Chapter Text
THOR
It was just after Thor and Loki pulled apart from their embrace that Stephen Strange decided to open a portal into Thor’s bed chambers. Asgard was gone, the brothers had made up, and there were plenty wounded. Of course, some things you can’t prevent or change for the sake of the timeline. But there was one thing that he knew needed to be changed. For the sake of the entire universe.
“I need your help,” he said, taking a deep breath. His heart raced, and he had just enough time to take in the warm, brown room before adding on: “I hope to whatever God there is that you grabbed the Tesseract.”
Loki arched a slender brow at the wizard. “Help? With what, exactly?” Stephen noticed how he dodged the subject of the Tesseract, mentally tucking that information away as Loki kept talking. “We destroyed Asgard and pushed along Ragnarok —”
“That’s just it!” Stephen snapped at him. Loki closed his mouth. Thor hadn’t said anything, just watched, which the sorcerer was grateful for; he wasn’t sure he had the patience to repeat himself. “Ragnarok wasn’t supposed to happen, yet. Because of mistakes made in 2011, half the universe will die.”
Loki laughed in disbelief. “What mistakes? I thought we weren’t supposed to meddle with the timeline.”
That’s when Thor decided to interject. “We don’t even have the Tesseract! We can’t fix whatever mistakes there are. It was destroyed on Asgard.”
Stephen looked pointedly at Loki. Loki stared back, visibly nervous. He started to scratch at his hands. “Yes. It was destroyed on Asgard —”
“Take it out. Right now,” Stephen ordered, voice rough. Loki flinched. Thor’s eyes widened with anger.
Carefully, he took it out from… well… wherever he had it. It materialized in his hand, bright and glowing blue, radiating a cool warmth from Loki’s hand.
“Loki!”
“I’m sorry, Thor; I just couldn’t help myself,” he said in a rushed tone. It was the most truthful thing Stephen had ever heard him say. The younger god cleared his throat, turning to the sorcerer. “Why do you need the Tesseract?”
He took the Tesseract from Loki gently. He held up his own Eye of Agamotto as he looked over both relics. “I can’t actually go back through time with the Time Stone,” Strange explained. “I figured with the blending of powers from the Eye and the Tesseract, I could take us back to where we need to go… in a sense.”
“There’s the catch,” Loki mumbled. Thor’s eyes were wider than ever.
“Go back through time? Are you insane?” Thor argued, shaking his head. “I lost my eye, lost my hammer, lost my home , and you’re telling me that I went through all that for nothing?” His hands had little lights dancing on them. Stephen took a deep breath. He didn’t know how to really explain this without upsetting Thor.
“If we do this the right way, we’re going to be sent back through time just as you were sent to Earth. We’ll all be the people we were before: we’ll look like them, we’ll become them — except we’ll remember everything.”
“I’m going to go back to Asgard, then?” Loki asked with an amused smile. No, it wasn’t amused: he was mocking Stephen.
Strange rolled his eyes. “Yes, you will. I found a spell in a forbidden book that will help me keep all of these changes in our own timeline.”
“You’re saying that if we go back through time and change what needs to be changed, Asgard will still be standing? What about the Avengers? What about the lives we’ve made and changed while we were there?” Thor started to pace, taking a bottle cap off of his dresser and tossing it as a plaything. “Tony Stark won’t make Ultron, which would be good, but he won’t change into a man who cares. Steve Rogers — my friend — won’t find comfort. Banner, in the other room right now, won’t learn that the Hulk is a good thing!” He winced. He then corrected himself, “ Can be a good thing!”
“I could still cause that trouble with the Chitauri, then destroy the Tesseract once and for all,” Loki mused, folding one arm under the other as he chewed at his nails. “That way —”
“I’d have to make sure you do that,” Strange said. “If you can arrange to meet me some time after the attack in 2012.”
Loki nodded. “Of course,” he said. They both looked at Thor.
“You two have no idea what you’re asking of me,” Thor said quietly. “I have to lose someone anyway — Jane.”
“If you play this out correctly, you never will lose Jane. But there’s a condition I really, really have to stress, Thor.” Stephen clenched his fists as he braced himself to say this. He really had no right to ask. “It’ll create a butterfly effect, changing your life for the better and help you stop the impending threat that’s coming right now. Trust me, you’ll want this just as much as the timeline does.”
“What’s your condition, Strange?” Thor stopped his pacing, looking at the sorcerer with an angry eye. He moved to face him. “Whatever your ‘butterfly effect’ will do, it can’t be worth losing everything.” He put finger quotations around butterfly effect as he said it.
Stephen didn’t want to answer, seeing Thor’s expression. He was a man barely holding back tears, probably from the stress of the day. Everything was resting on his shoulders now, and if the spell worked, it still would.
“Well?” Thor demanded.
Strange sighed reluctantly. “You’ll have to fall in love with Darcy Lewis.”
“Jane’s intern?” Thor stopped, puzzled and perplexed. “Why her? I thought Jane —”
“Jane, in other universes, is perfect for you. In this one, she’s not; I can’t explain why; in fact, I couldn’t find a reason other than the moment she hit you with her car, something about her mind changed. And, uh, former intern. She and Dr. Erik Selvig will go on to study the stones after this catastrophe happens. She’s the one you should have been paying attention to all along,” Stephen said. “Something went wrong, though.”
“What went wrong?” Thor folded his arms. Loki smirked.
“Probably the anxiety of being thrown onto Earth,” Loki said. “Darcy was so nice to you… if I recall your, ah, rather small accounts of what happened.”
“Quiet,” Thor snapped. Loki laughed. Stephen’s heart raced.
“Just… help me save the world. Please,” he begged. “We don’t have much time.”
“If things don’t end up the right way?” Loki queried.
“Then I send us back, again, until they’re right. But we really only have one chance to fix things.”
“Recite the spell while we have time,” he said. “And make sure you mean it.”
“This is the only time I’m ever learning Latin,” he mumbled to himself, taking the Eye of Agamotto out and holding the Tesseract tightly. Stephen breathed in deeply, lifting both of the Stones up high. “Qui salvandos stratis animabus nostris; retext omnia.” **
And just like that, the trouble started.
Thor would have said that the day he was having was already going pretty badly. He had to kill his own sister, for the Allfathers’ sake. But the next thing he knew, he was laying at the end of a large, gleaming metal strip, the purr of an engine stopping abruptly. His head hurt. His chest hurt. His arms hurt. And…
He had his eye back.
“Get the first aid kit!” a familiar voice cried out. His head swam. Oh, no. Jane… He couldn’t move, he couldn’t do anything out of sheer fear. That, and he was in pain.
And if that was Jane… then that meant that Strange’s spell worked. The air smelled of rain, and the ground was softer and earthier than he remembered. He saw the bright shine of a flashlight — Jane had told him that — and squinted to see. Jane’s lovely face hovered over his. “Do me a favor and do not be dead.”
He sat up, dazed. Shocked. Horrified. Odin’s beard, he was not used to this. He wasn’t ever going to be used to this. Jane’s voice, he had longed to hear it for so many months, and now he was with her… both of them, years younger.
He was back in 2011.
“Whoa, does he need CPR?” another voice asked, high and quick. His heart thumped heavily. Fall in love with Darcy Lewis . “Because I totally know CPR.”
Jane looked back at Darcy, shaking her head slightly. “Where did he come from?”
Thor yelled out in pain as he stood up — tried to. He stumbled around, looking. If this was 2011, then his hammer must be with him. “Hammer?” he called out.
“Yeah, we can tell you’re hammered,” Darcy said. Her voice stuck out to him more than it had; he didn’t remember her saying anything before. “It’s pretty obvious…”
But then, just before he called out for it again, he realized:
It.
Wasn’t.
Here.
Odin had declared him unworthy — his heart tightened at the realization his father was still alive — so he wouldn’t be able to get it. He turned to the three of them, the people he had thought of as friends, or would think of as friends, and studied them. Jane was looking over his impact spot, along with Erik. Darcy was staring at him.
“Jane, we have to take this guy to the hospital,” Erik told her.
Darcy smiled, getting down on her knees to study the impact position, too. “He’s fine! Look at him.” She pointed her thumb back at the god. He squinted at her.
“What realm is this?” he asked, chest rising and falling quickly. He didn’t remember what they called their little divides in America. “Tell me!”
“New Mexico,” someone answered, but he didn’t know who. His head spun faster and faster. He saw Darcy raise up that — that thing — with determination in her eyes.
Thor scoffed, humored by the taser. He remembered it well. His lips moved before he could think of what to say. “You dare threaten me, Thor, with so puny a — ”
She fired.
His body seized. The electrical current from the taser took the last bit of strength he had, and he was down on the ground, again.
“What?” Darcy asked. Her voice seemed far away. “He was freaking me out!”
Then everything went black.