Chapter 179: Ethan's Deal with the Allfather
Ethan looked at Thor and felt a mild surprise that he immediately recognized as unwarranted.
Of course, he thought. He's Thor. You beat him in a fair fight — well, a mostly fair fight — and now you're friends. That's just how he works.
There was something genuinely refreshing about it, actually. No grudge, no wounded pride turning into calculation. Just: you proved you're strong, therefore I respect you, therefore we're good. The emotional economy of a man who had never learned to be complicated about these things.
Thor clapped him on the shoulder with the specific force of someone who had grown up in a culture where that gesture didn't require calibration for human physiology. "Next time," he said, with complete sincerity, "I won't lose. Come back when you're ready and I'll show you what a real God of Thunder looks like."
"Looking forward to it," Ethan said.
He meant it. Thor's friendship level would go up every time they fought, and Thor's current ceiling was already considerable. The version of Thor who'd gone through everything the future had planned for him — the losses, the hammer, the exile, all of it — was going to be something genuinely worth testing himself against.
He glanced at the system reward.
Right to Wield Mjolnir.
He looked at the hammer. The hammer sat there, ancient and unconcerned, radiating the specific quality of something that had decided things about itself a very long time ago.
I could just take it right now, he thought.
He decided not to. Thor needed the hammer more than Ethan needed it, and leaving someone without their signature weapon in their own palace was a level of provocation that didn't serve anyone's interests. The right existed if he needed it. That was sufficient.
Odin dismissed Thor and Loki with a word — both of them went, though Loki went with the specific quality of reluctant compliance that communicated he was not finished processing what had happened — and the throne room cleared down to three people.
"You've got capability," Odin said, in the tone of a man who doesn't distribute compliments so much as issue assessments. "Close to my level, I'd estimate. The future is in reasonable hands."
Ethan filed this.
"I have a request," Odin continued. "In the future — when I'm no longer available — I'd like you to look out for Thor and Loki. Thor still has a great deal of growing to do. I'm going to arrange for him to spend some time on Midgard. When that happens, I'd prefer you didn't interfere with the process."
Ethan thought about the Destroyer walking through a New Mexico town and felt the very specific reluctance of someone being asked to watch property damage happen and not respond.
As long as it stays out of Hell's Kitchen, he thought.
He also didn't say what he knew: that Odin wasn't dying so much as choosing to retire from visibility, and that most of the Thor-shaped disasters of the next several years were self-inflicted. Odin was using "when I'm gone" as framing for what was actually "when I've arranged things to proceed without me," which was a meaningful distinction.
And the Thanos calculation — Thanos had waited until both Odin and the Ancient One were out of the picture before moving. Which meant Thanos had assessed both of them as genuine threats. Which put them in the range of whatever Ethan was now, which was a sobering data point.
"I appreciate the thought," he said, "but I'm not really in a position to manage two gods. They're both more capable than I am. They'll figure it out."
This was polite deflection, and Odin read it correctly, and the silence that followed had the quality of a man deciding whether to push.
Then Odin said: "I wouldn't ask you to do this for nothing."
He paused.
"You may take one item from my treasury. Your choice."
The Ancient One, who had been standing at the edge of the room with her customary stillness, produced a very small but entirely genuine reaction. Her eyes moved to Odin with the expression of a person recalibrating a long-held assumption.
She knew what was in that treasury. She'd had reasons of her own not to ask for any of it. The offer alone represented a statement about how Odin assessed Ethan — and Odin was, she knew from long acquaintance, constitutionally incapable of being generous except when he'd decided it was worth his while.
He doesn't do this, she thought. He doesn't do this for anyone.
She filed the observation with the pile of observations she'd been filing about Ethan since they'd met.
"Any item?" Ethan said.
"Any item."
Ethan thought about it.
He was going to be involved with Thor and Loki regardless — that much was clear from the Loki dream alone. The future had already tangled him into a multiverse crisis that he hadn't asked for, and whether he accepted Odin's request formally or not, he was going to end up standing next to at least one of them when something difficult happened. The request was mostly a formality.
But if he was going to get paid for work he was going to do anyway, he might as well get paid properly.
"I'll take a look," he said.
The treasury of Asgard was the accumulated prize of a civilization that had been taking things from other civilizations for several thousand years, and it showed.
Ethan walked through it slowly.
He passed the Casket of Ancient Winters. The Eternal Flame. The Infinity Gauntlet — fake, he noted, the real one hadn't been made yet, but someone had made Odin a replica for reasons he didn't particularly want to examine. The Tablet of Life and Time. The Warlock's Eye.
He took his time.
He had some ideas about what he wanted. He had some ideas about what he didn't want — anything that carried the specific kind of curse or burden that made the wielder a target for half the universe didn't seem worth the convenience. The Space Stone was already in his inventory. Adding a second Infinity Stone would be overextending.
He kept looking.
Back in the throne room, the Ancient One and Odin sat with the comfortable silence of people who had been old friends long enough to not require conversation to occupy space.
"Well?" she said, eventually.
"Strong," Odin said. "Stronger than I was at his age, probably."
"That wasn't what I was asking."
Odin looked at the ceiling.
"I can't read him," he admitted. "And you know I don't say that often." He looked at her. "Can you?"
"That's why I'm asking you," she said. "I can't see his future. There's too much uncertainty around him — not just him, everyone near him. The threads don't resolve."
"His enemies aren't limited to this universe," Odin said. "I can tell that much. Whatever is coming will be multiversal in scope. He'll have enemies from outside this reality and allies from outside this reality."
"I came to the same conclusion." She folded her hands. "I thought perhaps you'd seen something I hadn't."
"The future is for the next generation," Odin said. He had the tone of a man who had been saying this for a while and mostly believed it. "We're both — shall we say — on the way out. It's not our problem."
The Ancient One looked at him.
"You say that," she said, "but I notice that one of us just sent a completely opaque young man with an unreadable future into our treasury to take whatever he wants. While technically being 'on the way out.'"
Odin had the expression of a man who had been caught doing something that required a better explanation than he currently had.
"Besides," she added, with the slight edge of someone who had been building to something, "some of us who were supposed to be 'on the way out' have apparently been visiting Midgard to give parenting advice to our children. Which is not, strictly speaking, the behavior of someone who has accepted their exit."
A pause.
"I heard about the exile," she said.
Odin said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
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