"Wait," Jane said, looking between them. "Thor are you just going to ignore the fact that Earth is destroyed? Everyone is gone. I have nowhere to return to."
Thor looked at Luke standing there quietly and wanted to say what he could see plainly with his own eyes.
That the man in front of them was carrying something considerably heavier than Jane was right now, and that the stillness he was wearing wasn't composure, it was something else entirely.
"You are not the only one," Luke said simply. "I am also from Earth. I also lost everything."
"Then how can you be this calm?" Jane asked, because she couldn't understand it. She was a scientist, she needed things to make sense, and this didn't make sense. A person didn't lose everything and stand there like that.
Thor reached out and touched Jane's arm gently, a quiet signal to stop, because he could see where this was going and he could see what pushing further might produce, and whatever that was it wouldn't be good for anyone in this room.
"Jane," he said, low. "Not everyone expresses grief the same way."
"But he looks completely unbothered," Jane said, not letting it go, because that was Jane Foster, she never let anything go until it made sense to her. "He doesn't look devastated at all."
Thor was quiet for a moment.
"The last three times I saw him," he said carefully, "regardless of what was happening around him, he was smiling. He always had a smile." He paused.
"He doesn't look like that now. And he had a family on Earth, Jane. People he loved. You can think about what losing all of them at once did to him, even if you can't see it on his face."
Jane looked at Luke again.
This time she didn't say anything.
"So friend, can you remove it from her?" Thor asked.
Luke didn't respond. He simply raised his hand and in his palm sat a dense swirling mass of red particles, dark and liquid, the Aether condensed and pulled clean out of Jane's body without her even feeling it happen.
"I already did it," Luke said.
Thor looked at his palm, then at Jane, then back at Luke.
Jane looked down at herself, then at the thing that had been living inside her for however long, now sitting quietly in a stranger's hand like it weighed nothing.
"Are you alright?" Thor asked her.
"I'm..." Jane paused. "I actually feel better."
Luke closed his fingers around the Aether and it stilled immediately, the red particles compressing into something small and solid, the Reality Stone in its raw form sitting in his hand like it had finally found somewhere it didn't need to fight against.
"The Tesseract," Luke said, looking at Thor.
Thor told Jane to rest and that he would return, and the two of them walked toward the treasury in silence.
Thor was turning it over in his mind the entire way. Earth destroyed. How does someone destroy an entire planet that fast.
And Luke, who Thor had come to understand was something beyond what most beings in any realm could comprehend, standing there saying he couldn't do anything.
In Thor's eyes Luke sat above his own father. Above most things he had encountered across the nine realms. So how had someone gotten past that.
"Someone used the infinity gems," Luke said, as if he heard the question forming. "Turned everything to dust. I wasn't able to do anything."
Thor processed that quietly.
"But one of the two of them are in Asgard," he said. "How did anyone use all of them if one was here?"
"He found other ways," Luke said.
Thor looked at him sideways but didn't push further. The treasury doors opened in front of them and the Tesseract sat where it had always sat, glowing quietly in its case, blue and patient.
Luke took the Tesseract and crushed the casing in his hand, the Space Stone condensing into his palm before he stored it without ceremony.
Then from outside came the sound.
The horn of Asgard split through the air, long and deep, and immediately after it the distant crashing of something hitting the upper levels of the city hard.
Thor's head turned toward the sound.
"Trouble," he said, Mjolnir already in his hand. "I have to go."
"Go," Luke said, not turning around.
Thor looked at him for a moment then was gone, the thunder of his departure shaking the treasury walls as another BOOOOM rolled through from outside, closer this time, the sounds of battle spreading across Asgard around the treasury.
Luke stood in the empty room.
***
Outside Asgard the dark elves had arrived. Malekith's ships cutting through the sky around the golden city with the singular purpose of something that had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
The Aether had surfaced and they had come to take it back, the same way they had always intended to, Kurse already moving through the lower levels with a destruction that Asgardian soldiers were finding very difficult to slow down.
The battle spread across the city, ships crashing into structures that had stood for centuries, the sounds of it carrying through the treasury walls to where Luke stood alone.
*****
A/N: If you'd like to read ahead of the Webnovel release schedule, you can join my Patreon!
The Patreon version is 50 chapters ahead.
👉 patreon.com/Universal_Peace