HeartBound {Avengers Fanfic}

Chapter 19: Old Friends

"My skin has turned to porcelain, to ivory, to steel."

–George R. R. Martin

Freyja propped her right leg on the couch to get a better angle at which to heal the energy burns. Knowing she would have to save her strength, she called on the energy of the Tesseract, which was safely around her neck once more, to help her. The Avengers and Nick Fury sat around Tony's living room, all looking at her for answers. Fury's stare, in particular, was practically tangible and she felt as though his gaze was almost burning her.

"I suppose I owe you an explanation," she sighed.

"Now you owe me an explanation?" Fury asked skeptically. "You owed me an explanation the second you arrived. Now you owe me a goddamned solution. What the hell was that thing and what does it want?"

"His name is Thanos," she told him, wincing at his tone. "He's of a race known as the Eternals, an offshoot of humans who once held a colony on Saturn's moon, Titan. You would not find it now, as he nearly wiped it out of existence. He's obsessed with Death and the Tesseract. For some reason, he believes it will allow him to win her favor, quite possibly by using it to further his destruction."

"Death is a woman?" Tony asked.

Freyja shook her head, "She is an Entity, a physical embodiment of an idea, and is therefore neither man nor woman. However, she does present herself most often in female form.

"Thanos is in love with her – or he believes himself to be. However, he cannot get to the Tesseract, nor the information he seeks, without first finding me. I thought he would not come to Earth, as he knows my empathy for Midgard would never allow me to put you in danger. I was mistaken. Something must be happening, something which is making him desperate, and it is not just his loss during the attack he forced Loki to make against you last year..."

"How do you know all of this?" Bruce asked.

"Because I knew him as a child."

Everyone stared at her, each face plastered with a different emotion. She could practically hear the blood vessel in Fury's head burst, however. He looked as though he might strangle her. Despite his glare, Freyja felt relief wash through her as the magic binding her didn't keep the words from being said.

"My people found him abandoned on an asteroid, alone and covered in blood, and we thought he had been the victim. He seemed so kind to us. We never realized how manipulative he was, how he used our compassion in order to get closer to the Tesseract. Then he met me. I was living proof of his hypotheses, and so he became reckless.

"He ran experiments on himself, taking in miniscule amounts of the Tesseract's energy into his own body, in his pursuit for Death. Hundreds died at his hands until we cast him out of the Nine Realms. But I'll never forget how he looked at me. How he thought I was the answer to all of his questions."

"Why did you not tell us this?" Thor asked.

"All of Vanaheim took an oath of silence regarding Thanos," she explained. "We could not speak of him to outsiders unless doing so was absolutely necessary."

"What makes it any more necessary now than it was before?" Fury demanded.

"He is threatening the lives of every person on this planet. By doing so, he made it necessary for you to know of him."

"So where is he?" Natasha asked.

"Likely rallying an army," Freyja explained.

"You don't know?" Tony asked. "I thought you could see the future."