Chapter Text
Gamora was waiting, when Ebony Maw returned from his audience with Thanos.
There was blood on his face, and a telltale shuffle that promised of injury more than she could see on the surface alone. A cracked rib, perhaps, or a leg that had been broken, and just as cruelly shoved back into alignment.
His pace paused, and his tense glare darkened in her direction the moment that he realized he was being watched.
Then he simply strode on, a little quicker than before, and Gamora returned to cleaning her knife to weaken the bite of perverse satisfaction.
"His judgment?"
Ebony Maw made a soft clicking sound with his tongue, dark magic flickering at the hems of his every step like a vase overflowing, a river swelled with too much rain. "I am to perform sorcerer's justice, on the failed one," he said tightly, his voice held with all the restraint and calm that she could feel his magic was not. He wanted something to burn. "As a reminder of what will happen to me, should I fail again."
"So he was merciful, then."
"Yes." The sorcerer came to a stop before the final room in the rough, lonely hallway, one of the darkest, perhaps, one of the hottest. It had been one of the coldest, until they'd realized it was not an Aesir, but a Frost Giant in their hands. It had been not been guarded- the door, not even locked- in a long while. "Then," Ebony Maw continued, a twisted magic trailing at his fingertips still, "you are to dispose of him, as you begin your next assignment. I shall remain, to make strides towards finding a suitable replacement."
Her next assignment. Xandar. The power orb.
My plan.
"...Yes," Gamora said slowly, trailing the sorcerer into the cell. Without the invasion of Terra as a smokescreen, this would be made more difficult... but it was not worth it to wait. A chance like this might never come again.
All she had to do was complete this one final task, and then, she would be free.
But she was not free yet, and Gamora leaned silently against the rough, scalding edge of the doorframe, observing over her knife as Ebony Maw shifted about the cell, preparing she didn't know what, and didn't care. The forgotten son of Asgard lay in between them still, with a peculiar tilt to his spread limbs that did not suggest consciousness: still, Gamora stayed safely across the room. He had fooled her that way more than once, and even in his weakened state, she had always paid dearly for it.
"What was it you did to him?" she asked, carefully dispassionate, carefully cold, giving one foot a very careful nudge. Still, nothing. Unconscious after all. "I thought you were meant to be preparing him for his final test."
"I was," Ebony Maw snarled, and there was another flicker of magic in the air. This one that edged against her like the edge of barbed wire, his teeth bared and his hands clenched. Gamora stayed very safely multiple steps back. "I thought him sufficiently corralled enough to obey, and thus mistakenly allowed him the opportunity to crack his own skull against my spell. You see?" He yanked, hard, pulling one limp head up by matted, long hair, forcing Loki's head to turn for her to see the damage for herself.
That- yes.
That was definitely a cracked skull.
Somewhere in there, underneath the mass of blood, hair, and bone fragments.
She was rather sure that was a bit of brain, too.
Yes, that was a cracked skull- even for an Asgardian.
"What's the problem, then?" she asked, refusing to avert her eyes until Ebony Maw had let the head drop back to the floor, this time with a scornful hiss under his breath. "He's healed himself from worse." Loki's face hit left, bruising and already warming red where it was pressed to the floor, and somehow, Gamora was sickeningly, selfishly grateful when his filthy hair fell to obscure his staring eyes.
"Not when it was a magical injury, foolish girl. He has cleaved his consciousness from his physical body through use of my power, and I alone do not have the ability to force him back. Even if I did, it hardly matters- he has proven to be untrustworthy, and unworthy." He cursed something under his breath, something foul, something magical, something in a language too ancient for the Allspeak to know, and then without any further delay, swung his cursed blade straight against Loki's right arm.
There was an awful, sickening crunch.
"There," Ebony Maw murmured, though it was perhaps closer to a sneer. His face twisted, the pain and humiliation of his punishment crawling out to inflict on the Asgardian instead, but it was with a smile as he dragged his knife down again, forcibly separating every inch of the limb from the socket for it flop downwards as a limp, fleshy slug. "Let this be a lesson, to anyone else who believes they have the will to defy Thanos." A second twisted, wicked burning of his dark magic, and the carved off limb was obscured, disintegrating, crumbling to ash until all that was left was Loki.
Bleeding, limp, and insensate, on the filthy floor.
Gamora bit the tip of her tongue, and kept silent.
A year's worth of work to mold the son of Asgard into a son of Thanos, all reduced to nothing, in that one single, decisive moment.
With another derisive scowl, Ebony Maw wiped the blood from his mouth, rising again in a dark flurry of seething magic about his feet. "You are to dispose of him in the Void- left the way that we found him." He laughed coldly, a whisper of a noise to again hid his own humiliation. "You know what to do, child of Thanos."
Then he was gone, and she was again left alone.
Alone, with the son of Asgard she has spent nearly every day of the last twelve months trying to break.
He was barely breathing.
Gamora returned her knife to her belt, after a few more moments of impossibly stale, frigid silence. She dropped to her knees by his side, glancing over the form that she knew was much, much heavier than it looked, and considering how best she was to pull his body with her to her ship. To kill him now; to kill him after.
He was thin, underneath her. Perhaps as thin as an Asgardian could get, as bruised as an Asgardian could get, dark smudges on his slack face and body scattered with ugly, old, crusted cuts, wounds left to rot against a natural healing that had exhausted itself. She knew it was worse, still, underneath what little he wore that had not been shredded.
The pool of blood underneath him, and his now truncated arm, was still spreading.
"You're lucky, you know," she told him quietly, giving one sweaty, flushed cheek a firm pat. Two half-lidded, glazed eyes did not flicker even once. "You told us that you had no father. That you were Loki No-son. You're lucky you got out, before that changed. ...knowing you, you'd probably agree."
She didn't even bother to say aloud that Thanos had never planned to make him one of his children. Oh, he'd dangled the possibility out for Loki, holding it up as a lofty prize, if he should be good enough- but Thanos had never been going to follow through. He'd known being scorned as lesser, as unworthy, even by his new master, would hurt far more to the prince that had already disowned two fathers and would have no conniption of disowning a third.
It didn't matter.
The truth of it was the same: he was lucky.
Lucky, she thought, even as her hands drew to his throat.
Would he have become like Nebula? A near fanatic, sworn to Thanos' gospel because it was just suffocating enough to block out the horrors around him, so far gone that she didn't want to be saved? A devout servant as Ebony Maw, strong enough to tear Thanos apart with his own magics in a heartbeat but down on his knees willingly instead, head bowed as the universe burned around him?
Perhaps, desperate enough to stake everything on the madman the Collector, just for the chance to escape to back to the cold stretches of space, because he had no home to return to?
Whatever he'd have turned out to be, Gamora knew, he was lucky to have grasped an early end now.
Gamora positioned her hands carefully against the hot, already bruised throat, closing exactly and just so. There was already some redness, already bruises in the shape of fingers, already some swelling, but it was all faint, underneath her hands. They had gone after and broken every bone in his body thrice over, but his neck, always, had been left alone. Thanos had warned them all from the beginning that Aesir and Jotunn could still die from a broken neck, and now she could feel it for herself, in the delicate pulse of his life in between her hands- weak, thready. Unwilling.
He'd thank her for it, she knew. Perhaps while spitting in her face, but still, a thank you. Had probably known exactly what he was doing, in fighting back against Ebony Maw's spell, and had faced his own death with open arms.
One last neck to break, and then, they'd both be free.
Gamora glared, straight back into two half-lidded, unseeing eyes. One of them dripped blood.
There was nothing behind those eyes. Even if his heart was still beating, Loki's body was as empty and vacant as a corpse.
A corpse that now stared past her, on little more than his last breath, as helpless in her arms as a child, and through all the guilt and death and mad, senseless suffering, demanded that she do something.
Help him the way that no one had been there to help her, when she'd been the helpless child, and Thanos had found her.
She couldn't save him, of course. He was still breathing underneath her, but there was nothing in his eyes, and even if it had somehow been in her power she knew it wasn't what he would've wanted. There was absolutely no help she had to give him- Gamora wasn't even capable of returning his dead body to his home. If there was even anyone there who it would matter to, which Loki talked as if there wasn't, if Asgard was even reachable by standard space travel, which it wasn't, it would not be worth the risk to herself.
None of this, at all, was worth the risk to herself. Loki was dying, and even if it was partially by her hand, no good would come of any help that she tried to give now. She had no reason to not simply snap his neck, leave him in the cold of space from where Thanos had found him, and head to Xandar for the infinity stone.
She certainly had no use for the information that, while Loki was dying, and Asgard itself was unreachable, it was known that the Aesir kept a particularly close eye on Terra.
That if one of their own got dropped down onto it, there was at least a chance that they'd see it.
Gamora groaned.
You know what to do, Ebony Maw had said.
And, she did.
"You're gonna get lucky twice today, Loki No-son," she said, one hand slipping up from his throat to give his still, pale face another pat. "Don't make me regret it."
Two days after his death sentence was handed down by Thanos, the body was dropped silently out of a stealth space-craft to land in a plume of snow, right out in the middle of the deserted Canadian tundra.
He still breathed.
Two minutes after he appeared, unmoving, silent, and on the edge between life and death, an orange portal began to circle open underneath him. It was as bright as the gleaming snow around him, and sparked like the sun.