Marvel, page 5
I have done this. I have killed my brother.
Loki said nothing, named no conspirators, and raised his head high. If the axe falls, let it cleave my pride with it. “How did it happen?”
Odin rasped with disgust. “Is that all you offer? An invitation to greater suffering?”
“The Destroyer rampaged across New York City in Midgard,” said Sif, mastering her emotion. “Your brother tried valiantly to disarm it, but fell in the attempt.”
“Do not humor him, child!” Odin roared at her, driving his spear into the dais. “He knows. He knows. He luxuriates in the knowing, enjoys our grief as a performance, stalks the boards of this dark theater, and he with the starring role!”
“Husband—” Frigga tried to interrupt, but Odin silenced her with a look.
“Do not dare raise your voice in support of him,” the All-Father continued.
“I simply ask for mercy,” she finished, lowering her gaze.
Loki felt his heart hardening. “If what you say is true, if I have killed him, then mercy would be death.”
“If! If.” Odin laughed, which was more frightening than his fury.
Odin wiped his gnarled hand over his eyes. He shared one glance with the queen, then sucked in a noisy breath. The spear that had been motionless, driven into the floor, sprang to his hand. He leveled it at Loki, unleashing the full brunt of his fury. “What a waste you are! What a vain, greedy, cruel boy! Yes, a boy, I say. A boy. No man grown delights in recklessness or gambles with lives, for he knows the steep and hateful cost. You, boy, are banished from Asgard, a stranger to your home. Your powers shall be stripped, your name no more than a curse to be forgotten.”
His voice echoed for a long moment, then a pulsing light emitted from the end of Odin’s spear, striking Loki in the chest. He gasped, writhing, convulsing as fire ignited in his blood, and then swiftly was drawn out of him, his godly powers siphoned into the spear.
“Exile,” Loki murmured, bent double with pain. “For how long?”
“You have sentenced this family to a lifetime of bitterness, and you dare ask if your punishment will end?” Odin thundered. “For how long, you ask? Why, for the span of a father’s grief. For the length of a mother’s sorrow. And if your coldness prevents you from making these calculations, then it is the only mercy you will know.”
Frigga shook her head, breathless. “And the tragedy is, my son, we love you.”
Love. He had always felt Odin and Frigga observing him more closely, subtly bracing for the seismic event, for his giant’s blood to reveal itself, as if his evil would be innate and not learned in the hundred thousand nonverbal transgressions committed, of course, with love. The looks. The slightly clenched jaws. The silent but pervasive sense of waiting. Watching. When will he reveal himself? When will the real Loki appear?
When they were still boys, Thor had whacked him in the face with a snowball during the Winter Solstice festival. At first, Loki thought it was a bruise forming in the corner of his eye, but then he noticed everyone in the courtyard staring at him, aghast. There were whispers and pointing. The freezing-cold snow had revealed his true parentage, the dark-blue skin of the Frost Giants unmasking him forever. Panicked, he had fled to his parents, and watched the color drain from Frigga’s face as she beheld him and realized their lies, too, had been exposed.
Odin’s spear was still pointed at his chest.
“Where was I supposed to hold all this so-called love?” Loki snarled. He dropped onto his hands and knees like an animal. “How was I to receive it when my hands were already occupied with carrying so much shame?”
The answer was another arc of light from Odin’s spear. The answer pulled the floor out from beneath him, unmooring him from everything he had ever known.
The answer was exile.
Loki Laufeyson was falling.
5
TONY ALLOWED CAPTAIN TAYLOR and the feds to hold him up at the barricade for exactly six minutes. A few of them were dumb enough to draw their weapons on him. “Go ahead and open fire on me, fellas, it’s been a slow news day,” he said, agitated. If he hadn’t been able to get the commissioner on the line, then Pepper would have talked them through to the other side, or Tony would have found a way to harness the supernova of anger building in his chest and given the cops a twin incident to deal with. The intersection was already a nightmare; they didn’t need another crisis to manage.
In some places the road had peeled away like sunburned skin. Ash and grit wafted across the intersection in dark sandstorms. His focus narrowed on a pair of EMTs in red and white standing on either side of a covered body. Their expressions were grim. Their hands were stiff at their sides, as if to say, Nothing to be done here. They were answering questions for a man holding a tablet. Tony started running before Pepper could stop him. Somehow, she kept pace, even in her heels, even putting out a million fires on her cordless headset, even fending off Captain Taylor’s questions as he tailed them, brows tented, balding head shiny with flop sweat.
Some bureaucratic hive emptied itself onto the street. Little men in black-and-white suits and sunglasses swarmed. He had minutes, maybe only seconds, before the crime scene was picked clean by the government and whatever shadowy agency had been dispatched.
Tony shoved tablet guy out of the way and dropped to his knees. There was a sliver of shoes visible beneath the cover respectfully hiding the body. He knew the shoes. They were Tom Fords, impeccable, a Christmas gift from Tony. Over the years he had grown tired of looking at Happy’s rubbery Dollar Tree dress shoes, thick as a disco platform. Here, Tony had told him, shoving the box into Happy’s arms, now you don’t have to dress like Herman Munster.
“Sir? Sir? Can we get someone over here?” Tablet man was frantically speaking to no one in particular.
Pepper, his avenging angel, swooped in. “Hi,” she said, in her tone that was somehow no-nonsense and superbly kind. “We have permission to be here, all right? He just needs a moment with his employee. Could I have your name?”
Dueling tablets, as Pepper brandished her own.
Tony ignored them. Minutes. Seconds. He clenched his teeth and ripped the sheet away. There had been no expectation. Maybe he thought it would be like in the movies. Or the abstract descriptions he often read of what their Stark tech could do when X or Y was applied to human meat. It never occurred to him that it could be like this, that so much of a man could be missing yet his identity unmistakable. His stomach lurched. He leaned forward, his hands gripping Happy by the ankles. He had fat ankles. Tony had told him that, too. Bad shoes. Bad ankles. Had he ever said a single nice thing to his friend?
“What the hell happened here?” he whispered.
Fix it. Patch it back together. Tony could fix anything—make anything—and the need to do just that pushed on him, a physical pressure.
His heart pounded. His mind was spinning up while his body downshifted, hands heavy and frozen, chest filled with lead. He closed his eyes. Pepper argued with the men standing over them, but he couldn’t pick out the individual words. Noise. It was just noise. Something, something, something, employee carrying proprietary Stark property. Bespoke technology. Think, think, think. If you’re drowning, do you paddle or float? Paddle or float?
Someone behind him was shouting. More than one someone. He sat back on his heels and looked back and to the right. A machine was there, immense, shaped like a man, but still, stuck in a pose as if it had just been caught sneaking around. Its vacant face and head were caved in. Tony’s eyes traveled from its position to his, following a distinct scorch pattern along the ground, connecting the dots from the big, weird metal man to his dead friend. His eyes followed the same trajectory a few times, wearing it into his memory and brain like a groove. The men in black suits and black sunglasses were gathering around it like a Wicker Man effigy.
“Pepper,” he muttered. His eyes felt like they were full of sand. “That thing…”
She click-clacked away at a run. One of the EMTs was trying to peel Tony away. He shrugged him off violently, tipping over as he did. Twisting to the side, he fell, something hard jabbing into his ribs. The pain jolted him out of shock. He grabbed for whatever it was, ready to hurl it at whoever tried to touch him next, but the stupid thing was stuck to the ground. Tony rose to his knees, turning to find an old-timey blacksmith’s hammer there on the ground. That’s what had stabbed into his side, and what wouldn’t move. It looked heavy and mean.
Take it. Swing it. Smash it into that machine. Smash it to pieces for what it did.
His mind was too fractured to really put anything coherent together. What was that man-machine? Why did it look like a bomb had gone off and Happy was at the center of it? Why was there a blank on the pavement, oddly shaped like another man? Why that morning? Why that hour? Why was the weapon he gave Happy not enough?
Grunting, he took the hammer with both hands and pulled. It wouldn’t budge. He tried again and again, sweating, swearing, snarling, but it rebuffed him. The strangest part was that he had a sense that it wasn’t melted to the pavement, that it could be lifted, that it was eminently wieldable, but not by him. He yanked again, lightning flickering across his chest. His shoulder throbbed as if he had pulled a muscle deep inside it, and he gasped, his lungs squeezing around nothing, making his vision dip.
There was a sound like parade-day fighter jets howling overhead. Tony heard it, looked up, and felt a rush of air slam into his chest, sending him toppling. A perfect cylinder of air and light, like a fan-powered spotlight, enveloped the hammer. Shaking, dumbstruck, he watched as the immovable object was sucked into the sky, there one instant, gone the next. The tunnel left a thickened silence in its wake. He heard Pepper returning and scrambled to his feet.
“What was that?” she asked, clutching his forearm.
Tony leaned hard against her. Acid bubbled in his stomach. His throat tightened, that weird pulse shooting through his upper chest again. “What’s any of this?”
His voice came out strangled.
Pepper caught him around the waist with both arms as he began to slump.
“Tony?” She shook him. There was a slightly angelic quality to her as he hit the ground, the sun climbing behind her head, giving her a bright halo. “Are you…Tony? Oh God. Okay. Okay. Medic! Can we…Medic! Stay awake, Tony, stay with me.”
But he couldn’t. He was going somewhere else, somewhere mercifully quiet, and shadowy, plummeting down a short tunnel that ended before he could understand the parameters.
Tony thought he had left these dreams behind a long time ago. They always smashed into him the same way: twisted metal and screams, smoke and fire, the helpless twist in the gut as he picked up the phone and heard the words, “Tony? Are you sitting down? Your parents…there’s no good way to say this, they’re gone.” It was happening again. He was swimming in darkness, no longer himself, just a terrified young man again. Just a boy.
The smoke and metal became shapes. Abstract ideas. There were voices, too, but he couldn’t understand them, and trying to discern the meaning hurt, like a sudden flash of light into the eyes. Formless shapes hardened. Suggestions became facts. Those abstract blobs of gray and black and white formed edges, and—lost in the darkness—it all began to make a weird kind of sense. It was a flow chart now, the shapes and colors, cascading realizations, a sixty-car pileup of Things He Knew For Certain.
Action.
Action, action, action.
Doing, doing.
Making, making.
There was a new shape to his thoughts now, the birth of a grand solution.
The machine.
His most brilliant design.
Then: He shot awake with a gasp in the bright, vacuum-sealed, antiseptic freezer drawer of a hospital room. Blips and boops. Wires and needles.
“It’s all good news,” he could hear someone saying. Tony was coming back to himself. About damn time. There’s work to do. “More blood work and EKGs, of course, but as long as he stays consistent with the medication, there’s clear skies ahead.”
“That’s…thank you.” It was Pepper. “That’s such a relief, Dr. Blake, you have no idea.”
“Oh, I have some idea.” The doctor laughed softly. Tony tried to swivel his head, but his vision was still focusing. “It’s not every day you get to save the Tony Stark.”
“I hope he didn’t hear that, there will be no living with him,” said Pepper.
The door closed. Heels clicking. Blips and boops. A blurry face hovered over him, before the red halo became hair and the curved lines became a nose and a quizzical brow. “You’re awake?”
“I feel like a science fair project,” Tony muttered. “What happened?”
“Major heart attack,” said Pepper. She was clutching her bag in front of her skirt suit. Her hair was just mussed enough to tell him she had stayed the night in the hospital. “You’re at Manhattan Cardiology. All that red meat and caffeine, Tony, I just…would it kill you to eat a salad now and then? A smoothie?” She winced. “Sorry.”
“There are fates worse than death,” Tony said with a snort. “Like veganism.”
Pepper, a decades-long vegan, rolled her eyes. “I suppose I should be grateful you can crack jokes even like this.” She gestured to his wires. “You were in the CCU for twenty-four hours. They had to defib you.” Her hands trembled.
“Hey,” he said softly. “I made it.”
“I’m meant to comfort you, not the other way around.”
“No comfort for either of us, I’m afraid. No rest for the wicked.” No rest for heroes. He was already starting to feel better, more himself. In fact, he was vibrating, dazzling with unspent energy. Tony sat up and looked for a button to call the nurse. He needed to get out of there. He needed to start.
“No, Tony.” Pepper sighed. She carefully put one hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down. They had never defined what their “thing” was, exactly. Tony did whatever he wanted, and Pepper did the same, and all the while an unspoken decision to wait for each other lingered between them. Star-crossed but terminally overbooked, the threat of monogamy but not the call to it. Not yet. His thoughts stopped spinning long enough to land on the notion that he was relieved not to wake up alone in the hospital.
Pepper’s glare softened. “If this is about Happy, I’ve already made arrangements.”
“What arrangements?” He found the Call Nurse button and jammed his fist onto it.
“They wanted to take him. I had to flex every corporate muscle we have and call in too many favors.”
“They? Who’s they?” Tony demanded.
Pepper wiped at some of the dark makeup smudges beneath her right eye. “The government, I suppose, but it can’t be the DOD. It’s something else. I couldn’t get a straight answer. They put us in a bureaucratic phone tag loop that dead-ended at the Pentagon.”
The blips and boops went faster. Tony squeezed his eyes shut. The nurse came, but not because he wanted her to. She was short and creased, and looked as if she hadn’t slept in a week.
“Just keeping you on your toes,” Tony tried to joke, winking at the nurse, who shot Pepper an accusatory look.
“You try and tell him he has to stay put and rest,” said Pepper, shooting the nurse an equally cold stare. Ice against frost, and Tony’s money was on Pepper. It always was. “Go on, I’ll wait.”
The nurse seemed satisfied that his heart rate was coming down to healthy levels and bustled around the end of the hospital bed, back toward the door. “Cooperative patients have a way of going home sooner.”
Pepper pulled a crinkled paper bag out of her purse and rattled it at the woman. “Aspirin, statin, beta blocker, I promise he’ll be a good little soldier.”
It felt like an age until they were alone again. Tony squirmed.
“Rhodey stepped in,” Pepper continued; she had leaned down and begun to whisper. Smart. They could easily be watching or listening. James Rupert “Rhodey” Rhodes was former air force but still worked for the government. His role with the Department of Acquisitions had led to working closely with Stark Industries on weapons development for the military. More than that, he had become a friend. Tony called him their man on the inside, which Rhodey hated. “He backed them down to an autopsy only, but we got Happy back for a memorial. We could explore options, but, Tony, I really don’t think it will be possible to do a viewing.”
Tony nodded, itching to get out of the hospital bed. There was so much to do. Happy never talked much about family, maybe a mother in Queens? Had she been notified? His chest felt numb, and it wasn’t the medication or the heart attack. “And that thing? That machine that killed him? I need to have a look at it.”
“I know, I know. I’ll keep Rhodey on it,” said Pepper, less assistant and more mind reader. Her brows shot up in inquiry. “In the meantime…”
Behind the white pharmacy bag of medications, she slid something else up out of her bag. It was singed on the edges, metallic, humming with its own strange power. Part of the cruel machine that had caused such havoc downtown, part of what killed his friend.
“Good girl,” Tony murmured, reaching for it.
It felt at home in his hands, cruel and cold and filled with unexplored potential.
“Get an ETA on when I can get out of here,” Tony breathed, staring into the metal. He felt a palpable resentment toward the body that had betrayed him and sent him to the hospital. His body was just meat, slowing him down; his true thoughts, his brilliant, industrial diligence lay fixed on metal. “I have work to do.”
6
RŪNA, VARLET OF ALL-FATHER Bor, one of the original nine Valkyries, watched the sun rise over the golden, timeless hills draped before the warriors’ longhouse of Valhalla. As a Valkyrie, she and her sisters served as shield maidens, warriors for the throne of Asgard and protectors of sacred Valhalla, a dimension of peace and splendor, the ever-sought afterlife of Asgardians. They were also guides, of a sort, frequently tasked with escorting fallen souls to the afterlife. She was waiting for someone. Waiting on a friend. Beside her, a cluster of mountain ash wept a steady fall of red leaves, as if the place itself remained in mourning. Her stomach was full of nervous, slithering snakes. The summons to Valhalla had been vague, simply: He wants you to be there.
