Chapter Text
”You should have gone for the head.”
And just like that, it’s over. The sound of Thanos snapping his fingers is louder than it has any right to be, louder than the screaming and chaos from behind him, louder than the sound of Thor’s own heavy breathing and pounding heart, and he realizes that this is it before the world is bathed in bright white and every sound, save for the echo of the snap still ringing in his ears, fades away.
He expects to wake up to the glimmering and glistening walls of Valhalla - after all, if nothing else, he knows he is a warrior who died in battle. And while what he wakes up to is shimmering, it isn’t the gold he had been told about in stories of Valhalla as a child. Instead, he is imprisoned in some sort of multi-faceted sphere, with as many facets as the universe has starts, the light he sees only a reflection of the too-bright, too-white lights coming from above, such as the ones in Midgardian hospitals, only much harsher.
He lets out a groan as he sits up. As far as he can tell, there are no new injuries on him, but he is missing his weapon, as well as most of his armor and cape. He squints to lessen the glare coming off every surface, bathing the entire sphere in light, and sees almost two dozen other people lying prone on the floor of the sphere, some at different angles as the sphere tilts upwards.
He recognizes almost everyone - the “Guardians of the Galaxy” that saved him, minus the green one; all of his Avenger comrades; with Tony is a boy he has not seen before in a red and blue suit, next to him, the sorcerer he had encountered on his last trip to Earth (he thinks, with a pang, of Loki); with Steve, a man with a metal arm and a second man with red goggles, neither of which he recognizes; a group of three, all with a darker skin tone, none of which he recognizes lay beside Rhodes and a second man with what looks like a red space suit on.
None of them are moving, but if Thor is alive, then surely they are as well?
He checks anyway, when he remembers how, even if he is alive, every other person who was onboard his ship is not.
He nudges the closest to him - Tony, who is not encapsulated in his suit any longer but whose arc reactor still glows beneath his shirt - with his foot. When that fails to rouse him, he bends down and shakes him. His chest is very obviously moving, but waking everyone up and getting out of this glass (?) structure is still a priority. “Tony!” he says, remembering how the Avengers had always remarked upon how loud his “ridiculously deep, booming voice” was, especially Tony.
Tony groans and shifts, taking his sweet time waking up, but next to him, the child shoots up immediately. “Wha-” The minute his eyes open, they are closed again with a cry of pain.
This is what rouses Tony as well, who pushes himself up and tries to use his hand to shield his eyes from the light. “Kid, what- I where-?”
“Stark,” Thor says, and Tony is finished blinking himself into adjusting to the light, and so looks up to meet his eyes.
“Thor? Where did you come from, exactly? Did you put us here, because I thought you were the God of Thunder, not the fucking sun-”
There is more shifting from behind Thor, which he ignores in favour of answering Tony, “I did not put us here. It was, likely, Thanos himself. He had acquired the last Infinity Stone, had snapped his fingers.”
“Mr. Stark.” Unlike Tony and Thor himself, the kid next to them had yet to adjust to the light for some reason, had now buried his head in his arms and legs. “Mr. Stark, why is it so bright-?”
“We’re in a giant disco ball, Underoos,” Tony says, before something seems to hit him. His eyes widen, and he pulls up the bottom of his shirt in one fluid motion. On his stomach is a rather gruesome stab wound, but it seems to have healed completely over. Tony frowns upon seeing this, but he drops his shirt at another groan from ‘Underoos’. “Pull the suit up,” he says, more gently than Thor had ever heard him speak. “Your suit- it should dim the light-”
“It’s not lifting,” ‘Underoos’ replies. Tony’s frown deepens, but instead of saying anything, he shoves his hand in the suit of his jacket pocket and procured one of his ever-present sunglasses. He puts them on instead of handing them to Peter, though, and says, “FRIDAY?”
Nothing happens.
Tony doesn’t look surprised as he hands the kid the sunglasses, who puts them on with a relieved sigh and a “thank you, Mr. Stark,” and he is finally able to meet Thor’s eyes. “Oh, hey Mr. Thor - or Mr. Odinson? I’m Peter, Peter Par- whoa.” His eyes, behind the tinted frames, dart from Thor’s eyes to behind him. Thor turns to see most of those that had been unconscious had woken up and were shaking their still-asleep companions to wakefulness.
“We’ve got the whole gang together,” Tony mumbles under his breath. “You said Tinky Winky brought us here?”
Tinky Winky? Thor frowned. “Who? Is this a foe I have yet to fight?”
“No - the purple teletubby?” Teletubby?
“No one knows the names of the teletubbies,” said an apologetic voice from next to Thor. He didn’t have to turn around to figure that it was Bruce - he was well acquainted with both the voice and the tone, at this point.
Tony considered Bruce for a minute, then shook his head. “Whatever. Thanos.”
“Yes. He acquired all the Infinity Stones and had snapped his fingers. That’s all I remember. I had just-” He pauses. He had been so close, had almost won. If he had been a little smarter - Loki, surely, would have known where to aim, he had always been clever like that. “I had stabbed him, but it was not enough.”
“What do you mean, ‘it wasn’t enough’?” comes another voice, this time from behind Thor. Thor also knows this, slightly annoying, voice. Quill. “You went to get your super-duper-killing weapon, right? Why wasn’t it enough?”
“I didn’t go for the head,” Thor says, Thanos’s voice in his head synced with the voices coming out of his mouth.
There is a crowd gathering around them, now. Those around them are picking themselves up and coming to the main hearth of conversation. Tony and Peter are on their feet now, Peter still relatively wide-eyed at all the heroes around him. He seems very young, too young. All humans seemed young, really, but this one especially.
“You didn’t go for the head?” someone else repeats. It is one of those that he didn’t recognize earlier, flanked by two women he had also not recognized. All are dressed in a style of clothing Thor has never seen before, but, somehow, all three seem to exclude an aura he recognizes from his father and mother.
“I had the axe in his chest. He was still aware enough to snap. He did not die in time,” Thor says. He really wishes they would move off-topic. He keeps reliving the same horrified realization that he was too late, and it’s very unpleasant.
Drax - or something to that effect. Perhaps Drex? - answers his prayer. “We need to get out of this thing. It looks like glass. I should just-” He aims a punch at the glass, but there is a dull thud sound and Drax pulls his hand back, wincing and shaking it. “Nevermind. It’s very strong glass.” His fellow Guardians, as well as Tony, look very tired and disappointed.
“It’s reinforced by magic,” says the sorcerer he and Loki had encountered before.
Something in Tony seems to snap at hearing the sorcerer’s voice. “You!”
All eyes are on the pair. “Me?” the sorcerer says, raising a single eyebrow.
“What were you playing at, huh?” Tony says. While he seemed nothing but tired and resigned earlier, now he looks full of fury, fit to breathe fire, as many animals (and some people) on Asgard were wont to do. Had been. They are all dead, now. It’s just him.
“What do you mean?” says the sorcerer, in a tone that implies he knows exactly what Tony is talking about.
Tony has sensed this too. “Cut the crap! Where did all of that ‘I will not hesitate to let either of you die’ shit go? The one thing you weren’t supposed to do was hand the stone to Lachy!”
“Lachy?”
“The purple wiggle!” and even that sounds furious, as ridiculous as it is (is this another pop culture reference?)
The words sink in only once everyone takes a moment to process that Tony knows the name of the purple wiggle. The sorcerer had willingly handed the stone to Thanos? Was he one of them?
Everyone seems to bombard the sorcerer with furious questions at once.
“What the fuck?”
“Wait, seriously dude? Are you sure you’re on our side?”
“So we were spending all this time trying to hide the stones and you just gave one away??”
”I am Groot??”
Strange doesn’t answer any of the questions, but he does look each and every one of them in the eye as he says. “It was necessary.”
This only seems to make everyone more furious - Thor would be lying if he said he wasn’t angry, as well - before a voice from behind all the of the group says,
“Enough.”
Thor also recognizes this voice, the assured authority behind the forceful words. Steve Rogers.
And lo and behind, it is him, copycat beard still in place. Behind him are Natasha, Wanda, and the men with the metal arm and red goggles. Strangely enough, however, Tony doesn’t look at all pleased to see him. Normally, when reunited with fellow soldiers on the battlefield or off, there is reason to rejoice, as they have not passed yet. Tony only tenses up as he sees the captain. Rhodes evidently picks up on this, and he moves to stand right next to Tony, strange metals legs enveloping his, but the rest of his suit is gone. He glares and Steve and his group.
“This fighting is going to get us nowhere,” Steve says, somehow managing to send an apologetic, timid glance at Stark while keeping the same steel in his voice.
Thor knows that there has been tension between Steve and Tony in the past, but there was never outright hostility. Now, however, Tony snaps back at him. “No reason for a fight? That’s a first.”
“Tony-” Steve begins, and now, instead of all eyes being on Strange and Tony, they are on Steve and Tony. This time, instead of close to no one being in the loop, half of the gathered crowd seems to know what the tension is about. Thor doesn’t like being out of the loop.
“No,” Tony cuts off, just as if not more firm than the captain had been earlier. “I’m not doing this with you right now.”
Bruce has pressed his lips into a thin line. He doesn’t look as confused as Thor feels, but he doesn’t seem to be gearing up to be picking sides like many of the others seem to be. Thor moves closer in hopes of asking him to explain what’s happening - Tony and Steve don’t look like they’d be up to explaining anything right now - when the same man from earlier, with dark skin and two women on either side of him, cuts in.
“We need to find a way to get out of this sphere. Then we can argue.”
“Thanos obviously put us in here for a reason,” says the shorter, younger-looking one on his left. They look similar enough they could be siblings, or perhaps father and daughter. “So we should leave before he comes back, or does something to the ball.”
“Or one of his children does,” Natasha adds.
There is silence for a minute. “There are like twenty of us in here,” the red space-suit wearing one says. “If we all blast one of the cubes at the same time it should explode, right?”
“Not everyone has a blaster or something like it,” a blue woman says from the back of the group. Thor hadn’t even noticed she was there.
“Yeah, maybe it’s better if we all, like, punch one of the walls at the same time,” red-goggles says.
“There’s too many of us to aim for those small facets at once,” Tony says at the same time that the sorcerer says,
“The facets are too small. We won’t be able to punch it all at once.”
They look at each other for a split second before looking away, each looking vaguely annoyed, and, Thor thinks amusedly, with identical expressions.
“We could always have Banner Hulk out,” Steve offers.
Thor knows this is a bad idea, has seen firsthand the destruction the Hulk can create and in this sphere, it would not be good for any of the mortals around. “No,” he says. “There’s too much of a destruction risk.” Bruce nods with him, looking thankful, likely because he did not have to speak to object.
“So, Miss, uh, Witch, can try blasting it with her magic?” Peter offers.
“No, her magic is too volatile,” Tony says, frown lines deepening with every word.
“Excuse me?” Wanda hissed. “I’ve had these powers for years, I have perfect control over them-”
"Wanda," Vision says softly, looking pointedly at her hands, which have tendrils of red magic floating around them.
Wanda notices it too, and deflates, clenching her fists once more, and the magic disappears.
The talk of magic makes him think of Loki, of the iron control that he always had over his magic, making it do whatever he wanted it to. Then thinking of Loki makes his chest hurt, so he puts a stop to it right there. He is pulled out of his thoughts just in time to watch the group of superheroes dissolve into argument, each finding someone else to debate their idea with, while some, such as Bruce and Peter, stand helplessly off to the side, or otherwise looking quiet and annoyed, such as the authoritative one with the sandals, or Natasha.
Now is as good of a time to make use of his supposedly booming voice as any.
“Silence!” he says, and most everyone freezes. “We can try them all out. We have plenty of time.”
All of them, at least, grudgingly agree to that. Tony starts them off. “Dumbledore?” he says, turning to and making a go-on gesture at the sorcerer.
The sorcerer shoots him another annoyed look, before spreading his arms and closing his eyes. The red cloak settled around his shoulders lifts him up, and he takes aim at a tile just about chest level for Thor. He extends his hand towards the tile and everyone moves out of the way just in time to avoid a shock of yellow and orange magic heading directly towards the tile. Loki’s magic had always been green, Thor thinks offhandedly.
It’s several minutes before the sorcerer lowers himself back down to the ground, looking tired. “Something about this place . . . the magic isn’t as strong here,” he pants. “I need to try harder to reach it, to make it last, to make it powerful.”
“It’s not working anyway,” Rhodes says, ignoring Tony putting a steadying hand on the sorcerer’s shoulder in a way Thor can’t seem to match.
“Time to blast it!” Quill practically crows, pulling out his blaster.
“If magic can’t break it open, what makes you think a gun can?” the women on the right of the sandaled man says, shooting Quill a look that says, very loudly, that she thinks he is stupid (Thor would like to stand up for his friend, but he finds that he agrees.)
From then, many of the enhanced individuals try to hit the same facet - in case the magic had weakened it, Bruce offered - hard enough to break it. Thor takes a try as well, but it is strong enough that he can feel the pain of the punch as well, in a way that he almost never does. Peter follows him, then Steve, and the man with the metal arm (“Bucky,” apparently), then finally Drax again, When none of them can do it, it seems that many of them have lost their fighting steam.
“Now what?” the space-suited one says.
“There has to be a way to get out of here,” Mantis says, followed by the rabbit saying,
“There’s probably no way to get out. We’ll have to wait for Thanos.”
“What if it’s only impenetrable from the inside?” says a quiet voice. Peter.
Almost five out of ten of the heroes simply raise an eyebrow at him. Peter seems nervous, with all the scrutiny directed at him, but Tony says, “What’s up, Pete?” and he continues.
“Mr. Doctor Strange said it was enforced by magic. Well, what if it’s only on the inside. Like, if we found a way to break it from the outside . . . ?”
“Brilliant,” the sister/daughter of the authoritative man says, grinning.
“That makes sense,” Tony says, frowning. He does a lot of that now, Thor notes offhandedly. He didn’t use to do that. Thor remembers he always used to joke, always managed to somehow be smiling at even the worse situations. He seems older now.
“We just need to find a way to break it from the outside,” Bruce finishes.
“Great job, Pete,” Tony says to Peter this time, ruffling his hair as he does. Peter beams up at him, and slowly, Tony smiles back.
“Is there something out there we can use to break it?” Natasha says, trying to peer past the light’s reflection to see outside the sphere. “There’s a wall out there.”
“If we can force the thing to collide with the wall, we might be able to get out,” the sorcerer says, narrowing his eyes.
“Where’s the closest wall?” Quill says, pressing his face up against the sphere, before shifting down a bit to look at another wall.
“No time,” Drax interrupts. “Just push towards any wall!” He throws himself at one of the walls. The ball barely shifts.
“All at once,” Steve says. “We gotta line up and throw ourselves in the same direction at once.”
For a group of people who couldn’t stop quarreling not ten minutes ago, they arrange themselves neatly very quickly, and on the captain’s countdown, they all push forward, Thor putting at much strength into his push as he could. Steve and Peter may be enhanced, but Thor was a God.
The ball slowly tips over, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief before letting out a collective cry as the ball started to roll faster, and before Thor knew it, he’s colliding with people left and right, spinning and spinning until there’s a crash! and he only has a split second to cover his face before the sphere shatters into millions of tiny pieces.
“Everyone still have their eyes?” Quill is the first to speak once everyone has picked themselves up.
“Shit,” Thor picks up from behind him as most everyone replies with some form of ‘yes’. “I broke your glasses, Mr. Stark. I’m sorry, they broke when I hit the ground-”
“Don’t worry about it, kid.”
It’s now that it hits him just how much has changed. He’s been gone for years, away from Earth, the only Midgardian he had any interaction with was Bruce. He had come back to the world in shambles, just in time to catch the middle of a battle that they lost grievously and ended in them being in whatever this place is (and it’s your fault a voice in his mind whispers). But he has been gone long enough that Tony has acquired a son (with Lady Potts?), and Steve and Tony avoid each other like the plague. Too much has changed, and while he doesn’t regret saving Asgard from Hela, he regrets that it’s only after Thanos has slaughtered half the universe that he meets his old companions again.
“We’ve moved from one prison to another,” it is Wanda’s exasperated voice stretching across the silence that brings Thor back to face the reality that, one, there is nothing that he can do about that now, and, two, she’s right. The room they’re in now is significantly less bright than it was in the large sphere, likely because of the lack of glass and how the walls here are a sort of brown - stone, he thinks. There are four solid walls stretching as far as the eye can see. It is larger than the arena he had been made to fight in, perhaps four times as large. There are strange markings on the floor, forming a sort of maze on the floor. There are no doors and no walls. The ceiling seems to be emitting light, but it’s definitely solid.
“Okay, this is ridiculous,” Rhodey says, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the tips of his fingers.
“Are you sure Thanos didn’t say anything before he snapped?” Sandals says to Thor.
“No,” he says, hesitating before saying, “Only that I should have gone for the head.” Another harsh reminder of his failure.
“Then why are we here instead of, I dunno, dead?”
“We’re clearly in one of those Russian doll things,” the space suit man says.
“What, so we’re supposed to break out of this too?” Natasha says, while Mantis asks, confused,
“Russian doll thing?”
While Quill is explaining this to Mantis and the rest of his team (and Thor himself - clearly this is some strange Earth reference), Bucky, the metal armed one, speaks for the first time, “Even if we are, why? Wouldn’t Thanos want to get rid of us as soon as possible?”
“Okay, Mr. Share Bear,” Tony calls to the room at large in a tone Thor knows so well the nostalgia almost makes him smile. “Could you show your face, maybe, and tell us what’s going on here? Because unless this is torture as a punishment for trying to stop you or something - and, if it is, it’s a very effective punishment, being trapped in a room with these people for the rest of eternity-” he makes a sweeping motion with his hands, “- it’d be super cool to know what we’re doing here.”
The Steve Thor remembers would have been vaguely amused, before reprimanding Tony and moving on. This Steve does nothing more than sigh disappointedly and shake his head. Even the sorcerer looks less annoyed than Steve does, and the sorcerer has an annoyed eye-roll strong enough to give Loki a run for his money.
“Great, because he’s gonna answer-” red goggles says with a roll of his eyes (not nearly as powerful as the sorcerer’s), only to be cut off by a voice that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
“You are correct, Merchant of Death.”
“Speak of the devil,” red goggles mutters angrily as the woman on sandal’s right steps forward and glares at the ceiling, one hand up to shield her eyes.
“Who are you?”
“And what do you want from us?” Steve adds.
“My name is not important, only that I am a Child of Thanos. And in your futile quest to stop him from acquiring the Infinity Stones, you have killed my brethren, my siblings - too many of them. Gamora, Maw, more, and for what? To let people starve, to let them die senselessly when Thanos presents a solution, presents salvation?”
Thor can feel himself shaking, not from fear, but from anger - he was the one who killed all of Thor’s people, and he has the audacity to speak about presenting a solution? About making lives better? About salvation? “You slaughtered my people. You murdered my brother, killed everyone on my ship - almost all of whom were women and children, not warriors. You have no right to speak about salvation,” he spits out the last word, wishing he could spit directly into this Child of Thanos’s face.
Thor can feel sharp, inquisitive glances being sent this way, but he ignores it in favour of glaring at the ceiling, hoping that in some way, this Child of Thanos can feel his wrath, can sense what Thor is going to do to him if he ever, ever gets his hands on him.
“A necessary sacrifice.”
Thor had thought there was no way for him to get angrier. He was incorrect. Right now would usually be the time he felt the burn of lighting flooding through his veins, unleashed at even the slightest indication, but the only burn he feels is the rush of anger coursing through him, flushing his face and making him want to use his hands to crush something-
“You are here to pay for your crimes against the Children of Thanos. You are here to suffer, and nothing more.”
“What?” the daughter/sister on her father/brother’s left says, squinting at the ceiling before the light gets to be too much for her eyes and they join Peter’s in looking elsewhere.
There is no response from the ceiling. “Coward! Show yourself!” Thor cries, because that is exactly what he is, too afraid to show himself, hurting people from behind the scenes, nothing a true warrior with any sense of honour would do. There is still no answer.
“So,” Peter begins hesitantly. “Are we just . . . stuck here? Forever, now?”
“No,” Tony says firmly before anyone else can say anything. “We’ll figure a way to get out, Underoos. There has to be some way- Argh!”
Tony cuts himself off as part of the ground below them suddenly lifts up, and people are shuffled and moved out of the way of what are quickly growing into floor-to-ceiling walls. The maze on the floor is suddenly a maze throughout the room, and they are all separated.
Everyone, at once, realizes that this is not a good thing. “We need to meet up somewhere!” Steve’s voice calls.
“The center!” Bruce calls back from a different part of the maze. “We need to find the center!”
“Peter?” Tony’s voice says, near where Steve’s voice is.
“Here, Mr. Stark!” Peter’s voice says from a third location.
“He’s with me, Stark,” says the sorcerer from near Peter.
“Oh, that’s a comfort,” Tony says, and Thor can hear him rolling his eyes.
“Focus,” comes a voice from the same place, from the blue women from earlier, or perhaps from Wanda?
And then Thor’s stomach drops just as his feet do as the floor disappears from under him.