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Asgard [2013]
–Heimdall–
"This doesn't suit you," He turned around to see one of Prince Thor's longtime comrades, Sif, arrive, with her blade in her hand.
"What doesn't?" He asked her and turned around, to tend to his garden. Yeah, he knew what she was talking about but that doesn't mean that he has to acknowledge it, in front of her.
He knew that something was wrong with his "retirement" as King Odin put it, but King's words were absolute and he was in no condition to refuse his express orders. Besides, this also gave him the opportunity to do something that he previously had no time for.
"This! This farming, it is the work of peasants, not for a noble warrior such as yourself," Sif boomed as he heard her advancing towards him.
He sighed, dusted his hands off the dirt, and stood up. He looked at Sif to see her nostrils flared in anger and her hands clenched white. Something must have happened for her to have such an extreme reaction.
"What happened?" He asked her as he went into his humble abode to fetch a glass of water, as was customary to offer to a guest.
"Here. I don't have anything more fancy to offer to you but I assume that Hospitality was not something that you are here for," He handed her the glass of water and sat down on one of the rocks that outlined the boundary of his property. He looked around the land that had been given to him as part of his "reward" for doing exceptional work for the entirety of his tenure.
"How could the King have done this to you? Why didn't you fight it? Asgard is not safe without you watching over it, Heimdall," Sif said in between sips of water, the journey here clearly not being for the normal person since Sif, a warrior herself, was sweating at the intense heat in this place.
"....I don't have an answer to your questions, Sif. It is not our place to question the King's orders. He is wise beyond measure and as such, our job is just to follow his orders. Nothing more and Nothing less. Asgard has the All-Father watching over it, it will be more than safe in his hands." He said as his gaze travelled across the lands that he now owned.
Even though he said those words out loud with confidence, he was not really sure about what was going on with the All-Father right now. For instance, the gift of his sight might be exclusive to his bloodline, but that didn't mean that King Odin had no way of watching over all of Asgard.
The King had a similar sight as him but that was granted by Asgard itself, allowing its recognised rules to watch over every inch of Asgard's territory. While his sight allowed him to look for threats from far away, he could not focus on every single thing at once.
The same could not be said for King Odin. He has the ability to look over every single inch of Asgard simultaneously. He had hoped, now that Asgard was without a Watcher for the time being, King Odin would activate his sight instead, safeguarding Asgard from intruders and such.
The activation of such an ability is very easily sensed by someone as sensitive as him. And yet, as he looked around, trying to sense with all his powers, he could not find any trace of King Odin's sight on either him or on Asgard.
Which meant either one of two things.
That King Odin was somehow using the technique without him noticing it, which would be impossible because he had seen him use that ability before and he could never forget the feeling of power incarnate passing over your head as King Odin's gaze passed over you.
The Second one was that King Odin was not doing anything to monitor the realm, which was unthinkable. And yet….
He looked at Sif whose face was twisted in a grimace, clearly trying to form her words and get them out, but doing so without sounding treasonous was probably much harder than she thought it would be.
"So? What happened?" he asked her, not showing his internal mental turbulence to her. He had to do something to figure out the situation and to see if King Odin was truly letting the security of the Nine Realms be, instead of increasing it due to the loss of the combat strength of Asgard.
Asgard was at its weakest right now and it was probably true, that only the continued existence of King Odin was the only thing that was holding back the vultures from pouncing on the juicy meat that was Asgard.
"...The All-Father, he….banished me," Sif ground out, her hands holding the glass of water with such force that it almost splintered before she took hold of herself.
Meanwhile, he raised an eyebrow as the picture became even muddier with the news that Lady SIf had just delivered to him. Sif was not just any warrior, she was someone who could best an entire squad of Einherjars by herself if given a fair fight.
Now that Asgard was void of most of its top tier powers, he had hoped that the All-Father would instead ramp up the powers of the mid and lower tiers. He had no idea what was going through the King's head as he did these seemingly senile things.
"....And get this, he banished Thor and had a statue commissioned. Do you know for whom? Lokii!" Sif exclaimed as she threw the almost splintered glass at one of the rocks that surrounded his farm's boundary. As if the gates to a dam had been opened, Sif just spilled out all of her grievances, feeling safe enough to do so.
Frankly, he was unsure if the King would even care about the borderline treasonous words that Sif was just spilling over to him.
Through Sif, he realised what had been happening in the City without him being there. Axl was going to arrive in a few weeks and he had hoped to make this place liveable until his arrival.
Things were proceeding smoothly in that regard but he was doubtful if the same could be said about Asgard. Raising statues of Loki? Commissioning plays?
Pulling back forces from historically Asgard-defended sites? Not appointing anyone else as the Watcher? Not performing the weekly checks on the Rainbow Bridge and not to mention, restricting travel between realms.
These were not the actions of someone who had the good of Asgard in his heart. They seemed random and yet, he could see a pattern. Most of these actions would eventually weaken the already weakened Asgard, such that even Vaneheim would be able to run over Asgard.
"....Anyways, Heimdall, thank you for listening to my woes. I will be off now, I have a ship that will sail without me. Farewell," Sif said and leaped away from his farm, straight into the valley below.
He watched as she did the same and soon disappeared from his sight as she passed over some of the mountains that one had to cross so that they could reach his territory.
"Sigh, what has this madness come to," He muttered to himself before gathering the shattered remnants of his already sparse kitchen supply and heading back into the house that had been already built before he moved here.
Though, calling it a house would be doing it a favour. It was more of a shack. Now, he did have a very comfortable home in the capital city, overlooking the Royal Palace itself, but the King's words were very specific when he granted this land to him. He wished to see these barren mountains, lush with greenery by the time young Axl rose up in ranks. He could not do that while living in his spacious home back in the capital.
Honestly, looking at the fog and stone that surrounded him, he was sure that he would die here before that happened.
Sigh. Well, at least there was one upside to all this.
Just a few more weeks until Axl was here and he could begin his training then.
____xx___
Deep Space [2014]
Carol Danvers
Slurping on her smoothie, she leaned back on the most comfortable piece of furniture on her ship. Sure, the rest of the galaxy had furniture that could actively massage you or make you feel the same level of comfort that you probably did back in your mother's womb but the sheer comfort of an old beaten up sofa piece could never be compared to those.
It felt like…home.
"Home, huh," Her eyes flashed as she looked at her cup of smoothie and after gulping down the rest of it in a single gulp, she threw the cup to the side, the hard light construct fading, its job done.
Over the years, she had done so much and saved so many people, so many species really, that she had more favours than what she knew what to do with. Most of these favours were not from people who could really help her, considering their own precarious state but some of them did count.
After all, she did have to eat and sleep in a safe space. It got really old real quick when she couldn't find a safe place to rest. Despite her powers that could help her survive the vacuum of space for months at a time, she still needed rest. Some sort of left over quirk of her human biology, requiring sleep every couple of weeks to bring her mental state to its most optimal state.
So, cashing in some of those favours, some from people whom she really didn't want to associate with, but she did so in exchange for procuring her ship. It might not seem much for someone of her powers and especially for someone who had the opportunity to ride in the flagship spaceships of the Kree Empire, but it was her first personal ship, ever since she left Earth.
She left Earth to wage a one-woman war against the Kree and their expansionist tendencies. Hell, she had received multiple gifts from The Nova Prime because she believed that Caron's unrelenting assault on the Kree activities in outer space was one of the key reasons why the Supreme INtelligence agreed to a Peace Treaty with Xandar.
This ship and the memories she kept carefully stored on it were some of the only things she had of her old life. Her powers meant that she aged really slowly, almost negligible if taking into account the average lifespan of a human. As such, she liked this ship very much.
It was one of the reasons why she never really used the ship most of the time. She never stayed in a single place for a long time and that included her ship as well. She had yet to name it but this ship was probably the closest thing she had to a home at the moment.
Earth…had long since stopped becoming her home. She had spent more of her life in space, fighting the bad guys, instead of being on Earth. God, it was so long back that she even thought of going back home.
Sure, Nick still had her pager and she would go rushing back the moment she received his SOS but the thing, that would be her duty, her self undertaken, underpaid Job. Nothing more than that. Even the slight nostalgia she felt when she first went into space with her memories intact had long since faded away now.
Now, all she felt was a dull ache these days. A small hole that she knew could not be filled by going home. Not only did she not really have a home back on Earth but she couldn't abandon the millions, billions of people that required her help.
And therein, laid the problem.
Her duty.
She was the only one who was untied, the only one who would respond to any and all calls for help. Even the Mad Titan's territory was not spared by her but for some reason, the Mad Titan continued to avoid her, as if she was the plague. His forces even went so far as to turn tail and run, often leaving some of their straggler Chitauri forces behind when they got word that she was on her way to their location, to stop their disgusting practice of killing half of a world's population
She could not just abandon all these people who relied on her, to protect them from the cold horrors of space. That was the reason why she had not gone home.
That….was a big fat lie and she knew it.
"Urgh…." She grunted as she held her face in her hands, exhaling forcefully.
It had been decades, decades since she got her mind back from the clutches of the Supreme Intelligence. She had not noticed it at first but over the years, once she started meditating to desensitize herself to the horrors she had witnessed and stopped, she started noticing things.
Things like rough patchworks of memories that seemed muted for some reason and some memories that screamed suspicious at her. After going through her mind a few more times, she realised exactly what had happened and the extent of the damage that the Supreme Intelligence had inflicted on her.
Not on her body, but on her mind, her very self.
The time she had spent under the tender mercies of the Supreme Intelligence, a vastly more powerful mind than her own, meant that she had not noticed the extent of the mental damage for too long.
Once she noticed, she tried to repair it…only to fall short.
Her powers made her damn near invincible in the galaxy, and yet, she fell short when it came to something as inordinately complicated as the mind. She noticed some weird things happening, some memories with muted feelings as if she were a mere spectator, and some memories with normal feelings, taking her back to her time back on Earth.
Then came the clearly suspicious, hidden, memories in her mind. She had not noticed it because her mind had somehow suppressed them but she had, over the years, figured out the memories and what had been done to her.
Her fists clenched tightly as she remembered the pain, the screams, and all the blood that had spilled as a result of the Kree experimentations on her, all in a bid to understand how she ticked and how to replicate that.
In all those memories, the stoic face of the stupid Supreme Intelligence was a constant as it hovered above her prone form, watching as the Kree scientist tore into her body with savageness.
A shockwave escaped her fists as she began glowing for a moment before she shut off her powers with a forceful exhale.
With a sigh, she stood up and went into her office, the place where she monitored galaxy wide communications, to see if somebody needed her help or not. It was mostly useless because every place she went to, somebody needed help and her damned hero complex never let her refuse.
It was as if she was suddenly shoved into the backseat of her own mind wherever someone requested something of her. After many many years of self control, she could now finally muster up enough control to deny someone help when there was clearly someone out there who needed it more.
Her mind had latched on to some sort of idea of what a hero should be and she had followed that same thought for so many years that it had become so hard to just stop, to rest, before the next request for help inevitably came in.
It was only a couple of years ago that she had forced herself to take a couple of days off, where she shut off the communications network, save for her pager network, and basically forced herself to try and relax.
Even then, it had been an uphill battle, judging by the shockwave that had escaped her body earlier. She had endured four days this time without a breakdown and she was unwilling to push her mind more.
Progress was mind numbingly slow since she was all by herself, but Progress was progress and she was willing to take anything at this point.
Her very entry into the office turned on the communications system, flooding her systems with reports of what had happened in the wider galaxy in the past few days.
Her eyes narrowed as she watched multiple messages coming in from the Nova Prime herself, requesting support in the possibility of an attack on Xandar?
Just who would have the guts to attack Xandar, the home planet of Nova Prime herself? Unless they were a powerhouse on par with her, breaching the Nova Force was a fool's dream.
She opened the video that came with the report and her breath hitched as she watched the brilliant green light up the entire screen as Jack, The Green Guardian of Earth effortlessly dispatched an entire mercenary group.
That was not the problem. The problem was that he had done so at the behest of Tivan, The Collector.
Her eyes narrowed as her ship automatically ran diagnostics, confirming that this Jack's energy signature matched that of the deceased hero on Earth, even if it was vastly more powerful. She could see no collar on him but mind control couldn't be counted out yet.
"Chart a course for Knowhere," She commanded her ship and continued to read the other reports.
Even then, her mind continued to wander back to the video she had seen and the face. When the news had reached the wider galaxy that the Chituari had made a play for Earth, she had feared the worst, only to hear that Earth had successfully repelled the Chitauri, all without any civilian lives lost.
The only casualty of the Invasion was one Jack Sullivan, a minor boy no older than 15 who had saved New York and possibly, the world from an alien Invasion. She had mourned the early death of someone who could have possibly reached the same heights as she did….and moved on.
Yes, the death was tragic and clearly sad but years spent in space witnessing the worst the galaxy had to offer, had made her numb to the deaths.
But now?
Now it was a different story. If Jack was alive and somehow under the control of the Collector.
Well then, she had always wanted to test the immortality of the elders of the Universe.
Word Count - 3153
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