When Loki first sees her, coalescing out of the dust of Svartalfheim, he recognizes her immediately, and his instinctive reaction is one of unutterable relief. Finally, after everything, she is here, and he cannot even hate her for what he endured because of her. If she is here to carry out her only task, he can forgive anything.

He sits up stiffly. The hole in his chest still burns, but distantly; in the same way, he feels the gravel shift under his coat as he moves, the sand whipping against him and stinging his unprotected skin, but these sensations all seem vague and far away.

He watches her approach, and she watches him in return, her eyes sharp and dark and infinitely knowing. She is not young, he knows that, but she looks young, and only her bone-white skin and dark clothing mark her as who and what she is. She is dressed simply: black trousers, black boots, a sleeveless black tunic.

"Hi, Loki," she says, stopping a few paces away from him. No patronymic: that is probably for the best.

"Well met, Lady Death," he replies with a deep nod, the closest he can get to a proper bow from his position. He is already on the ground and he doesn't particularly think he has the strength to stand up.

"Oh, hey, no reason for the title," she says. "If it makes you more comfortable, go for it, but I don't really stand on formalities."

Loki studies her for a moment and realizes that not only is her garb very simple, it also appears Midgardian in design—and in fact the symbol on the long chain around her neck is, he thinks, Midgardian as well. "Forgive me," he says finally, "but…you are not quite what I expected."

"Yeah, probably not," she says easily. "I usually let people's expectations influence how I appear to them, but you didn't need me to." She settles cross-legged in the dirt across from him, and he finds himself unable to look away from her direct, piercing gaze. "I wanted to talk to you."

Loki stiffens, his hands tightening on his knees, and he keeps his voice level with an effort. "You are here to take me, are you not?"

Death grimaces apologetically. "No. Sorry. It's still not your time yet."

The sympathy on her face is real, Loki knows that without a doubt, but he still feels his stomach clench in dismay and something that might be panic. "But you're here," he says, trying to keep the desperation out of his tone. "Why—?"

"You're near death," she says. "You're not actually dead yet. Your healing's already kicking in. But it was a good opportunity to talk to you."

Loki exhales. No, of course not. Of course it is not his time, because the Norns yet wish to make sport of him. Suddenly he is exhausted, far beyond the physical stress of doing battle and being impaled, and the idea that he still cannot rest feels like a heavy weight settling on his bones.

If he is to survive, he will do so, and do it well; he knows how to survive, how to work toward something he wants in a seemingly impossible situation. But at the moment he cannot remember the last time he felt so tired.

"Fine," he says flatly. "What do you wish of me, then?"

She says very seriously, "I need you not to forget about Thanos."

He sputters out an incredulous laugh. "Forget—? Perhaps you underestimate the impression he makes on others—or you think far too highly of my ability to simply brush off…everything. You do realize that for my failure, he considers me unworthy of you? I can hardly forget the plans he has for me." The Other's voice hisses in his memory, and he clenches his fists. He will not, will not let Thanos tear him apart. Not again. (He has no choice in the matter, not when he sees the Titan and his servants in his nightmares almost every night.)

"I know," she says, and that's not pity in her eyes, he knows it's not, but it itches at him all the same. "That's not what I meant. Right now, you have a choice most people don't get. For all anyone else is concerned, you just died on Svartalfheim, and only you and I know differently, for the moment. So you can disappear…or you can do something Thanos doesn't expect."

Loki stares at her. "Are you telling me to stop him?"

"No, but I am telling you it's in everyone's best interests if you try."

"I am a traitor," Loki says. "An outcast, a pawn, a kinslayer, a monster who failed even at destroying himself and his fellow monsters. You would do better taking your message elsewhere."

"Yeah, maybe," she says. "Thing is, you know more than almost anyone else about what he wants to do and how he plans to do it, and right now, you're in a pretty unique position to work against him."

"Forgive me if I seem a touch slow to understand," Loki says, unable to keep all the acid from his tone (not that he is trying very hard). "I still have a rather large hole in my chest, and it is a bit jarring to be told to return to work when one is already engaged in the business of dying—fairly peacefully at that, finally."

"I know," she repeats, instead of laughing at him or becoming irritated in turn. "Ask away."

Loki breathes out through his nose, grasping for calm and not quite making it. "To clarify: you want him stopped. You do not want his sacrifices. You do not want him to—to unmake the Realms for you."

"Never did."

"Never. Of course." His chest feels tight, and he is dimly aware that his breath is coming short. "So everything he has done to win your favor, the worlds he has already destroyed, it was all for naught. Everything he sent me to do on Midgard—everything he did to me—" He snaps his mouth shut on the words. She already knows, he knows she knows, but he has spoken it aloud to no one and he is not going to start now. This one thing, he can still control.

There is genuine sympathy in her gaze, again. At the moment, it does not help much. "I could tell you that everything has meaning, good or bad, but that's probably not what you want to hear right now—"

"No it is not," Loki says tightly.

"—and the more concrete answer is, I didn't ask for any of it. Thanos did what he did because he believed I wanted it, not because I ever encouraged him. People do offer sacrifices sometimes, but I've never asked for that—never needed or wanted that, especially on the scale he has in mind."

"Then why have you not told him that," Loki snarls, nearly vibrating with anger and the effort of restraining himself from actually shouting at her.

She raises one eyebrow, wrinkling the symbol under her other eye. "You really think that didn't occur to me? Of course I told him. As soon as I realized what he was doing and why, I told him I wasn't interested. That was…quite a while ago, now."

"But…that cannot…" Loki shakes his head, confusion momentarily overtaking anger. "He is certain. I have never seen a being more confident that he is on the path to what he wants, and I grew up with Thor."

"Well, yeah," she says. "Sometimes people stop listening when you're not saying what they want to hear. You know how it goes."

All right, yes, he is not entirely lacking in self-awareness, and he can recognize the statement is as true of himself as it is of Thor and Odin, but— "Perhaps you were simply not clear enough—"

"I said I wasn't interested. He turned that into 'I'm being coy and I just want you to work for it.' I said I really, honestly wasn't interested and I didn't want his sacrifices, and he heard, 'Your sacrifices aren't impressive enough,' and that's what he keeps hearing, no matter how clear I am about not wanting sacrifices, period." She shakes her head. "I've told him to stop, that this isn't the way to impress me, that nothing he does is going to make me want him like he wants me, that I'm not interested in him personally. Whatever variation you're thinking, I've probably tried it. He won't hear it—literally, I think. I'm pretty sure Lady Death being voiceless got worked into his fantasy at some point."

Loki is silent for a moment. "And if you told him yes?"

She huffs out a mirthless laugh. "Oh, yeah, that would end well. He's already just hearing what he wants to hear. What do you think would happen if I rewarded him for that?"

"He would believe his methods were effective, and he would continue destroying worlds to please you," Loki says with a sigh.

"Bingo. Absolutely nothing to be gained there."

"Fine," Loki says. "Fine. So he refuses to listen to reason, or anything at all from anyone not himself. But if he will not hear you, then surely—you are Death. Cannot you stop him?"

She sighs, leaning back on her hands. She looks perfectly comfortable sitting on the ground, and Loki realizes (with a flicker of annoyance he recognizes is absurd) that her pitch-black clothing seems to be repelling the sand, because it does not look dirty at all. For his part, Loki can taste the ash and dust, and he suspects he is filthy even under his armor. "See, that's where it gets sticky. Where I come from, there are some pretty firm rules, and here it turns out there are even more—rules way older than you or Thanos and a little older than even me. I could break the rules and take him out, theoretically, but the end result would be way more destructive than anything he could do."

"I see," Loki says. He does, actually; he has studied and used enough magic to know that some laws of reality simply are, immutable no matter the power of the one seeking to change them. This knowledge does nothing to make him feel any less weary, and for a moment he thinks the weight of all this really will crush him, that he lacks the strength to do anything but sink into the dust of this barren realm and sleep there forever.

Still more exhausting is the inescapable awareness that he will not do this—he will get up and stagger across the plain until he finds a thin spot that will take him away from this rock, and see whether Thor has his own battle in hand, and find a place to heal and make his own plans. He knows this, because in all his centuries as a prince of Asgard, he went overlooked and unthanked and sometimes he sowed chaos to force others to remember his existence, and still he did his duty (or tried, which he is tired enough now to recognize is not always the same thing, given the disaster that was his brief reign and the ways he justified some of his decisions). He knows this, too, because in his despair he let himself fall into an abyss, intending and expecting to perish, and still he did not die, some small part of him determined to fight and survive even when his waking mind had utterly given up—and again, when Thanos broke him apart and reshaped him, when wisdom would have argued for acceding, for relinquishing even the fragments of himself that he managed to retain. He has wanted, over and over, to give up and give in; and each time he has found himself, in the end, unable to do so.

He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, head bowed. Without looking up, he says in a tone devoid of emotion, "Then what would you have me do, my lady?"

"That's still up to you," she says gently, too gently. "Like I said, it's still your choice. But I think if you take a little time to rest, you'll know where to start. Don't worry about Malekith," she adds. "Thor and Jane have that under control."

"Oh," Loki says. Well, at least he need not waste his limited energy there, although on the heels of that thought comes the familiar bitterness that once again Thor has no need of him. "Thank you for telling me."

"He's not just going to forget about you, you know," she says. "He never did before." He frowns at her, and she smiles, lopsided. "Believe me, I know something about complicated sibling relationships."

"Matters between us are a bit more than merely complicated," Loki says

"I know something about that too." She shrugs. "Just something to file away for later."

"I…perhaps," Loki says, because yes, at some point he will have to deal with the tangle his mind becomes every time he thinks about the man who was never and always his brother—but not yet, not until he is ready (if he is ever ready). For now, he prefers to focus on more immediate concerns anyway. If Malekith is no longer a threat, one way or another, then the Aether itself is the next priority. His tired mind presses onward almost despite himself, considering possibilities, likely outcomes. Odin will want to keep it, never mind that he must know now what it truly is and that keeping it near the Tesseract (and, worse, the empty Infinity Gauntlet) could be disastrous. He will simply have to make sure it never reaches the Allfather. Perhaps a message of some kind to Heimdall, who is at least canny enough to take appropriate action if he understands what manner of weapon Thor will bring back to Asgard…

"Right," Death says, smiling again, "there you go. I'll leave you to it." She climbs to her feet, clothes still spotlessly clean of dust, and turns to go.

"Wait," he says. She turns before the word is even out of his mouth, and he is sure she already knows what he wants to ask, but he says it anyway: "My—my mother. Is…is she happy?"

"I don't know," Death says, "I'm sorry," and he knows she means it. "Over here, I'm mostly the guide. I'm not always in charge of what comes after, and I don't rule Valhalla."

Loki swallows hard—something jagged seems to have lodged itself in his throat—and does not want to ask what he needs to know, not when the compassion on her face is already unbearable and he is certain she knows this question too. Finally he blurts out, "Did she suffer? Thor did not—I asked, once, and he never answered, and then…there might have been time, but I was…I feared he did not tell me because she did suffer." And if Thor had refused to speak of it because the truth was too horrible—craven as it was, Loki did not want to know, still does not want to know. He has to ask anyway.

"Algrim's sword pierced her heart," Death says gently. "It was quick. I won't tell you she felt no pain at all, because that wouldn't be true, and dying usually hurts at least a little. But for her, it was over very quickly."

Loki bows his head. He is…glad to know that, he supposes, although the information does nothing to lessen the ache of grief and guilt. "Thank you."

"And yes," she says, "to answer the question you're not actually going to ask, there's every chance you'll see her again, someday."

He looks up at that, startled. "But you said—she is in Valhalla. Wherever I am destined to go, surely those halls are barred to me."

"Maybe," she says. "Maybe not. Could be Valhalla's not quite what you think. Could be you're not destined anywhere specific just yet. Could be Ragnarok throws a wrench into everything. Who knows?"

"Not you, I take it," Loki says, studying her. The words are glib, promising nothing, but the tone is not entirely flippant, and something about those ancient eyes in her cheerful young face is oddly steadying. Almost as if, despite everything, a flicker of hope still exists—for the Realms, and even for him.

"Educated guess." She steps closer and rests one hand on his hair, smiling down at him—and then she is gone, vanishing cleanly between one heartbeat and the next, only her words echoing behind her: "Be well, Loki Friggasson."

For a long moment Loki sits unmoving, all the aches settling back into his body and the tentative beginnings of plans settling into his mind. Then he carefully climbs to his feet and begins his slow trek toward the hills.

I actually haven't read that much of The Sandman, for some reason, but at some point it occurred to me to wonder what things might be like if the focus of Thanos' obsession were none other than Death of the Endless and maybe she didn't like him back-and then of course I started thinking about that from a Loki-centric perspective, because I'm me. This was the result and I really don't know what else to say about it. Title is from Eliot's "The Hollow Men," because look, I haven't used an Eliot fic title since my Harry Potter days, it was bound to happen again eventually.