Get Help Ragnarok

After the Battle of New York, Loki was brought back to Asgard in chains. He was supposed to spend the rest of his life in a glass cell deep in the dungeons. But Loki, being Loki, was not done being clever yet.

The story of how he ended up secretly ruling Asgard is a tangled one, but the short version is this. Loki was very good at pretending. He could change his shape. He could change his voice. He could even, with enough effort, change someone's mind about whether they were looking at him at all.

So Loki pretended to die.

He was good at it. Truly first-rate. He had been practicing the death-fake for centuries — falling dramatically with his hand on his chest, gasping out a final clever sentence, going still while everyone in the room held their breath. He had done it so many times that Thor sometimes complained Loki was crying wolf. But this time, Loki really sold it. And when no one was looking, he sneaked away.

Then he snuck back to Asgard. He used his magic to disguise himself as Odin — the long silver beard, the heavy golden armor, the wise tired voice — and he sat down on the throne.

For years.

Loki, secretly, was king of Asgard.

He had a wonderful time. He ate grapes. He had servants peel them for him. He commissioned a play about his own heroic death — a very dramatic play, with actors pretending to be Loki and Thor and Odin, and a tearful scene at the end where Heroic Loki sacrificed himself for the good of the realm. Loki sat in the royal box every night, watching, with a small private smile.

The only problem was that Loki was not actually running the kingdom very well. He was too busy enjoying being king to do the boring parts of being king. Defenses got neglected. Edge realms got restless. And in a prison far, far away, somebody who should have stayed locked up was beginning to stir.

Then one day Thor came home.

Thor was suspicious immediately. Something about the way "Odin" was lounging on the throne felt off. Thor leaned forward. Thor poked "Odin" with the tip of his sword.

POOF! The illusion fell apart. Loki was sitting there in his green tunic, holding a half-eaten grape, looking caught.

"Hello, brother," Loki said weakly.

Thor sighed the deep tired sigh of an older brother who has been dealing with this kind of thing for nine hundred years.

The brothers needed to find the real Odin, who had been hidden away on Earth. Their search did not go well. By the time they finally found their father, Odin was old and ready to die. With his last breaths, Odin warned them about something they did not yet know — that they had a sister, an older sister, named Hela. The Goddess of Death. She had been imprisoned for a long, long time, kept far from Asgard's throne. Now that Odin was gone, she would be free.

Hela appeared almost at once. She was enormous, dressed all in black with sharp antlers rising from her head like a crown. She raised one hand, and Mjolnir — Thor's mighty hammer, the hammer no one else in the universe could lift — flew toward her. She caught it.

And shattered it like glass.

Thor and Loki had time only to leap into the Bifrost before Hela came after them. The light of the rainbow bridge swallowed them up and spat them out the other side — not on a planet they had chosen, but on a planet that the Bifrost had pulled them toward. Sakaar.

Sakaar was the strangest world in the Nine Realms. It was a planet of garbage. All across the universe, there were small wormholes in space — and any ship or piece of debris that fell through one ended up here, on Sakaar, washed up among the heaps. The ruler was an old, glittering, eccentric fellow called the Grandmaster, who liked one thing more than anything else in the universe — gladiator games.

Thor got captured immediately and thrown into the Grandmaster's arena.

Loki, of course, did not get thrown into the arena. Loki found his way upstairs, charmed the Grandmaster within an afternoon, and was soon sitting on a balcony in a fresh new outfit, drinking something fizzy out of a glass shaped like a star.

This was very Loki.

But then the news came. Hela was destroying Asgard. The Asgardian people were trapped. Without Thor and Loki, no one would save them.

Thor escaped the arena with the help of a former Asgardian warrior called Valkyrie and a giant green friend you may have heard of — Hulk had been on Sakaar the whole time, having a great time NOT being Hulk's quieter side, Bruce Banner. The four of them — Thor, Loki, Valkyrie, and Hulk — needed to escape Sakaar and fly to Asgard immediately.

The only ships big enough were in the Grandmaster's hangar. The hangar was guarded.

And that is where one of the funniest moments in all of Marvel happens.

Thor and Loki stood together at the end of the long corridor. Thor put his arm around Loki's shoulders.

"We're going to do Get Help," Thor said.

"NO," Loki said immediately. "Absolutely not. I hate that trick. It's humiliating."

"It works."

"It does NOT work every time. It works for YOU, sometimes, when I'm in a bad mood and you catch me off guard."

"Get help. Come on. Classic."

Get Help was an old trick from when the brothers were kids in Asgard. The setup was simple. Thor would pretend Loki had been badly hurt. They would limp into a crowded room, with Thor's arm around Loki, and Thor would shout dramatic things — "MY BROTHER, HE'S DYING, PLEASE, SOMEONE GET HELP." And then, when the helpful strangers got close, Thor would suddenly heave Loki at them like a bowling ball.

Thor argued. Loki resisted. Eventually Loki rolled his eyes and gave in, the way younger brothers do.

They walked toward the guards. Thor began to shout. "HELP! MY BROTHER IS DYING! GET HELP! GET HELP! PLEASE!"

Loki groaned dramatically and let his head loll.

The guards turned. They looked confused. They began to approach.

And at the very last second, Thor LIFTED Loki up — green and gold and yelping — and HURLED him directly into the guards.

CRASH! BANG! STRIKE!

The guards went down like bowling pins. Loki bounced off them and rolled to a stop on the floor.

"I HATE this," he muttered into the marble. "I really, deeply, completely HATE this."

Thor jogged over, helped him up, and patted him on the back. "Get help. Works every time."

They stole a ship called the Commodore — bright purple, ridiculous, very fast — and rocketed off Sakaar in a streak of light. The four of them flew to Asgard. There they faced Hela.

Loki, in that final battle, did something brave. He looked at the burning city of his childhood, and he made a hard suggestion. The only way to defeat Hela was to destroy Asgard itself — to bring back Surtur, the fire demon, and let Surtur's flaming sword strike the heart of the realm. Hela's power was tied to Asgard. If the land was gone, Hela was gone.

"Asgard is not a place," Thor said slowly, understanding. "It's a people."

The people boarded the refugee ship called the Statesman. Loki, in a moment few people remember to mention, also slipped into the vault one last time and quietly — for reasons of his own that he would not yet explain — pocketed the Tesseract.

The Statesman flew away into the dark. Behind it, Asgard burned. Surtur's flaming sword struck the realm and the golden city exploded into light. Hela was gone with it.

On the bridge of the refugee ship, Thor sat next to his brother. He looked out the window at the slowly fading glow where their home had been. Then he looked at Loki.

"You know," Thor said. "It's good to have you back."

Loki opened his mouth, ready, out of habit, to say something sharp. Something clever. Something that would deflect the kindness.

And then he stopped.

For once, he just nodded.

"It's good to be back," he said quietly.

For the first time in a very long time, the brothers of the storm and the shadow were on the same side. And they meant it.

It would not last. Hard times were coming. But this — this small moment, on a refugee ship, drifting in the dark — was real. And neither of them would ever forget it.