Chapter 134: Thor: I'm Begging You, Please Don't Tell Anyone About This
Loki had stopped managing his volume. This time he didn't bother hiding from the agents around him.
Which promptly threw the base back into the kind of chaos it had just settled out of.
"So. You've just confirmed that your father, that is myself, is actually alive. Everything you told your brother was invented to facilitate a claim to the throne." Matthew, wearing Odin's face, looked at Loki.
A flicker of genuine alarm moved through Loki before he suppressed it.
Damn.
He'd forgotten that particular detail.
He held his composure.
"Fine. I'll admit that much. Odin isn't dead. He's entered the Odinsleep."
"But what of it?"
"Thor's exile was Odin's own decision. He can never return. That stands regardless."
"Only I can inherit the throne. Only I can restore Asgard to its former standing." He spread his arms, with the manner of someone for whom this conclusion was already settled.
"Odin" regarded him without expression and shook his head slowly. "My child. With the person you are right now, you're not fit to be Asgard's king."
At this, Loki went off like a lit charge. "Not fit?!"
"And this idiot is?"
He'd aimed the question at Matthew but what landed in it was something real. Even doubting the figure in front of him, Loki had a genuine emotional register for Odin that had been touched by accident.
Thor, standing there, blinked at being called an idiot by his little brother. His dear little brother. The one who had always been mild-mannered and composed. What had gotten into him?
Had he entered some kind of rebellious phase?
"Brother, you..."
"Odin" raised a hand and interrupted. "He's right. You're equally unqualified to inherit the throne right now."
"Which is why I sent you down to Midgard. To experience it. To learn. To understand what a king actually is, and what his people actually need."
He looked at Thor with something that managed to read as disappointment. "But even now you still don't understand. Still as arrogant as you ever were."
"You've never grasped what it means to lose your power. Without it, you're an ordinary man. Nothing more."
Silence.
"Odin" turned to Loki. "And your character is equally unsuited for what Asgard needs."
"You see the authority of a king. You don't see what a king owes."
"When you understand what you actually need to do, the throne will find you in its own time."
He turned back to Thor.
"Thor. Stay. Learn. Experience."
"If you cannot earn Mjolnir's recognition, that tells you something. It tells you that you're still not qualified. Use that."
"Odin" turned and walked toward the door without looking back.
At the threshold, he stopped one more time.
"Loki." A pause. "I am only an avatar right now. I can't stop you. What you do is your choice to make."
"But if you still consider me your father, don't compound one mistake with another."
Then, under the gaze of everyone in the space, "Odin" dissolved into light and was gone, scattered into the night sky.
Loki stood looking at where he had been. His fist was clenched hard enough to make noise.
"Father," he said quietly, through his teeth. "You stopped being my father a long time ago."
He glanced once at Thor, who was still processing several things at once, gave a cold sound, and disappeared.
Coulson stood where he was and pressed two fingers to his temple.
So. This man was actually Thor. The Thor, from Norse mythology.
That would explain, quite a lot, how he'd taken down an entire room of agents with a taser.
Not far from the base.
Matthew, who had scattered into a sky full of what had appeared to be starlight, reassembled himself a kilometer away.
Though if he was being specific about it: not starlight. Fireflies.
When he'd decided "Odin" needed a dramatic exit, the firefly solution was genuinely the best he'd been able to come up with. He had the Avatar ability. He had to work with what he had.
He stepped back out of the Odin shape and walked back toward the SHIELD base.
The moment he stepped through the entrance, Thor dropped to one knee in front of him.
"Father! I understand now. I understand the depth of what you've done for me."
"To be worthy of Asgard's throne, I'll study and work and learn. I will become a king worth the name."
Thor still thought the Matthew in front of him was his father.
"Thor." Matthew looked at him. "I'm happy to give you my sports car as a mount. But I'm a young man. I genuinely cannot absorb a son on this particular afternoon."
Thor blinked.
Then his brain caught up with him.
The moment it did, Thor's toes began doing the work of someone trying to excavate a substantial depression in the floor through sheer embarrassment. His mouth corners were doing something involuntary. Several veins had appeared on his forehead.
He coughed twice, stood up, and stepped very close to Matthew, dropping his voice to where only the two of them could hear it.
"That thing that just happened."
A pause.
"I'm begging you. Please don't mention it to anyone."
Matthew patted him on the shoulder with the expression of a reliable man. "Don't worry. I won't say a word."
Because I have already filmed the entire thing.
Thor exhaled.
"Agent Coulson." Matthew turned. "Am I free to take him now?"
Coulson nodded. "Of course."
"Though before you go." He produced his phone. "Could I get a photo with him?"
The opportunity to actually meet Thor wasn't going to come around again. Some things had to be seized.
He handed the phone to Matthew.
Thor stood there with the mild confusion of someone who had encountered a new custom and was working through it. Coulson stood beside him. The photo was taken.
They were just heading for the door when the rest of the agents converged.
"I want one too."
"Me as well."
"One for me, I want to show my daughter when I'm on leave."
Thor put on the expression of someone performing a public-facing role under duress, and Matthew became the de facto photographer, working through the queue one by one.
Half an hour later, they walked out of the base.
"I didn't expect people here to be so enthusiastic once they knew who I was." Thor, turning it over in his mind, had arrived at something like warmth.
The news that Father was alive had settled something in him that had been badly disrupted.
And Father had taken the time to identify his actual shortcomings. That counted as encouragement, in its way.
"Enthusiastic is the word," Matthew said. "Also exhausting."
"Twenty minutes on the shutter. And then the ones who wanted video. This is not a line of work I recommend."
He gave a helpless shrug and gestured Thor toward the car.
Thor hadn't lifted Mjolnir. But the lecture from "Father" had done something. The tightness in his face had eased, and he carried himself like someone who had decided that living and learning was a reasonable approach to the time ahead.