The compound is just how you left it. Clean. Familiar. Whole. You land hard, like your body forgot how to breathe in this dimension. You stagger forward, pulse in your ears, arms scraped from tearing through dimensional edges that fought like claws.

Someone shouts. You don’t even hear the words. Just voices. A blur. Footsteps. But your eyes are locked on him. Thor.

Standing at the end of the hallway, tall and solid and so alive you almost crumple.

“You’ve returned!” He said.

Your mouth opens. No sound comes out. Your legs move before you think, dragging your heavy, aching body forward until you’re right there.

He steps toward you instinctively, but when he sees your expression, he stops. His brows knit, confused and concerned.

Five months ago, for you, that heart stopped beating. You were the one who held him until his blood soaked your hands. Until the sky cracked and a version of Earth you didn’t recognize shattered around you.

And now he’s here. Alive.

“You died,” you whisper. You didn’t mean to say it out loud.

Thor’s face shifts. Slowly. Carefully. “Not here,” he says gently. “Not in this world.”

You nod.

“I watched it happen. Five months there. I kept waiting to come back and see it was real here too,” you said.

After a pause, he speak again.

“It was only five days here,” he murmurs. “Five days of waiting. Of wondering if we’d lost you to the seams.”

He steps closer. This time you don’t stop him. He wraps his arms around you, not tight, but anchored. You breathe him in like you need him to pull the other dimension out of your lungs.

“You’re safe now,” he says into your hair. “You are here. And I am here. That is all that matters.”

You nod. But you don’t say anything. Because you need the silence now. He doesn’t rush it. He lets you stand there in the stillness.