"That's right," Smith said. "Thor. Not the Hammer Guy."
He left Thor with that and walked down the corridor to Loki's cell.
Loki was sitting up on his bed with the posture of someone who had been watching the entire sequence of events from a front-row seat and had opinions about the production value. He looked at Smith for a moment, and something in his expression shifted from composed to genuinely surprised.
"I didn't expect to see you here," he said.
"I'm visiting." Smith looked around the cell, then at the empty corridor behind him where the other prisoners had been. "I don't know what to say to you, honestly. Every other cell in this block is open. You're still sitting here."
The corner of Loki's mouth moved. "Those who ran ended up considerably worse off than those who stayed. I saw your work."
"The blast was calibrated for the space."
"I'm sure it was." Loki looked at him with the specific attention of someone reading between every line. "It was also instantly fatal for anyone it touched directly. You're not particularly interested in the distinction between incapacitating and killing, are you."
Smith nodded. "If you'd come through that barrier, I wouldn't have made a distinction."
Thor appeared in the corridor behind him. "Smith — Loki is my brother."
"He killed people on Earth. A significant number of them."
A beat. Thor turned his head toward the far wall and said, very quietly: "He's adopted."
The cell was absolutely silent.
Loki's jaw set. His fists closed at his sides. The expression that moved across his face was the specific expression of a man who has been struck in a wound that other people have no business knowing about, delivered by the one person who should have known better than to use it.
Smith pressed his lips together and looked at the ceiling.
"You're joking," he said finally.
"Both of you are joking," he added, because he needed another second.
He turned back to Loki's cell. "The people on Earth — they've been revived. All of them. Through the Dragon Ball wish." He paused. "If that weren't the case, there's no version of agreeing to bring you back that my personality would have allowed. A Cosmic Cube as payment wouldn't have moved me." He said it plainly, without inflection, so it landed as information rather than threat. "We're square."
He thought briefly about the inventory: the Destroyer armor fragments that had become his suit, the Tesseract now cracked open and the Space Stone seated in Odin's gauntlet in his system space. The Mind Stone in Brotherhood storage. The Reality Stone in Jane Foster's bloodstream, soon to need a new home. Loki's existence, directly or indirectly, had contributed to most of that. It seemed worth acknowledging.
"This is a family matter," Smith said. "You sort it out."
Loki stared at him. The surprise was genuine — he had been preparing for a different end to this sentence, and the one he got had arrived from an angle he hadn't covered.
Thor looked at Smith with the expression of a man who has just been given something he wasn't sure he was allowed to have. He stepped forward and put both arms around Smith's shoulders in a hug that was brief and entirely earnest.
Smith accepted this without comment.
"Prison rebellion is handled," he said, once Thor stepped back. "Let's see what's happening above us."
Frigga's chambers had been found.
Malekith moved through the door with the specific certainty of someone who had been following a signal, not searching. He saw the two women and walked toward them.
"Step back," Frigga said. Her voice carried the flat authority of someone who had been in rooms like this before. "I might let you leave."
"I am Malekith." He kept walking. "I want what was taken from me."
Frigga moved first. She closed the distance faster than he expected and the short sword came across in a strike aimed at his face. He parried. She pressed the exchange with the accumulated efficiency of a fighter who had centuries behind her and no wasted motion in any of it. His weapon left his hand on the third exchange. The sword came to his throat.
Almost.
Algrim arrived through the wall.
He took Frigga's blade from her hand and lifted her off the floor by her neck in the same motion — not a grab, a mechanical seizure, her weight irrelevant to whatever he had become.
Malekith straightened and turned to Jane Foster.
"You took something, child."
He reached for her.
His hand passed through her and she came apart — light and suggestion, a working that dissolved the moment contact broke the illusion. Frigga had placed it there.
Malekith turned back. His face was very still. "Mage." He walked to Frigga, hanging in Algrim's grip. "Where are the Aether particles."
Frigga looked at him levelly. Her breathing was controlled. "I'll never tell you."
Malekith studied her for a moment. "I believe you," he said, and nodded once to Algrim.
The blade went through her from the side. Clean, precise, aimed at the heart.
Frigga's body went slack.
The door came off its frame.
Thor's lightning arrived first — a direct strike at Malekith's face, the discharge so concentrated it burned. Malekith hit the wall with his face half-destroyed and Algrim pulled him upright immediately, moving for the window.
Thor was already running. He threw Mjolnir at Algrim's back with his full strength behind it.
The hammer connected. The force transferred. Algrim used it — the impact absorbed and redirected through whatever the curse had made of his body, the blow actually accelerating him toward the window rather than stopping him.
Smith was at Frigga's side before Thor reached the window.
He checked her. She was alive — the divine energy in her body moving against the wound with the slow insistence of something that didn't accept the conclusion easily. The heart damage was severe. The bleeding was internal. But she was still here, working against it with everything she had.
He had time. Not unlimited time, but time.
He helped her upright and kept one hand at her back.
Frigga looked at him, golden at the corner of her lips. "I'm dying," she said. Her voice was clear, not confused. She was assessing her own condition with the same directness she'd applied to everything else. "Asgard has no remedy for this. But the girl is safe."
"You're not gone yet," Smith said.
Thor came back in from the window. He had watched Malekith's ship engage its stealth field and vanish, and the expression on his face when he turned back to the room was the specific expression of a man who had just run out of things to throw himself at.
Odin came through the door with Gungnir in hand, the spear still hot from whatever it had been used on in the corridors below. He covered the distance to Frigga in three strides and went to one knee beside her. His hands moved over the wound with the desperate precision of someone applying every technique available and feeling each one fail to reach far enough.
His face did something that the God-King of Asgard's face was not supposed to do in front of soldiers.
He looked at Thor. "Come say goodbye to your mother."