Loki was, as it turned out, pretty far along, as the Jotnar reckoned pregnancies. They carried for fourteen standard months and only really started to show in the last five, and it was those five months, apparently, that Loki was in now.

His Aesir body had hit a point where it was no longer equipped to carry the child, and some unconscious reflex had shifted him to a shape that was more accommodating. Apparently—magically—his two forms usually coexisted somehow, which was how he’d managed to get knocked up in the first place.

“They have similar instances on Earth,” Thor said, almost absently. “Something to do with waves and particles—and they have a breed of undead cat, you know, it’s both alive and dead at the same time. It’s all very interesting, the way things coexist.” He cleared his throat. “What are you going to do?”

“Someone has to survive this day,” Thor grinds out, pressed briefly close to her by the fight.

“Someone will,” she tells him.

Thor is still standing there, beaming expectantly at Sam. “What say you, Son of Wil?” he booms, like he’s Aragorn recruiting that ghost army from the Return of the King, except that Thor is just trying to recruit one dude who can maybe talk to birds. (Again: nobody is supposed to know this.) Also Thor’s wearing a baby blue North Face puffer jacket and a woolly reindeer-covered hat that Sam is fifty percent sure was knitted by Vision, so the resemblance to Aragorn is really only a passing one.

“You want me to do what where again?”

“I wish for you to join me,” says Thor, with patient magnanimity. “Huginn and Muninn have been missing since the destruction of Asgard. Now that my people have secured a home here on Earth, I wish to find them.”

Hela did not ask for company in her sealed-up world, but evidently Odin is economical in containment strategies for his misbegotten children.

It takes the combined strength of Thor, Loki, and Valkyrie to drag Hela onto the Grandmaster’s ship, though Loki gets a split lip for his trouble and Hela’s nails leave deep gouges in the leather of Thor’s vambraces.

“Thor is used to his people speaking of him”. Thor, Loki, Asgard, and the stories told after the fall.

In space, no one can hear you scream when you walk in on your brother ruining everything.

“I have questions,” Valkyrie says.

“I don’t want to answer them,” Bruce replies.

“Hela knows there’s unrest outside the doors, thousands of Asgardians not yet eager to bow to her. But she’s unworried. They will bow. Alive or dead, they will most certainly fall to their knees on the blood-soaked ground and know that she rules them.”

A bit of Hela and Skurge in the throne room.

Takes place during Thor: Ragnarok.

Thor and Jane are having a baby. Tony’s conflicted about the whole thing.

They’ve talked about this, she and Clint, planned out what to do if the proverbial shit/fan scenario rears its ugly head.

Thor visits Earth to attend the grand opening of Stark Industries’ newest office tower, and helps Pepper deal with a few snags along the way.

One night Jane teaches Thor the basics of Western astronomy, and Thor tries to describe Asgard. Then the Bifröst breaks, and Jane isn’t having that.

Tony is bound and determined to make sure a human is awarded the title of Sexiest Man Alive (he even has a solid candidate in mind); Jane just wants media outlets to get their science right.

All that is left of him now is the extra chair pulled up to her makeshift fire pit, which she never sits in and hasn’t had the heart to move. Jane, and the search for Thor and a greater understanding of herself.

In which Darcy Lewis catsits for Captain America and Bucky Barnes doesn’t use the front door.

Loki has been returned to Asgard. Sif begins to realize that none of the people who once might have called him a friend, herself included, know what to do with him now.

Odin has decreed that Loki must marry. But he never said she had to marry a man.

“So, physics,” Darcy says when they leave the office.

“New Mexico,” Mel counters, equally dubious.

“Scientists,” she shudders.

Mel shrugs, a gesture that sits oddly on her heavy shoulders, “Can’t be worse than theater majors.”

“Hierarchical triple systems comprise a close binary and a more distant component.” - www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Darcy’s been cagey in regards to the whole ‘bi’ topic, because it’s complicated. Or, okay, people think it’s complicated, but it really isn’t and she doesn’t want to handle the barrage of inevitable questions.

Especially not from Jane, who asks questions like it’s her job (which it kinda is) and might cotton on to the fact that Darcy thinks she’s hot. Like, ‘Jodie Foster in Contact’ hot, except without the interstellar daddy issues.

(Later, Darcy will remember this thought and laugh and laugh. And maybe also want to cry.)