Work Text:
When the battle ends, all that is left is death and despair.
Thor has been in countless battles in his lifetime. He has seen countless die, both soldiers at his side and enemies slaughtered at his hand. He has been drenched in the blood of men, had it stiffen his hair into congealed dreadlocks, had it stain his skin for days after the war ended.
He has seen the turn of the stars, watched planets be born and die.
But on this day, he is shattered.
The devastation rips through him, vicious and unrelenting. He has lost everything.
The axe weighs heavy in his hand, the twisting handle digging groves into his hand. It was supposed to save them. He was supposed to save them.
The sun will shine on us again.
Electricity ripples under his skin, sparks flying between his fingers. This is not justice . This is not what he was owed.
Was he not owed?
Has he not already given everything?
His brother’s face, dirtied and desperate, the pale blue glow catching the sharp lines of his cheekbones. I promise you, brother.
His mother’s last gasping breaths.
His father’s pale trembling hands, Asgard is where our people stand.
Then Asgard is fallen.
His people slaughtered, his friends slain, his weapon shattered in the hands of his sister.
He has nothing left to him in this life.
When the battle falls silent is when the death begins.
I will just click my fingers.
He doesn’t know who goes first, and perhaps it doesn’t matter as much as who went. Before he knows it, people are fading away. They corrode slowly at the edges, losing themselves piece by piece, swept away into the universe, clouds of particles.
And it hurts.
He was never supposed to get involved in the beginning. They were base creatures, humans. Less evolved, flawed. Worst of all, they were temporary, they existed fickle and fragile.
He had fallen in love with them.
He had kept fighting, even as the world had collapsed around him, even as the only person in existence who could possibly understand him as been twisted into an empty shell, he had kept fighting.
The humans offered him their world, had said we need you and we trust you, and all that was left in the emptiness battlefield was his failure.
The first tears had been Steve’s. Slow and bitter, carving their way through the grime on his face. Natasha gathered him into her arms, whispered words like he loved you and I’m here and it won’t feel okay we don’t have to be okay I’m not okay.
And he had turned away. Because the emptiness inside him corrodes.
Steve doesn’t speak for a long time. His sorrow is carved into his face.
He lets the bifrost envelope him. The twisting fractured colours wrap themselves around him and he is tugged away through the fabric of reality.
It takes a few tries to find Stark.
Of the people who fought on Titan, only two survived. The youngest of them all had been lost.
Stark screams. He too has lost everything. He kneels on the surface of a planet far from of home and he sobs and shakes and screams.
Nebula sets her jaw hard. Says she won’t be coming to Earth. Her hands clench and unclench at her sides.
He wishes her good fortune.
His tone is empty, but she seems to understand. She salutes him bitterly.
He holds onto Tony. He knows what it feels like to have your world stripped away from you. He doesn’t give him words.
He lets the bifrost tug them away.
The earth mourns.
He remembers the battle in flashes, bright images and colours that have burnt their way into his memory like no battle before it.
He has fought for so long and so hard, and here is where they end.
His people end here.
His friends end here.
His brother ends here.
This battlefield is mangled with endings.
The fourth dimension unspools at Strange’s fingertips. It is a woven thread before him, split into the shimmering strands of possibilities. Now is a superposition of everything to come.
He picks one, and winds it around himself, falling into visions of causality, watching as events unfold. One by one he watches friends and allies die. He watches as worlds burn.
He picks another thread. He follows it until the universe collapses around his ears and then he starts again.
Peter gasps out his last breaths on Titan I don’t want to go .
Tony bleeds out, face paled.
Wanda lets her power consume her as it consumes the man she loves.
Steve weeps over Bucky’s mangled body.
He watches as Natasha has her neck snapped, her body falling in odd angles.
He watches as Quill screams and screams.
Groot blisters and burns.
Time whirls, infinite and malleable, around him. Like a shattered mirror, reflections and repetitions, pieces of time echo each other across the universe.
And they die, again and again.
Peter’s back snaps. Insect . He looks too small on the desolate surface of the alien planet.
Tony smashes his arc-reactor. The flames consume him as the shrapnel buries its way towards his heart.
T’Challa sits with Shuri’s body cradled in his arms. She’s bloodied, beaten and bruised, and her eyes are dark and empty as they stare into the heavens.
The battle heaves and flows. Blood and tears spill.
Thanos clicks his fingers.
Reality warps and twists, and every time they die .
He can’t fix it.
He tries to keep track, as he wades through the future. Tries to tally losses, weigh one possibility against another. But always, at the end stands Thanos, gauntlet glinting on his hand, smile tugging on his lips.
What if—
And he tries again. Watches cause and effect ripple across spacetime like the wings of a butterfly. He sees the events that led them here, sees Loki’s sacrifice amongst the remains of Asgard, watches as Peter clings to the spaceship, losing the air from his lungs. He follows Gamora as she falls, tumbles through the air, her last seconds knowing what her death represents. She hits the ground hard, deep green blood seeping into the cracks in the earth.
And then he sees it. He begins to understand the patterns that underlie it all, watches them over and over as they branch and collide and diverge, repeating themselves again and again.
A sacrifice is required.
He follows a new thread this time, picks it up mere moments beyond now. He traces it, follows its path in excruciating detail.
Tony, blood stained, alive.
Wanda, saved.
Thor, vengeful.
Quill, blinded.
Each part of the story clicks into place. Thanos makes it to Earth, only one stone missing from his gauntlet.
Vision dies.
Click.
There is no other way.
He is pulled from the depths of his vision with a gasp. Tony stands over him, face creased, the weight of the world on his shoulders. He asks
What did you see?
He replies much later, perhaps too late, there is no other way.
It had begun with him. In many ways, it had always been him.
From the moment they’d stuffed him into that stupid costume, shoved a shield into his hand and said you are hope .
He’d believed them.
Back then he’d believed in many things, had trust in things. Back then he thought that the fight was noble, that what he’d stood for was righteous. Even as the smell of gunpowder was distant and Bucky was too far away, he’d believed.
I’m with you ’til the end of the line.
They had grown up together, before the war. He’d watched as Bucky became everything he had promised to be, had stood at his side through thick and thin. He had let him go when the army claimed him, was so proud that was his Bucky in uniform, his Bucky going to fight to defend his country.
They had fought side by side, won side by side. They had been in uniform together.
And he had ended that war.
And he had lost his everything.
They never had time, after everything. They never had the chance to talk in between fight after fight. Sometimes they were together, sometimes Bucky was so far away it was like losing him all over again.
It hurt .
He never had the chance to explain, to confess.
He’d stopped believing, somewhere along the way, but people still told him you are hope , and he’d pulled the shield back into his hand, and stood side by side with a new family, people that he trusted to have his back.
He always knew he had to fight. After this long, he can’t remember much else.
They put him in a new uniform this time. Less scratchy, well fitted. The uniform changes, over the years, but it all says the same thing.
Remember what you represent. Remember your duty.
He doesn’t know if he can anymore.
He has lost Bucky many times. Too many times.
This time, with his name imprinted on his lips, this time was the worst.
This time broke him.
The end of the line.