Puzzle Of A Chosen Trickster

We Lost

(Narrator POV)
They had lost to Thanos. Half of the population was immediately gone. Turned to dust and thrown into the breeze to blow away like ash after a fire.

Tony was grieving, as most people were. He had to watch friends and the boy he considered a son disappear right in front of him.

He just kept hearing Peter's voice echoing throughout his head and it hurt. Tony could barely sleep, or eat, or think of something other than the sheer panic he saw in the teen's eyes.

Tony was currently wallowing away on a couch in some house that the less emotionally scarred Avengers (were they even Avengers anymore? What was there left to avenge?) had brought the more distraught ones to.

It had been 2 months since the Snap(™) and everyone was still trying to cope and make it better. Some people were worse for wear than others.

Steve was trying to move on so he could be a good leader and find a way to get the team through this in order to find a solution and bring everyone back.

Natasha was trying to help pull the fraying team back together and sew all the gaping wounds closed. She was trying to help Steve get the team back on their feet while also hunting down two of her best friends.

Clint and Bruce had both vanished not long after everything happened. Bruce for reasons that nobody was really certain of, and Clint because his entire family had turned to dust and he had to go home to the shell of a life he loved so much.

Thor was drinking and pushing his responsibilities as King onto anyone who would take it. Of course, not many people were even left to be ruled at this point, but everyone carefully tiptoed around that thought. He had enough to worry about while grieving his brother that had died in his arms (again, but for real this time).

Tony, as mentioned before, was wallowing. He was trying to pull it together and make the jokes, but then his masks would come crashing down and put extra weight on his chest that made it hard to breathe.

Everyone else had wandered off to do whatever it is you do when most of the people you knew and loved are now dust and you have no way to fix it.

All in all, it wasn't going great.

The (ex?) Avengers were all currently sitting in a house that Tony didn't recognize (but apparently bought at some point if Natasha was telling the truth), and they were all completely silent. It was getting kind of awkward and Tony had been listening to so much music recently in order to drown out everyone's voices that hearing silence made him want to throw up his whiskey.

That's why his eyes were trailing all over the old cabin they were in. Natasha was seemingly having a silent conversation via the eyes with Steve. They both looked oddly calm, but the furrow between the Captain's brows suggested that he was disagreeing with her on something.

Watching them having a staring contest quickly became less than enough to distract him so Tony's eyes fell on the sorrowful God in the armchair to his right.

He looked insanely tired with dark bags under his eyes and a hung head. His eyes were slightly red and were glassy in a way that told Tony that he was holding back more tears. He blamed himself, clearly, by the way he kept looking pained and then guilty.

Thor was staring at his lap where his hands were fiddling with some object which drew in his observer's interest immediately.

In his hands, was what appeared to be a pitch black stone. Circular, but more thin than a sphere (only a few inches thick) and about the size of an orange. All over the stone were very brightly glowing green markings that looked kind of like intricate runes. At just the right angle, they almost all seemed to line up in a way that made it look like the whole stone shimmered gold and green before Thor would move it and it would go back to black.