Chapter Text
Atop a small pile of rubble and rock that was half pulverized and half melted, a tall man with red hair and beard stood, staring at his hand. It was covered in a slurry of dried blood, rock dust, and the carbon that remained of the timbers of the foreign God’s house and surrounding woods. The skin of his palm had been scraped off by the force of the hammer, the other Mjolnir, and there was a wound in the exact center that was deep enough that it may actually scar. It was already mostly clotted, but a thin rivulet of blood ran from the scab as the man flexed his hand. The cut and the palm it was set in were numb, but the ends of his fingers buzzed with the sensation of the shock they had absorbed.
“Hm.”
Thor was not like Baldr. Thor loved to fight, yes, and kill – the only things he’d even been really good at, after all – but the pain…it didn’t make him feel alive, like his half-brother thought it would. Like he believed it should, after all those years of maddening blessing-curse had robbed Baldr of any feeling. Baldr didn’t really care about the fights he had found gradually flimsier excuses to pick; he just wanted to feel the pain he’d been deprived, or anything at all, in the absence of anything else.
The pain didn’t bother Thor, of course, not any more, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it. Baldr had hated him for it, thought that he “took it for granted.” Baldr had been totally numb for so long that he had forgotten that it wasn’t exhilarating, or invigorating, or anything else. Thor could take the blows, of course, the hits, the strikes that would fell Giants and most other Gods in an instant. He weathered them unflinchingly, as if they were no more than an unpleasant breeze, but he still felt each one.
Pain just felt like pain. That didn’t change.
He grunted again and wiped the muck from his hand on the dark green linen of his trousers. It wasn’t like there weren’t already layers of caked blood on them, anyway. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually washed them. Why give a shit? They’d just be covered with gore the next time he wore them. Every time.
Thor felt a ripple in the air, and the cawing of ravens. Instantly, the air seemed to heat without warmth, like a fire burning cold. His father was angry, truly angry. A chill ran up Thor’s back, a shiver he had never been able to repress fully.
He would be punished for this– severely. He found it hard to care.
“So, would you mind explaining to me what happened here,” Odin said, his voice calm and soft.
If Thor couldn’t feel his father’s magic, and wasn’t intimately familiar with the God of Too Many Fuckin’ Things, he might have thought the voice belonged to a kindly, friendly old man, just a little disappointed, but understanding. A patient, compassionate mentor. As it was, the idea was so laughable as to almost be a deliberate joke, had Odin any sense of humor whatsoever. There was nobody and nothing here but Thor and his father. The foreign Gods would be long gone by now, and any former living thing halfway to the horizon that wasn’t a God was a bloody smear at best, instantly squashed and pulverized by the gravity well formed by the intruder’s smaller hammer. Nobody was around to see Odin’s grandfatherly pantomime. They both knew there wasn’t a single word the Allfather said that wasn’t carefully selected and weighed like fruit in a market stall. Thor found the whole charade a little exhausting, honestly. But then, he felt that about most things.
When had he started finding his father more tiring than terrifying?
“You were supposed to let me talk to them first.”
Thor was many centuries past rolling his eyes. Outwardly, at least. That reaction had long been gouged out of him, a tumor removed with expediency instead of care.
“They wouldn’t have listened anyway,” he muttered. “Thought I’d skip ahead and not waste your ti-”
“And that’s why you don’t do that!” Odin yelled. Even with his voice raised, it was still surprisingly soft. Odin didn’t rely on volume for his voice to carry. He closed his good eye, the one not hidden behind a thick leather eyepatch, and took a deep breath.
“You're not the one who thinks, Thor. You don’t make decisions. And why is that?”
Thor’s shoulders hunched. It didn’t make him look any smaller. He towered over his father eclipsed him in every physical dimension, but he had seemed insignificant the moment Odin arrived, like a child dressed in an adult's pageant costume. “Because it is not my place.”
“Because it is not your place…what?”
“Because it is not my place, Allfather. I am your hammer to be directed.”
“Yes,” Odin said. “ Directed. ”
Odin’s hand suddenly lashed out like a viper. The back of his fingers lightly grazed Thor's cheek. Thor’s head snapped back with a spray of spittle, and he staggered, barely regaining his footing before he fell over. Despite this, his eyes never left Odin.
“And you disobeyed a direct order.” Odin breathed in again, deeper this time. “No, no, this is my fault. I’ve let you have too much leniency. This always happens when I give you independence. I should have learned my lesson after I let you choose Modi’s punishment. You always go wild with too much freedom. Too far."
This time, Thor looked down at his feet.
“Oh, no backchat this time? Hope you actually listened. Give me the mead. That's the last thing you need right now. And even after I was going to let you take your blood payment if they didn’t agree to peace. Unbelievable. Really, just unbelievable.”
Thor unhooked the bottle of mead on his belt that he was supposed to offer to Kratos and his half-giant son– to Loki, the boy that Kratos called Atreus– and handed it to Odin. As soon as it touched Odin’s bony fingers, it vanished in a swirl of feathers. Odin turned around.
“Get back to Asgard. You’re grounded. Give me the hammer, too.” He looked around as if noticing the destruction for the first time. “Hm. Lose control of your temper again?”
Thor held out Mjolnir to his father, but Odin ignored him, examining the wreckage of the wooded plateau Kratos and Loki’s house had been built on with a sudden keen interest. If it weren’t for the too-ornate traveling cloak, he would have looked for all the world like an engineer examining the rubble of a collapsed bridge to find the fatal error.
Thor knew better than to withdraw the hammer, even if Odin was pretending to have forgotten his order. He also knew, for the most part, when Odin was asking a question that wasn't actually a question. “There was someone else with them. Another God,” he offered instead, still holding out the weapon.
Odin didn’t seem surprised. A caw sounded in the distance, as if it was taking credit.
“Hm? Yes, I’m aware.” Odin’s gaze returned to his son, the sharp blue of his remaining eye piercing as Gungnir. “And your response to this new God was to, ah, try to bash his brains in, of course.”
I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk , Thor thought, a deep part of him that hadn’t spoken aloud for a truly long time.
Externally, he simply shrugged. He was just his father’s hammer and muscle, after all, and that’s what he would always be.
“He claimed to be me. Even had a hammer. A Mjolnir.” He opened and closed the hand he had tried to catch the smaller Mjolnir with again. The wound had healed completely. No scar. Shame.
“Bah. If it’s all out of your system, get your report ready and meet me in my study. Don’t stop at the Hall this time, I mean it. I'll pull the alcohol out of your blood if I have to.” Odin snapped a hand out at Thor again. This time, instead of striking the taller man, a whirl of feathers enveloped Thor. When the ravens dissipated, there was nothing left.
Odin’s lip twitched. Now that the initial flash of white-hot anger of being so blatantly disobeyed had dissipated and its cause out of his sight, Odin began to analyze. Thor was going to be benched for a while until he got this latest rebellious streak out of his system, but thankfully he hadn’t done too much unexpected damage. Houses could be rebuilt. When he salvaged this situation, he'd have a new one built for the old Greek God of War in whatever middle of fucking nowhere woods Kratos wanted, assuming he hadn't forced Odin to kill him by that point. Odin would rather it not come to that – he needed Loki cooperative, and as strained as his relationship with his father was, killing the foreign God without some layers of plausible deniability would not be conducive to that end.
Honestly, even if Odin had talked to Kratos and Loki at their table as originally planned, he had no illusion that they would have agreed to anything he said. His “peace offering” was a best-case scenario, a might-as-well-try-it salvage attempt. Kratos was probably a lost cause. He knew that the mildest slight, or even being marginally in his path, was met with overwhelming, fatal violence. And his idiot sons and even more idiot grandsons had done a good bit more than inconvenience the man. To Loki, he was already planning on playing the reasonable, kindly grandfather figure that he so obviously lacked, and having Thor go off even more half-cocked than usual would help with that.
Yes, the situation with Loki may not be going as smoothly as he wanted it to, but this was still how he expected any talk with the Ghost of Sparta to end, the only difference being a matter of how much damage was caused to the Midgard countryside. That was still within the expected range. Odin had seen what was left of Greece.
In regards to Kratos and Loki, then, not much has actually changed from his initial projections. Thor had jumped the gun against his wishes, which was an issue, yes, but not much has actually changed. The problem was this…not-Thor.
That was truly unaccounted for. Odin didn't like unplanned contingencies.
But…Odin not liking the unexpected didn't mean he couldn't work with it. Plans were already conjuring themselves, and he’d have a good amount of time to observe. See what made this stranger God tick. How he could be made useful. Making problems into assets was one of Odin's specialities, after all.
He couldn’t care less what the blond man called himself. Or if Loki decided to use that ridiculous name of his father’s homeland, for that matter. Odin himself had dozens, nearly as many as he had titles, not even counting those that were titles in themselves. Names had power, yes, but less than people thought. It was who you were and what you did that mattered.
And Odin was, and had done, a great many things.
Like the ones that returned his son to Asgard, a tornado of ravens sprung from the ground, surrounding Odin. When they dissipated, he was gone.