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“So how did you get here?” Loki asked the guardian of the stone, hoping that in making conversation he might learn something useful. There was a human vibe about the man, but the vaguely haunted expression and the taut red skin didn’t match up. He wondered if it was a glamour to make the man look other than human for some reason, like his own Asgardian skin, a glamour he had cast and recast so many times he knew it would hold in his sleep, and sometimes wondered if it would even hold in death. (Of course, he was not keen to investigate.)
“I sought the infinity stones, many years ago, on Earth. For the glory of the Third Reich. And they sent me here, to guard what I could not possess.” There was a theatrical bent to the man’s pattern of speaking, a sense of narrative importance, stripped of any humour or self-consciousness. He always found it fascinating, which humans slipped easily into grand language on the universal scale, as kings spoke, and which humans clung on to their small frames of references and a casual bearing as if that meant their world was still the same. .
“The stones sent you?”
“I don’t know. Something, or someone, sent me. I was sent.”
Loki despaired. Not only was he technically helping Thanos commit genocide on a level never before imagined, he was now passing time on a dead planet in conversation with a Nazi. A stupid Nazi. He immediately lost all interest in the man’s story, and changed the subject.
Loki’s neutral expression now came with some effort. “What guarding did you do? You let Thanos and Gamora walk right in.”
“The danger is not to the stone, but to those who pass the threshold. They must come prepared to sacrifice what they love. If they cannot provide a sacrifice, the stone will take them too.”
Loki felt a flicker of hope stir in him, and tried not to let it show. He could imagine the scene unfolding, Thanos triumphant, over Gamora’s pale corpse, suddenly collapsing. Loki knew enough about Thanos to know he loved nothing but death. He’d heard about Thanos’s parenting style: the two girls stolen from murdered parents, forced into becoming child soldiers, the torture, the cruelty, the forced cyborgification. Even if Thanos believed he loved his daughter, the soul stone would surely see through it. He’d ripped her from her people because he thought she would be useful to him, and nothing more.
Two possible outcomes, then. If the poor girl, on some level, loved her adopted father, there was a sliver of a chance that she might emerge with the soul stone. Loki quickly weighed up his ability to steal it from her in such circumstances, and decided that he wouldn’t try his luck. But he didn’t expect to have a chance – the most likely outcome, in his view, was that father and daughter alike would be dead shortly. And he could leave the stone where it was, maybe kill the Nazi for good measure, and go home. Well, back to Thor and half their people, if they woud have him.
“How long should we wait, then?” he asked, impatient to be proved right. “If they die, will we know? Would there be, I don’t know, a cosmic burst of energy or something?” Loki really wished he knew more about the infinity stones. They were a power from a time before the first Asgardian to dream of magic was conceived, long before the Jotuns came to Jotunheim, and they defied understanding. Even when Loki had wielded one, he felt as much as thought the stone was wielding him.
The guardian took in a deep breath, and blinked slowly. Loki watched his face (which was more hideous the more one looked) eagerly for news. “Thanos has the stone.”
Something dropped to the pit of Loki’s stomach. “That’s not love,” he said, disbelieving and suddenly disgusted, taken unawares by his own strength of feeling. “The stone doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”
The guardian didn’t move to reply, but instead staggered backwards on his feet a little. Loki instinctively reached out to steady him. “Are you alright?” he asked, automatically.
“My purpose is ended,” the man rasped, both surprised and certain. “I am no longer required. Please tell me, what happened to Earth?” But before Loki had time to respond, the creepy stretched-out Nazi had disintegrated into a handful of grey ash.
Loki wiped his palms on the sleeves of his coat, profoundly uncomfortable with these recent developments. A few minutes later, Thanos returned from the same direction he’d walked in some half-hour previously. He didn’t even bring the body with him. He gave the appearance of being upset, and Loki fell into a quick step beside him, and said nothing. The longer Loki ran errands for Thanos and did his bidding with only a vague image of heroism to sustain him, the more and more he started to worry that maybe it was simple cowardice that brought him here after all.