Chapter Text
Hela smirked, “Don’t tell me Surtur killed you too, brother.”
Loki blinked at the barren throne looming high above him. The last scene he could recall flashed in his mind and Loki grabbed at his throat, swallowing convulsively yet feeling no pain.
“No. The Mad Titan found us.” Loki spoke mostly to himself but his words obviously meant little to Hela, who raised a lone, unimpressed eyebrow.
“And Odin’s second born couldn’t defeat him?” She scoffs, “Disgraceful. I can understand why you couldn’t, Jotun.”
Loki flinches a bit, wide eyed gaze despondent. She could see through his shapeshifting? Or, perhaps, death is all-knowing when a soul arrives? Is Thor alright? Would Thor travel through Hel before reaching Valhalla? Or was Loki never going to see his brother again?
He can still hear his brother’s muffled scream.
Loki finally dropped his hand from his collar, glancing around. The place was empty or it appeared so. There must be more souls here yet he didn’t know how Hela ruled Helheim if it was within Niflheim. He supposed he was going to have time to learn.
“I am not going to Valhalla.” It’s a statement but he’s looking for confirmation. A small hope that maybe, just maybe, this was solely a pit stop.
“I am not all-knowing, as the title of Allmother would have you believe.” Hela waves a careless hand.
A burn of indignation moves his tongue before he can catch himself: “Thor is Allfather.”
When she meets his eyes, he has to stiffen himself in the face of it. The land was pulsing with her, a piercing stare that made him feel minuscule, obsolete. He was nothing to her and he knew it. He wondered how Thor had truly fared when facing against her one on one.
“Allfather to a fallen kingdom,” She laughed. It was a joyous sound, one that sent chills down his spine in its reverberation. “To a lone Valkyrie who cowardly escaped my wrath millennia ago and a measly couple thousand refugees, most of whom are women and children. The sacred realm has perished.”
Hela’s tone was smug and satisfied. A show of how little life had meant to her when her goal all along was to get back at Odin for how he wronged her. Justice has been served as far as Hela is concerned and Loki hates her.
He sees himself in her.
“Thor will survive. He is stronger than you think.” It was the only comfort Loki could offer himself.
“Isn’t that obvious?” She tapped her claw-like nails unto the arms of her throne. “Odin denied him access to his full strength with that hammer. Due to our father’s foolishness, it will take centuries before he understands his true strength. If he ever masters it.”
Sensing seiðr was natural for any master and Thor’s had always felt like an infinite well of untapped potential. He doesn’t know how to feel over Hela acknowledging it either. Was she impressed by it? Or did it amuse her more, as Odin hadn’t held her back? What would Thor look like if it had been him locked away and an untethered executioner?
She eyed him passively. “When I first met our brother, I had my hand wrapped around his tiny little throat. And I am almost touched by your Aesir appearance. It seems Odin had missed me after all.”
Loki shivered a bit, swallowing roughly. He didn’t want to think about that and, if he were honest, he knew now that most of his father’s actions towards him and Thor were in a bid to turn them away from the path Hela had sought. They’d been so close to falling into it. He did his best to look unaffected.
Loki faded to his womanly figure, “Is this more like it?”
Hela blinked at him and shook her head, a small show of disgust. Loki let the illusion fade back, removing the other to allow blue to encompass him.
“Or what of this? Now we are in no way related.”
Hela’s teeth glint, a sickening smile. “Yet I am more related to Thor than you are.”
A stab at his heart and Loki knows she knows it. His Aesir overlays him again and it feels like home.
“I disagree. I have denied my brother familial relation constantly yet he refuses to refer to me as anything other than family. And I know he would have done the same for you because Thor is much too forgiving.”
“He made an attempt.” Hela concedes his point and Loki’s mildly triumphant over it. “Idiotic as it was. He had seemed amused by your grandiose entrance.”
Loki doesn’t hold back his own smug grin, “Obviously. I was saving him after all.”
She hummed and the air vibrated. When she stood, Loki tensed and automatically reached for his seiðr to conjure daggers with the tips of his fingers, not yet drawing—he didn’t even know if he could. Hela sauntered down the broad steps, approaching him a measly foot apart. If he had been frightened of her upon introduction, she was downright oppressive now.
“That may be true. But I do believe, if I know my brother at all, he shall be suffering.” She walked around him lazily and Loki stiffened even more when she paused behind him, leaning into his ear. “Knowing he couldn’t save you.”
Loki’s heart, or what remained in death, dropped. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe. Her words were no doubt the truth because Thor was selfish like that, to take the blame of events out of his control. Events Loki brought on himself.
Hela continued her path, smile grim and stretched as she returned before him. “After all he has lost in… what was it?”
She pretended to catch the thought she’d supposedly forgotten and Loki found loathing stoking in him for her blatant pleasure. She was a horrendous goddess and he wondered why she was so needlessly cruel to him, if only as another payment to Odin.
“Oh, yes. A mere two weeks. From his father,” She began to list the count on her fingers. “To his hammer, his pathetic Einherjar army, much of his weaker people, his hair, his eye, his home, his friends—I assume they were warriors, more Asgardian refugees, and then his brother!” She barks a laugh, “And he doesn’t even manage to defeat a Titan! I am sure the Allfather is groveling as we speak, brother .”
Loki went from enraged at her arrogance to horrified at having all of what Thor’s just lost laid before him. And Hela doesn’t even know the half of it. In the last ten years… Loki doesn’t think he would survive that kind of loss. Norns, he didn’t even survive his mother’s death.
Glee radiated from Hela. Loki had never hated his father more than this moment, for producing such a wretched child to have ever walked Asgard. If Loki knew he could beat her, he would have taken the utmost delight in carving her to ribbons.
“He will survive.” Loki’s voice was hoarse and not quite convincing.
“Maybe.” Hela shrugged carelessly before tapping a finger to his chest once, snapping a line taut. Loki feels like he’s dying all over again, throat constricting and eyes flashing, he’s falling. Her voice is ringing in his ears: “But do you truly believe he will ever be the same?”
Loki knew Thor would never be the same. He just hoped he’d get to see him again.
…
Thor could only feel relief when he finally fell asleep for the last time. Even waking up in a maudlin landscape that stretched infinitely, faced with a towering throne holding the sister he’d killed so long ago, he did not feel any dread.
“Allfather,” She drawled, mocking.
Thor found it easier to understand her now than he had upon their introduction so he merely smiled in greeting at her. “Sister.”
The tapping of her nails echoed distantly, like a time bomb ticking in his ear. Here, she matched. When he’d first seen her on Asgard, he could not imagine her staking the throne. This, however, made a lot more sense.
“A shame you didn’t turn stout like our father. It would have given me great pleasure to see you reduced to a replica of him.”
Thor knew his white beard and hair and silver eyepatch were a close mirage of his father. He’d gazed in the mirror many times. Some days finding comfort in their similarity, other days resenting his father for the courses he’d taken to leave Thor as he is now. An old god waiting for peace.
“Yes. I suppose I understand the difficulties Father had to endure so late in his life.” A small pit of sympathy for Odin but it doesn’t have much weight. The end of Odin’s life had been recompense, in truth.
“Four millennia has jaded you, brother.” She sneered, the expression surprisingly elegant on her.
“I rather believe it you that is jaded, stewing in your lonesome for millennia until I died. I am dead, yes?” Weariness was settling like a fog, hazing over him to a pinpoint of realization that her land was lulling him into a false security. Thor was a little amused by the cloying of the scape, tendrils of rest attempting to assure him of the faux positive it would be to sink into it. “Have you enjoyed your solitude?”
Hela’s fingers cracked the arms of her throne in a tight grip as she peered down at him. “I see your aging has not rid you of your bluster.”
Thor’s smile widened, “Would I be the god of thunder if that were the case?”
She crossed her arms and her gaze remained pointed and unsettling. He didn’t feel a need to posture and aggravate her as he once did but that didn’t mean he took kindly to her blasé. However, Thor didn’t have a leg to stand on in defense. This was Hela’s domain and he was but a subject.
“Such a brash power,” Hela rolled her eyes. “Your brother’s even more pathetic. The god of mischief? Blegh .”
“I believe Loki is quite skilled in trickery,” Thor shrugs. He had the urge to correct her more but didn’t know how to accurately contradict her without offending her. He didn’t care about angering Hela but he feared where Loki had ended up after his death, and he had no idea if he could make it worse for his brother.
“Odin set you both up for failure. He had you believing Mjölnir was your source of power.”
“For good reason.” Thor is old enough now to understand his father had been afraid of Thor’s lust and admiration for battle and his way of control was to restrict him. “Restraint is an important lesson with domains such as ours.”
She fakes a gag. “You are just like Frigga.”
Thor doesn’t think it’s the insult she means it to be. He grins warmly, “I hope so. She is my mother after all.”
Her lip curls, “I do not think I want you here any longer.”
“Where am I to go? I did not die in battle so I don’t believe Valhalla is open to me.” Why else would he be here?
Hela rolled her eyes again, “My, Odin’s sons are daft. You will find Valhalla interprets battle a lot more flexibly than the Norns would have you believe.”
“Is there a path I’m meant to follow?” Thor glances around again but finds nothing he hadn’t already seen before. Besides the roiling smog, which had increased tenfold in density while they’d been talking. Almost like it was listening.
“And Odin called you his chosen heir. Are you really asking me for help?”
“You are the only one here.” Thor points out. “Who else should I ask?”
“Death is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. I do not choose where souls lie to rest. If they appear before me , it is of their own knowledge.”
Thor’s brows furrow, “Where are the souls meant to reside in Helheim then?”
Hela squinted at him for a moment. She sighed, long-suffering, gesturing with a hand in a lazy circular motion. When she reached the hand out to the air, the fog drifted in to caress her like a lost lover.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“No…” Thor looked closer at the smoke cloying with him, reaching out his own hand to touch the illustrious movement. It drifted through his fingers, tugging here and there. When he listened closer, he could hear an echo of voices atop voices tickling his ears. The sound of memories long past. “What is this?”
“This is peace.” Hela’s nose scrunched, “Could you imagine how loud it would be if they were all cognizant?”
“But you could send them anywhere! You are the queen!” Thor was outraged, pulling his extremities closer to avoid the green-tinged smog now that he knew what it was. It still did not leave him alone.
“They have landed in my realm of their own volition,” Hela asserts with a stony glare. “This is their rest. In any case, they allow themselves to become this.”
Now he just felt lost. He looked to her desperately, internally praying Loki was not among the fog. “What does that mean?”
“I do not make them into the fog.” As if its mention was a conduit, the smoke began to dance around her, reverent. “They die and then they let go, where they will remain in their memories for the rest of time. There are few able to resist it but they never stay close to me.”
Thor heard the underlying notion: good luck finding any of these resistors. They have long since gone into the infinite land of Helheim to find their own peace. Whether they eventually succumbed to their memories or not was not Hela’s decision. She is merely a gatekeeper, a protector.
Thor doesn’t think they’d been so different after all. Perhaps they would have even gotten along if they’d met under different circumstances.
Thor thinks he understands what to do now.
“You have taken great care of them,” Thor relaxes and watches the dancing around her. It was graceful and ethereal, speaking of devotion and praise. It didn’t know what—rather who —it was worshipping but it knew it was right.
She blinked dumbly at his words, shocked momentarily, but Thor kept going before she could respond. “If I am going to leave, I do wish to say that I am sorry. As much as I can be for the things out of my control.”
She scoffs, tendrils circling her crown, “I need no apologies, brother. Why don’t you go see your real family?”
“You are a part of my family, even if we do not love each other as so.” Thor gave her one last smile before letting go. A tether he hadn’t noticed until Hela had explicated the smog snapping. As he faded, the last thing he saw was Hela sighing, slumping into her throne.
He knew the crown weighed heavily on her. And not because it was a burden.