"It doesn't acknowledge me either—I just dragged it over here with magnetism..." Eager to look blameless, Daisy led off by casting herself as the underdog, the spurned party, and gave a rough rundown of the hammer.
"And what do you suppose the selection criteria are?" Baldy was still hung up on this affront to the laws of physics, and couldn't help asking.
What were Mjolnir's selection criteria? Whoever the hammer decided was worthy, was worthy; whoever it decided wasn't, was worthy all the same. Its only standard was having no standard at all.
Still, Daisy ran together a few traits the past holders shared, arching a brow. "Courage, integrity, selflessness—virtues along those lines, I'd say."
At "courage," Nick Fury felt the faint stirring of an urge to try. At "integrity" and "selflessness," he gave it up—neither one had ever had anything to do with him.
Privately, Daisy thought he had nothing to do with courage either, but she was wise enough to keep that to herself and turned instead to Black Widow. "Natasha. Care to give it a go?"
Black Widow begged off again and again, but under Daisy's relentless insistence and Baldy's probing gaze, she had little choice but to step up to the hammer.
Her fingers reached for it a few times, then drew back. She looked at Daisy, half-amused. "So this is the real reason you wanted me along? You think I'm some terribly brave soul?"
What Black Widow wanted to say was, what are you even seeing? I don't know that about myself—where on earth did you get it?
Daisy's face was serious. "Natasha, you carry a quality almost no one else does—the ability to cut the past loose entirely and walk into a new life. Your courage has no equal."
The praise was extraordinarily high, and at the gravity in Daisy's face Black Widow let her usual breeziness fall away. Those usually flirtatious eyes had never looked so solemn; she lowered her head, sunk in thought, as though dissecting her own heart.
"Natasha, give it a try. I believe in you too." Baldy offered his old subordinate a word of encouragement as well.
Black Widow regarded the hammer the way one might regard a judge about to pronounce sentence. She laid a hand on the haft and asked Daisy again, "What happens if I lift it?"
Daisy said nothing. Say too much and she might talk Black Widow out of her own conviction—and in any case, there was no need to explain now.
I could be a hero too? Thinking of the many innocents who had died at her hands, Black Widow gave a self-mocking little laugh. The whole thing struck her as faintly absurd. Were the heroes all dead and gone, that someone like her could be counted among them?
Still, under the encouraging eyes of Daisy and Baldy, she quietly steeled herself. Trying it wouldn't kill her.
Both hands closed around the haft, her lips pressed thin, and she heaved upward with her whole body. All three of them saw the hammer rock—just barely—before it lapsed back into its dead, leaden stillness.
"Nope! Told you it wasn't me. Ha—you definitely read it wrong." Black Widow exhaled in palpable relief and backed off a couple of quick steps. Half a minute, that was all it had taken, and the tension had her breaking into a sweat.
Daisy and Baldy exchanged a glance. Both had caught it. Black Widow carried a nobility of character she herself had no idea she possessed. It seemed she'd fallen just short, though—either some lingering hesitation, or simply that she hadn't yet been pushed to the edge, so the quality hadn't surfaced in full, Daisy reasoned to herself.
That Black Widow had the qualification, there was no doubt whatsoever.
As for the one Director on the scene and the one self-styled Director beside him—best leave them out of it. The pair of them were a hundred thousand miles from anything resembling noble virtue.
While Daisy mulled over the question of character, Baldy's mind had jumped to something else entirely. Perhaps the Avengers he was planning to pull together ought to have Black Widow on the roster after all? Baldy turned the calculation over in his head.
To Baldy's vocal disapproval, Daisy carted the hammer off to a corner of the room.
"You should try too. I think you're a hero as well." Black Widow's smile bloomed bright; she still found the whole thing hard to credit.
Daisy indulged her curiosity—no gravity, no magnetism, nothing but her own raw strength. The result surprised no one: the hammer didn't so much as twitch, treating her like she wasn't even there.
Knowing the two of them had matters to discuss, and with her own head full of questions besides, Black Widow slipped out of the office without a word, leaving only Baldy and Daisy behind.
"We'll get to the hammer later. Walk me through the mission and that corpse you brought in." Nick Fury studied the woman's body, his expression darkening further. Sin had lived seventy years; she was far from unknown, and every major intelligence outfit had a file on her. Baldy recognized her, of course.
There was nothing about the real story worth hiding, so Daisy laid it out plainly.
"So what you're telling me is—the Hammer of Skadi originally chose this woman down on the ice, but after you killed her, the hammer took off on its own?" Nick Fury felt as though his entire skull was crammed with hammers at this point. What was it with these Norse gods churning out hammer after hammer for no good reason!
Daisy gave him another crash course, this time on the myth of the Midgard Serpent, Jormungand. Anyone else would have snapped at her for spouting nonsense, but Nick Fury was as well-traveled and worldly as they came, and he believed her account on the spot.
"And you struck a deal with these Norse gods to find the sealing site first—so you could settle the whole thing in advance?"
Daisy was a touch exasperated. "You saw the way that hammer went tearing off like a thing possessed. Vanished. We've burned all this time, and there's no telling how far along the Midgard Serpent's unsealing already is."
Remembering the words of K'un-Lun's Yu-Ti—and with Loki still nowhere in sight and so much time already squandered—she figured the Fear Itself event was going to happen regardless.
She had no confidence in it. A catastrophe on that scale had once steamrolled the Avengers even with all of them fighting together, and where were the Avengers now? Captain America was still flat on his back, Thor had gone missing, leaving—what, Iron Man on his own? The outlook was bleak just thinking about it.
The way this timeline was unfolding, it was probably shaping up to be one of the grimmer branches the Ancient One had foreseen.
Daisy stewed in her gloom, unaware that there was a "someone" out there more wretched still.
After fleeing Antarctica, the Hammer of Skadi had been frantically pouring out energy, and from it a half-transparent figure of pure ice and snow had taken shape—crude, abstract, like the scribble of a three- or four-year-old, with no time spared for contours or detail. Yet this ice-sculpture of a body could already house a soul, and so long as a soul resided in it, the hammer once again had its host.
Bearing that host, the hammer plunged into the Mariana Trench, then tore open the spatial barrier and slipped into a small pocket of space beyond.
This was where the Midgard Serpent had been sealed. Odin had deliberately bound it in the deepest depths of the Earth, certain humankind would never find it, and for added defense he had left several sea serpents behind as wardens.
By rights every serpent answered to the Midgard Serpent—but traitors exist in every corner of every world.
The moment the Midgard Serpent fell to Odin, five sea serpents had switched their allegiance, and now they were the very last creatures who wanted it freed. Odin had simply handed them the role of jailers. These emerald, hundred-meter-long (328 ft) sea serpents would be reduced to ash by a single glance once the Midgard Serpent broke loose. Had the Hammer of Skadi been at full strength, with a host to direct it, it could have beaten the serpents back. In its present condition, though... it was going to be difficult.