After the coronation came the meeting of the new Security Council, hastily chosen from among the king's greatest allies and headaches.
"I think this is everyone," said the king. "Since we all know each other, I'd like to--"
"Don't know him," the Valkyrie said, gesturing with a bottle, then taking a swig.
"Ah, yes. This is Heimdall, guardian of the Bifrost."
"Formerly," said the prince, feet up on the table, a posturing everyone else was choosing to ignore lest this meeting become all about Loki.
"Not the Heimdall?" the Valkyrie said, a sentiment that could not have been half as unexpected to everyone else as the follow-up: "That little twerp?"
The king boggled. The prince put his feet down and leaned forward in his chair, showing more interest in these proceedings than in any he'd ever presided over previously.
The Valkyrie continued: "The same Heimdall who used to spy on us whenever he got the chance?"
Heimdall couldn't help but smile at this. In truth, it might even have been closer to a grin. It had been centuries since anyone had made him feel anything other than ancient. For a moment he might have been a youth again, ducking his obligations in favor of haunting the sparring fields so that he might watch the Valkyries at their practice. "The same."
*
The objective of the meeting was simple enough: to determine how they were to get to Earth without dying along the way. As with most battle plans that were more complex than 'attack, and hope for the best,' there were more moving parts than anyone else had expected. They conferred long into the night, until the multitude of tasks had each been given an owner (or several, in the case of every task given to Loki).
Heimdall's task was what it had ever been: to watch, and report whatever he saw that might affect their journey in any way. It did not seem to matter how much less he saw now than before Asgard had burned. He could still see farther than any of the others. Everything had changed, and yet nothing had.
Perhaps that was why he never saw one particular change coming, several weeks later.
*
In the end, it came upon him suddenly, centuries after what had been the last time.
Once, Heimdall would have seen this for what it was the moment he woke. But it had been too long since the last time for him to see it as anything, at least at first. How many of the others must have felt restless? How many of them must have felt as if they could not bear the presence of nearly anyone for another moment? It was something he must abide, as they all must abide the crowdedness, the three-quarters rations, the inability of the ship's environmental systems to make the air anything other than stifling, and Loki in general.
By the time it began to occur to him that his ailment might in fact be an ailment, others had begun to take notice. Perhaps he'd already begun to perspire, twice or three times as much as he should have with so little exertion. Perhaps he'd already taken to staring sometimes, pacing through halls other times, looking for something that he would almost surely be unable to find this time. Perhaps his scent had grown strong enough for noses meant to recognize little more than which foods were good to eat and which had spoiled to register his current state.
"Heimdall, are you well?" Thor asked at some point. What Heimdall said to fend him off, this new king who took all maladies personally, he would never recall.
"Heimdall, are you dying?" Loki asked, a few minutes or perhaps an hour or two later. It was more difficult than it should have been to decide how eager he sounded about the prospect--
And it was not Heimdall who fended off this particular inquiry.
"He's fine," said another voice, like a drink of water when he was parched, or the first sight of a living ally when all his fellows had long since fallen. "Don't you have someone else you could be bothering?"
Loki must have decided he did, for Heimdall neither heard his voice nor glimpsed his profile again.
The new voice's owner came closer. Close enough for him to see her, to know her as the Valkyrie, the last Valkyrie, the one who sometimes asked people where Heimdall was, as if she might seek him out, and then did not. Close enough for him to smell her scent at last, and to know she was what he needed, though he had not been entirely cognizant of needing anything until that moment.
"You know you're in heat, right?" she asked.
"I can't," Heimdall said, words he had to fight to think, much less to say, and that seemed as if they were being spoken by some other person a very long way from himself. "I haven't--it's been many centuries since my last season."
"Same here," she said. "I'm going to take you back to your quarters, all right?"
If Heimdall still doubted what was occurring here, the doubt ceased the moment she touched him. In a moment, he was hard and wet and aching, where before there had been only the yearning, so deeply buried he would not have recognized it otherwise. She could have had him there, in the corridor; she could have had him at a council meeting; before all of Asgard, if she'd wished to. Nothing else mattered in the midst of things, as nothing else ever had. But although the air was filled with not only his arousal, but hers, she did none of this, but only led him as she'd said she would. In the meantime, Heimdall grasped for decorum through the haze, remembering how not to nuzzle at the throat of an alpha who had not yet indicated overt interest in a coupling. Or trying to remember, at the least.
When they were in his quarters, she said, "Is there anyone I should get for you?"
"There's no one," he said, and then, struck with the sudden, terrible thought that she might not know: "There are no other alphas left."
She didn't look surprised, which was enough of a relief to allow that concern to rest beneath the tide. "Am I staying, or are you the sort that likes to weather it on your own?"
Despite his former position, the requirement that he stand apart from those he watched over or sometimes merely watched, Heimdall had never been that sort. "Stay," he gasped, all thought of decorum banished. "Please."
"All right." She disentangled herself from him, which was enough to begat a small measure of panic. Began to strip, which was enough to silence it. "How do you like it?"
"Rough," Heimdall said, the last thing he was capable of saying for some hours.
"Works for me," she said, and came to him.
*
The next time Heimdall woke, he found he was also emerging. The haze had gone, leaving satisfaction in its wake. Beside him lay the Valkyrie, as naked as he.
"You good now?" she asked, yawning and stretching, the most glorious of sights. "Or are you going to need another round?"
Seeing clearly for the first time in a day, or perhaps in several, Heimdall looked within to discover the answer. This clear-sightedness could have been a lull, rather than a conclusion. But as he looked, he found the restlessness had gone. The haze, entirely unfathomable when he was lost in the midst of it, had been cleared away. All that was left was the memory of their coupling, and the results thereof.
"My time has passed," he said.
"Too bad," she said, this Valkyrie who was the last, and who besides himself was the last remnant of a long-ago age. "I could have gone again."
"I am with child," Heimdall said.
"Fuck me," said the Valkyrie.
*
"It's early for you to know, isn't it?" the Valkyrie asked a while later. They'd dressed, been to the canteen, and brought their breakfast back to the Valkyrie's quarters, this time. There seemed to be an unspoken understanding that it would be somewhat more dignified if they were to have this conversation out of eyesight of the bed they'd so abused.
"Yes," Heimdall said. "Nonetheless, I am quite sure."
"How's that? You can see it with your...eye thing?"
"That," Heimdall agreed, "and I have borne children before, after each of my seasons."
"And you couldn't have told me that before we--fuck, no, you couldn't have. You were really out of it by then," she said, and retrieved from a nearby shelf the other reason they had come to her quarters instead of his.
Heimdall, who had never before failed to come to prior arrangements with the alphas he'd chosen to lie with, none of whom had been any way displeased by the results, was at something of a loss for words. It was not so much that he did not know what he wished to express, as that having never expressed it before, it was necessary for him to give his next words some consideration.
"I don't do babies," the Valkyria continued, taking a long, deep swig from a bottle that contained something quite strong. "Kids are all right, I guess. When they're walking, talking, riding horses. Holding swords. They're kind of useless before then, you know?"
"Yes," Heimdall said, not offended. He couldn't have been, for her words recalled the Asgard of old. The Valkyries' daughters, fostered to other homes for their earliest years, the greatest honor and privilege any family might boast, then returned in their fourth or fifth year to begin their training. "I will keep her until she is of that age. Then, if you wish, we will share her."
Never before had he had a hand in raising one of his children. To tie with the Gatekeeper had once been another of the great honors, hotly competed for in the years leading up to his seasons. Always before, Heimdall had chosen his partners with the greatest of care, for he could not have a family and a post at once. Always before, it had been enough to turn his eye to his descendants on occasion, to mark the passage of centuries by the threads that had come from him. But so many of the threads had been cut altogether. There were so few left, and none who knew from whence their line had come. Not one of those who remained had yet been living when Odin had decreed the primal urges of alpha and omega no better than the murderous urges of his firstborn, and with Gungnir cast a working upon all Asgardians save his Gatekeeper (and, apparently, the last Valkyrie once thought lost with her sisters). It was a history not taught in books, nor remembered outside of the briefest flashes among a generation long since deceased.
"This one is mine," said Heimdall again, a choice that would once have been unthinkable, and now was no choice at all. His post was not what it had been. He was no longer apart from the people he served. He did serve a people now, and not merely a king. For the first time in his long life, perhaps he could walk two or even many paths at once. "She need not be trained as a Valkyrie unless you wish it."
"Maybe," she said, slowly, not reluctant so much as thoughtful, perhaps. "If it's a girl. Maybe no one ever told you, but boys can't be Valkyries."
Heimdall, who'd wished to be a Valkyrie long before certain other wishers had ever been conceived of, and been disabused of the notion on a daily basis by every Valkyrie who spotted him, threw his head back, and laughed, and laughed.