st_ormbreaker | (no subject)

(no subject)

Thor idly throws Mjölnir up in the air with a spin, then catches it easily in one hand. He always tends to play with his hammer whenever he's feeling restless and for some reason, he feels restless now. Going home suddenly feels incredibly important, even though the only thing waiting for them there is the festival and accompanying feast for Walpurgis. The holiday might have felt important when he was much younger, the same way Yule was important to him when he was very small, but 1500 years of celebrating and feasting had drained his excitement for it. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy it (he did) -- at this point, it felt more ritual than anything else.

Still, there was something that felt important about it this time in ways it hadn't before. He couldn't help but think it was because Tony was accompanying him. None of the other Avengers had ever had the chance to visit his homeworld, and it was difficult for him not to feel excited and proud to show it all to someone.

"You will want to stay close," he says, before he lifts Mjölnir. "You do not want to fall off of it."

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Thor drops back onto the bed, his hands folded together, and looks down at his feet. He tries not to think about how even after all of this, Tony's worst nightmare comes true.

And it comes true because of him.

Edited 2018-08-31 04:16 (UTC)

Tony was weightless, and his back hit the door. Everything was fading from view.

His future with Pepper. His role as a father to Peter. His pact with the Avengers. His duty to the people of earth. They were like physical things, slipping through his fingers like dust.

Tony laughed a wheezing and hollow laugh. At the center of his despair, why was there a sense of relief?

What can he really say to any of that? He swallows, and he's able to find his voice again, though it starts off hoarsely.

"We don't know if that's what you go back to," he says, hoping that what he thinks might happen will be true. That some good might come out of talking about it. "Maybe when you go back, you can still fix things, stop it from happening. Maybe in some other, parallel universe, everything turns out fine."

Thor likes to imagine that. Maybe it'd make telling Tony all this worthwhile.

"I know now where five of the Infinity Stones are."

"Thank you. And I'm sorry."

There were no tears. There was only a very tired smile at the end of his bout.

"For the truth. For...everything. Trite. Sorry. Again."

A long silence. Tony turned his head. This wasn't painful, he was too numb for that. But he could feel Thor's anguish like a blade to the chest.

"I'll go."

Thor wrings his hands together.

"Don't go."

It's all he can manage right now.

"And have you continue the affair with the dead man?" Tony shook his head.

This had been a mistake from the start, whether Tony wanted to admit it to himself when they were talking or laughing or sleeping together like they were.

He was already in a relationship. His old teammate filled the void. It could have been anyone from home. It was never fair to begin with. No, it was beyond unfair. It was cruel. Why did it take the revelation that he wasn't long for the world to come to terms with it?

'I am the lowest kind of human being.'

"You deserve more than I can give. A hell of a lot more."

Thor thinks of that moment with Thanos, when he pressed Stormbreaker into his chest bit by bit, wanting Thanos for one moment to have some taste of the suffering he had endured up until that point.

And then the snap.

What'd you do? What'd you do?

It was as much Thanos' fault; logically, he knew that, but he held himself at the same level. They were selfish, both of them. And half the universe died because of that.

"You are better than I deserve."

"I don't know. I'm both a carcass and sloppy seconds. Those are some dizzying levels of self-loathing, my friend." Tony's knee-jerk response to summon levity was black as pitch, but he couldn't help it. He felt sick, but he felt at peace. Enlightened, almost.

Thor knows self-loathing. And he hopes against hope that Tony doesn't feel it even half as much as he does when the memories rise to the surface.

"You're not," he says, when he's finally able to find his voice again. It occurs to him, briefly, that he might not know what he's referring to. This carcass or the sloppy seconds. Thor doesn't bother to clarify.

"You're not," he says again.

Tony's head dropped. Thor was pleading, and he couldn't even look him in the eye.

This wasn't love. It was never going to be anything close. Better to break it off before someone started believing their own lies.

"I want to be friends. ...You can punch me for saying it after all this, but I do."

"Please don't go," he says again. "Please, Tony."

"I'm going." Tony's hand went for the handle. "I have to. I can't--I don't know where."

Even as he clenched the knob, no part of him could simply walk out. Not just as a friend or a lover, but as a human being.

"...So come with me."

Thor pushes himself up off the edge of the bed, feeling pathetic on top of everything else. He hopes that Tony doesn't pity him, but who wouldn't when he begs?

He joins Tony, a step or two behind him, and waits for him to open the door.

Tony looked back, and immediately regretted it. He had his heart set on another fly around the sky to clear their heads (if there could be such a thing) in the slightest, come to a mutual agreement about their problematic arrangement--but his damn mirror neurons had to kick into overdrive just from the look on the other man's face.

"Don't...just don't. God. Make this easy for me. Please."

Not a second after the plea left his lips was he back against Thor's shoulder, leaning into him with every ounce of strength in his legs.

Thor closes his eyes, wills himself to look okay and not the way he feels right now. Tony's mourning a reality Thor hopes doesn't exist for him. He doesn't want Tony to see his nightmare come true.

And if knowing where the Infinity Stones are isn't enough to stop him, he truly hopes that Thanos kills Tony before he can see everyone turn to dust.

Thor wraps his arms around him and pulls him close so that even Tony's unsteady legs give beneath him, he can still hold him up.

Thor wants to tell him he'll kill Thanos, that he'll spend the rest of his life hunting him down and then destroy the Infinity Stones right then and there so it never happens again. He couldn't stop Thanos with Stormbreaker, but perhaps a weapon that was so powerfully-forged could shatter all six of them.

But he knows it's not going to change anything.

"I don't know what I'm even pushing back against anymore. But I don't want it to be you." Tony clenched the fabric covering Thor's back. "I'm weak. I'm sorry."

"You still have time to figure that out," he murmurs. Thor doesn't want Tony to go, ever. But perhaps Tony leaving was an inevitability. Even if his future might not be.

"Here." At the Madonna Inn. Tony could laugh. This was his sanctuary? His chance to figure things out before he went to that Great Hotel In the Sky?

He turned his head up to meet that face he had been trying desperately to avoid, and a sense of clarity returned. It wasn't about him. He wasn't the one who'd have to live with this. Not for long, anyway.

"...It's a tough spot." Understatement. "Maybe I can't get you through it. But I can try."

"I'll get through this."

His father's secrets, the Warriors Three, Asgard, Heimdall, his brother, failing to save everyone. He needed to get through this if he was going to find Thanos. He had no other choice.

He might still very well be the only one who can kill Thanos, though he's sure now that his mission accomplished, he would simply submit.

When Thor is certain that Tony can keep himself upright by his own power, he relinquishes his hold on Tony. Even as Tony changes his mind and agrees to stay with him, Thor can't help but wonder if it's out of pity or obligation.

He attempts a smile, then runs a hand over Tony's hair.

Now that he had his eyes on Thor's face, Tony couldn't take them away. There was an outpouring in his chest.

Finding out he was going to die and Thor being submerged in an ocean of grief? Real nice time for the highs to hit, but there they were. The hands on him felt good, incredibly so. They felt real, they felt warm. Just being this close made him feel drunk in the best way possible. Now, it wasn't just that it made him forget. He would have done absolutely anything for the sake of one smile out of the man.

It was a truly awful realization. They fit together entirely too well. Two broken pieces to make a whole, or something equally bathetic.

"You got me. You got me good."

It occurred to him in that moment they all stood together in silence, before Steve said oh God in that sad and desperate voice that probably mirrored exactly how all of them felt, that he might very well outlive everyone. He should have been thankful when he survived that he had lived through it, but standing there, he became acutely aware of it:

He could very well survive anything.

Thor played ignorant well enough that others were well enough convinced that he didn't know much about anything most of the time. But as he stood there, arms and legs stretched, opening the iris, he knew exactly what he was getting into. He knew that it was more likely that he was going to die than he was to survive. Gamma-ray bursts were the most violent form of energy there was, each one of them the equivalent to all the energy expended by Earth's sun. And for minutes, he lived through it. A decade before, he had sustained a mortal blow from the Destroyer. Now he was standing against a sun so dense that even a teaspoon-sized scoop of it weighed a billion tons.

Thor knew from the moment he started making Midgardian friends that it was likely he would outlive them; he knew and accepted (though sometimes painfully) that inevitability from the start. His longevity had plenty of advantages, more than his his short-lived companions. He cycled through those thoughts over and over again whenever he was struck by the realization that he'd out-survive them until the words felt like a mantra. And up until that moment when Thanos snapped his fingers and he watched as half the universe turned to dust, he believed it was possible that they might outlive him, and knowing that possibility was there brought him some strange measure of comfort.

But after withstanding the full force of a neutron star and surviving Thanos' snap that snuffed out lives easily and without discrimination, Thor knew there was nothing that would kill him.

If he had been more intelligent, more disciplined, Thor wouldn't have allowed himself to grow so attached to his Midgardian friends. To Jane and to Tony. But being around them, loving them came so naturally that it felt right. Who was he to try and stop it?

Some small part of Thor wishes he had. He still would have grieved half the universe, but grieving his friends was impossibly more painful than grieving for strangers. He had already accepted Asgardian extinction as an inevitability in the week of peace they had aboard the Statesman, but he hadn't accepted the possibility that his friends might die, or live to suffer through the deaths of those closest to him. And that was just as painful as realizing that after the Asgardian survivors were culled once, and then a second time with Thanos' snap, they numbered less than 100.

Thor pulls back his hand, and unable to stand the weight of Tony's gaze, made his way to the far side of the bed and sat down on its edge, his back facing his friend's. He knots his fingers together and tries to think of nothing, but finds for the first time since his arrival at the Madonna Inn that he can't do it.

Tony followed. He still wanted to leave, take some time in his suit where things were familiar. That wasn't going to happen, at least not anytime soon.

He didn't know what was at the end. Maybe all of it came true, maybe none of it did. Maybe the reality of it was Tony came from an ever so slightly different universe and was mourning over nothing. All that he could languish over later.

He knelt before Thor's slumped form, gazing up at him silently.

How could he face the weight of a neutron star and yet be so unable to face the weight of Tony's gaze. He tries to ignore it, but like so many other things right now, it's impossible.

He looks to one side of the room. He doesn't know what to say, and so he doesn't say anything at all.

There was surely some piece of wisdom, some comforting word he could summon that would break the tension. Tony had become adept since his stay, certainly moreso than he'd ever been. Nothing was coming. Thor was a void.

Still, he had his truth. Despair, relief, they were comforts that Tony Stark still wouldn't allow himself to wallow in. Not before his supposed death was staring him right in the eye.

"...It's not over. Not for you. Not for me."

And for the first time since he sat down on the edge of the bed, Thor manages to make eye contact with Tony.

"If we remember when we go back," he says hoarsely, "there's still a chance you can stop it from happening."

Maybe not in Thor's reality, but if he could stop it from happening in Thor's, in Loki's, in Quill's, in Rocket's, in Peter's, then it would make what he endured worth it.