This is what she gets for thinking a nine hour drive would be more relaxing than a one and a half hour flight. She’d been thinking with her wallet at the time and by the time the rain starts coming down in the late evening while her hatchback is struggling down the waterlogged dirt road a little ways from the Indiana border, she’s cursing her self of two days ago who’d reasoned that a nice long drive would be a good way to decompress before having to face the reality waiting for her in Virginia.

There is nothing decompressing about her windscreen wipers going back and forth in brutal defence of the rain, her headlights the only illumination of the road for several miles. She’s hunched up in her seat, trying to peer out as best she could, but natural light has all but slipped away from the sky, and she’s been forced to reduce her speed to a crawl just to make sure she doesn’t go veering off the side of the road. 

That’s the only reason, when the figure appears seemingly from nowhere in the middle of the road, she’s able to slam on the brakes hard and fast enough, to stop her car from crashing into the man. She doesn’t realise the scream that had come from her mouth in her shock, nor the horn she had pressed down until a few moments pass and the car comes to a skidding halt inches from the man, tyres desperately trying to hold tract on the slippery road. 

Adrenalin shoots through her, and she breathes hard and fast, arms straight in front of her clutching the steering wheel in a white knuckled grip while her foot remains like lead on the brake. There’s nothing but the sound of her breathing inside the car, and the grating of her wipers that continue to dash back and forth across her windshield. Outside the rain continue to bucket down and right in front of her the man stares in her headlights. 

A few more seconds pass before she moves again, pulling up the handbrake and shutting off the engine. Half of her is still reeling from the fact that she very nearly killed a man on this godforsaken stretch of road — which she will be hundred percent filing a complaint about when she gets back home. The other half of her is wondering what kind of man would be out wandering alone in the middle of the storm — where was he going, or more concerning, where was he coming from ? In any other situation, Rebecca would have locked her doors, stayed put, and shut her mouth . . . but she had almost just run him over. 

' No, ' he says, surprised at first that she would assume, then remembers that there are stories about him all over the world. They differ depending on what side you were on but all of them paint him as a dangerous man. Surely — not dangerous to her ? Gods run among them. He has a serum in his veins that makes him stronger and taller and that much harder to kill but he would never pretend to be a god.

He’d fought next to a god, summoned down by the cries of help of his own believers. Thor is how he knows how to find her. An offhand comment about the soldiers who would make it to Valhalla — and those that would be claimed by the Underworld. 

Steve crashes the Valkyrie into the icy waters of the Atlantic, the missiles go off around him and he’s buffeted with their force taken far by the ocean current. He’s fished out by Howard Stark, and a few weeks later, they win the war.

The war is over and it should feel like everything they’d done to win it, the lines they crossed, the people they lost, the people who sacrificed themselves — were all worth it. But Steve still can’t sleep at night. He relives the moments, the days, the years of the war over and over again. There is so much death but he’d wade through it all to have the few, brief flashes of his friend’s face scattered in amongst those memories. Sometimes he was smiling, sometimes he was even laughing. Most of the time he was haunted, but by that time, weren’t they all ?

‘ Is it real ? ’ he’d asked Thor once, after he’d decimated an entire field of enemy troops that would’ve taken Steve and his humankind weeks to get past. ‘ Valhalla ? The Underworld ? Heaven, hell ? ’

Thor had smiled at him, campfire flickering shadows across his face and making him appear every bit as majestic and mythical as the stories say. ‘ We’d have to die to find out. But . . . I know of one who traverses both worlds, who takes from one to feed another, who rules it . . . Her name is Persephone. ’ 

Steve had choked on his spam, coughing out, ‘ The Greek goddess ? The queen of the underworld ? ’

Placing a hand on Steve’s back, and smiling in that serene way that makes Steve feel young and naïve, Thor had said, ‘ You say that with such disbelief, as if not long ago you thought I dwelled only in children’s fairy tales. ’