Chapter Text
For a long time, Thor just drives.
He has no idea what else to do and the inaction of the action is what keeps him going.
But the longer he drives, the more Thor begins to become aware of an overriding emotion when he looks back at his--at Hela. Impatience. Not anger, not fear, just impatience. This isn’t some random Asgardian he can dump in the middle of the road and Heimdall will take them home. Nor a diplomat that Thor can argue into going home anyway. No. Hela is his father’s daughter. She doesn’t get to retreat. Thor’s been in her position too many times. Odin doesn’t react well to failure.
And because he can’t leave her, Hela is in his way. A bump in the road he has to cross over, and Thor’s teeth set in frustration at this fact.
Loki needs him now.
Eventually, Thor pulls off to the side of the road. It’s a long, dusty road in the middle of nowhere and their only company is the local fauna and small animals. Thor, ironically, needs more gas. He’s been driving for over three hours now, but Hela never woke up to bother him. That, admittedly, concerns him. It shouldn’t. She should matter. Nothing should matter except Loki, but she does.
She’s slumped against the back of the seat, blood pooling lazily out of her nose. It’s fresh, which isn’t a good sign.
Thor grits his teeth and rests his head against the top of the car for a moment, trying to will patience into himself, but patience has never been a virtue he was gifted with to begin with, so has minimal success. He needs to find Loki, but he can’t do that until he gets rid of Hela first. He just needs to make sure she’s okay, and then he can kick her off of the quest. She won’t stop hunting him, but at least he’ll have a heads start.
Odin shouldn’t be able to send anyone else after him for a while.
But he might not be able to take Hela back.
Not without the Tesseract, at least.
Does he care? If Hela stays here? Will she be violent? Will she hurt people? The first thing she tried to do was hurt him. That can’t be a good sign.
Speaking of the Tesseract, Thor opens the back door and stares at floor. The Tesseract is laying there. Thor stares at it for a moment, overcome with his stupidity. What the hel was he thinking, leaving that next to Hela? She could have woken up and taken him back to Asgard. What would Thor have done then ?
Thor grabs the Tesseract and Hela’s sword.
The Tesseract he tosses into the trunk of the car for lack of anything else to do with it. His stomach is knotting and the contact with the glass makes his skin feel like it’s burning. He’s biting at his tongue to the point that it’s bleeding by the time the Tesseract is nestled snugly inside the spare wheel.
The sword, he stares at. The design is unfamiliar to him. It’s shaped almost like an arm bone. It’s distinctive. A weapon made for kings. Like Mjolnir. It has none of the runes that Thor has come to associate with his family. Loki spent a long afternoon instilling Mjonlir with protective runes he was learning from Frigga after a particularly brutal battle, and Thor had come to expect them on his weapons.
Loki’s weapons have them too, but likely made by himself.
Hela’s are just metal.
There’s blood on the handle of the sword, dry and dark. She hit him, but she didn’t cut him, and Thor vaguely remembers that Hela was bleeding from her arm. She was hurt and he did nothing. Maybe that’s why she’s still unconscious. Blood loss. Norns. He didn’t…he didn’t think of that. He was freaking out too much.
His father lied to him.
Frigga lied to him.
It should hurt less.
After Loki, and the truths that were hidden from him about their family, about Loki’s kidnapping and Odin and Frigga’s apathy about that--it should hurt less . It doesn’t. Thor feels like he scraped the bottom of the secrets their family has after Loki’s true heritage was revealed. Apparently, it was a false bottom. Because this family is nothing but secrets hounded upon by secrets.
Odin and Frigga lying to him about Loki.
Loki lying to him about how much he hated Thor. How much Thor was ruining his life.
I remember a shadow. Living in the shade of your greatness.
Thor remembers the instinctive hurt. The anger. He didn’t understand, but Loki kept talking as though it should be obvious. As if Thor was an idiot for not being able to read his mind and know what he was talking about. Loki stopped talking to him, and Thor was to blame for that?
He knows that.
But it still hurts.
And Hela is still hurt. Thor breathes in through his teeth and pushes his tongue against the back of his teeth, tired. He stares at the weapon for a moment longer. The point--the point is that the blood on the blade must be Hela’s.
The metal of the sword glints off the light strangely, almost like it’s lost its luster.
Strange.
The sword he slides onto his belt. He doesn’t have a weapon, but Hela seems to be able to summon them, and he would be a fool not to take this just in case.
He moves toward the car and leans inside, tilting his body this way and that until he can get the meager light from the distant twilight to enter the car. Hela’s breathing is deep, but something about it seems pained. The shadows under her eyes are worse, showcasing just how unwell she is. She looks like she’s been given a sleeping curse.
Thor reaches out tentatively to take her pulse, but the moment his hand pushes against her wrist, Hela grabs his and jerks upright. Their foreheads nearly collide together at the force of the movement and Thor slams his head against the roof of the car in an effort to avoid her.
Thor swears, rubbing at his skull.
Hela digs her nails into his flesh, not letting go. There’s something wild in her blue eyes, like static electricity crackling through them. She breathes in. Her shoulders drop a fraction, but her eyes still linger on him with disbelief.
“So it wasn’t a dream,” she whispers. Her voice has a husky quality to it.
“What wasn’t?” Thor demands.
“You,” Hela says after a moment. Her grip on his arm digs in deeper, until it feels like her nails will pierce his skin. Thor jerks his hand away, and to his surprise, his sister’s gives without much of a fight.
She blinks several times, squinting. Thor watches her, wary. Waiting. For what he doesn’t know, but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it? He doesn’t know if she’s going to try and kill him again, and he doesn’t know what to do about her.
She’s in the way.
That’s all he can focus on.
Hela’s gaze lands on him again. This time, her eyes are steady. “Where is the Tesseract?” she demands. She moves closer to him, and Thor backs out of the vehicle to avoid her.
Thor forces himself to stare at her. He does not look at the trunk where the Tesseract is sitting, barely out of sight. The first rule of misdirection is not to bring attention to something. “I don’t have it,” Thor lies after a moment. His voice is steady. For all that Loki used to accuse him of wearing his heart on his sleeve, a lifetime in politics has at least taught him how to lie.
Hela’s eyes narrow. “You don’t have it?” she repeats.
“No.”
“Why,” the word is slow and dragged between her teeth, “do you not have it? Where did you--?” she manages to make out of the car with one hand braced on the door, and stops. Her head swivels to take in the sight around them, the change in time and scenery, and she pales slightly. “Did you leave it there?” she exclaims.
“Where?” Thor asks, putting another step of healthy distance between them. Hela looks ready to inflict bodily harm, and Thor has been on the receiving end of that look from Odin too many times to not take it seriously.
“At that--that thing! That Midgardian hut!” Hela throws out a hand in the wrong direction to indicate where they came from. Her arm is smeared with blood. “You stupid boy! What is wrong with you?! How did it escape your notice that the Infinity Stone was our only means out of this mess!? I told you--!”
I have it! Thor wants to shout. Do you really think I’d leave it with some random Midgardian!? I’m not an idiot!
Thor bristles. “Oh, I’m sorry, I was meant to just let you take me back to Asgard?”
“Yes!”
The anger overcomes his fear, and he draws closer to her. She’s tall, but he’s taller, and her thin, sickly complexion makes her practically tiny in comparison to him. But she doesn’t back down. Thor forces the words out. “No. I’m not going back. Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
Hela drags in a breath. It’s hissed and low, like a snake. “He’ll do worse than kill you.”
There’s no need to clarify who. Thor’s stomach clenches tightly at the reminder. When Odin had first turned on him in the Observatory after the Jotunheim mess, his face filled with wrath and Gungnir in one hand, Thor remembers being terrified Odin was about to kill him. Thor had finally, finally pushed done something stupid enough to push past the meager love Odin held for him. And Loki would have to witness it.
The threat shouldn’t mean anything. Thor should be able to say that Odin’s love would never let that happen, but Odin’s love has never stopped Thor’s pain and often only encouraged it. Loki was never spared any torment because of Odin’s love.
“I don’t care,” Thor forces the words out.
Hela grabs his arm. Her fingers are cold. “Stop being an idiot.”
Thor pulls out of her grip. Again, it’s easy. Too easy. “Why do you care!?” he shouts. “No one cares if I live or die! That’s the point of me! They’ll sing songs and parade about how good my life in Valhalla is!” Thor rages, “Not that I think I’ll get there, but Hel doesn’t seem awful--!”
Hela physically withdraws. “Clearly you’ve never been.”
“And you have ?”
Hela’s smile is bitter.
“Norns!” Thor exclaims. “Nevermind. The point is that I’m going to die. If Odin does it or something else, why should I care? I’m just a figurehead. Asgard will survive without me.”
Hela’s dark eyes are narrowed. “Do you truly care so little about your life?”
Thor rolls his eyes and moves away from the door. “Let me get something for your arm,” he says. He saw a basic first-aid kit when he was burying the Tesseract. Inside, there’s some very small bandaids and half a bottle of antiseptic. Helpful. Norns, what Thor would give for some healing stones.
Thor returns to Hela’s side. She hasn’t moved. She looks too tired, and she’s squinting at the setting sun like she’s never seen light before. “Give me your arm,” Thor says.
“I’ll heal.”
“You’ll heal faster if it’s not infected,” Thor points out. Hela relents, though it looks like it pains her and offers out her arm for him to see. Thor takes it and peels away the black cloth to reveal the wound. It’s a deep gash, messy and ugly, like something physically ripped itself out from underneath her skin at the crease of her elbow. Blood has dribbled down her forearm to her wrist in dried rivulets.
The wound has stopped bleeding, but that means relativiely little. It’s already red and starting to swell and pucker, and all the training Thor has received for battlewounds indicates how bad this is. Thor bites the inside of his cheek and sighs.
Bandaids aren’t going to fix this, but at least it’s something.
Thor grabs one of the waterbottles from the front and cleans the wound as best he can. Underneath all the blood, Thor sees that there’s dark metal braces under her skin. They don’t look natural, and there’s something about them that makes Thor’s entire arm hurt to look at. It stretches down to her fingertips.
Hela doesn’t even flinch while Thor does his fieldwork, nor does she protest, which Thor guesses is less because she’s grateful and more because she’s too miserable to complain. Her jaw is set and her eyes are glazed over with exhaustion.
As Thor is taping down the last bandaid, he realizes something about her skin. And her blood. And her. And oh.
“You’re…mortal.”
Hela’s mouth sets. She doesn’t look at him, and pulls her arm back to herself protectiveily, rubbing fingers along the edge of the inflamed wound. She lightly rubs a finger over the texture of a bandaid.
“Why did Father send you here as a mortal ?” Thor asks. “He must have known that there’s no way you’d be able to beat me unless you were at full strength.” And now, thinking back to that gas station fight, Thor realizes something. If that was Hela without her Aesir blood, gods what is she like when she is with the strength of Yggdrasil?
Hela sneers. “Dad always liked impossible tasks with no end. I think he enjoys the show. Makes him feel good about himself.”
Thor thinks about his banishment. Worthiness that wasn’t defined or explained, but something Thor was supposed to become without instruction. Impossible task, no end. Thor could have spent the rest of his life waiting and waiting if Odin hadn’t fallen into Odinsleep and Loki went mad.
“Why are you even here?” Thor asks. “You don’t want Odin to kill me, that much is obvious. You don’t agree with him. Why did you come here if you didn’t even want to help?”
“Oh, we’re questioning my motivations when you ran away?” Hela’s smile is sharp. “Darling, I don’t think that I--”
“I didn’t run away !” Thor interrupts, bristling at how childish that makes him sound. “I’m finding Loki. I know you know who that is. You recongized him. Someone took him, and I think Father let them. He doesn’t care about any of us.”
He didn’t mean to say the last part. It’s taken him years to accept the fact that he didn’t have a great childhood, admitting that his father failed is just…it’s different. He and Loki never talked about it before Thor’s failed coronation. Their parents. Any time they tried, both of them were hindered by overwhelming loyalty. Loki has none of that now, and Thor thinks that he’s sliding that way himself.
After what his parents did to Loki…
Hela’s mouth closes slowly, and her jaw bunches up again. “I know he doesn’t care. Believe me, I know. ”
“Then why did you agree to help him?” Thor demands. Hela is says nothing, scowling, and Thor can feel is temper beginning to slip. He forces in a sharp, even breath and bites the end of his tongue until it hurts. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m finding Loki. If you don’t intend to help me, you can stay here. Bleed out, I don’t care.”
He does, unfortunately, actually care about that.
This is his sister. His sister that Thor doesn’t know, but he knows, because her movements are familiar, her face, her scent, but Thor has never met her before. His body is reacting to the familiar stimuli even though his mind has no idea when it happened or where or why he recognizes her voice. Why doesn’t he remember?
It feels like he met her in a dream when he was a child.
How much older is she than him? When did she leave? Why can’t he remember?
Thor moves to the front of the car and grabs his phone, trying to think. Fine. Okay. He just needs to make it to New York so he can talk with the Sorcerer Supreme. Then he can get an idea of where to head after that. How far off course is he? He’ll need to stop for more gas and sleep soon, but maybe he can make it another hour or so before that happens. Get as much distance between himself and his wayward sister as possible.
And… and then if the Socrerer Supreme has no ideas…maybe he can ask Tony and Bruce. They’d be in New York. They’ll help him, won’t they? Maybe if he just omits the fact that the person he’s looking for his his brother. No. He believes that they would help him anyway. They may not like Loki, but both of them are good men. They would never condone another’s suffering if there was something they could do to stop it.
“Let me come with you.” Thor jumps and turns around with a swear. Hela is standing behind him, lithe and deadly, and Thor squeezes his eyes shut like he can just imagine this all away somehow. Perhaps at heart, no one ever really ages out of childhood.
“Let me come.” Hela repeats. He opens his eyes. How is she even upright? She looks ready to faint.
“ Why?” Thor demands. He sort of feels like laughing. “So you can force is both back home again? I’m not going back. You’ll only slow me down.”
“The Tesseract is my only way of going home.” Hela explains with limited patience, “And I do want that. So let me come or I’ll force you to. It’s your choice.”
Thor looks at her, barely upright, sick and pale. Her forcing him to do anything is a joke and they both know that. Hela’s eyes are dark and insistent. Her fists curled at her sides. Thor shakes his head. “I need to focus on Loki. You’ll only slow me down.”
“So you’ll leave me here to die?” Hela snaps. “Truly noble, little brother. I suppose I should have expected nothing less from Odin’s favorite son.”
That stops him short. Hela is mortal. She needs food. Water. Shelter. She’s not an Aesir anymore that can withstand and survive. She needs her wound to be checked over and cared for. If he leaves her out here, she will succumb to the elements and she knows that.
Thor closes his head and tips his head back with a long groan between his teeth. “ Fine.”
Hela’s face is carefully composed, but Thor thinks he sees a flicker of relief in her face. “Good,” her voice is filled with confidence, like she expected nothing less from him, the liar. “Or perhaps, we could make this easier on ourselves and just return home.”
“No. Get in the car.”
Hela gets in the car, and Thor follows. He resets his course for New York on the Google, and settles the phone in the cup holder so he can see the map from the corner of his eye. Hela has climbed into shotgun, and being this close to her makes his skin crawl.
Hela is silent, but looming as she stares him down the entire drive. She seems tense all over, like she’s expecting him to stab her the moment she turns her back to him. Thor finds the entire thing stupid. When he stops for gas about twenty minutes later, he returns to the car to see Hela searching the glove compartment.
“You’re not going to find it,” Thor warns, though his stomach is in his throat with building panic, “It would take a tracking spell to find the Tesseract.”
Hela sneers at him.
Thor is just relieved she stops searching. The trunk of the car is hardly the best spot he’s ever chosen, and if Hela does bare minimum poking around, she’ll find it. Thor can’t sense it, at least, which definitely means Hela in her mortal form can’t either. When they’re at a motel for the night--figuring out how to get one was needlessly complicated, why does Midgard make everything complicated?--Hela flops onto one of the beds with a sigh.
“Why don’t you just take the Tesseract to your destination?” she asks.
“I don’t know how,” Thor admits with some reluctance. They need food. Thor isn’t hungry, but Hela must be. “Using the Tesseract isn’t common knowledge on Asgard. Besides, I don’t trust you with it.”
“Hm.”
She doesn’t say anything else after that, staring up at the ceiling, arm tucked around her stomach.
Thor leaves her in the room and goes back to the front office to ask where he can find substance. The man behind the desk looks puzzled at the phrasing, but points him toward something called a vending machine or “if you want something that isn’t just sugar, there’s McDonalds down the street. You could also just, um, Google it?”
Oh.
Right.
Asgard doesn’t have anything like Google.
Thor thanks the attendant and goes to figure out how to use the vending machine. There’s a spot that takes cash, but Thor rapidly discovers, much to his frustration, the cash has to be almost perfectly straight to be accepted into the machine. Stupid Midgardian overcomplications. Thor is walking back to their room when he sees something dark swoop overhead.
He freezes.
Birds.
Ravens.
Huginn and Muninn. His father’s birds. His eyes . He’s watching them. Thor ducks his head and moves back toward the room faster. He can’t do anything, Thor reassures himself, the Bifrost is broken. He gave Hela the Tesseract. He could use Dark Energy, but who would he even send? If Hela was his first choice, the options must be limited. Frigga can’t. She’d need to regain her strength after sending Thor.
Maybe the birds are just watching.
Norns, please let them just be watching.
Thor returns to the room and Hela raises her head from the pillow to scowl at him. Thor throws the food from the vending machine on her. And the water bottle. She grunts with annoyance, but doesn’t complain. Thor looks out the window, and sees his father’s ravens watching the room from a near by tree.
What, Thor wonders, not for the first time, did his father do to Loki that he’s so terrified of Thor fixing? Whatever it was, their father’s love wasn’t enough to spare him. It’s never enough to spare them.
000o000
He doesn’t mean to sleep, but when he does, slumped over the table, Loki is laying on the floor, bloody. Thor is laying across from him, and the image is fuzzy and distorted, like he’s seeing it through a scrying bowl.
The room is small and dark, the only light emitted from Loki’s witch-light, which is hovering weakly over his head. Loki’s eyes are shaded and glazed from pain.
“Loki,” Thor whispers, sitting up. “Brother.”
Thor gets close enough to touch and can see that around Loki’s wrists are deep, bloody cuts in the shape of bracelets from restraints. “Loki.”
Loki’s eyes raise toward him. For a moment, Thor feels hopeful that his brother sees him, but Loki’s not looking at him, instead at something just past him. Thor turns when Loki’s face siezes with dread, and he hears a door open. The shapes that come into the room are blurry, nothing Thor can recognize.
Hands seize Loki and haul him upright. Loki explodes with movement. Fighting, biting, doing everything he can to make pulling him out as wretched a process as it can be. “No!” Loki shouts. “No, no--stop. Stop. Thor! Thor!”
There’s a pulse of magic when he says the name, and Thor turns, trying to grab him.
Loki’s form slides through his fingers like an illusion, and Thor is shoved . The world blurs in a kaleidoscope of gray colors, blurring until it makes him dizzy and he lands, hard, into his seat with a gasp of pain. He jerks upright, struggling to pull the blur of the table together. His phone is buzzing on the table top. The screen has words flashing across the top that takes him what feels like an age to recongize as DARCY LEWIS.
Loki. Loki.
That dream felt different. Real, somehow, in a way that the others didn’t. It wasn’t just a voice calling out to him in the dark. It was--it was visceral.
Loki was crying out for him . Not their parents, not for help, but for him.
Thor only notices the phone again when it stops ringing. He picks it up between trembling fingers and it buzzes in his hand, revealing a text.
DARCY LEWIS:
Hey. you dead god-man?
(recieved 9:56 a.m.)
A.m.? What does that even mean? Midgard and their time, splitting into increments that consume each other. Thor takes in a deep breath. Loki is still alive. That’s what matters, isn’t it? If Loki’s being tortured, that means he isn’t dead yet. That’s a good thing. It is good. It’s terrible. Loki is being hurt and Thor can’t do anything but watch. If only the dream had told himself about where Loki was. It was a cell. It could have been a million cells but Asgard’s.
Thor forces his eyes back down to the phone.
YOU:
No.
(sent 10:01 a.m.)
DARCY LEWIS:
:(
Call me. Jane’s worried.
(recieved 10:01 a.m.)
Thor’s eyebrows raise slightly. Jane is, is she? He doesn’t call, he doesn’t have the mental energy to manage it. Instead, he gets up and moves methodically toward the washroom. He splashes his face with water, trying to get his nerves to calm. His heart is beating so loudly that he swears his veins will break beneath the strain of the force.
What would he even say to Darcy?
Hey. My dad sent down my sister, who I forgot for some reason, to collect me and I hid one of the most powerful objects in the universe in the spare tire.
He should…he should definitely hide that. Properly. He’s so used to having Loki beside him to help. Loki could have put it in his cache, or at least enchanted it. Funny that Thor realizes how much he’s been using magic as a crutch since birth only now that Loki is gone. But it wasn’t the magic. It was Loki . He never dreamed that there would ever be a time that he wouldn’t ever have his brother.
I’m not your brother, I never was.
And then his coronation happened.
Loki, so desperate to disown a lifetime of friendship all for the sake of blood. Does Thor matter so little to Loki that the moment he learned they weren’t blood brothers, Loki threw their entire lives to the side. Why? What did Thor do to--?
It doesn’t matter.
He just finds Loki and--
And what?
What has Thor done to earn his brother back? Nothing. He’s the same but made anew and so is Loki. They’re strangers circling the known and it’s getting them nowhere except hurt.
Thor splashes more water onto his face. He’s shaking.
Norns. Pull yourself together. This is why Father can’t entrust the throne to you. You’re weak. You’re pathetic.
Thor looks up at his pale face and clenches his fists.
Look at you, the Mighty Thor. With all your strength…what good does it do you now?
Nothing. It does nothing. And Loki knew that and Thor knew that and…and that’s why they’re here. He should have been better.
Thor leaves the bathroom and nearly spears himself on the end of Hela’s sword. The smell of blood is overwhelming and distracts him more than the sharp end of the blade pressed against his sternum. Hela looks awful, her face so pale that her hair looks like an outline done to a drawing on white paper.
Thor meets her eyes over the weapon. All at once, a rush of calm surges through him. “Hela, wait.”
“We’re going back,” Hela says. She has to grip the weapon with both hands, her weight rocking from one foot to the other. What is wrong with her? “We don’t have any other options.”
“You need to lay down,” Thor says evenly and brushes past her weapon. As he expected, she doesn’t follow him. Thor doubts she has the strength to do much more than stand.
Hela’s voice is filled with frustration. “How can you be so… lackadaisical about this? Do you truly have so little regard for your life?”
“If Father wanted to kill me, he would have sent you to do that,” Thor says and grabs the car’s map off the table. He follows the charted path with his finger. Hela grabs his arm. Thor looks up at her, anger surging through him. She opens her mouth, but he’s faster. “Are you going to help me or not? I don’t have time to deal with you. I will leave you behind if you keep fighting me and Heimdall can scrape what’s left of you off the pavement.”
He doesn’t mean for the words to be so harsh, but he doesn’t take them back. Hela’s mouth sets. She looks away from him for a moment. “You’re a pain in the ass.”
Thor smirks. “I know.”
A pause. “Is he truly in danger?”
“Yes. Father put him there and I don’t intend to just let this happen. Mother says that it was for a reason, but I can’t imagine a reason that would justify that much pain.”
Hela tilts her head, and the intelligence in her icy eyes makes him pause. It reminds him painfully of Loki. Hela is violent, but she’s clearly not just a blunt instrument. Her words are careful, “You’ve seen our brother.”
Our brother. The casual claiming makes him feel vaguely nauseous. He doesn’t know her. Why does she have the right to claim Loki as her sibling when Thor isn’t even allowed to do that?
“No.” Thor says automatically, then stops. “Sort of.”
“Define ‘sort of.’ ”
Thor bites his lower lip in frustration and, oddly, embarrassment. “I’m having…visions.” He looks up at her for a moment and sees her eyebrows raise. The rest of her expression is unreadable, but his hands clench in preparation anyway. Seers aren’t common on Asgard anymore, and the art is thought more of as hallucinations than a helpful practice. Frigga has rarely shared her visions with Thor, but he’s always trusted her word.
He waits, braced, for verbal eviseration. Laughter. There’s none of that.
“Loki is being tortured in your…visions?” Hela’s voice is even. Thor nods slowly. Hela’s shoulders slowly set. It’s the first time that Thor has heard her say his name, but the way it rolls off her tongue with familiarity gives him hesitation. How well does she know them? How long was she here? Why doesn’t Thor remember?
Hela finally lowers her sword. The silent acquiescence was more than he was hoping for. He takes in a deep breath and returns back to the map. Hela takes a seat on the other side of the table, fuming, but says nothing. Thor feels overwhelming relief wash through him. Thank the Norns.
“Are you going to stop trying to stab me now?” he asks casually.
Hela scoffs. “Don’t get your hopes up, darling. Loki’s rescue would certainly inconvenience Dad, and when he drags us back, I’d like to have the last laugh.”
So it’s not care. It’s just spite. Fine. Thor can work with spite. Spite is a powerful motivator, and maybe she’ll actually be helpful. Maybe. He doesn’t know her skillset, not like the Warriors Four and Loki. He’s not sure how or even if she’ll balance him, but he is, he realizes with no small amount of shame, relieved to not have to do this alone.
Even if it is with his sister. The sister he knows, but is a stranger to him. Is that the fate of his entire family? He’ll know them, but eventually they’ll all be strangers? This isn’t fair. But nothing’s fair, and he just has to live with that. Even if, as he maps out the rest of his route to New York and Hela sits, exhausted, across from him, one question keeps circling:
Why can’t I remember her?