"No," Odin said.
Jane stared at him.
"Or rather — there is no method I know of that removes the Aether and keeps the host alive. Those are two separate problems that have never been solved simultaneously." He looked at Jane with the measured dispassion of a man assessing a complicated situation rather than a person, then looked at Thor. "Show her Asgard. She can stay here for now. We'll look for an answer."
Thor's expression cleared. "Yes, Father."
Odin turned to Smith. "Walk with me."
The treasury was several levels below the palace proper — the kind of room that had been accumulating significance for a very long time. Odin moved through it with the comfortable familiarity of a man who had put most of this here personally, knowing every item's position without needing to look.
He stopped a few paces inside and let Smith take a moment to orient himself, then spoke. "You're aware of what's coming. The Nine Realms converging — distances collapsing, boundaries thinning. The resonance will be felt across all nine."
"Even Helheim," Smith said. "Hela can see through it from the seal."
Odin was quiet for a moment. "You've been there."
"A few times."
Odin looked at him with something that wasn't quite surprise and wasn't quite resignation. "And? She didn't throw you out."
"We've had some reasonable conversations." Smith thought of the request she'd made when he was leaving last time — something aged and decent to drink, if he was coming back. "She asked me to bring wine next time."
Odin let out a long breath through his nose. "That's more than she's given me in centuries." He walked slowly toward the far end of the room. "I don't know how to talk to her anymore. She was who she was long before I made the decision I made, and I've spent a very long time telling myself the decision was necessary and not asking whether I owed her an explanation for it."
Smith listened. He had no opinion to offer on someone else's family history and no particular interest in manufacturing one.
"If you reach a real agreement with her," Odin said, "tell me. I'll break the seal myself and stand in front of my people and tell them they have an eldest princess." He looked at Smith directly. "I'd rather it happen that way than the other way."
That was more than Smith had expected. He filed it. "I'll raise it with her next visit."
Odin nodded. Then, with the ease of a man changing a channel: "I'll have someone prepare a batch of the aged vintage for you to take. She should have some of home."
He began moving along the collection, and Smith followed.
The Infinity Gauntlet was on a stand near the center of the room — golden, ornate, sized for a being considerably larger than a standard human. The six stone settings were present and visibly empty, fitted with convincing replicas that caught the light almost correctly.
Nearby: the Casket of Ancient Winters, sealed and quiet. The Eternal Flame in its housing. Several items Smith didn't immediately identify but catalogued for later consideration.
Odin watched Smith's eyes move through the room and chuckled quietly. "I can have your armor reworked. Rune enhancement — I can't grant divine blessing, but runes applied correctly are not nothing, and I can see that what you're wearing now started its life as something from my own collection."
Smith looked down at his suit. Odin had identified the Destroyer armor's origin correctly. "I appreciate the offer." He paused. "I'm more interested in the gauntlet."
Odin went still for a beat. Then he looked at Smith with the particular attention of someone revising an estimate. "Your interest in the Infinity Stones is more developed than I assumed."
"I should tell you something first," Smith said. "Earth currently holds more than one Stone. I'm aware there are other parties in the universe with the same interest." He met Odin's gaze. "I'll be careful."
Odin held the look for a moment, then picked up the gauntlet from its stand and turned it in his hands once. "These settings are all replicas. I should make that clear before you get excited."
"I know." Smith took the gauntlet.
The moment it settled on his right hand, it began to adjust — the metal reading the dimensions of his grip and reforming around them, the oversized frame compressing inward until the fit was exact. Smith flexed his fingers. The weight was right. The balance was right.
He reached into his system space and retrieved the Tesseract, placing it on the floor of the treasury in front of him. Odin watched without speaking.
Smith closed his right hand around the cube and applied steady pressure. The Tesseract's casing — engineered containment for a force that had bent S.H.I.E.L.D.'s best researchers into years of work — fractured along its geometric seams and shattered outward in a burst of cold blue light. The Space Stone sat in his palm, warm and humming, its interior depth impossible to look at straight on.
He pressed it into the gauntlet's corresponding setting.
The click of it seating was clean and definitive. Blue energy ran up from the stone along the gauntlet's channels, spread across the back of his hand, climbed his wrist, and faded at his forearm. The gauntlet's surface temperature dropped several degrees and then normalized.
Odin was very still.
He was looking at Smith the way you look at something you've recategorized mid-observation. An Infinity Stone used bare — not channeled through a vessel designed to insulate the user, not wielded through some constructed intermediary, but held and engaged directly without visible consequence. That was not a human performance. Odin had no immediate framework for what Smith's bloodline was, only the evidence in front of him — the absence of a tail ruling out certain obvious candidates, the power signature ruling out everything baseline.
"You can manage the Space Stone," Odin said finally. "I don't recommend advertising it. The Tesseract's casing was useful precisely because it obscured what was inside. The Stone without that casing is a different kind of signal."
"Understood." Smith agreed with the strategic logic entirely. He also knew that the signal only mattered against opponents who could do something about it, and his current assessment of that category was narrower than Odin's. Still — no reason to be careless.
He thought the gauntlet into his system space. It disappeared cleanly.
Odin looked at where it had been, accepted this without comment, and turned back toward the entrance. "The convergence will make the next few weeks unpredictable. If you have no urgent reason to return to Earth, stay. Asgard has a room for you."
Smith had already made this decision before Odin extended the invitation. Frigga was alive. He intended to keep her that way, and doing that required being present when Malekith moved.
There was also the matter of Kurse — Algrim transformed. Smith had a specific memory of Thor being launched by that thing. He was curious, in a professional sense, about how that translated to actual output.
"I'll stay," he said. "I'll go find Thor."