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Heimdall is not Aesir. He is a remnant of a time forgotten, the brightest of those born of the sea, ever vigilant—even across time. Sleeping as he flies over thought and memory, memories of things to be, his watchful mind dreams as few have or ever will. He dreams, and he focuses all of the power of his ancient mind on a single purpose: remember what you see. He must, he knows he must, he walks among the broken dead, he sees the souls wander without any to mourn their passing—he stands witness to the fall of Loki, the widened eyes of the sometime King as the fierce bright of his life-force is extinguished, and Heimdall wakes.
Remember what you see.
He wakes with the words on his lips, and looks out at the forms of Asgardians lying in clustered disarray, in their artificial moonlight. So few of them now. His charges, all of them; young and old, together breathing as they sleep. Heimdall shifts gingerly on his wounded leg and looks closer, just to be certain—listens to the very currents of the air flow and ebb. It reminds him of some childhood memory of inception. The sea drawing up to the shore, retreating. Yes, they are sleeping. He takes comfort in this, though he knows not why.
Keenly awake, his dark silhouette stands. There is a familiar shivering in the seidr as someone moves, unseen to the rest of the ship, doing his best to remain unseen, and the near-historic familiarity of it almost makes Heimdall smile.
Almost.
Their paths cross near what seems to be a wholly unremarkable stretch of hallway, but if Loki has sought it out, then there must be some secret at work.
“I will not ask where you are going, or how,” Heimdall’s low voice, for a moment, suspends both of them in what feels like a thousand forgotten instances of interrupted mischief.
“Good,” Loki says, “because I hardly know myself.”
Of all the things the man could have said, this most surprises Heimdall. Loki could have passed entirely unnoticed if he had the will. Instead, he is hesitating, on the edge of some precipice, something which begs disuadement. That alone stirs Heimdall’s mind to warning. Remember what you see.
“I am sure Thor will be utterly shocked to find me gone,” Loki’s voice reaches him in his waking mind.
Stranger still, he is actually inviting conversation.
“He has high hopes for you,” Heimdall says. “Even now.” There is no silence anymore, not on a ship, but there is a found silence between the two men. The day that Loki unspeakingly seeks Heimdall’s counsel must be a dark one indeed. The fierce bright of his life-force extinguished.
“I cannot sway your mind,” Heimdall says.
Another false smile. “There are few who can.”
“Listen well nonetheless. Whatever allegiance is yours, I care not. I cannot foresee any final doom which does not intersect and bind the many threads of lives, so it means little whether you go or stay. But your brother,” Heimdall forges on, softly, the molten glow of his eyes flickering, “will need you ere the end.”
“Thor has a boundless capacity for making new friends,” Loki folds his arms, and he must fuel the false smile with all his illusory gifts. “I’m sure he’ll be quite alright.”
“I did not say you were his friend. A man does not go to war with his friends.”
“War,” Loki echoes, a mere breath of a sound that fits itself to his voice, like the name of an old lover. An uncertain thing now, the glory near forgotten. “Ah, you have seen something, haven’t you? Of Thor? What specters of things wake the watchman?”
“I saw your death.”
“Which one?”
Heimdall shakes his head. “Your last.”
When the Allfather first brings his sons to look upon the madness of battle, it is not them he thinks of. In his mind’s eye is a girl of pride and the dark radiance of ambition, a goddess buried deep in the recesses of Asgardian memory. He stands them on a ridge at the edge of a plain, two boys near adulthood, where two peoples are at war.
“We could take both of them,” young Thor says of the armies, with boyish vigor, but Odin hears her.
“We will do nothing,” Odin says. “If, someday, their bloodlust spreads to other lands, we will return, but until that day there is no evil they can do but on each other.”
It is morning on this realm, and their breaths are silvery, the sun a pallid gray smudge behind the clouds. He had roused them early; they donned their armor with that stifled glee of children who are allowed to join the adults at some secret privilege. Their disappointment had been only momentary when he told them they would not actually wage war but in fact watch its waging. It had been more than sufficient for them to know they might be close enough to see gruesomely exciting things, valor and treachery and all those much-chronicled deeds.
Odin knows he has fueled their curiosity. It is enough that they have grown in a palace of conquerors. Even a child can sense such origins.
The three figures stand as sentinels on the ridge, watching the tides of soldiers clash as they have for all night and all time, even as all-seeing eyes watch them from a golden hall far away.
“I thought it would be louder,” says Loki, drawing his cloak about him more tightly. From the heights, it is but a tinny roar. Even the foul-smelling wisps of smoke seem distant, liable to disperse.
Thor squints. “I’d wager it is up close. Like a storm.”
“Come, let us walk down a little. Be watchful, my sons.”
They are all too willing to oblige, weaving their way with long steps and softly laughing voices down through the frozen weeds, here and there the purposeful stumble and elbow in the ribs. Odin has not seen them with such casual comraderie in a long time, and he spares a thought to wonder if this is, perhaps, the right time.
Loki is the one to find a rusted shield. It cracks under his step. A hollow sound. It is a sword caked with dirt next, and a femur; a field strewn with the still armored bodies of untold thousands.
“Who were they?” Loki asks, tilting his head to match the gaze of eyeless sockets.
“Wicked men,” Odin says, “berserkers, many of them. Mad, or greedy for gold and feudal power. A wasteland that was once a city west of here is a testament--they massacred each other.”
With his boot, Thor grinds what appears to be a knucklebone into the dust. “Good.”
“And what of those still fighting? They seem very much not massacred.”
Odin follows Loki’s outstretched hand to the dim sea of crashing forms on the field below, a little less indistinct now. They seem strange, pressed back as they are to the ruinous walls they still defend. The sickly air of the place, perhaps, makes the eyes swim enough not to see the men for what they are.
It is not until they encounter a berserker that the Odinsons lose their smiles.
It is quite a vicious skirmish; they are taken by surprise, but quickly it is a whirlwind of eager parrying and blows, the breaking of shields anew, the blossoming of daggers. Their attacker is a blur of rage, and they put themselves between the berserker and the Allfather, and he lets them. He lets them at it. Maybe his heart breaks for them.
When the helmet comes off of the slain, they see it for its horror.
“A child,” Loki spits, and Thor drops the helmet as if it suddenly burns to touch. “Those are children fighting? Berserked children?”
“Willingly. Their fathers are dead,” Odin says calmly. “Their war is not finished until their people’s lives are spent.”
“Then what curse is on this place?” Thor demands. Some distant shout scatters the foliage of a tree as blackbirds, wheeling noisily up into the sky. “What makes them go on?”
“A sought war is a heedless master. Should it come to Asgard, you will know no end until there is peace, or all is lost. Men will fight for you,” Odin says. “To their deaths, readily. They will fly into Hel.”
“Father, those are warriors. Warriors who have taken oaths. Not children.” Nimble-fingered Loki is already picking holes in Odin’s lesson, and Odin wishes he would, for once, wait long enough for it to settle. It was not a lesson intended for him.
But while a frustrated Thor watches the blackbirds swing in frantic formation above the battlefield, Loki is looking at his already drying dagger. Berserked blood looks the same as ordinary blood. Preferring it to the pale face, the unwrinkled death mask of rage, he watches that thin red rivulet with a morbid fascination; this is his fallen bird, felled by an ignorant stone.
He wonders why he cannot see the wisdom in it.
The boys have sobered, for a time, and go lightly where they walk. Thor seeks out Fandral, perhaps to enlist him in some pursuit. Loki seeks out somewhere high up and open to the sky from which to read. Frigga sees their hollow grins, the lack of effort in them, and she finds Odin in his chambers with a raven on his arm. Bird and man are pensive. She stands framed by the doorway.
“You took them to Midgard, didn’t you?”
There is no question that to use the Tesseract a second time would be to tempt fate, but fate has ever found him delightfully tempting. In the dark hall, a thousand felled birds and drying daggers later, he faces Heimdall, who stands as stockstill as if he had never left his observatory. Loki faces the quietly rising horror of the unspoken. He can go, he can skirt the stepping-off-point and flee. Take the danger of Thanos with him and away. Live until more fleeting ends. Or he can stay. He can step off. He will need you ere the end.
There is no question whose end this is.
“Goodnight,” Loki says, with long, slow steps backward into the dark. When Heimdall does not move, he makes a mock gesture of dismissal. “You are free to go.”
Heimdall’s gaze goes beyond and through him, and into the depths of the ship. “She is in the engine bay.”
“What?”
“The Valkyrie. I thought you might like a drink.”
Loki stops his careless backwards walk, his expression veiled by shadow and long years of perfected practice. Heimdall seems smaller without his armor, somehow closer to the fragility of existence that has haunted Asgardian steps of late, but every bit the guardian of old. Loki cannot say that he likes the watchman, anymore than he likes the cord that binds his hands indeterminately to the people on this ship, even as he wonders if it is a noose or a lifeline. Lacking clear friends, it could be both. But a man does not go to war with his friends.
Damn, Loki thinks, resisting the urge to shiver. He goes to war for them.