Avengers Thunder

The first time Thor met the Avengers, he picked up Tony Stark by the collar and threw him into a tree.

It was not the smoothest beginning.

To be fair, Tony had fired a particle beam at him. And Thor had been in the middle of a very important argument with his brother Loki at the time, and being interrupted by a man in a red-and-gold suit was — well, Thor was still working on his temperament. The tree was fine. Tony's armor was fine. Mostly fine.

What followed, after the tree, was a lot of yelling. Then more yelling. Then an extremely large green person appeared and hit Thor with something very large, which Thor found surprisingly satisfying. Then Captain America said, in a voice that managed to be both calm and utterly commanding, "That's enough."

And somehow, it was.

Thor looked around at the assembled figures — the man in the red-and-gold suit, the soldier in blue, the woman who moved like water and fought like a storm, the man with the bow who never missed, the large green fellow — and had the strange thought that he had not expected this world to have any warriors worth noticing.

He had been wrong.

The Chitauri came through the sky above Manhattan in a long, terrible stream — an alien army pouring through a portal held open by the Tesseract's power, the same blue cube Thor knew from Asgard's history, now being used as a door to Earth. Their war machines roared overhead. Their soldiers filled the streets. The city was bright and burning.

Captain America spoke. Everyone moved.

"Thor," Steve said, with a kind of easy certainty that Thor found deeply comfortable, "can you light the top of the Chrysler Building?"

"Happily," said Thor.

BOOM. The lightning found the spire. The electrical charge pulsed through the city's systems. The plan worked.

Afterward, eating something called a "shawarma" in a destroyed restaurant — still in their armor, too tired to move, surrounded by rubble — Thor tried to eat his shawarma with a fork, found this unsatisfying, and picked it up with both hands. Tony watched him do this and made a small approving sound.

They were family, in their way. The strange kind of family that is assembled from people who would never have found each other otherwise, held together by purpose and proximity and the shared experience of having saved the world together on a Tuesday.

Thor brought things to the team that no sensor or satellite could provide. He understood the Infinity Stones — what they were, where they came from, what would happen if someone brought them all together. He understood the Chitauri, the ancient empires of the universe, the threats that existed beyond the thin blue shell of Earth's atmosphere.

He was the window through which Earth's Mightiest Heroes could see the larger world they lived in.

He also brought the thunder, which was useful.

In the large battles — the ones where the enemy came in quantities that overwhelmed any human measure — Thor was the heavy hitter. He would rise above the battlefield on Mjolnir's strap, or later on Stormbreaker's momentum, and look down at the shape of the fight the way a general studies a map. Then he would pick the most important place — the place where a single enormous bolt of lightning would do the most good — and he would fall like a hammer from the sky.

BOOOOOM.

He could stop a Leviathan. He could bring down a Chitauri carrier. He could face things that would vaporize a human being and emerge from the smoke still standing.

He knew what this meant. His Asgardian body, built for a thousand years of battle, was the thing that allowed him to take the most dangerous hits so that his mortal teammates did not have to. He put himself between them and the things that would kill them.

He did it without being asked, and without keeping track.

There was a night, after a battle in which things had gone wrong in several complicated ways, when Bruce Banner found Thor sitting alone on the roof of the Avengers compound, looking at the stars.

"Those are your neighborhood, aren't they," Bruce said. "The stars."

"Some of them," Thor said. He pointed to a cluster near the horizon. "Asgard used to be near those."

"Used to be," Bruce said quietly.

"Yes." Thor was quiet for a moment. "I lost a great deal. My home. My people. My family."

Bruce sat down beside him. "The team helps. When everything else is gone, at least there's the team."

Thor looked at Bruce Banner — brilliant, gentle, complicated Bruce Banner — and thought about what it meant to find family in unexpected places. About Odin, who had built something like a family from warriors and scientists and wanderers. About the choice to stay, to protect, to build something new.

"Yes," Thor said again. And this time the word was full of a different kind of weight.

Above them, the stars burned on — those ancient, enormous, indifferent lights that Thor had known from a distance since before Earth had been more than a promising young planet. He was older than most things on this world. He would outlive many of them.

But he was here now. With these people. In this moment.

The thunder was quiet tonight. The sky was clear.

He was content.