Chapter Text
Then came the moment Thor knew he had to turn and walk away from the viewing portal, and that he had to be first to do so.
Before him, the field of rubble that used to be their home was dark. Behind him, the silence was vast. He had never heard a gathering of Asgardians so quiet.
“I bid you take your place in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave shall live forever,” he said, facing the new asteroid field, loud enough for his voice to carry to the people behind him in spite of facing the wrong way. “Nor shall we mourn but rejoice, for those that have died the glorious death."
He turned. So few of them left. Perhaps four thousand, five at most, with nothing left to them but the clothes on their backs.
“The halls of Asgard are gone, and many of our people with them,” he said. “We will say our farewells and move on from here. We are Asgard now. We live on.”
He stepped forward. If there had been a harder step to take, he could not immediately recall. He had to keep walking, he had to move away, someone had to lead them away from this carnage. Since he’d ordered it, it seemed fair that he take responsibility for the consequences. What had he ordered it for, if not for people to be able to live on? He took another step, and the small crowd parted around him.
I am Asgard’s doom, and so are you. Thor had even been warned. He’d needed to do it. He knew. And yet looking at the rubble, and worse, turning away knowing it was still there…every nightmare had been real in the end. As he passed, he could hear other voices picking up the lines of the mourning prayer. Hopefully he wouldn’t be the only one walking away.
He also hoped that they gave him long enough to try and work out where he was going right this minute. He’d never been in a spaceship like this before. The layout was confusing.
Thor stepped through a pair of smaller doors at the end and to his great relief found not a washroom or a storage cupboard but a corridor. The doors along here came at lengthy intervals, suggesting larger storerooms or barracks. For all their sakes, he hoped barracks. If they were truly blessed, this would be a ship used to transport battalions, enforcers. Berths would be both small and hard in that case, but they would be there. Bracing himself for the worst (a large room bare of anything but slave restraints), he opened the first set of doors he came across.
Barracks.
His tears felt like fire in his eyes as he surveyed the cramped room. There were perhaps two hundred tiny berths in here. Some of them would have a place to rest, at least, even if this was only the main crew quarters. He would go back and -
- and work out who he had on this ship, how many children, how many families, how many elders. They would have to count the people and count the beds, and make decisions about who needed them most should they have more of the former than the latter. And soon. Thor had been taught how to provision for people, tedious work though it was. He could do this much.
All the cuts, the bruises, the strains, he could feel them now. He’d been punched, stabbed, nearly thrown off the Bifrost. He was so tired. His eyes hurt so much. Somewhere inside, not all that deep inside either, he just wanted to find a bottle and go back to that window. He knew a little of how the last Valkyrie had felt, now.
“I thought I might find you here,” his brother sniffed from behind him. “Somewhere dingy, accomplishing nothing of use.”
“There are beds in here,” Thor said, unnecessarily.
“Hardly beds,” Loki said. “More like shelves.”
“There have to be orphans - should they have priority here? Or will there be too little supervision? Did you find the medbay on the way here? What about the oxygen and water recyclers, are they working well?”
“I can tell you what’s not working well: your brain. And yes, I know where the medbay is, I thought I might escort you there myself. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, brother of mine, but you’re missing an eye. It looks rather painful. Though I must say I anticipate some experiments in depth perception.”
Thor smiled. It was an effort, under the circumstances, but one that felt worth it. Not only had Loki come back, Loki was worried. “All right,” he said.
Loki raised an eyebrow. “No arguments?”
“You can tell me everything you know about the ship on the way.”
A second eyebrow raised to join the first. “Is that some responsibility you’re showing there? How hard did our sister hit you over the head?”
Thor thought about it. “Mostly she stabbed me. Cut me a few times.”
“Well, blood loss might explain it too. Come on, this way.”
It was only days ago that Thor had been forced to make a plan for what happened when his brother almost inevitably betrayed him. Now he followed along, and if he was too heartsick to be truly happy, then he could at least have this.
As they went, Thor insisted on opening at least a few of the doors they passed. There were two more rooms of those tiny, hard berths. Six hundred beds for four thousand people, but six hundred more beds than they might have had otherwise. Four thousand more people. “You’ll be in the captain’s quarters,” Loki said. “Don’t argue.”
He didn’t think he had the energy. There was so much to do, he couldn’t afford to waste time fighting with his brother. Privately, he was thinking the medbay was sounding like a better idea all the time. Aside from the cuts and the bruises and the stab wounds, he was developing a nasty headache, and every muscle felt like lead.
They were not the first to find the medbay. Thor heard the crowding before he saw it. Of course there were injuries, and many of them. He made himself stand up straighter - when had he started listing to the side? How long had it been since he slept? Surely he was due for his second wind. He smiled.
“Oh, for goodness’ - stop pretending you’re not injured.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” he said. He spotted a forming centre to the chaos, and navigated in that direction. He recognised the woman in that centre vaguely, one of the more junior healers from the palace, one of Eir’s many students. She might well be the most experienced healer left to them. “Good lady,” he said. “Is there anything that might be done to make your task easier?”
Behind him, Loki groaned.
“Your high- your majesty,” the woman corrected herself hastily, “There is - your own injuries -“
“They will keep for now,” Thor said. “I will need assistance with the wounds later, when those worse hurt than I are seen to.”
“He’s missing an eye,” Loki hissed at the healer and Thor both.
Her gaze darted to the very edge of Thor’s vision; Thor did not so much as move his head. “Are there any supplies we should seek out as we explore the ship?” Thor asked, as if Loki hadn’t spoken. “Bandaging, medicines?”
“Your majesty,” she said, and hesitated, “Anything. Anything at all. There’s not much medicine here. If you find blankets, though…the heating here is barely enough. Without blankets, we’ll lose some more for certain.”
“Thank you,” Thor said. “I shall make it a priority.” They would need a lot of blankets. Space was cold, and this spaceship was far from a luxury passenger cruiser, climate controlled for the comfort of every passenger. Still, the wounded should get the blankets they found, if indeed they found any. He made to leave. He could not - there were others in need of the healers, far more than he.
“Your majesty,” she said. “Please, allow me to at least assess your wounds first.”
Loki’s arm snaked out, and weary as he was, Thor couldn’t stop him. “He will stay very still,” Loki said.
Now that he’d been cornered, he had no choice but to submit with dignity and set a good example. His armour had taken the worst of the stab wounds, his other cuts and bruises were dismissed, and then there were soft hands at his right eye. Or where his right eye used to be. Though he could feel every touch, his field of vision no longer covered that space.
It was - not the worst loss he’d suffered today. On reflection, it didn’t make it into the top five losses of the past week.
After several painful seconds, the healer withdrew. “The bleeding has stopped,” she reported. “You were quite correct, your majesty, those are not priority wounds. Though as a rule, the sooner cleaned the better.”
“Thank you, Lady…”
“Ingvild, your majesty.”
“Lady Ingvild. I shall trouble you no further, and hopefully we shall find you more supplies.”
This time, Loki let him walk off. He even followed, with a quick bow of the head that Thor spotted out of the corner of his remaining eye. Soon enough, though, his brother was hurrying to his side again. His - his blind side. Thor could not see him very well. “And here I thought you’d actually learned something,” Loki said, once they were out of earshot.
“I cannot hide my wounds,” Thor said. Though he was no stranger to pain, he had never left the healers untreated. “As you pointed out so helpfully, I am missing an eye. Even if I can’t see it, everyone else can. But nor can I appear weak. Now least of all.”
“You’re going to fill in for every rock in Asgard, are you?”
“If I must.”
He didn’t need to see to know that Loki was rolling his eyes. That was all right. Loki was upset himself, and Thor had to be strong enough to bear Loki’s worrying, too. “Now what?” he asked. “Go and nobly work yourself until you collapse?”
Thor turned and clapped Loki on the shoulder. He was still there. No illusion. If his hand landed somewhat off-centre from where he’d intended, that was all right. “There’s a lot to do today still.”
—
Mostly, Loki was waiting for Thor to fall on his stubborn face. Three reasonably deep stab wounds, all the usual bruises and strains of a difficult fight (which he’d lost), and oh yes, one of his eyes had been cut out. Not even the mighty Thor could ignore that forever, though Loki believed he’d try.
He preferred this to returning to the cargo bay where that awful emptiness was. The palace. His mother’s gardens. The libraries he’d studied in. The great hall, the practice yards, the streets, the mountains. Everything. Gone in an instant. Asgard was destroyed in minutes, reduced to no more than rubble and dust.
Loki did not particularly want to think about that, nor his role in it. So he wasn’t going to. Not even -
He watched and followed as Thor somehow made it back to the central cargo bay and started organising small teams of the uninjured to either search the ship for materials or mind the children and the injured. The Valkyrie, he sent back out on the gaudy monstrosity of a leisure vessel to search for any other small craft that may have departed Asgard, under Heimdall’s direction. Spacecraft were rare on Asgard, but some few merchants kept them, and they had their own leisure craft - not that they were designed to withstand the rigors of long-haul space travel. He set the beast to hauling machinery out of the main area, with as little smashing as possible.
Not bad for someone almost collapsing from exhaustion, Loki supposed. Somewhere along the way, Thor had grown - well, just grown. As he himself had pointed out to Loki, just to make the entire matter even more galling.
And where in all of the Nine Realms had he learned sleight-of-hand?
In the meantime, he alone had not been assigned a useful task, but was simply left to stand there and ensure his brother did not fall on his stupid, stubborn, already-injured face, and to contribute what little he could to the organsiation. Well, fine. Loki could stand here all day and they’d see who fell over first. Perhaps Thor would get the hint if Loki kept glaring at him.
After a few hours, reports started coming back. The ship was fuelled and all its recyclers were working - oxygen, water, waste. The crop towers were likewise functional, producing a basic range of bland, nutrient-dense food, supplemented by a half-stocked protein paste dispenser. The ship's sewage systems was up to its task. That was the best of it. Like many a slaver, the Sakaarians had soon learned that an up-front investment in such systems quickly earned itself back several times over through preventing wastage and deterioration of the goods it carried, and kept guards and crew in better shape as well.
The bad news was everything else. The barracks he had found Thor inspecting were the only beds they had, outside the tiny infirmary. There were only a thousand blankets on board, and the heating system was limited. Bathing facillities were equally limited, and save for in officers’ quarters, all vibration-based - a deeply unpleasant experience to most Asgardian ears. There were few tables, few chairs. The laundry was only designed to take the load of a few hundred people, rather than several thousand.
They could survive a few months like this. They would be cold, hungry, desperately uncomfortable, boring and grimy months, but they could survive it.
The Valkyrie returned escorting two Asgardian leisure craft, packed with another sixty or so survivors. They were in worse shape than most of the others on board the Statesman, the craft concerned being designed to hold no more than twenty each, and they’d been up there for days. While Thor directed them to the overwhelmed cafeteria distributing its tiny portions of cardboard-tasting cooked grain, Valkyrie took Loki aside. “Has His Majesty been working the whole time?” she asked him, frowning.
She meant Thor, and she said it strangely, halfway between nickname and honorific. “He saw the healers briefly, and unfortunately, they told him that his wounds weren’t serious,” Loki said.
“His knees aren’t steady,” Valkyrie said. “You need to drag him away to get some sleep now, ‘cause I don’t think he’s slept since the Anus. I’m still exhausted, and I managed to have a nap on the flight out to those people, and I wasn’t hurt as badly as he was.”
Thor looked perfectly steady to Loki, but then, she was the better fighter. More attuned to the movements of others. “I’ve been waiting for him to fall over,” he confessed.
“Well, he’s going to do it in the next thirty minutes,” she said. “Get him out of here. I have to go. Heimdall says there are another nine small ships out there that aren’t going to last long.”
“No such concern for me?”
She snorted. “I think you’ve hit your limit of self-sacrifice for the day. Let’s not pretend. If you need sleep, you’ll take it.”
Truth be told, he’d exceeded his limits for self-sacrifice today. He let her go with an incline of the head as gracious as that he’d given to the healer who hadn’t insisted Thor sit down. Still, it was at least something constructive to do. He sidled up to his brother and whispered, “If you fall over now, you’ll undo what you were trying to accomplish.”
Thor turned and nodded grimly, then excused himself. More madness. Since when did Thor listen and take reasonable advice? Loki led him onwards, to the captain’s cabin he himself had occupied on the journey to Asgard. It was a luxurious suite, and Loki would be sorry to vacate it.
“More blankets!” Thor said happily, upon seeing the bed. “Excellent. I’ll send those to Lady Ingvild.”
“I’ll take them,” Loki said. On his way back, he’d bring a healer. It looked like it was a lost cause persuading Thor to keep much more in here than the bare furnishings. “Give them here.”
Thor did so, then lowered himself onto the bed with a groan, remaining eye closing for a second. “I have to admit it’s nice to sit down,” he said. “To have a bed, even. It’s been…hm. Two weeks, I think, what with one thing and another. Muspelheim’s hospitality leaves something to be desired.”
Of course. Thor had said he’d visited Surtur, and he’d got the crown somehow. “Well then. Enjoy.”
Loki took the blankets Thor had discarded. There was a cupboard not far away with spares for the suite - the captain and their guests on this ship lived very different lives to the crew, who in turn were far better provided for than the slaves.
There were more people sleeping now, worn out by the events of the day, huddled together on the floor in the rooms Loki passed. A few cried out in their sleep. He hurried on. Most of these people had been treated, yet his brother had not. There was only so long a missing eye could go untreated. He had never seen Thor injured like that before. Not - permanently.
The healer Ingvild was still awake when Loki arrived in the medbay, looking every bit as exhausted as Thor, and now spattered with as much blood. “Your highness,” she said wearily.
“I propose a trade,” he said, hefting the blankets. “These, for someone to treat my brother’s wounds.”
Ingvild blinked. “There is no trade required.” She surveyed the medbay, then turned to a younger man, his face bruised and battered. “Ulrik, will you go with his highness to treat his majesty?” To Loki, she said, “Ulrik has slept a few hours, unlike myself. He will do a better job.”
“Very well. I am grateful for your assistance.”
“He is wounded, and he is our king,” Ingvild said, drawing herself up to her full height. She was not a tall woman, but nor was it hard to see how she had imposed her will on the healers here already. “It is our duty twice over.”
While Ulrik collected a few supplies, Loki cut the blankets he’d brought into thirds. Six became eighteen. Another twelve Asgardians could have a scrap of fabric to warm them in the void, or to provide a slight bit of comfort on the metal floors. Twelve, out of thousands. So few had survived, and so many they couldn’t provide for.
This was futile. Pointless.
But Ulrik was done gathering what precious little medicine he could, and in the captain’s quarters Thor was still needing a healer’s care, and so Loki guided the one to the other.
—
Brunnhilde had never thought she’d be a Valkyrie again. She’d thrown her armour into the trash heaps of Sakaar centuries ago. She hadn’t touched the Dragonfang in almost as long (it wasn’t hers, it had been Sigrid’s, and she couldn’t - not into the trash). All her plans had revolved around drinking and dying.
It had only been a few days ago that she’d picked up His Majesty. Only a few days and he’d somehow convinced her to come back to all of this. She kind of wanted to punch him for it.
The console beeped, and she came all the way awake. She was here. No time for navel-gazing, she had work to do. Just like she’d told Lackey. Nine ships. Limited time. Everyone out here had been out here for days already, before Hela had really started killing people. She hit the console for communications back to the Statesman. “Okay, I’m here.”
“So are they,” Heimdall said. “Above you.”
She’d never worked with Heimdall before. The Watchman of Asgard had concerns beyond one unit of soldiers, elite as the Valkyries had been. Good luck, though, since Heimdall turned out to be a good man to work with. Very keen eyes. Brunnhilde tilted the Commodore up and started scanning. “Nothing yet.”
“Left. A little more.”
Maybe it was a little creepy, him being able to see her every move, but he was also too much a stick-in-the-mud to abuse it. Maybe you got used to it. His Majesty wasn’t bothered. Brunnhilde looked into the starry abyss, trying to distinguish metal from rock from infinite darkness. “Got it,” she said at last, and jammed the controls forward. “Send me the next set of coordinates.”
She pulled up alongside the vessel. This one was a merchanter. Short-range trips only. Hopefully they had some cargo along with their people. They needed to feed everyone they already had.
Brunnhilde hailed them. “Asgardians?”
“Who’s asking?” The voice was young. Male. Scratchy with thirst. Bad sign. This guy was no Korg, either, to roll with the punches.
She piloted up so they could see her through the viewscreen, shiny armour and all. “A Valkyrie,” she said. “His Majesty has me searching for other survivors. Heimdall directed me to you.”
“Asgard is -“ a sob.
“There are still Asgardians,” Brunnhilde said. She’d heard His Majesty say something like that, only more flowery, ‘cause he was, well, him. She was talking to a kid. And if a kid was talking…there probably weren’t any grown-ups around. “You guys have food and water? They’re an hour’s flight in this ship, and no offence, but yours is slower.”
“Food, yes,” the kid said. “No water. Our recycler was hit.”
“Wanna let me aboard? I have a few bottles.” There was even water in them.
Docking was awkward, but she managed it. She entered onto a ship packed with children. Most of them had to be under three centuries old. There were a few older children, but nobody of an age to fight. They all had glassy, red-rimmed eyes and cracked lips. Asgardians were tough, but if Brunnhilde had arrived a day later, these children would be dying instead of just suffering.
One little girl whispered, “A real Valkyrie…” as Brunnhilde passed. She tried not to hear the awe in the girl’s voice.
The boy who’d spoken to her was still in the cockpit, with a pair of girls around his own age. They were the oldest, but still far from adult. “What’s going to happen to us?” the taller of the girls asked.
“I’m going to leave you water and program coordinates into your nav computer,” Brunnhilde said. “You three are going to share the water out and fly to those coordinates. You know the Watchman, right? Heimdall? He’ll be looking for you.”
“You’re not going to come with us?” the boy asked.
Gentle, she had to be gentle. None of them were asking about their parents. It didn’t take a genius to work out why. “I can’t,” she said. “There are eight more ships out there like yours. His Majesty sent me out to find them and make sure as many people get back as possible. Your ship works, but others might not. You’ve already been brave. Just a bit more, yeah?”
The second girl, who had a harder expression than the other two, lifted her chin and said, “My mama said that King Odin was dead, and so was Prince Thor. Mama said we don’t have a king now.”
The other two got her meaning. “Ragnfrior…” the boy said, fear in his voice.
“Odin is dead,” Brunnhilde said. She’d never call Odin her king again, she’d promised herself that long ago. She hiked up her sleeve to reveal her Valkyrie tattoo. “I swear on my honour, Thor Odinson lives, and I am sending you to him and all that remains of Asgard.”
She wasn’t good with kids. She wasn’t good with people. She wanted a drink. Maybe two or three.
“We don’t have a choice,” the first girl said to suspicious little Ragnfrior. “We need water. Lady Valkyrie, we accept your aid.”
It had been a long time since anyone had called her Lady Valkyrie. It had been a long time since she offered aid.
Brunnhilde stayed long enough to make sure the twenty children aboard all got their mouthful of water. Enough to keep them alive. Even if water might be short aboard the Statesman, she could still promise them more in good conscience.
Then it was out into the darkness again, near the edges of the asteroid field where Asgard used to be. Eight more ships. Perhaps another four hundred survivors at most, if those ships were large and crowded; more likely there would be two hundred or fewer. Heimdall had sent her the next three sets of coordinates, all within an hour’s flight of each other, three hours from where she was. She could make all three before she had to return and restock, she thought.
Once again she slept most of the way to her destination. She hoped that Lackey had persuaded His Majesty into getting some sleep himself, ‘cause if he hadn’t, she was going to kick his ass. Or get the Big Guy to do it. He probably deserved a bit more fun after they’d called him off Surtur.
The next ship she found was a fragile little thing, clearly used for recreational space-viewing rather than any sort of serious travel. Its passengers numbered ten children, and two women heavy with child. One of those, Lady Astrid, was the engineer who maintained the ship before. “We’ll need all of you we can get,” Brunnhilde said, and Lady Astrid smiled wanly.
The ship after, she was too late. Brunnhilde hailed them to no response, and then docked - only to find that they’d run out of oxygen in the past hours. There was nothing she could have done, she knew. This time, instead of sending people on, she put on the emergency rebreather (just because Asgardians could survive the vacuum of space for a few hours didn’t make it fun) and salvaged what she could. Food, water, heat sources - it all got stuffed into the back of the Commodore. She hesitated over the personal effects of the dead. Some books, a doll, a small pouch of jewellery. Small things, loved things. Like she’d taken Sigrid’s sword, once upon a time.
Scrapper 142 hadn’t survived on Sakaar through sentiment and squeamishness. These people were dead. They wouldn’t be needing it. The living Asgardians on the Statesman, though, needed everything they could get. Even the doll. If it stopped one kid crying it was probably worth it. She took them, too, and stripped the corpses. After that indignity, all she could do was say the proper rites, the words clumsy on her tongue. Good thing nobody was there to hear.
She wasn’t planning to tell His Majesty about this one. Let him guess where this stuff had come from.
Feeling numb inside again, and aching for a drink again too, she headed off to the third and final ship of this run.
It wasn’t far. It was also big. The biggest she’d found yet, a proper shuttle to travel between local systems with cargo. In normal circumstances it wasn’t meant for more than twelve, maybe fifteen; under the circumstances she wouldn’t be surprised for fifty people to be aboard. She flew up, viewscreen-to-viewscreen again, and said, “Calling Asgard.”
There was a long pause, and then, “There is no Asgard.” A man’s voice, this time, strained and exhausted but not cracking of thirst.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Brunnhilde said. “We’ve got a few thousand Asgardians on a ship. We’re gonna go somewhere safe and start again.” Just where that was, she was going to leave up to someone else. “I’ve got coordinates.”
She couldn’t hear the discussion that would surely be going on inside, but there had to be. She tried to fly casual. After all, this time she really wasn’t there to sell them into slavery. After way too long a time, she asked, “Look, can I dock and give you the coordinates and the last of my supplies? Heimdall says there are another five ships with survivors out there, and they’re running out of time. I need to get back and restock.”
“Heimdall?” another man asked. “Heimdall survived?”
“Yes, Heimdall survived.”
There was another long pause. The adults were worse than the kids in deciding what to do about her. Asgard was a kind world. Its children were trusting. But every adult learned suspicion sooner or later. “Come aboard,” the second man said at last.
Brunnhilde couldn’t pretend that the expressions of shock and awe as she did so weren’t gratifying on some level. Damn right she was a Valkyrie. They’d fought and won in each of the Nine Realms, and the epics sung about them were epic. It was a short-lived feeling, however - they weren’t a they anymore. The Valkyries were only her. There was a weight to that. She hoped she could stand it once the rush wore off.
Aboard, she repeated the story of how they’d been forced to destroy Asgard-the-place in order to save the few thousand people they could. The people knew about the destruction of Asgard - it was kind of hard to miss - but the whole ‘actual survivors’ thing they had a little more trouble with.
“Hela said the princes were dead,” the man in charge of this little group said.
“Premature call, yeah,” Brunnhilde said. She needed to get them all out of here. “Just pushed them off the Bifrost. They landed safe and sound and came right back.” Detour through the gladiatorial games of Sakaar aside. She didn’t need to mention that. And they way these people talked about His Majesty, she didn’t think telling them she’d sold him as a slave would be a good idea.
Eventually, they said, “We will do as our king commands.”
Our king. That wasn’t a welcome reminder. She’d called him your majesty and meant it, back on Asgard, but it was one thing for her to say it, when there was nobody to hear but that Banner guy, and another for someone to call him their king. Her king.
Saving Asgardians, she could do. Defending the throne again…
She’d have to drink on it.
—
The healer Loki found was careful, thorough, and extremely apologetic about the lack of anything to numb the pain. “I’ll come back later to fit you an eyepatch,” he said. “It has to sit right on your face, your majesty.”
“Only when you have the time,” Thor said. He could feel a strange emptiness in his face, along with what was now the ache of a healing wound. “The gravely wounded come first.” Hela had aimed for his eye specifically, destroying it but otherwise not doing much damage to his face. Her spite was his…not gain. Lesser loss. The injury could have been much worse.
Loki hadn’t come back. Thor had no hope that he would. He’d done everything Thor could have hoped for. More than Thor might once have expected. He was very proud. If only Loki would stay…
Then, once the healer was gone, he laid out on the bare mattress and slept. Somewhere in the back of his foggy mind, it felt almost shameful.
The dreams that came to him were not peaceful. He watched his people slaughtered on the bridge, he fought Loki in Sakaar’s arena and killed him, he saw crowds in Asgard’s streets and spoke the order to burn it all anyway, he dreamed of his grief forged to something terrifying in its emptiness. It was less than restful. Thor woke almost as tired as he’d been when he’d slept, and in even more pain. These quarters boasted their own bathing facilities, lavishly appointed as far as these things went. Reasoning that the water recyclers were working well and that he needed to be seen as in control of himself and his surroundings, Thor made use of the steam-washer. It felt good, for thirty seconds, and it did at least let him clean up.
He found his way back to the main area of the ship. There were people milling around there, most of whom had neither a hard little bunk nor a blanket, when Thor had had an entire bed. There was no sign of Loki, nor of Valkyrie. Instead, he approached Heimdall, keeping his vigil at the main window. Thor was pleased to see that at some point the healers had attended to him as well, bandaging his leg wound. “Did anything of import happen while I slept?” he asked.
Thor had stood next to Heimdall and looked out over the stars beyond Asgard many a time. Now, though Heimdall stood on his good side and Thor could still see him clearly, there was darkness to his right, and unfamiliar stars ahead. This would take some getting used to.
“Korg of Krona has finished counting our people. Not including us, Korg, Lady Brunnhilde, Prince Loki, and Master Banner, we have four thousand, three hundred and ninety-two Asgardians on board, plus seventeen surviving gladiators from Sakaar.” Only seventeen gladiators? Many must have fallen in the defence of his people. Thor would see them honoured as appropriately as possible. Korg would know how many, and likely their names as well. “Lady Brunnhilde is on her final trip out to retrieve the last of the people who fled the planet. I count another eighty-one on those ships.”
Asgard was a people, Thor told himself again. Asgard was four thousand, four hundred and seventy-seven people. Plus Korg, the surviving gladiators, and Banner, if they wished to be counted amongst Asgard’s numbers. For what they had done for Asgard, they would always have a place here. “Any progress with supplies?”
“Precise rations haven’t been worked out yet, though the group you assigned to distribute meals has worked together well so far. We will have enough for a journey of approximately six weeks at most. Assuming that no crops fail.”
Not long, as far as space travel on a slow vessel like this went. “There are luxury goods in officers’ quarters for us to sell or barter,” Thor said. “It might not get us much, but if it buys us another day’s food we should do it. How fare our wounded?”
“Ten died from the time of boarding to now, and two more will likely follow by the end of the day cycle. Most here bear minor wounds. The infirmary here was only designed for twenty. We have twice that many in need of medical beds, and an additional thirty who would greatly benefit from bed rest. In terms of healers, we have eleven, plus four apprentices and three apothecaries. All are on the verge of exhaustion.”
“I will visit them soon and see if I can persuade them to take a little more rest,” Thor said. “We will need their skills. Is there anything else I should know?”
Heimdall said, “Your coronation will be today.”
Thor started. “Surely you jest. Today? In these circumstances?”
“Today,” Heimdall said. “Asgard needs this. We need something to hold on to.”
“If it must be, it must be,” Thor said heavily. He didn’t want it. He had been happy as Midgard’s protector. Even travelling the realms in search of the Infinity Stones he had been happy. And yet he’d sat on the throne and taken up Gungnir to challenge Hela. He was not blind to the implications, nor the responsibility he’d accepted. If his people would have him, he would serve. If his people needed something to hold on to, he would let them hold on to him. “When?”
“Three hours. The plans are already under way. Such as they are.”
No throne. No crown. No Gungnir. There would be nothing traditional about this coronation. “I will be presentable for it,” he promised.
“Then that is all,” Heimdall said.
“Thank you, Heimdall,” Thor said. In all honesty he could not possibly thank Heimdall enough. He, and Asgard, owed him a great deal. That said, the way Heimdall would want his efforts repaid was through Thor’s own dedication to Asgard. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Then he set to his tasks. There was still plenty of work to be done. Disputes had arisen over bedding, tempers had flared over bathing. Nothing serious, but all best set to rights before they became so. At least there had been no arguments about food or water. Everyone was hungry and thirsty alike in that regard.
Valkyrie was still out, while Korg and the Hulk had finally sought a place to rest. Truly, Banner’s endurance in that form was remarkable. Loki was nowhere to be found, and every passing minute made it more likely that he had fled. Thor only had himself to blame for that; he had needed to goad Loki and it was the only way he could think of that was likely to work, yet if his brother had taken his callous words to heart, that was the price Thor must pay for Asgard’s salvation.
When Thor visited the medbay to see how the wounded and the healers were faring, he himself was taken aside by one of the apothecaries. “That eyepatch, your majesty,” she said. “That wound needs proper covering.” Not to mention it would spare everyone the sight of bandages around his eye, or worse, the tattered remnants of his eyelid over the empty socket.
She changed the dressing, too. He hoped they could spare the resources. Fortunately, he had always healed fast even by Asgardian standards. He should be reasonably presentable for this coronation. Clean, at least.
When he realised that most people were drawing towards the main area of the spaceship, Thor knew it was time.
He managed a purposeful stride back to the captain’s quarters to prepare. Unreadiness and reluctance were not things he could afford anymore.
He wished his brother was by his side.