them from destroying everything," he said. "That is why Loki and I went to Midgard, and it is why I want to ally with the Jotnar. With the right help, we can stop these things from happening. But before we can begin any of that, there is still the other secret you kept from us."
Odin's eye widened. Thor looked at Loki, who was now white as a sheet. "You owe Loki the truth. If you will not tell him, I will."
This was a really interesting chapter to write. Considering how respectful he always is in canon, I didn't expect Thor to be so angry with Odin, and that just kind of happened as I was writing it, which was really intense. It felt a lot like Thor's version of the scene with Loki and Odin in the Vault (except with Mom and little bro standing there watching it happen, obviously).
I think when I first thought about how I would handle this scene, I pictured it happening in the throne room, but once I got here, that didn't make sense. Odin just barely woke up, and it's evening. He wouldn't be back on the throne until the next day. That gave me a bit of a problem. I couldn't picture this taking place in a bedroom or a banquet hall, really. Eventually, I came up with this study, which looks really cool in my head. And I added Geri and Freki to it, because I love that Odin has pet wolves. Their names mean "greedy" and "ravenous," which sounds pretty scary on the surface, but it could also just be an exasperated/affectionate reference to the way they're constantly begging for scraps (like how Cerberus is a really intimidating sounding name, but it really just means "spotted one," which is my favorite thing in all of Greek mythology).
All the stuff about Hela and the Aesir-Vanir war is my headcanon to fill in some of the gaps and explain how Odin went from being a ruthless tyrant to being a benevolent king. Odin is a very complicated character, and I find him endlessly fascinating.