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Oh, this is gonna get me into so much trouble.
That's the thought I keep coming back to. I even share that thought with the only other person in the pod with me, though the chances of him having any opinions on the subject are... Oh, but I don’t need at answer. Just to say it. Just to point out that what I’m doing I’m doing against my best judgement. And in direct violation of my orders...
“You are so lucky your mom seems so nice,” I sigh.
And, as ever, there is nothing but silence from the corpse of the Asgardian man. Well... technically Asgardian. Because the ghost that’s been haunting my dreams every night since we took aboard all the bodies we found in the vicinity of the Statesman – or whatever the thing was called before it was nothing more than space debris – made it very clear it wasn’t as simple as that.
Never failed to call him her son, though. And clearly she cared a great deal about his remains being properly seen to. But as soon as I started talking Asgard she assured me that was not the resting place she had in mind. No, she wanted her son buried under the snows of Jotunheim. For reasons that I couldn’t pretend to understand.
She seemed serious about it though. Very serious. Night after night she was after me. Appealing, pleading, promising I will someday be repaid if only I do her this one kindness.
Now, the bodies were meant for this place called Terra where the last few surviving Asgardians found a refuge. Considering everything they’ve been through we weren’t even gonna charge them for this job. Just return their dead to them so they can lay them to rest. We may have been the scum of this galaxy and all that, but we weren’t completely heartless. And these were hard times. Hard enough to turn even Ravagers uncharacteristically kind.
The Statesmen wasn’t the first ship we looked into with salvage in mind only to find ourselves with the sad duty of removing what dead we found aboard and delivering them to their nearest kin. It was a real departure from our usual mode of operation, that was for sure.
And yet – no one complained. We just did it. Some of us were almost solemn about it. And so very careful with the bodies frozen into a fragile solidity out in the hard vacuum. Because that easily could have been us...
The living had to be here for the dead, especially now. In a horrible way they probably outnumbered us.
It might have been exactly half of all life that disappeared but... That was not all we lost. All the people left adrift without help, all the disasters that only happened because the person that was meant to prevent them was nothing but a pile of ashes now, all those who looked at this achingly empty galaxy and found they couldn’t bear to live in it – those deaths were on him too. Thanos. Wherever that monster was, he was responsible. For every child that would slowly starve, calling for parents that would never come, for every vessel that would never reach its destination because the crewmen that knew how to get it there were gone... He enacted his vision in a single moment but even now, weeks later, we kept dying.
Maybe that’s why we cared so much. About the dead. About giving them a proper burial. We cared because the possibility of joining them was too real, too close, and after the things we lived through it... It just didn’t scare us the way it once had.
Death seemed a thing of peace when what the living had was nothing but heartbreak and uncertainty and pain.
Peace. Yes. The dead man I was flying to his proper burial place seemed very peaceful. Looking at him I knew I never would be. The turmoil I was feeling right now might subside, a little, but it would never be truly gone. Only death would make it go away.
There were days when I almost looked forward to it. The absence of pain it meant. Days when I understood those who chose to follow all those they have lost to the Titan’s madness. It would be so easy to give up... when there was so little to give up, it would be the easiest thing in the world...
But not today. Not yet.
Not because I felt some great investment in my life and whatever it might bring. I had a job to do, though. A mission. I as good as promised her I will do this and so I was going to. Even if I didn’t understand why she insisted, didn’t have a clue why it mattered that her dead son was returned to the world he came from... She thought it important enough to come to me, night after night, dream after dream. And for a goddess to beg a nobody like myself? How could I possibly refuse?
“You know... I still don’t really get it,” I say to the silence of the pod and the man who can’t possibly hear me. “Why she told me all that stuff about your sister. That her powers came from Asgard, that having the world underfoot made her into a creature of incredible power. It’s almost like she was... I don’t know... saying that the connection between you people and your worlds is some magical bond...”
I’m talking to a corpse.
This was what happens. This is why Stakar kept telling us to keep an eye on one another – because it was so very easy for a mind to snap under all this pressure.
Was that the story? Was there really a regal looking Asgardian appealing to me from the afterlife – or did my mind simply break and concocted this strange narrative so that I have an excuse to head for a world that promised an icy death one way or another...?
“You know... That actually sounds a whole lot likelier. It would be delightful and everything – if your dead mom actually cared so much she could make herself haunt some random stranger... But that’s not the universe we live in, though, is it? Yeah, I know,” I reply after taking in the expressionless face of the dead man, “you guys were supposed to be all really special. Magic, basically. I heard all the stories. And they were great stories. But that’s just the thing. They were always about great heroes waging battle... People like me don’t belong in the middle of all that. No... people like me can’t even take the pressure of having to move a few corpses without going to pieces over it...”
I close my eyes even though I have no tears to try to keep from spilling. I’m all cried out. There are no more coming.
And I consider it. Turning us around. Forgetting all this nonsense about Jotunheim and... “But I can’t do that, can I? I kinda promised her. And it really seemed to matter. It was almost like she thought it can... I don’t know... Do something? You being reconnected with the world where you were born... Like there was some magic she couldn’t possibly explain to me just in the act of placing you back on that familiar ground.”
Which was crazy of course. What could it do? Revive him? No, he was as dead as they came. Even if it weren’t for his injuries he spend far too much time in the vacuum of space. Not even someone with Asgardian biology could take that and survive.
I was just making up fairy tales in my head to distract myself from how crazy it all was. Everything about this. The fact I’ll have no one, not even a dead man, for company on the return trip – and who will I be pretending to tell these things to them? No, the trip back to the Ravager fleet will be an experience along the lines of coming to terms with who I am now. Someone who talks to herself...
“Whatever. That’s my problem. I’ll deal with it. But first I’ll deal with you...”
Whatever that meant. Just... place him on the ground. Re-establish his connection with the place. Let the snow, when it comes, cover him.
Not particularly complex as far as funeral rites went. Yet when she said it she somehow managed to make it sound like a ritual. Something sacred – no less sacred by being done by me, either. It was between him and the world I carried him to. I was merely an accidental part of the whole thing. I could leave as soon as I was done. I could fly of and never come back and whatever happened next...
“Nothing. Nothing will happen next,” I remind myself. “You're dead. No way around that. No magic spell that can undo it. Not even Asgardians are that powerful. Now get a damn grip.”
Which is the last thing I say for a long while – to him or to myself. Because I can see the world now, that frozen wasteland of a planet I only ever knew from stories.
That world, too, has just lost half of its people. And it will make no difference at all to those who were still left, that I was bringing this one back. Returning him to the place he once dwelt, long ago, before it was Asgard he came to think of as home.
“Oh this is... I can’t just...” I start, staring at the body that no, I can’t justleave out in the open like this.
There was a reason most species felt the need to cover up their dead with soil or sinking them into the depths of the sea. This felt... wrong.
“She really seems to believe it, you know?" I share with him, because why stop now? ”Your mother. I think she really expects this to do something. But you’re not going to wake up are you...? You’re not in some cursed sleep. This isn’t some magical place that revives the dead. All it does is make for nice symbolism. Resting here, with the view of the same stars you were born under.”
He doesn’t reply. Of course he doesn’t. No one will ever hear his voice again, on this world or any other.
“Goodbye, Loki of Asgard,” I whisper, and have my words stolen by the screaming wind of the blizzard. “I hope you had a good life. I hope it was enough.”
It would be so very easy to lay down on the ice beside him. To let the cold steal what little I had left. I spent enough time around dead to find myself envying them...
But I won’t. As tempting as it is he should rest alone. Besides – who am I to keep company with the gods?
I’m nothing but an intergalactic lowlife and, these days, a little more than an undertaker.
But if that’s what I was then my work here was finished. I saw him to his destination. This final resting place he probably never imagined for himself.
I did my duty. And there were others still.
So many others. So many graves waiting to receive them. I might wish it to be someone else’s responsibility but it was mine. Ours. This was who we were now. The ones that looked after the dead while we wondered what was there to keep living for. Drifting through the endless night of space nothing but lost souls. The only difference between us and them was that we were still breathing...
Snowflakes glitter on his pale face when I turn around for one last look. There is something godlike to him even now. And this galaxy might be a much poorer place for him no longer being in it. I’ll never know. I never knew him, after all. I just happened to be the one that laid him to rest.
The one that will perhaps always wonder...
She seemed so sure it’ll make a difference. That what hope there was was in placing him on this world. That the connection he had with this place meant something. Could change something about how his story ended.
Frigga seemed to have hope – and it was that hope that made me do as she asked. Perhaps because I had none myself and so destroying someone else’s seemed unthinkable.
And do I know, with any certainty, that he’ll never draw another breath again...? There were stranger stories told of the Asgardians...