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Thor’s muscles are locked, unable to look away as the Titan drops Loki’s limp body to the ground.
“No resurrections this time.”
The Titan raises his hand and the remnants of the ship – littered with the bodies of his people, with those he’d sworn to protect with his life – are hit with the force of the Power Stone. With a wave of blue Tesseract light, the Titan and his Order are gone as the ship fractures, splits apart. The monstrous vessel jumps away from them as the Statesman finally disintegrates.
And then disappears.
On the real Statesman, Loki sags beside him, catching the table to support himself.
“Don’t,” Loki says before Thor can do or say anything. “You should tell your people we’re safe.” He swallows, heaves a breath, manages to continue: “For the moment. We need to get to Earth. Establish New Asgard, make sure they’re safe. And be ready for the war that’s coming.”
“Loki –”
“Later.” Loki finally looks at him. “You can say it all later. Just – go and be King now.”
Thor puts his hand on Loki’s slumped shoulder. He doesn’t know what to say.
“You’ll be here? When I’ve spoken to them?”
Loki’s eyes close, and it almost feels like he leans away from Thor.
“Yes. Yes, I’ll be here.”
The enormous ship loomed before them. Thor thought he heard Loki swallow. He grasped at words.
Loki spoke first. A soft, rasping voice: “Tell them to cut the engines.”
“What?”
“Tell them to cut the engines,” he repeated, finally tearing his eyes from the hideous vessel to look at him. His eyes were wild, and he’d paled to an almost sickly degree. “Thor, I don’t have time to explain. You have to trust me. Please. Make them cut the engines.”
There was an aching chasm between them still, but Thor saw his brother; it was a rare moment where, silently, Loki was reaching across that chasm to him. Thor seized the comm and gave the order.
The former gladiator’s confusion crackled over the line. “What do you –”
“I said. Cut. The. Engines. Now,” he repeated tersely, eyes fixed on Loki.
Loki was facing the ship through the glass. As the Statesman went silent, his eyes closed and he drew a breath. And then from all around him there was a glow. Not the usual glow of Loki’s seidr, not the familiar green, but...
“Loki, no!”
“Ssh!” Loki hissed back, eyes snapping open. His eyes were black, consumed by the Aether. The aura around him glowed that horribly familiar dark red, the glow that ought not to have been a glow at all it was so much a thing of darkness.
For a wild, awful moment, Thor thought Loki was about to vanish, or to hand them all over, to betray them all, to betray him.
The leviathan that loomed over them blasted a beam. It hit... It hit a spot ahead of them, where they would have been had the engines not been turned off. Yet there was a ship within that beam – a ship that looked exactly like the Statesman.
“What’s going on?” It was the Valkyrie. He hadn’t even realised she’d come in, he had been so fixed on Loki.
He shook his head, helpless, indicated Loki and what could be seen through the window.
The Valkyrie swore.
“I need to see what they’re doing,” Loki said suddenly. The pitch of his voice was off, and it was gravelly, as though it pained him to talk. “You may not want to watch this part.”
With a twist of his fingers through the swirling dark aura, the window transformed, and they were seeing the inside of the Statesman. Soldiers like none he’d ever seen ripped into the ship. He watched himself – a copy of himself – blast them with lightning, and saw himself knocked aside by a blast of purple light.
Loki cursed. “He has the Power Stone.”
His fingers played through the Aether again, moving the copies of their crew like puppets. He was putting up a good fight. They were being cut down nonetheless.
Thor tore his eyes away to look at the Valkyrie. Her hand was resting on the hilt of her sword.
“Keep the people calm,” he ordered.
“Heimdall’s ahead of you. He’s gathered them in the bay in case we need to evacuate.”
“Good. Keep them ready to move. For now...”
Valkyrie nodded in Loki’s direction. “For now, he’s handling it?”
“Tell them.” As he spoke, a spray of blood hit the illusory Statesman’s floor. “Spare them the details.”
She nodded, glanced at Loki once more, and ran back to join the gathered refugees.
What Loki played out on that copy of the Statesman wrought by the Reality Stone... Thor never could have imagined anything like it. And it was so lifelike...
Sparks crackled around his knuckles, and he had to breathe deeply through his nose to suppress the roiling storm that what he was seeing raised in the pit of his stomach.
He watched the copy of himself say, “You really are the worst, brother.” And those became the last words he said to Loki...
Thor burnt the suppressed bolt of lightning into his palm.
He hadn’t been sure Loki would still be there, despite what he’d said. He feels guilty for that when he sees Loki there, folded into one of the ostentatious chairs with a tumbler of the spirit they’d found on the ship.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Loki says, waving the glass in the air. His tone implies he doesn’t truly care whether Thor minds or not; he is so wry, so nonchalant...
Thor has a thousand other, more pressing questions to ask, but the one that bubbles up in that moment, almost to the point of him voicing it, is when exactly that prickly armour of disdain had appeared. He’d never been like that as a child. What was it Thor had missed?
A great deal, most likely.
“Well?” Loki says over the rim of the tumbler. “Aren’t you going to let me have it?”
“Are you alright?”
Loki gives him a bemused look. “Well the vintage leaves something to be desired, but...”
“I mean the Aether, Loki.”
“The one I had your dear companions take to Knowhere was a fake, obviously.”
“It could have consumed you. Are you hurt?”
Loki lowers the glass. At length he says, “No, I’m not hurt. I spent the time you were gone learning how I could harness it. I’d been anticipating a... confrontation with Thanos for some time. I worked out how to channel the Aether through my own seidr. I can safely contain it in a pocket dimension and pop it out when needs must.”
“Who is this Thanos?”
“You heard the one called Ebony Maw’s little spiel.” Loki’s stillness, his movements, his words, his silences... everything about him has the quality of a knife’s edge.
“He was the one who sent you to attack Earth?”
Loki makes a vague gesture with the tumbler. “Something like that.”
“Were you one of the... what did he call them? The Children of Thanos?”
“What do you think?”
He may as well still be consumed by the Aether he is so darkly unreadable.
Thor lowers himself into the other chair. “I think they sound like a cult. That’s not like you.”
Loki makes a bitter sound in the back of his throat and drains the glass. He pours himself another and slides the bottle across the table to Thor.
“Too much a megalomaniac to serve, eh,” Loki says to his drink.
“Loki, what did –”
“Can we just skip to the part where you berate me for endangering everyone with my reckless power lust by retaining two Infinity Stones on my person?”
“I – berate you?”
“Surely you’re itching to.”
“No!”
Loki raises a mocking brow. “Oh, come on. It was reckless, selfish, a damning and yet utterly typical indication of my lack of care for anyone but myself and my continuing, indeed truly ingrained criminality.”
“No one else was thinking about the risks with the Infinity Stones. What would have happened, if the Tesseract had been left on Asgard when it was destroyed?”
Loki sighs. He speaks almost reluctantly. “There’s no knowing for certain. My supposition is that it would have opened a wormhole so big it would have swallowed all nine realms.”
“And that fake Aether on Knowhere, that will buy us some time?”
“Some. It was... a challenge to forge convincingly. It should generate illusions but not do anything tangible. That seemed... safest.”
“And you gave him a fake Tesseract too?”
“A considerably inferior fake. I used the real Tesseract for their grand finale, but he’ll realise very soon that it’s not doing what he wants it to. So we need to get away.”
“We should be prepared to face him again?”
“We need to get to Earth. There are two more Infinity Stones there. We can set your people up as safely as possible, and then... well, what you’ve been preparing for all your life.”
“A war, you mean?”
“Yes. Finally your chance to wipe out monsters.”
Thor lays a hand on his shoulder. Loki tenses.
“Loki...” Thor hunts for words. “Asgard is your people too. It’s because of you that that,” he gestures to the window, “didn’t really happen to us.”
“It’s also because of me that it nearly did.”
“But you prevented it.”
“Self-preservation.”
It takes Thor a moment to push the words out. Finally, he says, “And will you continue to... self-preserve?”
Loki barks a dry laugh. “Are you asking for advanced warning of my betraying you?”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“On the Bifrost, and on Svartalfheim...”
Loki puts his tumbler down very slowly and carefully. “What are you implying?”
“I don’t want to lose you, Loki.”
He makes a derisive noise in the back of his throat. “You have a very strange way of demonstrating such.”
“I know I’ve... I’m sorry.”
Loki determinedly does not look at him.
“Selfishly, I want you fighting at my side in... whatever we’re going into. But if this Thanos has some sort of vendetta against you...”
“There’s nowhere I can hide.”
At length, he meets Thor’s eye. And it is then that Thor knows. Had they really faced Thanos, Loki would have subjected himself to the same fate as his simulation: his life for as many who could be spared as possible.
“We’ll fight together, then.”
“Your Avengers will clap me in irons on sight.”
“They can try,” Thor says.
Loki rolls his eyes. “And you’re going to oppose them, are you? In a time when you need their full support? You saw what we’d be up against.”
“It won’t be me alone. All of Asgard will stand with you.”
The look Loki gives him is painful: like he is searching for deception in what Thor said. But at last he purses his lips and gripes, “Mad, the lot of you.”
But he doesn’t argue.