Chapter 225: Thor Is Actually Unhinged?
Loki stared at Odin's body on the vault floor and felt, for a moment, like a child.
He'd said what he'd said. He'd meant it. He still meant it. And now Odin was on the ground and not moving and Loki's hands were doing something they weren't supposed to be doing, which was shaking slightly.
He'd always told himself the feelings weren't there. He'd built an entire identity around that claim. It was considerably harder to maintain when the man you'd decided you didn't love was unconscious at your feet.
Kaito reappeared from behind him.
"So," Kaito said, with the bright interest of someone who had just returned to a situation he'd left and found it had evolved entertainingly in his absence. "Did you actually talk him to death? I didn't think that was a real thing." He tilted his head at Loki. "You should be celebrating. Father's down, brother's gone. Throne's right there."
Loki said nothing. He was watching Odin's chest.
"He's breathing," Kaito said. "Relax. You didn't kill him. He just — fell over. Dramatically." A pause. "You're welcome, by the way. I would have stayed for the whole thing but the old man had opinions about that."
Loki exhaled.
Then, before the relief could settle into anything complicated, he crossed to the corridor entrance. "Someone help — the Allfather needs aid, now—"
Two guards appeared with the speed that guards in royal palaces have when they've been stationed nearby specifically because something was expected to happen. They lifted Odin with practiced care and carried him toward the healers' wing. Loki watched them go.
Kaito watched Loki.
"You know," Kaito said, "you just won. You understand that? Thor got thrown out. The old man's unconscious. Asgard needs a king and you're standing here." He sounded genuinely puzzled. "What are you waiting for?"
Loki turned around slowly. The complicated expression from a moment ago had reorganized itself into something harder and colder and more familiar.
"The throne of Asgard will be mine," he said. "Thor is not coming back."
"There it is," Kaito said approvingly.
"This," Loki said, picking up the Casket and walking out of the vault without looking back, "is my destiny."
Kaito fell into step behind him, hands in his pockets, the slight smile of someone watching a play he already knows the ending of.
He thought about Tsukasa, briefly. Tsukasa would have hated this whole situation. He would have complained about the intervention in narrative structure and then intervened anyway. It was one of his more endearing hypocrisies.
"You know," Kaito said to Loki's retreating back, "without your brother around, your life is going to get a lot quieter. I'm not sure quieter suits you."
Loki didn't answer. But his pace didn't change either, which was its own kind of answer.
In a diner in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, a very large blond man was staring at the bottom of a shattered coffee mug with genuine satisfaction.
"Another," he said.
The waitress looked at the ceramic fragments on the floor. Then at him. Then at the woman sitting across from him, who appeared to be weighing the social calculus of apologizing on his behalf versus simply leaving.
"He does that," Jane Foster said, which was not quite an apology but was the best available description. She turned back to Thor. "You can't keep smashing things. This isn't — people don't do that here."
"The drink was good," Thor said, as though this explained everything. For him, it did.
Darcy Lewis, who had been watching from beside Jane with the expression of someone watching a nature documentary about an animal she hadn't known existed, leaned over to Jane and said, under her breath: "I'm just going to say it. He has to be on something, right? Or off something. There is no third option."
Erik Selvig, who had reached the end of a patience that had already been stretched considerably, put down his fork. "Let's try this again," he said. "Your actual name. Your actual home address. Not the version where you're the son of a god and heir to nine realms. The version I can use to call someone to come get you."
Thor looked at him. Something moved behind his eyes that was too complicated to be simple offense.
"My father..." He stopped. Started again. "I cannot go home. My father has — I was cast out." He looked down at the table. "I have failed. I am nothing."
The diner was quiet for a moment except for the ambient noise of a small town going about its afternoon.
Darcy, who had been revising her assessment of him from "dangerous" to "extremely sad about something" over the course of the meal, glanced at Jane.
Jane was watching Thor with the expression she got when a data set didn't fit any of her existing models and she was trying to figure out why.
Selvig tried one more time. "Your friends," he said. "Anyone. Give me a name, a number, something I can use to help you get home. Surely you know someone on this planet."
Thor thought about this seriously for a moment.
"There is... someone," he said slowly. "A friend. He lives in a place called Hell's Kitchen." He frowned. "Though I am not certain he is well-known enough that anyone here would—"
"What's his name?" Jane said.
"Ethan," Thor said. "Ethan Cross."
The effect was immediate and inexplicable, from Thor's perspective. Jane Foster sat up straighter. Darcy's eyebrows went somewhere above her hairline. Selvig put down his coffee cup with the careful deliberateness of a man who wanted to make sure he'd heard correctly.
"Ethan Cross," Selvig repeated.
"You know him?" Darcy said. "You actually know Ethan Cross."
"We have met," Thor said, with the mild dignity of someone who does not understand why everyone is reacting this way. "He is a capable man. Though I do not see why—"
"Why," Darcy said, and her voice had taken on a quality that was somewhere between excitement and profound exasperation, "do you know the most famous person in New York?"
Thor stared at them.
More famous than the God of Thunder, he thought, with a mixture of irritation and something that was almost impressed. How did Ethan manage that.
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