The Bifrost Sword was never meant to be without a wielder. Heroic, ridiculous, impassive, passionate, it mattered not who the owner was, but rather, what they knew of its power.
Heimdall, even with his all-knowing wisdom and experience of almost a hundred millennia, hardly knew its worth. He read a spellbook once on godlike abilities, and decided to gift himself the one he could obtain from the artifact he knew he was destined to own. Sif, having been raised among the customs of Asgardian women before taking the path of a warrior, knew a touch more than Heimdall - but even that barely scraped the surface of the vast power that was the Bifrost Sword.
The sword had the power to cleave interdimensional doors between worlds, more commonly known as portals. It was one of the things that Sif, quite impressively, had recalled. The portals, under the command of the wielder, would stay in their realms as they were located unless the wielder was terminated. Or, more accurately, unless the wielder's control was terminated.
Groot knew they were in trouble as soon as the McLaren drove in.
It was a sleek, beautiful thing - bright with a silver finish, every bit as gorgeous as the staged photos of the car Quill would share with him on shiny pages of a magazine (the kind you read, not the kind you load in guns). But it wasn't the sports car that worried him. It was the bumbling man in the driver's seat, clad in a baggy beige suit, sporting sunglasses and wispy tendrils of hair around his temples. A Terran citizen.
Groot sent his roots rippling through another swathe of velon creatures, and the spooky lady in the red severed the length on his command, hurling the kebab of creatures back at their own front lines. A tiny form suddenly sprung from the side of the ship, yelling at the top of its lungs.
Groot strained to make the words out. "...yellow stone...Thanos..." Then it clicked.
Thanos had the yellow stone.
Groot barely had time to react before the portal suddenly shifted, dragging him by his Bifrost root with it.
*******
Sif and Gamora rounded on the Guardians, their faces impassive. Within, dread coiled like a cobra with fangs too close to its own flesh, about to break the fine skein that was their family, their beliefs, the codex of everything they stood for. But on the outside, all that could be seen were two cold-blooded killers.
Quill was the first to rise. "Gamora - you're all right, he's gone, he-" He made to move toward the assassin, but Mantis held him back.
"They are not who they seem."
"What do you mean they're not-" Quill made a noise of frustration, straining against Mantis' hand. "Lady Sif! She's on our side-"
Sif's head rotated to face his. Her unnaturally blue eyes bored into theirs.
"-isn't she?" Quill's voice broke off in a question. Rocket groaned, hauling himself from the floor. His ears flattened at the sight of the blue-eyed warriors, and he hissed.
Sif picked up a broken half of the Bifrost sword at the hilt and slid a knife from her boot. Gamora pulled two knives from the wall. Their eyes seemed to glow as they began advancing towards the trio.
A misfire hit the ceiling, and the warriors paused for a second, glaring at the source. Mantis stared back, her wide eyes wider than usual and her hand tremulous on a laser blaster. A chunk of metal clanked to the floor. Light spilled in from above. The warriors continued their advance, and the Guardians began backing up.
Quill was the first to hit the wall, his legs nearly buckling beneath him as the ship's destroyed console jammed into the crook of his knee. He reached for the intercom in his ear, only to find it absent.
Rocket pressed a broken shard of metal into his hand. He tried to swallow past the tightness in his throat, and clutched the shard in front of him.
Suddenly, the warriors went still. Completely still. Then minuscule arcs of blue light jolted through their bodies, and the two warriors began shaking uncontrollably, before dropping to the ground. A figure clad in brown leather stalked into the light, revealing her bald blue face.
"Come with me," she said urgently.
Quill snorted, his shard still clutched in front of him. "Last time we saw you, you tried to kill us. Where you at these days?"
"You really are the biggest idiots of the galaxy," Nebula hissed. She yanked at the two guns in her hand, retracting the taser wire. "We have no time for idle chit chat. Either you help me get these two on my ship and back to land-" She gave each woman a kick in the leg, just to be sure, before tossing a shuriken on each, binding them around the limbs in silver rope. "-or you can cower here like injured orloni, licking your wounds, until they wake up, get out of the rope and start attacking you."
She jerked the ropes for emphasis, and that seemed to startle the Guardians out of their stupor.
"I'm with her," Rocket said without another second of hesitation, dropping his toothpick-of-a-knife.
"Me too," Mantis added quickly, tucking her laser blaster under an arm.
Quill sighed, rolling his eyes, before pitching in to help.
*******
The Maw stood in front of the huddled group of skrulls, still dressed as spider children, herded into a corner with thrumming scraps of metal he stood like soldiers at his side. His pale complexion glistened in the strange, muted daylight of the planet - like light shining through the mucus of the velon embryos. If the skrulls refused to cooperate with him, the embryos they would become. The Maw told them as much.
"I will say it once more, so may my words be clear." The Maw clasped his hands behind his back, revelling in the way the skrulls closest to him flinched at the slightest movement of his fingers. "I have detected there to be a constant energy signature among you, even after my Lord has gone. Thus I have deduced that one of you -" here, he leaned forward, and the skrulls bunched closer, "is hoarding a second infinity stone."
He stood straight again, staring down his pallid cheeks at the group. "If the perpetrator comes forth, I shall kill him, and only him. The rest of you will be spared. If no one comes forth..." he let the pause sink in, his eyes flitting over the frightened faces.
"...there will be no mercy."
The skrulls were silent for a second. Then, one choked out, "I have! I have the stone!"
The Maw smirked, a slow, deadly smile drifting over his thin mouth. "Stand up so I can see you."
A trembling creature stood - bloodied, with red fabric ripped in several places, but the two legs it stood on were strong and steady.
"Come forth," the Maw ordered. The creature shuffled towards him, its eyes downcast. It stopped a length away from him, just barely out of arm's reach. The Maw crooked a finger. The creature's legs skidded towards him.
"Where is it?" the Maw whispered.
Then suddenly, as if triggered, the skrulls leapt.
Fingers pulled at his face, catching him by surprise, and he staggered backwards, arms outstretched to get these wretched beings off him. Metal pried skrulls by their abdomens off his body, skewering them where they hung, and he thought he saw a glimpse of green flash in the corner of his vision before he yanked a shard out of a fallen corpse and stabbed it into the soft hollow of another skrull's eye.
Fingers curled against throats. Heads twisted in his unforgiving arms, metal dug into flesh, and by the time the Maw had satisfied himself with the state of his opponents, his pallid skin was stained with dark blue. Idly, he wiped his chin on the back of his arm, smearing it with the slimy substance, before closing his eyes. His environment thrummed.
The mass of substance sprinting down the hall, the power of the stone and the tingle of dark magic - the trickster.
The Maw's lips stretched in a horrendous grin. He tapped his collarbone twice, and a small screen stitched itself together from bright blue light.
"My Lord...the trickster brings you a gift."
*******
He could hear the magician running from him - no, running would be too generous a word. He was stumbling, clawing, tripping over himself in an attempt to be free, free from the circle Thanos had entrapped his former henchman into.
"Desperation. What horrid mistakes we make when we are desperate." Thanos saw rather than felt his hand, a fuzzy, pearly shape, connect with the rippling bony figure before him. A distant thud, and his fist opened, clamping around the wiry neck of the trickster.
Narrow slits of green stared back at him, wrought by a clenched jaw and delightful grimace. Thanos' thumb twitched, and Loki's eyes struggled to stay open, gasping for what little air he could achieve through the torturous stain of his trachea.
"I won't kill you, not yet," Thanos promised, though the flexing of corded tendons in his arm spoke otherwise. He willed them to still. Instead, he fashioned a blade with figments of reality, polishing them over and over in the gleaming light of a hidden chandelier. What a gorgeous place to die, really.
"I still need the stone."
The tip of the blade grazed a basilic vein, and the spurt of blood was so sudden Thanos nearly dropped the magician in favor of getting his arm out of the way. Loki pushed back against him in retaliation, petty struggles against his so-proclaimed 'Lord' that he had failed and continued to disrespect. The punishment was warranted. Thanos stepped back into the blood spray and dug the blade deeper.
"A magician's dominant hand is his greatest weapon. The more one practices magic, the more they'll rely on storing their energies in it and the more their lifeline is connected to it."
Thanos genuinely hoped Loki would not die too quickly. He still hid a stone, somewhere, beneath his atrociously extravagant cloaks of green and black. The pain should be unbearable enough for the magician to reveal the location himself. But for someone like Loki...someone who built their life off living the hard way...physical pain was not nearly enough for him to relent and give in.
So what did Loki love?
An orange light gleamed from Thanos' gauntlet - the newly-acquired Soul Stone, courtesy of his favorite daughter's unwilling aid. He would have thought after rescuing her, training her, and making her a part of his grandiose life and ambitions, she might have a little more respect for her father. Disappointingly, he had never gotten the opportunity to have the 'boy talk' with her. He would have to fix that as soon as she dispatched her idiotic so-called 'lover'. Lady Sif could deal with the thieves who boasted themselves to be her family.
Family.
Something glowed in the cortex of the magician's head, and, curious, Thanos pressed in.
The reflection of a pointed face from a silver dagger. A slither of black on a green duvet. Ice-cold betrayal.
He frowned, chasing another direction.
A pat on the back on a glass elevator. "You fool, you didn't listen." A cloaked figure waiting beside a pristine white cage. A blonde teen jumping in place of a waiting hand's blow-
Thanos felt Loki's resolve weaken. A wicked smile pushed at his cheeks. Testing the boundaries, he slipped between the heavy curtains of the magician's mind.
What wonders the Soul Stone did.
He could feel every bit of Loki's world. The mess of empty gilded archways. The shades that flitted through them, nothing more than a breath of fleetingly warm air. The ice cold glaciers that trapped the trickster within his own mind. The distant chant of 'get out, get out, get out'.
Something buzzed on the back of his neck. A wispy yellow glow tinted Thanos' vision momentarily. Call brother, the Mind Stone advised.
"Brother," Thanos stated. The archways parted.
A vortex of projections shot past him - many green and red, spotted with leech-black and even the occasional blur of white. But all of them sported a haze - a pale brown haze, for most. For the rare few, it was a vibrant, warm yellow. Fleeting. Fragile.
Reaching out, Thanos ran a hand through a red stream. It bruised a dark purple beneath his fingers, and distantly, he heard a choked gasp.
His hand left the stream, now searching, curious. The tips of his calloused fingers grazed a green bypasser, and blossoms of raw pink oleander preceded the shock of malevolent lavender, drawing chants of no no no from the glaciers beside him.
"The stone," he reminded Loki in dulcet tones. The magician spasmed, but spat indignantly in response.
"You will never be a god."
Thanos tsk'd. "Your refusal to comply will be your downfall, Laufeyson."
Then he was back in the mind of the magician, strewing veins of permanganate in every stream of memory he could reach, hearing panicked shouts of "Loki!" vary from every mood he thought possible, painting them all in his own venomous glory. Loki was screaming words, unintelligible words, breaking sentences and brokering negotiations, trying so very desperately to get his own mind to respond to his commands. But Thanos would not stop. It was near insatiable, this appetite that kept him clawing at his surroundings, if only to hear the cries that reverbated off the glaciers of a person's mind. Perhaps this very madness was why the others called him the Mad Titan.
"Take it!" Loki was screaming. "Just take it, and leave!"
Vaguely, Thanos could feel Loki pushing back at him - no, pushing back at the blade in his hand. Pleading, begging for death. Thanos pulled the knife from the pulpy flesh and tossed it aside. "Pathetic snake."
Then his calloused fingers scraped along the side of a golden stream, and the subsequent scream pierced into his mind, like metal pincers clamped around his very soul.
He's not yours to take.
Thanos exited Loki's mind, his head smarting from the racket. The magician was slumped against the wall, the pallid sheen of his forehead clear indication he was nearly on Death's door. But Destiny had proclaimed Loki's death to be at the fault of another's. Thanos could not kill him. No matter how infuriating, offensive or disappointing the trickster was, he could not kill him.
The trickster's mind was a blank board of pure fear, and after having a moment to regain his bearings, Thanos truly took in the hindrance he had given himself.
The mind of his victim had been a precariously organized board - thousands upon thousands of years in knowledge, in skills, in secrets. The Mind Stone could have told him everything - where the stones were, who he was fighting against, every planned attack made against his army and in the fashion purely belonging to the self-loathing trickster, the best counter attacks to combat them. And in the precious minute Thanos had given himself to indulge in the torture of the magician, he had burned through it all.
"Take it," the magician kept repeating, his eyes casting skywards.
As Loki continued to mumble nonsense, Thanos could only feel the crushing weight of disappointment drop on his chest. Another stone, just out of his grasp.
He would not make the same mistake again.
Perhaps someone will still come back for the trickster, he thought idly. "But of course, there's no one left for you, is there?" He did not know whether to feel conceited or sympathetic.
"Hey Thanos!" Someone shouted - a disturbingly pitchy voice. Almost like the spider child. He turned his head.
An eerily blue boy stood behind him, wild hair illuminated by the intense blue of the Tesseract cradled in his arms. Smoke billowed in wreaths around him. "You're an absolute bastard."
His hand felt oddly empty. Before Thanos could contemplate Loki's escape, something fell onto his cheek, itching with an intense pinching sensation. Instinctively, he wiped it away. The skin on his hand sizzled agonizingly, a pockmark burning through the callouses.
Then, the ceiling spilled over.
*******
The build-up of acid was putrid enough that Estella's eyes were tearing up, even at two meters distance. However, she felt hardly any guilt at all as she emptied a kilometre-worth of molten pipe acid on Thanos' head.
She allowed herself a tiny wince, before projectile-diving into the strange bloody man's hair, dissolving him as quickly as she could.
She didn't have long to work before she lost the man - and Alycs had given her strict instructions not to lose him. She didn't have the time to question him, but with the life practically flooding out of the man, she didn't have the heart or morals to argue. A living person needs help. She would help.
Estella reformed and propped the guy up against the wall - at least, she hoped it was a wall. The lighting was ghastly, and the metal walls seemed to be closing in on her.
Not the time, she chided herself.
Estella set to work, assessing the cut - it was far too dangerous for her to burn acids through the broken area and reform it, and she didn't have enough time. She would have to stop the bleeding first.
Shrugging off her jacket, Estella practically ripped off the sleeves, wrapping it around the cut as gently as she could. "Stay with me, sir," she demanded as she saw the man's eyelids begin to falter. "Alycs was really stubborn that you stay alive, so you can't die on me."
It seemed to do the trick. The man looked a little more alert - at least, his eyelids were flickering. Estella allowed herself the tiny wisp of optimism, before she set her hands on either side of the cut. She would have to melt the arm back into its owner - risky business, that. But a lopsided arm would be the least of their worries. He could always get an extension later.
Estella concentrated.
Time seemed to go by in fractions. Quarter. One half. Three quarters. One.
The cut seemed to ignite, pulsing like the northern lights. The amputated sleeves of her discarded jacket melted, and the gentle violet glow illuminated the man's pointed, sweaty face.
Quarter. One half. Three quarters. Two.
Her entire body seemed to be quivering - either she was really cold, or really tired. Maybe a bit of both. Her glowing hoodie without the SHIELD jacket didn't feel as warm as it used to. But she forced herself to go on.
Forcing air through her nostrils felt like trying to force her way through a herd of rhinos. Her breathing came out in ragged gasps.
She would fix the man.
"Estella? Purple kid, I can see you." Mr. Stark. "Do you need back up?"
"A ride out would be good. I think she fell into a fridge. Thor's got Thanos in a vicious electric tickle session. I got the blue box thingy, by the way."
Pause. "Good work, Kid Agent." Buzz. "Estella, I am headed your way."
"Mister," Estella winced. "Mister, can you feel your fingers?"
The man caught her eye, and nodded, ever so subtly.
"Can you move - can you move your fingers?"
The fingers twitched. Thumb, index, middle, ring...and little.
Estella felt a bubble of something rise in her chest - pride. She had saved a man.
Relieved, she sat back on her heels. I did it, she thought to herself. Then she promptly fell over, sprawling onto the floor.
How long it had been, she would never know, but all she knew was there was a distant bang - a whir of repulsors - and then Iron Man's gauntlet-glove-thing was lifting her up, encasing her in a protective hold. Then wind rushed past her ears, almost like a clap of thunder, and her feet descended gently on a hard surface. Tony hadn't gone for the man. Maybe someone else picked him up. Or maybe he ran away.
She blinked back to her bearings. The wind tousled her hair, overlapping parts across her face. Between tendrils of hair, she could see the battlefield thousands of meters below, with the cars glinting on one end and the Defenders pushing back the velon creatures on the other end. Her feet balanced on the dented surface of the roof, and for a moment, she was brought back to the night she first remembered here - that night, where she sank through Mr. Stark's roof, then took a chunk out of it trying to get away.
"You alright, kid?" Tony's voice floated through from the Iron Man suit.
She started slightly, then nodded, albeit a little absently. "Sorry about the roof."
Tony barked out a laugh, and she turned. "That's why I put you here," he joked. "Poke as many as you want into this one." He held his hand to the side of his head in a salute, before zooming off.