THE INBETWEEN ~ STEVE ROGERS [5]

Asgard is dead

You know that funny feeling you get, just before a storm?

It's the little things. The wind picks up. Your skin feels electric, static making your hair stand up straight. The air smells like chaos, like dirt and sea salt and fresh rain. It bubbles in your stomach, the knowing, the anticipation of something big and frightening coming your way.

These little worries were my bane for months. I tried explaining it to Steve, I really did. But when you're connected to a power outside your world, to something bigger than yourself, no one can truly understand unless they are the same.

Loki had been twanging the strings of our tether for days. It was like an electric shock to the brain, a wake up call in the middle of the night that left me sweating and heart beating a million miles an hour.

"Something is wrong," I had confessed to Steve. "It's like he's trying to warn me."

I tried reaching out to Doctor Strange, hoping he would want to know something was up, but despite my efforts I couldn't find him. I guess he was a 'I'll call you' kind of guy.

My brother seemed more concerned than Steve, to be honest. Steve was used to me having these feelings, these worries when it came to the tether but T'Challa had taken me seriously when I called him to express my fears. For him, a bond across the universe was not unheard of and his fears reflected my own.

Something was coming.

That bubble in my chest, the heavy lead weight of worry needed a release, and one night, I got my wish.

It began in the early hours of the morning, when the moonlight still shone faintly through the cracks in the curtains of our motel room. Sam was snoring next door, and I had found myself in a half sleep for the last four hours, mind wandering from thought to thought in the drugged, sluggish way of the night.

Without warning I slipped into the dark, not sleep but unfiltered consciousness, a plane I had hoped not to revisit. Here, only bad things were revealed.

First it was anguish, tearing open my chest with the screams of a thousand voices cut short. I writhed, squeezing my eyes shut to no avail. I saw flashes of death, bodies floating among the stars, frozen wails still on their faces

One thousand blows hit my skin, shredding me. My mind was on fire with the sounds of a people being slaughtered.

My people.

Asgardians.

Second, a fear like none I had ever experienced filled me up and overflowed, and when the sceptre, a weapon I hated like no other, pierced my heart I couldn't make a sound. Cold and hard as the eyes of a shark it ebbed the life from my body as quickly as it had been created.

Only I was not being killed. A dark-skinned face flashed across my eyes, kind and strong and dead, accompanied by a name.

Heimdell.

Third, after all that pain, there was a harsh and bitter metal taste in my mouth as something grasped my neck, it squeezed, blocking the air from my lungs eye burning from lack of oxygen. A third time I was being murdered. His feelings were mine; guilt and love, regret and...hope, meant just for me.

I felt my neck, his neck, snap and his soul left, on its way to heaven or hell or Valhalla.

The tether snapped, like broken guitar strings, the whiplash forcing my body to convulse and my mind to scream white hot.

Loki.

When I woke, or when my mind came back from wherever it had been, not even my husband's cool hands wrapped around my waist could stop my shudders. Throat raw, hands trembling, heart weeping with a pain of which I couldn't describe.

It was beginning, the storm, and I had witnessed its start. Whatever was coming, it would soon be here. Loki had been right to be afraid, and now he was dead.

And I wailed in agony for the loss of a people I would never know.