Bruce has set up a makeshift lab in Wakanda, while the world takes stock of their dead and Wakanda mourns for their king. Bruce isn’t doing anything important, but he needs to do something, so he studies Wakanda’s vibranium supply and attempts to keep Shuri busy.
Otherwise, the grief might just be too much for the both of them to bear.
Bruce also tries very hard not to think about Tony and what form of matter Tony may or may not be at this very moment. He’s only moderately successful.
It’s on the third day of the second week after half of the world has turned to ash that Thor brings Bruce a little green snake. Bruce is baffled, but he tried to be polite about it. Bruce is heartsick, though, so that makes everything a little harder.
Then Thor asks for Bruce to see if the snake is Loki, and it takes every bit of willpower Bruce Banner poses to not burst into tears. Thor is so strong and so keen to smile, he makes it so easy for everyone to forget that he has lost nearly everything.
Bruce pokes at the snake without any further complaints. When nothing happens, the grief on Thor’s face is unimaginable.
Bruce begins spending time with both Thor and Shuri, in a desperate attempt to combat his own grief by combatting theirs.
All the while, every second or third day, Thor brings Bruce a small green animal and asks Bruce to see if it his lost brother. Bruce checks every time, with care and precision, but the result is always negative. It’s awful for both of them, but Thor can’t seem to stop and Bruce doesn’t know how to make him.
This pattern holds for a few weeks, until Thor brings Bruce a beaten and battered lizard. It’d been burned somehow and it looked like one of its limbs had been badly broken. When Thor presents it to him, Bruce honestly isn’t sure if Thor had just brought the little thing to Bruce to see if it could be saved.
“Could you check?” Thor asks, the question quiet and hurt after so many weeks of negative results from Bruce’s prodding and poking.
“Of course,” Bruce says softly, adding his portion of the call and response.
He gingerly picks up the lizard, as the poor also looks like he’d been through the wringer, and gives him a quick once over. Bruce’d been right about the broken leg and the burns were pretty –
The lizard fucking turns into Loki. A damaged, burnt Loki who scuttles backward on a broken leg while spitting blood.
Thor bursts into tears. Bruce bursts out laughing. Everyone has their own way of processing grief and shock and grief turned into shock, apparently.
It’s later, when they’ve gotten Loki a little patched up, convinced Okoye not to kill Loki (”He tried to destroy the world!” she says – “He’s gotten better,” Bruce says), and Thor’s eyes were mostly dry, that Loki finally says through clenched, bloodied teeth:
“They’re in a pocket dimension.”
“Who?” Bruce whispers, stunned.
“Everyone. I told him he’d never be a god. He was just a warlord playing at being something powerful. He should’ve fucking listened.”
the fact that Loki’s death scene in Thor 2 was originally intended to be real & retconned later and the end where he’s alive was filmed during pickups has me SO fucked up because now I can’t choose between which headcanon I prefer re: his behavior in Ragnarok. like listen, okay, either:
1. loki was planning on playing dead the whole time and so his very sad death scene & everything he said therein was a calculated move and he was practically writing the theatrical version of it (starring matt damon as himself) as he went along
OR
2. loki really thought he was dying and every melodramatic word of his death scene was 100% heartfelt and then after he realized he wasn’t dead he fucking… woke up peaced out to go take over asgard (lol?) and several months later he was sitting on the throne and could remember every word of what he said to thor on that day and was like “wow im so fucking poetic. that should be a play. starring matt damon as Me perhaps”
So, for some reason, people always kinda seem to write the Jötnar as having the same diet as those of Asgard, despite the fact that Asgard is a vibrant, lush land with farms, and Jötunheimr is… You know. Frozen.
So, let’s talk about what the Jötnar are gonna eat.
So, building on my already established idea that the Jötnar don’t put on too much fat, and instead have extra muscle, they’re gonna need some damned protein to sustain it. Because we’re dealing with such a cold climate, we’re probably going to be looking at animals who’ll withstand the cold, but what you won’t see much of is any bigger, greener flowering plants or the like.
So,
Jötunheimr, in my view, has huge, wide, choppy seas. Big, massive waves, very salty, choppy water, and pretty much all the Jötnar are natural swimmers because, uh, they gotta be.
Being as the Jötnar are physically fit and muscular, as well as likely seafaring to at least some extent, we can expect them to eat:
various fish, as well as squid, crustaceans and molluscs
fish eggs
sea birds and their eggs
sea-faring mammals like whales, seals and walruses
sea weeds + plants
And because we’ve already seen some massive beasts that wander around
Jötunheimr, I’d also expect them to hunt that sort of thing. The Inuits eat polar bears as well as animals like caribou, and I definitely don’t think the Jötnar would shy away from hunting and butchering a predator as much as a prey animal.
All of this meat is gonna be super heavy in protein, oils and nutrients that the
Jötnar are gonna fucking need.
I feel like their diet is meat-heavy and meat-centred, but then they’re also gonna have what plant matter is possible to get hold of – I mentioned sea weed and other sea-centred plants, but I would also imagine they eat various edible mosses and fungi that survive the sub zero temperature in the relative warmth of the caves beneath Jötunheimr, and then there’s also stuff like tubers and hardy grasses that they probably eat a fair amount of too.
You know what they’re probably not used to?
Milk. They almost definitely do not eat milk, or cheese, or anything of the kind, except extremely rarely, and I imagine that while the
Jötnar aren’t entirely lactose intolerant, they probably can’t stand to have more than a little bit of milk at a time once they’re no longer babes in arms, and definitely not processed into butter, cheese or any other dairy product.
Then, sweets. Notice how, uh, everything I’ve mentioned so far does not taste sweet. In fact, a lot of it is going to be heavily salty (much of the fatty meat and fish) or bitter (the weeds and tubers). I don’t think the Jötnar eat sweets, and in fact, I imagine they either have no capacity to taste it, or have a very small capacity for sweetness, and are swiftly overwhelmed by pretty much any sweet taste in their mouth. Even a little bit of honey or sugar would just make them gag.
Also, as a result of the stuff they eat – really heavy on meat which probably doesn’t come around that often, and subsequently is probably saved over time, as well as on very tough plants and tubers, I’m actually super attached to the idea of the Jötnar having mildly acidic saliva?
Firstly, it’d break down the plants and tubers easier, making them much, much easier to chew, but it also means they’d be able to withstand meat that had slightly rotted without any issues at all, as it’d just burn right through the acrid nastiness of it, and subsequently rotted stuff which is already a bit acidic would probably be considered a huge delicacy.
Also, I think the Jötnar do have alcohol, but now that you’ve listened to my acid delicacy theory… Yep, you guessed it! I feel like it’d be kind of similar to poitín, which we make here in Ireland out of potatoes (yeah, I know), but instead out of frozen roots and tubers. So it’d be like, very bitter and very acidic, and probably straight-up poisonous to most Asgardians.
Tasertrickslove 