Thor Odinson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
st_ormbreaker) wrote2018-10-07 07:09 pm
st_ormbreaker) wrote2018-10-07 07:09 pm
(no subject)
Things were settling down a bit. It was… unsettling. But at the same time, Steve was starting to calm down a little about being trapped in this strange place. He was starting to accept the fact that he was a prisoner here, that the magic in this place was strange and unusual, that people came from different parts in the timeline, from different worlds, even. He wasn’t entirely complacent, but he was starting to understand the limitations--and to accept them.
He was in the bar with a pint at the end of the day, finding that he much preferred human contact to that of the strange employees of the Inn. Others came and went sometimes, but Steve hadn’t had a conversation yet tonight. Hopefully that would change. Steve was hoping for the distraction.
That distraction comes in the form of a tall, muscular blonde, who's missing much of his hair and an eye. The eye wasn't usually the first thing people noticed was missing (he had a replacement, after all, though it didn't match the other) -- it was the hair, which was every much an essential part of Thor as a hand or a leg might be to somebody else.
Thor approaches Steve from behind and claps a hand on the side of one of Steve's shoulders. Then, just as abruptly as he surfaced out of seemingly nowhere, he pulls the other man into a side-hug -- the best he can manage while Steve is perched on a barstool, nursing a drink.
"Rogers!" he says, grinning. "I heard you just arrived. Didn't know where to find you. Should have expected you'd be here."
Here was basically where everyone went after they arrived. Thor included.
Steve jumped a little at the arm around his shoulders, and turned to look--then started at the sight of Thor. His hair was much shorter, and... was there something weird about one of his eyes? But the smile on Steve’s face was genuine and bright. A friend! He had a friend here! Not Bucky, who had issues of his own, or Tony, who was dealing with other things. (At least, Thor didn’t seem to have any immediate issues bothering him.)
“Should have expected me?” Steve asked, but he was far more interested in buying Thor a very, very large drink. “Come! Sit! It’s so good to see you!”
Thor's happy to climb on the barstool next to him. Before Steve can order his friend a drink, Thor's already asking for a bottle of Balkan. It's no Asgardian brew, but it's one of the strongest drinks they have at the inn, and Thor knows from experience that Steve is probably the only person on Earth who can handle Grunhel. If he could handle that, he could easily stomach this.
Their bartender returns with the bottle and two glasses.
"People work in shifts," he says, pouring Steve a glass first. "Not much else to do but work. Picked up a few hobbies though." Once Steve's glass is full, he pours himself one as well.
"Two years," he says. Tony didn't have much to say about Steve, but he made it clear that this Steve was from some time between his departure after Sokovia and his return in Wakanda. "Or is it one year? I'm not sure how long ago things happened."
Steve was more than willing to drink alongside his friend the God. They could handle the same kinds alcohol, practically, though Steve was fairly convinced Thor could drink him under the table. Steve wasn’t dumb enough to try.
“Two years?” He asked, his eyes wide, eyebrows raised. “You’ve been here waiting for me for two years?” Time moved in different ways here, but Steve had no idea that was even possible.
"Here?" Thor asks, incredulous. "No, I've only been here for a few months. Was in space for two years before we met up again."
Well, obviously not this Steve, if he was from when Tony told him he was from. Thor takes a swig of his beverage.
"Don't ever grow a beard," Thor tells him. "It doesn't suit you. Made you look old."
“Oh.” Steve wasn’t sure how he’d become so confused. This place did weird things to him. He let it go, though, and watched Thor for a moment. It did feel like years had come between them. Thor had changed.
“I’ll take that into consideration,” Steve said, a smirk splitting his lips. “And you… your hair.” He said the words with a questioning lilt, just begging for an explanation.
Thor runs a hand against the back of his head. He's still getting used to the shortness of it -- the way it feels when he runs his palm over it, like he is now.
"Oh, a crazy old man shaved it off," he says casually, as if crazy old men go around cutting people's hair on the regular.
“I take it there’s a much longer story to that,” Steve said, lifting his glass and holding it up as if in a toast. Then he gulped from it, winced slightly, and set it back down again. “So, what do I need to know about this place? Considering you’ve been here a few months longer than I have.”
Thor follows suit, but lets out a little contented ahh! instead of a wince. He doesn't set the glass down quite yet, either.
"Well," he begins, curling his fingers around the glass. "The food and drink are free. The buildings themselves are self-repairing." Fortunately for him and the few times he made the mistake of calling Stormbreaker from the other end of the building. "Occasionally, portals will open up to other places. Last time it opened to Europe. But not our Europe."
Thor takes a quick swig of his beverage, then finally sets his glass down across from Steve's.
"We had a bunch of weird, undead creatures who attacked us a few days ago. That was new."
“I heard about the battle.” It actually made Steve feel a little more at home. He was a soldier first and foremost, so hearing about protecting their new home was… well, he felt like it gave him purpose. Or promise of purpose. “Did you fight?” He asked, then lifted his glass to sip again.
"Yes, with Clarice and Carlos and Tony and Loki."
It's not until Loki's name leaves hs lips that he realizes that he hadn't said anything about him yet.
He probably should have.
Especially considering how things went down the last time Steve saw him.
"Loki's here," he says. "He's being good. If there are any problems, I'll take care of them."
Steve recognized Tony’s name. And Loki’s. Loki. Steve hadn’t thought about him in a while--he’d been so preoccupied with the search for the Winter Soldier, and the threat looming of the Sokovia Accords… It was almost refreshing.
“I know you will,” Steve said after a moment of considering his old friend. “There’s no one else I’d trust with that challenge.”
He lifted the glass and gulped once more. It didn’t burn as much on the way down the second time. “You really have no idea how to get out of here? No one’s come up with anything?”
There's no one else I'd trust with that challenge.
Steve's always been the level-headed one of the four of them. He and Tony tended to be rigidly inflexible at times (though he was getting better at going with the flow of things with time); Bruce, on the other hand, tended to be swept up with whatever the rest of them were doing. He didn't particularly have the backbone or the inclination to decide things for himself and stick with his choices, and Thor had taken advantage of it in the past. Namely back on Sakaar.
Thor didn't feel proud of it, but Asgard had been his priority. Even now, he didn't regret pulling Bruce into one of his family's squabbles, even if he knew consciously that he'd taken advantage of him.
"Stark's working on something," he says, though he's worked on that on his own. Mostly just testing the physical limits of the pocket universe they were stuck in; nothing as sophisticated as what Tony was doing. "People have been known to return home, but it happens randomly and without warning."
“Randomly and without warning.” Steve repeated the words, tasting them. He was still wrapping his head around all of these things. But he was taking it all in stride, actually, getting used to his surroundings a lot easier and faster than he ever would have expected to.
“I don’t like the sound of that.” The idea that this power could take him away as easily as it’d kidnapped and trapped him here. Steve sipped from the glass again, starting to feel a little warm--surprisingly--at the alcohol now seeping into his system.
“Not much we can do about it,” Thor says with a listless shrug. He takes a long swig of his beverage. “You should catch me up on what you’ve been doing since the last time we saw one another.”
Steve didn’t like feeling so helpless. He wanted to be in charge of his own destiny, and the idea that he could randomly and pointlessly be swept up and taken away was unsettling. But what could he do about it? Funny how helpless he was about his helplessness.
“Where do I even start?” Steve asked, lifting the glass. “It feels like life has been one big roller coaster for the last several years.”
"Well," Thor says with an easy smile. He tips his glass to Steve, just as they had done a few minutes before. "Start with the beginning of that rollercoaster, right when I left."
Everything in Sokovia had been a rollercoaster in itself. Thor, at least, had a few years of searching for the Infinity Stones that was (mostly) uneventful, aside from the occasional scuffle. It sounded like Tony and Steve had more eventful lives. As did Br--
"Oh," Thor says, suddenly realizing it. "Banner -- I found Banner on this planet called Sakaar. He'd been fighting for this crazy old man -- different from the crazy old man I told you about before -- called the Grandmaster." A beat. "He was the Hulk, by the way. It wasn't Banner fighting people." Though honestly, the mental image of Bruce fighting anyone knuckle-to-knuckle is enough to draw a chuckle from Thor.
"You found Bruce?" Steve perked up. That was someone he hadn't seen in a long time. They'd put some time and effort into trying to track him down, but really... there were so many other things going on. He was always there in the back of their radar, but with all the other things... bad guys, Winter Soldiers, terrorists, etc, poor Bruce had been left alone. Actually, a lot of the Avengers thought he'd prefer it that way.
"I sort of assumed as much," Steve said with a soft chuckle. "And he was winning all those fights?"
"Probably," Thor says amiably. "Or at least until he fought me." He tries to sound casual about it -- not at all incredibly proud that he managed to hold his own against Hulk, who even Thor can acknowledge is the most physically overpowering Avenger. "It was kind of a big deal at the time. Lots of best placed against me, but you know..."
Thor gestures vaguely.
“Oh, I know.” Steve couldn’t help but smile. It’d been so weird to be in this strange hotel--a captive in a dimension that was not quite his own, but nor was it anyone else’s here. Not that he knew of or could tell, anyway. But to have Thor here made things a little easier, honestly. This was better. And the alcohol was helping, too.
“So, you found Bruce on the strange planet--no, Hulk--you found Hulk on the strange planet, and then… what? What happened next?”
Thor is midway through his drink when Steve asks his question. He finishes it off, then sets the glass down with a solid, glassy sound.
"Oh, we escaped the planet with a friend of ours and Loki and then went back to Asgard to kill my sister and her undead army," Thor says, as if this is a perfectly normal course of action. "To be fair, she was evil.”
Steve’s eyebrows shot up at that thought. “So, there’s more than just you and Loki?” He wasn’t sure the universe could handle more of them. Hopefully Loki was able to finish the job. An evil goddess and an undead army sounded like a pretty horrible lot to deal with. “Did he finish the job?”
"He? You mean the Hulk?" Thor shakes his head and looks at Steve, eyes narrowed. "No, he just punched my sister's pet wolf off the edge of the world. Anyway, we didn't know about my sister because my father imprisoned her in Hel and didn't tell us about her. She's dead now, so Earth's not in any danger."
From her, anyway.
“My family is very complicated,” Thor confides, as if this weren’t already abundantly obvious.
“Well, that’s good.” Steve said, though he wasn’t convinced they weren’t in danger here. Because this wasn’t Earth, was it? It was something different? Someplace different? “I think most families are complicated in one way or another,” he added, thoughtfully. “Heaven forbid any of us were in danger.”
He may have accepted that they were stuck here at this hotel, but Steve hadn’t accepted that they weren’t in danger. Especially with monster attacks and battles and mysterious forces keeping them there.
"We aren't in danger," Thor says. "At least, not most of the time. Some people have been here nearly two years and there hasn't been any danger until last month."
Not that the attack hadn't put Thor on-guard. He drinks up.
"I would say that we have people we need to protect here, but most are strong enough already."
"Well, with a handful of Gods around, I don't know how much good I'll do." Steve said, grinning softly. He lifted his glass and finished the last of it, now feeling quite warm and a little dizzy at the feel of the alcohol in him. He was by no means drunk, but he was definitely feeling an effect. It was more than usual for him, which was a pleasant surprise.
"So, when do we start?" Steve asked, turning his attention to Thor.
"Never stopped," Thor says, grinning. "Avenging's a full time job. I did go on hiatus for awhile when Bruce, Valkyrie, Loki and I made the Revengers, though."
That takes Thor back.
"I went back to Avenging pretty soon after that." And hadn't stopped since.
“That’s the kind of thing I like to hear,” Steve said, grinning over at Thor. He felt like he should probably go to bed. It was a pleasant sensation, warm and fuzzy and sleepy… like he used to get when he drank. In another lifetime.
“We’ve got to meet. You, me, Tony… gather the forces and try to solve this problem.”
Thor wants to tell Steve that they have one other problem they need to solve before they solve the one that'll bring them all home, but he doesn't say anything. Not yet. Instead he smiles, tilts his drink at Steve and says, "The only way I would be more convinced of our success would be if Banner were here."
“I would say Don’t jinx it, but maybe that’s exactly what we need around here.” Steve grinned a little lop-sidedly at Thor. “Luck and our small, smart friend who sometimes turns into a giant, green friend.”
Thor returns the lopsided smile with one of his own and clinks his glass against Steve’s. “To Banner,” he says. “And our little reunion.”
He was in the bar with a pint at the end of the day, finding that he much preferred human contact to that of the strange employees of the Inn. Others came and went sometimes, but Steve hadn’t had a conversation yet tonight. Hopefully that would change. Steve was hoping for the distraction.
That distraction comes in the form of a tall, muscular blonde, who's missing much of his hair and an eye. The eye wasn't usually the first thing people noticed was missing (he had a replacement, after all, though it didn't match the other) -- it was the hair, which was every much an essential part of Thor as a hand or a leg might be to somebody else.
Thor approaches Steve from behind and claps a hand on the side of one of Steve's shoulders. Then, just as abruptly as he surfaced out of seemingly nowhere, he pulls the other man into a side-hug -- the best he can manage while Steve is perched on a barstool, nursing a drink.
"Rogers!" he says, grinning. "I heard you just arrived. Didn't know where to find you. Should have expected you'd be here."
Here was basically where everyone went after they arrived. Thor included.
Steve jumped a little at the arm around his shoulders, and turned to look--then started at the sight of Thor. His hair was much shorter, and... was there something weird about one of his eyes? But the smile on Steve’s face was genuine and bright. A friend! He had a friend here! Not Bucky, who had issues of his own, or Tony, who was dealing with other things. (At least, Thor didn’t seem to have any immediate issues bothering him.)
“Should have expected me?” Steve asked, but he was far more interested in buying Thor a very, very large drink. “Come! Sit! It’s so good to see you!”
Thor's happy to climb on the barstool next to him. Before Steve can order his friend a drink, Thor's already asking for a bottle of Balkan. It's no Asgardian brew, but it's one of the strongest drinks they have at the inn, and Thor knows from experience that Steve is probably the only person on Earth who can handle Grunhel. If he could handle that, he could easily stomach this.
Their bartender returns with the bottle and two glasses.
"People work in shifts," he says, pouring Steve a glass first. "Not much else to do but work. Picked up a few hobbies though." Once Steve's glass is full, he pours himself one as well.
"Two years," he says. Tony didn't have much to say about Steve, but he made it clear that this Steve was from some time between his departure after Sokovia and his return in Wakanda. "Or is it one year? I'm not sure how long ago things happened."
Steve was more than willing to drink alongside his friend the God. They could handle the same kinds alcohol, practically, though Steve was fairly convinced Thor could drink him under the table. Steve wasn’t dumb enough to try.
“Two years?” He asked, his eyes wide, eyebrows raised. “You’ve been here waiting for me for two years?” Time moved in different ways here, but Steve had no idea that was even possible.
"Here?" Thor asks, incredulous. "No, I've only been here for a few months. Was in space for two years before we met up again."
Well, obviously not this Steve, if he was from when Tony told him he was from. Thor takes a swig of his beverage.
"Don't ever grow a beard," Thor tells him. "It doesn't suit you. Made you look old."
“Oh.” Steve wasn’t sure how he’d become so confused. This place did weird things to him. He let it go, though, and watched Thor for a moment. It did feel like years had come between them. Thor had changed.
“I’ll take that into consideration,” Steve said, a smirk splitting his lips. “And you… your hair.” He said the words with a questioning lilt, just begging for an explanation.
Thor runs a hand against the back of his head. He's still getting used to the shortness of it -- the way it feels when he runs his palm over it, like he is now.
"Oh, a crazy old man shaved it off," he says casually, as if crazy old men go around cutting people's hair on the regular.
“I take it there’s a much longer story to that,” Steve said, lifting his glass and holding it up as if in a toast. Then he gulped from it, winced slightly, and set it back down again. “So, what do I need to know about this place? Considering you’ve been here a few months longer than I have.”
Thor follows suit, but lets out a little contented ahh! instead of a wince. He doesn't set the glass down quite yet, either.
"Well," he begins, curling his fingers around the glass. "The food and drink are free. The buildings themselves are self-repairing." Fortunately for him and the few times he made the mistake of calling Stormbreaker from the other end of the building. "Occasionally, portals will open up to other places. Last time it opened to Europe. But not our Europe."
Thor takes a quick swig of his beverage, then finally sets his glass down across from Steve's.
"We had a bunch of weird, undead creatures who attacked us a few days ago. That was new."
“I heard about the battle.” It actually made Steve feel a little more at home. He was a soldier first and foremost, so hearing about protecting their new home was… well, he felt like it gave him purpose. Or promise of purpose. “Did you fight?” He asked, then lifted his glass to sip again.
"Yes, with Clarice and Carlos and Tony and Loki."
It's not until Loki's name leaves hs lips that he realizes that he hadn't said anything about him yet.
He probably should have.
Especially considering how things went down the last time Steve saw him.
"Loki's here," he says. "He's being good. If there are any problems, I'll take care of them."
Steve recognized Tony’s name. And Loki’s. Loki. Steve hadn’t thought about him in a while--he’d been so preoccupied with the search for the Winter Soldier, and the threat looming of the Sokovia Accords… It was almost refreshing.
“I know you will,” Steve said after a moment of considering his old friend. “There’s no one else I’d trust with that challenge.”
He lifted the glass and gulped once more. It didn’t burn as much on the way down the second time. “You really have no idea how to get out of here? No one’s come up with anything?”
There's no one else I'd trust with that challenge.
Steve's always been the level-headed one of the four of them. He and Tony tended to be rigidly inflexible at times (though he was getting better at going with the flow of things with time); Bruce, on the other hand, tended to be swept up with whatever the rest of them were doing. He didn't particularly have the backbone or the inclination to decide things for himself and stick with his choices, and Thor had taken advantage of it in the past. Namely back on Sakaar.
Thor didn't feel proud of it, but Asgard had been his priority. Even now, he didn't regret pulling Bruce into one of his family's squabbles, even if he knew consciously that he'd taken advantage of him.
"Stark's working on something," he says, though he's worked on that on his own. Mostly just testing the physical limits of the pocket universe they were stuck in; nothing as sophisticated as what Tony was doing. "People have been known to return home, but it happens randomly and without warning."
“Randomly and without warning.” Steve repeated the words, tasting them. He was still wrapping his head around all of these things. But he was taking it all in stride, actually, getting used to his surroundings a lot easier and faster than he ever would have expected to.
“I don’t like the sound of that.” The idea that this power could take him away as easily as it’d kidnapped and trapped him here. Steve sipped from the glass again, starting to feel a little warm--surprisingly--at the alcohol now seeping into his system.
“Not much we can do about it,” Thor says with a listless shrug. He takes a long swig of his beverage. “You should catch me up on what you’ve been doing since the last time we saw one another.”
Steve didn’t like feeling so helpless. He wanted to be in charge of his own destiny, and the idea that he could randomly and pointlessly be swept up and taken away was unsettling. But what could he do about it? Funny how helpless he was about his helplessness.
“Where do I even start?” Steve asked, lifting the glass. “It feels like life has been one big roller coaster for the last several years.”
"Well," Thor says with an easy smile. He tips his glass to Steve, just as they had done a few minutes before. "Start with the beginning of that rollercoaster, right when I left."
Everything in Sokovia had been a rollercoaster in itself. Thor, at least, had a few years of searching for the Infinity Stones that was (mostly) uneventful, aside from the occasional scuffle. It sounded like Tony and Steve had more eventful lives. As did Br--
"Oh," Thor says, suddenly realizing it. "Banner -- I found Banner on this planet called Sakaar. He'd been fighting for this crazy old man -- different from the crazy old man I told you about before -- called the Grandmaster." A beat. "He was the Hulk, by the way. It wasn't Banner fighting people." Though honestly, the mental image of Bruce fighting anyone knuckle-to-knuckle is enough to draw a chuckle from Thor.
"You found Bruce?" Steve perked up. That was someone he hadn't seen in a long time. They'd put some time and effort into trying to track him down, but really... there were so many other things going on. He was always there in the back of their radar, but with all the other things... bad guys, Winter Soldiers, terrorists, etc, poor Bruce had been left alone. Actually, a lot of the Avengers thought he'd prefer it that way.
"I sort of assumed as much," Steve said with a soft chuckle. "And he was winning all those fights?"
"Probably," Thor says amiably. "Or at least until he fought me." He tries to sound casual about it -- not at all incredibly proud that he managed to hold his own against Hulk, who even Thor can acknowledge is the most physically overpowering Avenger. "It was kind of a big deal at the time. Lots of best placed against me, but you know..."
Thor gestures vaguely.
“Oh, I know.” Steve couldn’t help but smile. It’d been so weird to be in this strange hotel--a captive in a dimension that was not quite his own, but nor was it anyone else’s here. Not that he knew of or could tell, anyway. But to have Thor here made things a little easier, honestly. This was better. And the alcohol was helping, too.
“So, you found Bruce on the strange planet--no, Hulk--you found Hulk on the strange planet, and then… what? What happened next?”
Thor is midway through his drink when Steve asks his question. He finishes it off, then sets the glass down with a solid, glassy sound.
"Oh, we escaped the planet with a friend of ours and Loki and then went back to Asgard to kill my sister and her undead army," Thor says, as if this is a perfectly normal course of action. "To be fair, she was evil.”
Steve’s eyebrows shot up at that thought. “So, there’s more than just you and Loki?” He wasn’t sure the universe could handle more of them. Hopefully Loki was able to finish the job. An evil goddess and an undead army sounded like a pretty horrible lot to deal with. “Did he finish the job?”
"He? You mean the Hulk?" Thor shakes his head and looks at Steve, eyes narrowed. "No, he just punched my sister's pet wolf off the edge of the world. Anyway, we didn't know about my sister because my father imprisoned her in Hel and didn't tell us about her. She's dead now, so Earth's not in any danger."
From her, anyway.
“My family is very complicated,” Thor confides, as if this weren’t already abundantly obvious.
“Well, that’s good.” Steve said, though he wasn’t convinced they weren’t in danger here. Because this wasn’t Earth, was it? It was something different? Someplace different? “I think most families are complicated in one way or another,” he added, thoughtfully. “Heaven forbid any of us were in danger.”
He may have accepted that they were stuck here at this hotel, but Steve hadn’t accepted that they weren’t in danger. Especially with monster attacks and battles and mysterious forces keeping them there.
"We aren't in danger," Thor says. "At least, not most of the time. Some people have been here nearly two years and there hasn't been any danger until last month."
Not that the attack hadn't put Thor on-guard. He drinks up.
"I would say that we have people we need to protect here, but most are strong enough already."
"Well, with a handful of Gods around, I don't know how much good I'll do." Steve said, grinning softly. He lifted his glass and finished the last of it, now feeling quite warm and a little dizzy at the feel of the alcohol in him. He was by no means drunk, but he was definitely feeling an effect. It was more than usual for him, which was a pleasant surprise.
"So, when do we start?" Steve asked, turning his attention to Thor.
"Never stopped," Thor says, grinning. "Avenging's a full time job. I did go on hiatus for awhile when Bruce, Valkyrie, Loki and I made the Revengers, though."
That takes Thor back.
"I went back to Avenging pretty soon after that." And hadn't stopped since.
“That’s the kind of thing I like to hear,” Steve said, grinning over at Thor. He felt like he should probably go to bed. It was a pleasant sensation, warm and fuzzy and sleepy… like he used to get when he drank. In another lifetime.
“We’ve got to meet. You, me, Tony… gather the forces and try to solve this problem.”
Thor wants to tell Steve that they have one other problem they need to solve before they solve the one that'll bring them all home, but he doesn't say anything. Not yet. Instead he smiles, tilts his drink at Steve and says, "The only way I would be more convinced of our success would be if Banner were here."
“I would say Don’t jinx it, but maybe that’s exactly what we need around here.” Steve grinned a little lop-sidedly at Thor. “Luck and our small, smart friend who sometimes turns into a giant, green friend.”
Thor returns the lopsided smile with one of his own and clinks his glass against Steve’s. “To Banner,” he says. “And our little reunion.”