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Chapter Text

Even after the end of the world-

Jane laughs when the doctor returns, because she already knows what she's about to hear. 

"Fucking fertility gods," Darcy mutters as she manoeuvres through the last of the lunchtime traffic. She's smiling, though, and that helps firm up the firmament of decision in Jane's unsteady mind.

"I'm gonna be a mom, Darce," she says, nudging her shoulder to Darcy's as they walk back up the little path to Jane's mother's London townhouse. "Like, I'm actually going to be producing a human being out of my lady parts."

"Dude," Darcy says, horrified but still smiling wide enough to split her face in two. "You have got to find a better way to describe it."

- the Trees still grow.

They move home while Jane can still be of use in packing up the house.

There isn't as much as there might have been, but Jane's okay with that. She's gotten all the proof she needs on the existence of Einstein-Rosen Bridges, proof that can't be refuted, so she's more or less got a Nobel in the bag, and her research grants are a guarantee for the next twenty years.

And she's not all that interested in building another bridge to the stars, not after her most recent experiences. Sure, she's getting something awesome out of it - a whole new person! - but she's also gotten her heart broken twice over by the same asshole space prince, and she's had enough. She's out. 

Jane dumps her home-made equipment in the dumpster in the alley behind her mom's house, keeping only what pieces she needs to prove her theories.

Darcy approves, if only because it leaves more space for the five pairs of new boots she bought while they were living in London. For once, Jane doesn't mind.

The branches might shake-

It's so humid when they step off the plane in Richmond that Jane sucks in a noisy breath, glad to be home. 

"I can't believe you're from Tidewater," Darcy grumbles, holding out her arm in preparation for Jane stumbling down off the final step onto the tarmac. "I mean, I can, I so totally can, but I mean, come on! I grew up just over the rainbow in Piedmont!"

"There's a big distance from Chesapeake to Richmond, Darcy."

Darcy is rolling her eyes before Jane can even finish speaking, tugging her along in her wake as if it's no big deal that they're probably not supposed to walk across the tarmac to the terminal, given that Jane can see a little minibus coming to pick everyone up.

"Dude," Darcy says, "you've been to Asgard. A hundred miles should be nothing to you."

- but the roots dig deep, and stay strong.

Their new apartment is in Petersburg. It's near enough to Willowdale that Jane can come and go from Culver without too much difficulty, which means Darcy can finally get stuck into that doctorate she's been muttering about since she, in her own words, "cakewalked" her masters in London.

They commute together, in the same shitty van that knocked Thor to the ground after he fell from the sky. Darcy drives, mostly, and Jane is happy to just let her seat back a little more every week, making more room for her slowly growing belly.

Jane's mom lives in Chesapeake, Darcy's folks and family in Richmond, and they're roughly the same distance from both. Darcy is sure that their collective families think that they're secretly lesbians who're having a baby via an anonymous donor, and Jane is carrying because she's older and has less time to have babies, but they've all been so supportive that Jane doesn't even mind the convoluted theories. 

"Dude," Darcy says, sidling into Jane's lecture hall with a smoothie in either hand and her book bag hanging too heavy from one shoulder. "Jane, why aren't your feet touching the ground?"

Oak and Ash-

"It's twins," the ultrasound tech said, weeks ago, and Jane hadn't thought anything of it.

Then Erik arrives, and he has a printed translation of the Prose Edda, and Darcy laughs so hard she snorts when he tells them that Thor is - was- has always been destined to father twin boys, called Modi and Magni.

Jane has been planning on calling her twin girls Madison and Margaret, for her grandmothers. Maddie and Maggie.

- Thunder and Lightning

"I don't want my babies to save the world," Jane says, stretched out under the apple tree in the back garden of Darcy's parents' house in the Richmond suburbs. 

"They won't," Darcy says easily, swinging slowly in the warm August evening on a tractor tire tied to a high, thick branch. "They'll just rebuild it."

The Tree becomes Trees as needed -

Jane arrives three hours early for her appointment, and is pleased - and a little smug, at Darcy and Erik - that they take her down to theatre ahead of time.

It's scary - she's never had a general anaesthetic, if nothing else - but she knows that when she wakes up, she'll be a mom for real, so mostly it's exhilarating, like seeing those rainbow lights in the desert sky for the first time but better, because she'll get to keep her babies.

- but They are always One.

Chapter Text

The Nine Realms stand eternal - 

Njord emerges from the water with a crash like a thunderclap, and Thor almost applauds his theatricality. Current leader of the Vanir, Old Man of the Sea, and tied in the unhappiest marriage in Asgard, Njord is a man Thor likes to have by his side when the Warriors Three are elsewhere.

Njord's children, and his wife, on the other hand, cause more trouble than they're worth.

Freyr is near as skilled as even brave Hogun, with his Reaper's scythe and his sharply golden-green gaze on all, but he is too bright, laughing when there is no cause, a child of spring who sees no reason for anything but joy, even in war.

Even Thor, a child of storms, knows better than that.

Of Freyja Thor knows a little less - Sif's match in beauty, if not in warcraft, the keeper of Fólkvangr's business tends to begin when Thor's is finished. 

Half of all the dead are hers, whether they die by Thor's side or by his hammer.

Her halls are surely overflowing of late.

- but even eternity sometimes trembles.

The Vanir are worthy allies, and Thor enjoys having them with him. He misses his mother, misses Loki, but enjoys having Heimdall in the field, appreciates what Bragi's particular skills add to their army's might, loves unhappy Skadi as much as he does her reluctant husband.

His fellow Aesir - Sif, Tyr, the spirit of Baldr who is with them whenever Asgard has need of hope - he values all the more, and wishes that there might be more of them. 

The Aesir reside solely in Asgard, but not all who reside in Asgard are Aesir, and it pains him, because they need more warriors, now that the end of the world is coming.

Again.

Distant whispers echo louder - 

Mimir's Well at Yggdrassil's roots is a sacred place, guarded by the Norns and warded against casual visit.

Still, Thor must venture there. If the wars between Nidavellir and Jotunheim, the wars between Vanaheim and Niflheim... They harken of something darker than simply war.

His father is untroubled, easy on his throne in a way a king should not be - so it falls to Thor.

The Norns welcome him, but what lies in the far bottom of the Well does not.

Odin's get, the Whisperer hisses, come for a scrap of cantrip or prophecy, is it? Best set your own house in order before thinking of the World Tree, Thunderer.

- than screams unwanted.

Heimdall sees all, with his golden eyes.

"Muspelheim wakes," he says, "and the Great Tree shakes. The World Serpent stirs, the Devourer howls, and the Dead walks forth alone. It is time, Thunderer. It has come."

Thor aches for his father's courage, for his mother's wisdom, but one seems failed and the other is lost forever, with Idun and her apples missing. 

So it falls to him, and to his. He will do what he must.

All that must come to pass will be - 

Hugin and Munin follow in his wake, one perching on his shoulder and the other on Njord's. 

"Odin forbids this," Heimdall reminds them, setting his sword into the mechanism. His armour today is muted, not his usual glittering gold, more suited for battle. A good omen, Thor hopes. "But it must be done, nevertheless."

"For Asgard!" Sif cries, rising a cheer from the armies assembled along the wide length of the Bifrost bridge.

"For life," Freyja corrects in her sweet lilt, her feathered cloak heavy around her narrow shoulders, and the cries are muted, just a little.

- whether we wish it or not.

Battle wages across the Nine Realms, beginning first on the outskirts of Vanaheim.

"The Destroyer himself has not ridden forth yet," Njord says, sweeping cloak of seafoam flaring about him as he swings twin swords through encroaching armies like waves over sand - slow and inevitable. "There may yet be time."

A roar echoes in the distance - not the Destroyer, for whom Thor's father named his deadliest guard, but something that may be worse.

"The Devourer howls," Thor says, and ignores the way Fandral's smile fails. They all know what must be, even if Odin and Loki's absences have thrown them all in flux. "The Thunderer must answer him."

Sif's hand on his arm stalls him, her bloody smile stills him.

"Perhaps," she says, "but who says you must answer him now?"

Eternity is a repeating pattern - 

In the world of dark and fire, the Destroyer gathers his cloak, like the night, around his endless shoulders. 

"Midgard calls me," he says, voice like death and chaos. "There are seeds there. We must destroy them."

- and prophecy is only remembering what came before.

Chapter Text

Burn away the branches-

The sky opens over Culver, and the faculty sighs. If the university is destroyed by some kind of freakish science gone wrong, the insurance just won't cover it.

Again.

- and the heartwood remains.

Darcy and Jane teach with a baby each strapped to their chests. 

Maddie seems to prefer Jane's astrophysics lectures, cooing quietly as Jane explains all the phenomena that make up the universe of which Maddie is such a frighteningly integral part.

Not that Maddie knows she's got such a big role to play. Neither does Jane, not yet.

Maggie sits facing Darcy's students as she teaches her tutorial groups. She watches them all with her serious little face, Jane's starry eyes sharp under her fringe of curls. 

Darcy thinks Maggie's going to rule the world when she grows up. If only she knew.

Darkness is not the opposite of light-

Jane is standing right in the middle of the central quad when Darcy finds her, staring up at the big, burning-dark hole in the sky.

Maddie and Maggie are each staring up just as hard, Maggie with Jane's eyes and Maddie with Thor's. 

"If this is another Convergence," Darcy says, slipping her arm through Jane's and frowning, "then we are totally suing Asgard for repairs."

"It's not another Convergence," Jane says, dragging her eyes away from the torn sky. "I think it might be the end of the world."

- but merely its absence.

Heimdall's eyes shine bright in the dimness of the war chamber, and Hugin and Munin settle on his shoulders, like shadows of the wings of his helm.

"Surt is opening a portal to Midgard," he says. "But Muspelheim has always been barely within my sight - I cannot see where on Midgard he is bound."

Something in Thor's heart chills at the thought of the fire-demons pouring out onto Earth, and Mimir's whispers echo loud in his ears.

Best set your own house in order.

"Find Jane," Thor says. "The Destroyer will be near."

Light a candle to spite the darkness-

The rippling waves of shadow and fire that threaten to pour from the hole in the sky remind Jane of the day her dad died, in a car crash. She'd been in the car with him, had been sitting in the back behind the passenger seat, and had had a clear view of the big shard of windscreen that had taken him through the throat. 

The red-black of that hole in the sky makes her think of the too-red rush of blood across glass as her dad choked to death, and the black absence of fainting, of spending nearly a week in hospital because she was completely catatonic.

She does know what it makes Darcy think of, but it must be bad, because Darcy is murmuring under her breath in Hebrew, and she recites from the Song of Songs when she's really, really scared.

- but be sure to watch the flame.

Culver University seems too small to have produced such a being as Banner's warrior self, Thor thinks.

Jane seems infinitely smaller, under Muspelheim's almost-present shadow.

"I will see them safe," Freyja says, her cloak of feathers billowing out around her as she prepares for flight. "Until Idun returns to us, I will take her wards as mine - and she would have taken your mother's wards as hers, Thunderer."

She is gone in a flash, a swoop of light and warmth that sweeps Jane and Darcy away, and then-

The heavens open.

Old hurts can come from new weapons-

Jormugandr roars through the gap, and they are all so stunned that for a moment, there is stillness.

"The World Serpent and the Destroyer all at once," Sif says, and her smile is made bloody once more by the fires pouring into Midgard. "More fun that way, I suppose."

Thor aims for Surt, thinking to unmake the Destroyer before his shadow can fall any further.

The World Serpent catches him unawares, and is a worthier adversary than he might have expected.

- but they are no less dangerous for it.

"The Aphrodite of the North," Darcy shouts as explanation of just who the woman in the feathery cloak is, over the rushing wind, keeping her hands over Maggie's eyes and ears as best she can. Their saviour, who is apparently the goddess Freyja of all people, has an arm around Darcy's waist and an arm around Jane's, which means they're mostly free to try and protect the twins.

Jane just isn't sure they're doing much good against a supersonic wind. She's pretty sure they just passed Mach 2. She's pretty sure one of Thor's gang showing up means that the world is ending. 

She's pretty sure she doesn't care, so long as her girls get through this unscathed.

Empires of the world may crumble-

"Asgard has fallen before," Hogun intones, and Thor does not even lift his head. Wrestling Jormugandr down - holding the Serpent so Sif could drive her spear through his eye, so Freyr could swipe his scythe deep into the beast's skull, so Njord's twin swords could slash it through the heart, so they each could inflict their mortal wounds on the immortal beast - has exhausted him, and he feels almost as though he is human again, as he was when first he met Jane.

"It took so long to rebuild," Sif says, her confidence wavering as they gaze out at the tangled masses of their armies warring against the shadows and the fire. "It felt an eternity."

"It was not an eternity," Skadi says, voice as sharp as the ice from whence she came. "But it will be this time, if we do not win this war, because there will be none of us left to rebuild."

"Even if we all fall," Heimdall says, looking east, to where Freyja carried Jane and Darcy, "there will be some who can rebuild."

His eyes are brighter than ever when Thor finally lifts his head.

"Modi and Magni," Heimdall says, and all around them there is shock. "They are come."

- but the Tree of the World remains steadfast.

Chapter Text

Lightning cracks - 

Thor lands like an earthquake in front of them, and Jane can't help but laugh at Darcy's reaction. Maggie is still strapped to Darcy's chest when Darce steps forward to sock Thor straight in the jaw, thumb carefully tucked outside her fingers, so nothing breaks.

"You piece of shit!" Darcy yells, Maggie sucking on some of her hair. "You had to know you'd knocked Jane up! You're a fucking fertility god!"

Darcy leaps forward and punches Thor again, right in the nose this time, and Maggie swings her little fists in mimic of her favourite momma. Jane just keeps laughing, because yup, this is really her life.

- and thunder rolls.

Jane looks pretty fucking regal, with a baby strapped to her chest, wearing those ugly ass hiking boots she insists on wearing when she has a heavy day of lecturing.

She definitely looks more regal than Thor currently does, with his nose bleeding and his lip looking kinda sore. Darcy is proud of herself, and holds Maggie's hands out in a little victory dance just because she can.

Jane is speaking to Thor, but Darcy can't hear her over the roar of the huge fucking shadow emerging from the hole in the sky, but Darcy figures it must be important, because Jane is glancing over Thor's shoulder every five seconds but hasn't started running.

Jane might not have any self-preservation when it comes to herself, but she's going to tear the whole universe apart someday to protect the girls. It's one of Darcy's favourite things about her.

The ash blooms last - 

Maggie's hands unfurl as soon as Thor reaches out toward her, revealing the weird little birthmark curled between her right index finger and thumb. 

In the shifting red-black light that reflects so greasily off Heimdall's armour, the birthmark seems to glow.

- and the oak grows taller - 

Maddie laughs, bright and brilliant, and lifts her own hands up into the air just as Maggie begins to frown.

The birthmark on her left palm is glowing, too, and Jane wonders if she's going to end up as high in the air as Darcy is.

- but they each serve a purpose -

"Get the children to safety!" Thor bellows, swinging off into the darkness as Heimdall raises his sun-bright sword. 

Freyja gathers Jane and Darcy under her arms again, cloak billowing in the rising winds, and they're off again, sonic booms and watering eyes not enough to stifle the genuine terror bubbling up in both of them.

"That thing wants the girls," Darcy says, as soon as they're still again. There are two men here, one she kind of recognises as a friend of Thor's - Fandral, that's it, he seems different to how he was in New Mexico - and one who looks so much like Freyja that he can only be Freyr. "How do we stop it?"

"You don't," Fandral says, swords flashing in the flickering light. "Nothing does."

- and one cannot be without the other.

Maggie and Maddie are humming now, though, fat little hands raised to the sky, and the marks on their hands glow.

"Runemarks," Freyr laughs, raising his own hand and revealing something bright and green on his forearm. "And here I thought only gods carried them."

"Didn't anyone tell you?" Darcy says, voice sharp. "These two little ladies are Thor's twins. They're going to rebuild the whole world if you don't beat the big old blackbird of despair."

"And they aren't even a year old," Jane agrees, "so unless you want a world of abstract shapes and purple elephants, I'd get fighting."

The Whisperer gives no prophecy - 

Surt's cloak spreads wider than Freyja's, flies faster, but that is not important here.

Here, his cloak must guard as well as fly, for Asgard and Vanaheim have set their armies against his, and even before he is within sight of the seedlings, Nidavellir's armies pour forth from a portal in the lush green grass.

"Bloody sick of always rebuilding," he hears Eitri-King roar. "Kill the buggers, lads!"

The dwarves are... Unexpected. They do not usually fight in this conflict.

The seedlings are close, though. Surt can feel their magic surging, bright and strong and pure.

It cannot be allowed. 

- and the Norns reveal no fates.

Far away on Asgard, Odin-who-is-not-Odin watches all, and frowns.

"Why," he asks of no one in particular, "has a portal from Alfheim opened? The Light Elves do not fight at Ragnarok."

Perhaps not, Mimir mocks him, but the Allfather and the Trickster do.

The Bifrost Bridge shines even as it unravels - 

"There is no time," Sif shouts, painted all in blood and soot, and never so beautiful as she is now. "We are too few!"

The armies of Asgard and Vanaheim, of Nidavellir and Alfheim, waging war behind Thor and Njord and Eitri and Freyr, but it is not enough. 

They have no more allies on whom to call. 

If they fall, the Destroyer will kill the children, and nothing will be rebuilt.

The end of all things seems inevitable, and then two mismatched hands reach from the earth, just as the sky opens once more, this time to reveal colours beyond counting.

- because it never truly comes undone.

"Hela," Thor says, as together they and the Allfather reach for the Destroyer. Njord is there, and Freyr, and Heimdall and Sif and Skadi and all the others, as well as Eitri and a dozen elves. "Welcome, niece."

"Uncle," she says fondly, dead hand skyward and runed while she pats his cheek with living fingers. "You need only have asked, you know."

Hela has long been his favourite of Loki's children, if only because she has never tried to murder him.

The end of the world isn't really the end - 

Jane almost screams when the shadow above them twists in on itself, and Fandral's swords shine brighter.

"Well I'll be," Fandral says, brushing his hair back with one armoured wrist. "They've got the bastard on a leash."

There is magic happening here - energy lines, Jane can see them, bright streaks of some power or other coming from the hands of all those gathered on the quad. Thor is there, his line crackling with strength and lightning, and Odin, but his magic looks purple from here, and seems to burn against the already burning sky, wild and unleashed.

Sif's is pure gold, as strong as she is, and Jane jumps - even though she isn't touching the ground - when bright green shoots from Freyja's palm, blue-white from Fandral's.

The fire that leaps from Maddie's hand is golden-green, the light from Maggie's silver-blue, like the earth and the sky and the sun and the moon and everything in between.

The shadow shrinks, and the twins close their little fists, and something - the whole sky - seems to scream.

- but it is an end, and those are best avoided.

Chapter Text

The oldest roots run deepest - 

The sky stops screaming when a bolt of kingfisher-blue wraps around the shadow's maw, and the winds fade when rosey-gold joins the blue. 

"It cannot be," Freyja breathes, the green cord shining from her palm sparking brighter. "Lady Frigg!"

The twins are laughing still, and shriek with delight as the shadow shrinks and shrinks and falls.

- in support of the newest shoots.

"It would seem I misjudged you, Doctor Foster," Odin, Allfather, King of Asgard, says, smiling down at Jane as if she should be pleased. There is a head under his arm, waxy and preserved, and it's smiling at the twins. 

Darcy punches it in the nose, just like she did Thor.

In times past, tradition was held sacred - 

Not-Odin is bound by his daughter's magic, and she seems thrilled. 

"You really thought it would be that easy?" Hela crows, Odin's ravens circling over their heads. "Oh, you are a fool."

Thor, standing nearby, watches and fears.

Away, by his mother - returned from the dead by necessity, it seems - stand Jane and Darcy, with his daughters.

Will Magni and Modi come to loathe him as Hela does Loki?

- but the World Tree has many branches, none exactly alike.

"They are of Asgard," Frigga says gently, running her fingers over Maggie's hair, then Maddie's. The girls both look like Jane, not like Thor, except for their eyes. 

Their eyes are old, which can be a little weird, on babies.

"They are of Petersburg," Darcy fumes, not entirely sold on the idea of Frigga as Odin's wife, if only because she is way out of his league. "And they're Jane's daughters, not Thor's. Shit, they're more mine than they are Thor's!"

Odin comes back, sans creepy head, and sighs.

"I fear you may be right, Lady Darcy," he says, cradling Maggie's tiny head in his huge hand. "They are far more of Earth than of Asgard, at least. We cannot take them from you."

"As if you could anyway," Jane says, small and angry and backtalking a god, like, wow! That is not the Jane Darcy met when she signed on for that dumb internship all those years ago!

"As if I could," Odin agrees, now curling his hand around Maddie's head, and Darcy wonders if this is supposed to look as much like a goodbye as it does. "Indeed."

"You can visit," Darcy blurts out. "I mean, I don't know how you do things upstairs, but on Earth? We've got like, custody agreements and shit. You don't have to cut yourselves out of their lives completely."

"And if today is any indication," Jane cuts in, "we're going to need help with their birthmarks."

Odin and Frigga exchange Significant Looks, and Frigga smiles.

"It's not how we would usually do things, in Asgard," she says, taking Odin's hand. "But I have come to believe that change may well do us good."

New growth springs from even the oldest of trees - 

"So... Is Ragnarok not happening now?"

Thor laughs, long and hearty, and then sighs.

"It is merely delayed," he says to Jane, who is holding Madison, while he holds Margaret. It is... Difficult not to call them by the names prophesied by the Whisperer, but he will do it, to atone. "By binding the Destroyer, we have bought ourselves time."

"Time for what?"

He looks at the sleeping babes in their arms, feels pride and guilt surge in his belly and decides that he will ask Stark and Steven to watch his daughters, and Natalia as well.

"Time for growth," he says, and Jane sighs.

- and leaves them stronger for it.