Loki let out a low whistle. "Extraordinary."
Thor had just put the last Dark Elf soldier down when the white light finished fading. He turned, took in the smoking crater where Algrim had been, and looked at Smith with the expression of someone quietly updating a number they'd thought was already high.
"As expected," he said simply.
Smith dusted his hands off, more from habit than necessity. He looked at the space where Algrim had stopped existing and felt the mild, specific frustration of an interesting problem that had resolved itself too early.
"If he hadn't thrown that grenade, I'd have kept going." He said it without self-consciousness, the way a craftsman comments on interrupted work. "Something that can shrug off Mjolnir and still stand after a full exchange isn't easy to find. That's a rare thing."
Thor and Loki crossed the ruined ground to reach him, stepping over scorched earth and the occasional Dark Elf who had decided discretion outweighed orders. Loki looked at the battlefield with the calm appreciation of someone evaluating a painting — taking inventory, noting technique.
"Once you have the Aether," he said, "I cannot picture who gives you a real fight."
"There are plenty," Smith said. "The universe is large. The Aether is one Stone." He said it without false modesty — just math. "Don't get ahead of the situation."
Thor nodded distantly, his eyes already scanning the sky where Malekith's ship had vanished. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was doing what he always did when Smith demonstrated something new — revising his understanding of where Zeus sat on whatever scale he used. He kept revising upward. The number kept not being high enough.
"What's the play?" he said. "Malekith has the Aether. We've lost his position."
Loki looked at Smith as well. Both brothers waiting, without having planned to.
Smith scanned the flat, grey horizon. "He's going to Earth."
Thor's shoulders dropped slightly — the physical equivalent of a sigh of relief. Earth he could work with. Earth had people he trusted and terrain he knew.
"The convergence of the Nine Realms happens at a fixed point," Smith continued. "It's not the first time — it occurred thousands of years ago, which is why the Dark Elves nearly won then. Malekith needs to deploy the Aether at the exact second of convergence to have the reach he wants. The Nine Realms overlap for moments and then separate — it's the only window where the energy propagates across all of them simultaneously. The center of that overlap is Earth. Greenwich, specifically."
"So we go to Earth and we wait for him," Thor said.
"That's the short version."
Loki had been quiet for a beat, working through the implication of something. He raised a hand. "I'd like to register a practical concern about my arrival on Earth, given that the Battle of New York was entirely my doing."
"Like I said before, everyone who died in New York is alive," Thor said. He looked at his brother levelly. "Smith's Dragon Balls brought them back. All of them."
Loki went very still.
"Everyone," Thor said again.
It took Loki a moment longer than he usually needed to compose a response. Something moved across his face in the interim — not guilt exactly, but the specific impact of being handed a consequence you'd already accepted and finding it had been reversed without your knowledge or input.
"That is," he said, then stopped. Started again. "That's remarkable." He looked at Smith. "You actually—" A breath. "You're a real hero. I mean that without irony, which is uncomfortable for me, so I'd appreciate it if we moved on quickly."
"Then come to Earth and do something useful," Thor said. "You get a chance to balance the ledger."
Loki straightened his coat. "In that case, justice has a new supporter." He glanced at Smith. "Lead the way."
Smith opened his right hand. The Space Stone pulsed, and the portal opened in front of them — a clean cut in the air, the other side showing a cobblestoned square at night, streetlights in the distance, the particular dark of a London evening.
They stepped through.
Greenwich was quiet. Nearly midnight, almost no one around — just the square and the old observatory on the hill behind it, and the kind of silence that historic districts get when the tourists have gone home.
Thor looked around, orienting himself. "He'll actually come here?"
"He'll come here," Smith confirmed. He let the portal close behind Loki. "But not tonight. At the speed his ship moves, he's not arriving until tomorrow at the earliest. And even if he got here now, the convergence window isn't open yet. He can't do anything until it is."
Loki had been looking at the square with the expression of a man experiencing mild nostalgia. His eyes tracked from the observatory to the street to a specific spot near the edge of the square that probably meant nothing to anyone else.
Smith glanced at him. "S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files have a cold case. Unsolved airline incident, early seventies. The hijacker used the name D.B. Cooper." He paused. "The flight attendant's composite sketch is a fairly strong likeness."
Loki turned slowly. "That," he said, "is impressively niche knowledge."
"I have Level 7 clearance."
"It was a bet." Loki spread his hands. "Thor and I made a wager. The terms required me to hijack an aircraft and disappear dramatically. I lost — I'm still not entirely clear on the specifics of how — and the terms were non-negotiable." He shook his head. "I didn't expect anyone to still be looking."
"They're not looking very hard," Smith said. "But the file exists."
Thor, to his credit, managed to look like he hadn't heard any of this.
"So," Loki said, pivoting cleanly. "You said he'll be here tomorrow. We stand in a square in the dark until then?"
"No." Smith was already raising his hand again. "The Brotherhood has rooms. Jane Foster should already be there." He looked at Thor. "You can check on her."
Thor's expression shifted toward something quieter. "Yes. Let's go."
"One more thing," Loki said, and his voice had picked up the specific quality of someone who has been thinking about something carefully and decided to ask anyway. "Thor told me the Aether can't be destroyed. You said it was difficult. Those aren't the same word."
Smith looked at him for a beat.
"No," he said. "They're not."
Loki filed that away without comment, which, from Loki, was approximately equivalent to a round of applause.
The portal opened.
The Brotherhood's rest area was warm and well-lit, and currently occupied by most of the people Smith had expected to find there. Jane was on a couch with Darcy beside her, mid-sentence about something that had clearly been going on for a while. Fox and Bulma were across the room. Pietro was leaning against the wall in the posture of someone who had been standing there long enough that it had become load-bearing. A handful of others nearby, catching the conversation at the edges.
They all looked up when the portal opened.
Smith stepped through first. Thor and Loki behind him.
Jane was already on her feet by the time Thor crossed the room, and they met somewhere in the middle — no preamble, no words, just the particular relief of two people confirming to each other through contact that the other is actually present and intact.
Darcy watched this for approximately one second before her attention moved to Loki, who had stopped near the portal and was standing with his hands loose at his sides, meeting the collective wariness of the room with an expression of composed, professional neutrality.
The room's memory of New York was written plainly on several faces. Loki read all of them and made no move to address it, which was probably the correct call.
Smith closed the portal.
"Get some rest," he said to the room. "Tomorrow's going to be a longer day."