Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Broxton, Oklahoma, Earth 1982

Six Months After the Loom

“You’re really quitting, Sylvie? Gosh darn it, if you aren’t the best employee who’s ever set foot in Mickey D’s.”

Sylvie gazes fondly at Jack, looking for all the world like a toddler trying out his father’s oversized work clothes and playing Grown-Ups. He’s wonderful. Lyle’s wonderful, the customers are wonderful, her truck is wonderful. Everything about this place has given her the same message: You are valued. You have dignity. You matter, and we won’t forget you.

But she’s ready. She’s been cared for; her second childhood has been accomplished, the soothing arms of Ronald McDonald have rocked her to sleep for long enough to keep her going. 

“I’ll visit,” she says, ruffling Jack’s hair and hoping it’s true.

She’s done here.

Strontia, 45 BCE

Two Years After the Loom

Sylvie sheathes her sword and, for the first time, doesn’t feel the need to draw it again any time soon.

After a year and a half of being a gladiator, she’s honed her combat skills to perfection, and she’s been able to do it without the constant low-grade fever of fear from her apocalypses. She’s the best warrior she can possibly be, without the ever-present knot in the pit of her stomach.

And again, she’s done.

Sakaar, 3542 CE

Five Years After the Loom

Hedonism suits her; she’s been told so by countless men and women over the past three years, on countless planets in different time frames. 

Well, they don’t use the word hedonism. Most people don’t know what it means. She brushes away the memory of the person who does know what it means — not because she’s angry, no, not anymore. That’s why she used to shutter her memories of him — after the Citadel, before the loom. 

Now, she pushes him aside because… well, it’s pointless to think of him.

Right.

Right.

He sacrificed his freedom for her and Mobius and, well, everyone, and she’s eternally grateful to him. But there’s no point in thinking about him, when she’ll never see him again.

Even though, sometimes, usually when she’s imbibed of a particular combination of currant wine and the Grandmistress’s favorite hallucinogenic eggplant, she fancies that she feels him. Planted there, at the end of time. For all time, always. Holding it all together, every strand of every timeline she’s visited and more. 

Alone.

Maybe we could figure it out together.

“Hush, brain,” she admonishes herself.

“What was that, Sylvie?” drawls the Grandmistress from across the room. “Do you need another cube of eggplant?”

Sylvie extricates herself from the arms of an adoring lover or two and frowns as she dusts off her purple, diamond-studded jumpsuit.

“Nah, I’m good.”

She’s done again.

D’bari IV, 1980

Ten Years After the Loom

Sylvie lets out another om, closing her eyes and feeling quite at peace with herself as a meditative being. 

Her cave is perfectly sparse, her stoic hermit status fully achieved. The children of the village come to peek at her sometimes, and she conjures new species of flowers for them to string into garlands.

There’s one of the children right now, in fact. He blinks at her with wide eyes, the same ones that used to pierce hers right before his extermination by the Dark Phoenix, back when she was still bound to apocalypses. She’d almost loved this little boy (although real love wasn’t possible or practical), and now she’s found a timeline where he won’t be killed at all. It’s blissful, or it would be, if she hadn’t become rather adept at balancing and observing her emotions. If she grows too happy, after all, her heart always has a painful fall from a great height.

She conjures the boy a bright red gardenia with a thousand blue-flecked petals.

“There, sweet one.”

She knows that Loki can hear her when she speaks. His visceral reactions to her words were cataclysmic at first, nearly causing an earthquake on her timeline once. But he’s gotten used to her presence, it seems. She only feels him sigh in response — sometimes with pleasure at her happiness, other times with confusion… when she’s not quite happy. He doesn’t know what to do with himself when she’s not happy.

She’d imagined unrestrained freedom to be one joyous memory after another, but years of meditation and life experience has taught her that this can never be the case.

She smiles as the child runs off with the flower, then looks around at her spartan home, the dwelling of a self-denying ascetic.

But she’s not as selfless as she pretends to be. See, now she wants to help people, and she suspects that the underlying motivation behind helping people is to feel better about yourself.

Which is why she’s just a tiny bit miffed at Loki, perched there at the end of time, getting to ruminate on how good he is.

Oh, Sylvie. Years of mindfulness, and you’re just as petty as ever.

She collects her meager possessions, and again, she’s done.

Sevastopol, Earth 1854

Twenty Years After the Loom

The humans, Sylvie has learned, are some of the most war-prone creatures in the multiverse. But they’re also so grateful when she helps them, sharing her expertise and her magic. Their flaws are beautiful and tragic. There’s a reason she can’t stay away from Midgardians and their battlegrounds throughout history, as she strolls in and saves all the lives she can.

But she doesn’t stop the wars. The wars were their choices, after all.

She threads new strands into the multiverse with every spared soul, creating branch after infinite branch as the course of their history shifts and changes.

And she feels Loki more than ever. With every new branch, she senses his hands, adjusting and readjusting to accommodate them.

Will it ever be too much for him?

No, she thinks, this glorious purpose is perfectly suited for him, and he chose it. Every branch is a newfound joy to him.

Sylvie. Is this wishful thinking?

Is this what the TVA folks used to say about every trapped and ill-fated soul?

Sylvie stands up amidst the first month of the longest siege of the Crimean War and strides through a time door. There’s one more place she needs to go. Just one.

Asgard, 985 CE

She checks on young Loki periodically. It’s sometimes hard to keep track of the precise iteration of the timeline where she’s been following the little girl, but she always finds her. Well, really, she’s not a girl; she’s a young woman now, making plenty of haughty mistakes and getting into trouble and living her life. Living.

Her mother. Her brother. Her father, and all her friends. She worries sometimes that this Lady Loki will make the same mistakes as the Loki who now bands the multiverse together — mistakes that wrenched him away from his family and ended so many lives. But no. This girl is on a better path, she can already see it.

“Thor! Thor, what have you done?” Loki cries, as Sylvie watches from just outside the garden. “Have you broken your sword again? Come here and I’ll mend it.” 

It’s so kind, so affectionate, the relationship these two have. Of course, young Loki turns the sword into a snake before she fixes it, but she gets it done eventually. The two siblings walk off arm in arm, pontificating about the meaning of the play they watched the previous night.

Together.

The truth hits her like a time stick to the head:

He doesn’t have to do it alone.

The relief that floods her at this realization is palpable. Despite her years of practicing emotional awareness on D’bari IV, she’d had no idea she was holding in this much desire, the aching need to see him again. The need to touch him.

She’s self-aware enough now to know that she once loved him, long ago. But she doesn’t need that kind of love now, of course. She just wants…

She just wants…

I just want you to be okay.

He can hear the things she says, but not her thoughts. So she tries it aloud, experimentally:

“I just want you to be okay.”

And as her Loki hears her words from his seat at the end of time, there’s a shiver throughout the multiverse.

Chapter Text

Sylvie gazes down at her TemDisc, which she still feels quite smug about possessing. The bands of gold wink at her, arching like eyebrows as they ask her the question: Why have you never once considered going to him?

He’s right there, a few clicks away.

“Piss off,” she snipes at it affectionately, and declines to answer the question.

And so, as the Asgardian sunset casts a crystalline rainbow above the Bifrost, she strides behind a boulder and opens a time door.

She knows the coordinates. The last time she used them, she sent Ravonna Renslayer there. She used to wonder what had become of Renslayer in the void, idly fretting that she might tame Alioth and get to Loki. 

But Sylvie never did anything about it. It still wasn’t her problem.

Maybe it should have been.

But there’d have been no justice in that. She’d fought long enough. She had never once believed that she had any obligation to do anything beyond freeing the timelines. Her purpose, glorious and savage and righteous, had been fulfilled.

And at any rate, when years and years went by and she could still feel Loki just peaceably doing his thing at the end of time, she figured that Ravonna had been thoroughly digested and that was that. Good riddance.

You’re stalling, Sylvie.

Sometimes, she can’t tell if it’s her conscience or her TemDisc that’s speaking to her, as though it were a cheeky little animal sidekick in a Disney movie.

“Right,” she says, and she walks through the door into a murky greenish-blackness, cool and just the slightest bit damp, like an Arctic swamp, if that’s a thing.

And Loki is…

Oh.

She had expected to be face-to-face with him right away as he sits placidly at the desk of He Who Remains, but that’s not the case. She’s stuck, actually, in a tangle of timelines, there’s no other way to put it. It occurs to her, as it has before, that Loki might no longer exist in corporeal form, that he might have become pure energy as he tends to the timelines. She braces herself for not being able to see him, after finally deciding it’s what she wants.

She bats a timeline out of her face reflexively, then balks. I hit a timeline. Is it okay? Did I kill people?

But she realizes almost instantaneously that the timeline is fine. Actually, it’s not one timeline, it’s a whole strand of them woven together. Far from being bruised, they sparkle and shimmer at the spot where they were knocked about, feeding each other and giving each other more life.

She looks around; she can’t see a damn thing except timelines upon timelines, and she’s unsure what she’s even stepping on… until she realizes that there’s a floor manifesting for her, underneath her feet, wherever she needs to place her feet. Instinctively, she knows this is happening because of who she is.

Only Lokis can do this.

A stab of guilt pierces her heart, as she remembers how badly she had wanted to follow Loki when he shattered the blast doors and faced the temporal radiation. Almost believing that if he could do it, she could do it as well. But she didn’t believe enough, so she let him do it alone.

And…

I deserved to have my life.

She did. She can’t regret not following him, not when she had so much to learn on her own. But she knows now that she was always meant to follow him, in time. In her own time. Even if he doesn’t want to see her, she needs to offer him support. It’s up to him if he chooses to accept it.

If I can bloody well find him, that is. Do we really need this many timelines?

Her TemDisc rolls its metaphysical eyes at her.

And then, as the timelines thin out, she sees him. Sitting there, eyes closed, physically bound to the multiverse that she fought her entire life to restore. It sends a shiver of gratitude throughout her entire being.

But then, of course, being Sylvie, she frowns. He’s on a throne, for one thing, which is interesting, given that she can quite clearly recall him saying that he didn’t have a need for one of those anymore. His expression is far too beneficent, like he’s some martyred god or something.

Sylvie…

Fine, I guess he is.

She wants to throttle him, just the teensiest bit, before she throws her arms around him. But of course she’ll do neither of those things. They don’t touch anymore.

Sylvie stops a few feet away from him, where the timelines have finally left a clearing around their protector. The Citadel is entirely gone, including that vile desk of that vile man, which she’s quite pleased about. 

Loki still hasn’t opened his eyes, and she wonders for a moment if he’s sleeping, but she has a strong feeling he doesn’t do that anymore. Plus, there’s a firestorm going on behind his eyelids. He’s very much awake.

But he doesn’t know she’s there.

Well, there’s no need to wait around for him to open his eyes. She considers clearing her throat or shuffling her feet or something slightly more subtle, but in the end, she can be only Sylvie.

“So it looks like you did want a throne, actually.”

Loki starts violently and throws his eyes open, mouth agape and chest heaving. It takes his eyes a few moments to adjust to the fact that he’s staring at an actual living face, and when it hits him whose face it is, he shakes his head and readjusts his grip on the timelines that he’s currently holding.

“Sylvie!” he cries. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t sneak up on people like that?”

Sylvie folds her arms. “Come on. We’re Lokis. Sneaking up on people is our stock-in-trade.”

“But I’m holding the multiverse together! I should think that you of all people wouldn’t want to risk—”

Then he remembers that he is now a serene, compassionate god who cares for all his subjects equally, and Sylvie is simply one of them who has happened to visit him at the end of time and make his heart do things he’d never thought it would do again.

Steady, Loki.

He’s proud of her, and any feelings he’s having are remnants of their past friendship coupled with his abiding love for all living creatures. She’s doing well in this multiverse of his, and he can’t help but be happy about that. He regains his composure and smiles evenly at her. He’s obviously going to say something very wise and gentle, because he is a force of pure good in this narrow/vast world he inhabits.

He opens his mouth.

“You changed your hair,” he blurts out.

Damn.

The corners of her mouth turn up and she looks almost as though she’s thrilled to hear him say stupid things again — which can’t be the case, so he must have imagined it. Her hair really is captivating, though: long and unkempt, with tiny wildflowers scattered about in it, almost as though they’re growing right out of her head. Still rather blonde, although it looks like it shifts restlessly between blonde and brown, and there are even a few streaks of green that look like vines (his first thought was that they look like timelines, but everything would look like a timeline now, he supposes).

“Well spotted,” she says.

He waits for more, for her to ask him what she wants. She shifts her shoulders and uncrosses her arms, sticking her hands in her pockets. She’s dressed like an ordinary Midgardian in the springtime, with jeans and a light jacket.

“Well?” he asks, finally. “How can I help?”

She looks startled, like she doesn’t quite understand the question. “What do you mean?”

“I wondered if you might visit me sometime, if you found something amiss with one of the timelines. I presume that’s why you’re here now.”

She’s shaking her head by the time he finishes speaking, and one of her hands finds its way out of her coat pocket, gesticulating in emphasis. “No! No, I’m not here for help.”

“Oh,” Loki says. “Then…” Now he’s confused. “Then… what, as the Midgardians say, is up?”

“What’s up? Um…” She raises her shoulders almost to her ears as she thinks, and her eyes go up and to the left. Her nose scrunches up. He has to turn away for a moment, because this look of hers is etched into his soul and seeing it again is causing him more turmoil than he could ever have thought possible.

But he regroups in time for her eyes to return to him.

“Um… just… here to say hi, really,” she says. “How are you, and all that.”

Loki really doesn’t know how to answer this question. “How… am I.”

“Yeah. I mean, here you are. I wasn’t even sure you, you know, had a body anymore. So… nice to see you.”

Loki is taken aback. “You thought I didn’t have a body?”

“Well, I don’t know, Loki! I thought maybe you were absorbed into the whole multiversal energy thing, or something. I mean, this…” She moves her hands around in a crude imitation of the timelines. “This is all very… new to me.”

This is… new for me.

Loki takes a breath, trying to leave the past tucked safely in the past where it belongs.

“So… you’re just here to say hi,” he summarizes.

“Yeah, I guess. To catch up.”

“All right. I’m… here, at the end of time, holding every single timeline together. That’s pretty much it for me.”

“Oh,” she says, nodding. Her eyes are wide with interest, as though she’s trying to pretend he’s just said something revelatory. “Well… it seems nice. Here.” She casts her eyes around at the lack of anything except timelines around him, and he feels a strong urge to defend his home.

“Yes, it is nice. I’ve found my glorious purpose. There’s nothing more for me to do or want.”

Sylvie’s lips go tight and he thinks that perhaps she might be feeling a pang of sympathy for him, which of course he doesn’t need. Then she tries to hide it, fumbling for words.

“Um… do you sleep?”

“No.”

“Eat?”

“No.”

“Go to the loo?”

Loki feels a snort of laughter rise in his throat, which is so unfamiliar to him that it almost feels like he’s ill. It’s like he’s a little kid again and Thor just made a scatological joke behind Odin’s back and he has to painfully swallow his mirth. But he tries to keep it down, for surely benevolent gods don’t giggle at potty humor.

“Do you… see a loo?” he asks, gesturing around with his chin, as his hands are perpetually unavailable.

“I do not,” Sylvie says, her cheeks pink with embarrassment. He feels a wave of sympathy for her, now, and to her credit, she notices but doesn’t get defensive. (As he did.)

Her mouth formulates another question, which he sees her hesitate to ask.

“Are you immortal, Loki?”

This is a question he’s asked himself many times. There are some truths he knows because of his centuries spent becoming a master of the sciences, and there are others he knows because of his magical, all-powerful godly intuitions. This answer has been irksomely elusive to him. But he knows the most likely answer.

“I think so,” he breathes.

Sylvie nods, and her face betrays nothing of how she feels as she asks, “Do you want to be?”

To this, he truly has no answer.

He sighs, breaking the tension of the moment, and nods down at the floor near him, conjuring her a chair. Then, in haste, he modifies it to be a golden throne of the exact size and style as his.

She gives him a withering look. “I’ll take the chair, thanks.”

Like a dog tucking its tail between its legs, he turns it back into a plain wooden chair.

“I’m sorry about the throne,” he says, indicating his own seat. “It wasn’t my conscious choice. It just appeared as I ascended, and it seems to be inextricably linked to my presence here as a guardian of the timelines, so… I just kept it.”

“It’s okay,” Sylvie says. “I don’t really mind. I was just teasing you. I miss—”

She stops, and he recognizes their familiar dynamic of being unable to say anything of substance to each other. But then, to his astonishment, she pushes through and continues the sentence. “I’ve missed teasing you.”

He senses there’s more she wants to say, but apparently that’s all she’s able to get out right now. He tries to quash the thudding of his heart and skims past the admission. But her vulnerability with him has made him suddenly quite eager to talk, and when he opens his mouth, he really isn’t prepared for what comes out.

“Sometimes,” he says, gazing off at a strand of timelines that has formed an infinity symbol, “I wonder if all of this was just a big “fuck-you” from He Who Remains. He recognized that I would break his program and he’d lose, and so he said something like… ‘joke’s on you, sucker, you can save your precious multiverse, but you’re stuck as a tree for all of eternity. And here, take a throne, since you don’t want it.’”

Sylvie’s eyes are wide again. “Wow,” she says. “You made it sound like you were so happy here.”

“I am!” he says quickly, suddenly realizing how dark his thoughts have gotten at times, and how much he just admitted to her. “It was just some… random thoughts. I’m sure that’s not what happened. He Who Remains didn’t plan this at all.”

Sylvie nods. “I agree,” she says. “I think this was all you, Loki. It’s very impressive. I wish more people could know of your sacrifice, of what you’ve done.”

He should be pleased, he thinks, that she’s borderline-thanking him. But he can’t help wondering what’s been stopping her from telling everyone of his sacrifice.

It’s fine, Loki. She’s got her own life to live. That was the whole point of this.

She’s no more or less important than anyone else out there.

He wonders how long he can keep on telling himself that, as she sits there perched on the chair with one foot up, resting her chin and hands on her knee.

“So,” she says briskly. “You can hear me when I talk, right? On the timelines? Hope you enjoyed all the shagging.”

Loki is reeling again, from her bluntness. He’s utterly out of practice in communicating with living beings, and he feels like he’s getting thrown into the deep end having his first communication experience be with Sylvie.

“I didn’t choose to hear you, Sylvie! I hear everyone! All their prayers and hopes and dreams and…”

“Like Santa Claus?”

Again, there’s that feeling of laughter that borders on illness; his humor muscles have atrophied from disuse, no doubt like all his other muscles besides his hands and his brain. He barks out a brief chuckle, though.

“Well, I’m not bringing anyone presents. But yes, aside from that, I suppose I am rather like Santa Claus, if that’s how you want to look at it.”

“But you notice me more than the others,” she says, discerningly. “Me, and probably Mobius. Maybe your Thor.”

He shifts his hold on the timelines; the ones in his left hand are feeling sated, and he quickly whips them out of the way to swap them for another coiled strand.

“Yes,” he says slowly. “I… can’t help noticing you a bit more than most. Look, I’ve learned to control it. I hear your voice but I tune out the… you know, the substance of what you’re saying. I give you your privacy, I promise you that, Sylvie.”

“Did you learn to control it before or after the shagging marathon started?”

Loki is red in the face, he knows it, and he fears he looks like a giant Christmas tree with all the green around him. “Before! I swear!” He’d controlled it as soon as he could, knowing that she’d probably end up falling madly in love with someone else. He wanted to feel her happiness without knowing any of the details of her love affairs.

“But you heard the words I spoke just a short time ago. I know you did.”

The memory of her words fills his soul. I just want you to be okay. When he’d heard these words, he’d allowed himself to go into a bit of a trance, trying to allow his seiðr to make sense of them when he knew for a fact that Sylvie didn’t think of him with fondness anymore. He never would have dreamt she’d show up a few minutes later.

“Of course I heard you,” he says. “You were speaking to me.”

Despite all the time he’s spent keeping his heart free of Sylvie, he can’t help knowing that this is true.

Sylvie plants both feet on the floor, hands on her knees, and leans in his direction.

“I’m here to offer you a break,” she says. “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure exactly why I was coming when I stepped through the time door. But I know now. I believe I can hold the multiverse in place just as effectively as you, if perhaps not for as long as you’ve done it. Not yet. Although maybe, in time, I’ll be able to do it, and we can just… trade off. You know? Like a timeshare.”

“Like a…”

Loki can’t laugh about this now, even though it’s absurd. He, too, leans forward, so that their faces are about a foot apart. 

“You didn’t go through what I went through, Sylvie. You didn’t experience the radiation. It made me who I am, it made me the only person capable of doing this.”

“I don’t think so, Loki! You have no idea how powerful my magic has become. Greater than yours was when you began this endeavor, I’d say. I think that, as your variant, I could take over. The ground manifests for me, just like it does for you… see?” She hops off the stool and demonstrates. “And yes, of course there would be an adjustment period, but I would get used to it! I can do it, Loki, and I think you deserve a chance to live a life, just as I’ve been doing.”

Loki shakes his head. No no no, this is all wrong… What was my sacrifice for if I can just take a vacation from it…

“I can’t,” he says. “The timelines are part of me. My cloak is literally made of timelines.”

Sylvie does that other thing with her face, the excited, pouty frown of someone who is stating the obvious.

“Then… maybe take off the cloak? Just a thought.”

No.

His entire purpose and identity are being undermined. Nobody else has the capacity to do this job. This is a threat to his multiverse, and he won’t stand for it. He sits back in his throne, which he actually does rather like, and rests on one arm of it. He’s never reclined in this particular way on this particular throne before, but at the moment he feels the need to protect it, to claim it with as much of his body as possible.

“No, thank you,” he says. “I appreciate the offer. But I believe I’ll stay here.”

The woundedness in Sylvie’s eyes quickly morphs into detached acceptance. She nods and stands up, looking down at her TemDisc and typing in some coordinates. “Okay,” she says. “It was just a thought. Nice to see you.” She’s about to step through, but she casts one last glance into his eyes.

He doesn’t stop time, but it feels like time stops him as he absorbs the heat of her disappointment.

What are you doing, you callous brute?

You’re still a monster, after all.

“Wait!” he calls out, as her foot disappears through the door.

She pulls back, not yet facing him.

“Yes?” she says, with no expectation in her voice as she looks at the bottom of the time door.

He shakes his head. “I’m so sorry,” he says, feeling a tear beading in the corner of his eye. “I haven’t… I haven’t spoken to anyone in years. I’ve only practiced being good from afar. I don’t remember how to do it in person.”

She turns to face him. “Then leave for a while, and get some practice. Please. You deserve it, after all this time and all that you’ve done for the multiverse.”

As the tear slips down his cheek, he nods. “Not now,” he says. “I need some time to prepare myself. But…” He sounds like a little boy. “Will you come back soon?”

Sylvie curves her tight lips, then widens the smile. “Yeah,” she says. “Tomorrow. I don’t know if days mean anything to you, but…”

“I know what you mean,” he says, his features melting into a smile that matches hers.

“Okay, then,” she says. She makes the slightest move towards him, like she might come over and touch him, but she stops herself. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Her shoulders give a contented little lift as she walks through the time door.

Loki blinks several times, wondering if that was all a dream or a test or a temptation. Aren’t gods tempted periodically?

Well, if it is a temptation, he may as well succumb to it. He never played by the other gods’ rules anyway.

He closes his eyes. He wants to hold onto his bright smile, but it drifts away as he settles back into his usual routine, which involves very little bright smiling. Really, there is quite a lot to do, as he must keep his brain actively engaged in perpetuity, in order to make sure nothing is amiss. Come to think of it, he’s just been disengaged from his monitoring for quite a few minutes, and he has to get back into his habitual rhythms as quickly as possible.

But even with all the regular hubbub of his mind, he holds fast to one vital thought.

Tomorrow. Sylvie’s coming back tomorrow.

Chapter Text

“Now… just… hold them gently but firmly…"

“I am, Loki, don’t you see?”

“Yes, but I’m not yet seeing any of your life force seeping into them yet.”

“My life force seeping into them? That’s a really unappealing way of describing the process.”

“Well, Sylvie, I don’t know what to tell you. Such are the consequences of living with a multiverse.”

Loki has started her off small, allowing her to hold one single strand of timelines. She knows she could have taken more, but is willing to appease Loki's cautious mind for the time being. They've been sitting here for an hour now, and she's getting antsy for more.

Sylvie shifts uncomfortably in her throne, which is positioned facing his. “Do you really think I need to sit in this thing?" she asks him. "I’d rather stand. I could get some exercise in. Do some squats, you know.”

“I don’t want to mess with anything, Sylvie. This is how the multiverse manifested itself to me, and this is how I think we should keep it. I conjured that throne for you using molecular strands from my own throne; did you know that was a thing? It was very complicated and very fascinating. I haven’t done anything like it in years.”

“You don’t spend your days just conjuring zillions of things up here?" Sylvie says, conjuring a lava lamp with her free hand. "I would.”

“Of course not.” Loki hesitates, looking like he might shed a bit more light on the matter… but he doesn’t. Instead, he nods at her throne. “Get comfortable.”

Sylvie lets the lava lamp dematerialize and relaxes into the throne, allowing herself to feel powerful and quite magnanimous, with a little dash of self-righteousness. A burst of green light flits out of her fingertips and dances down the timelines. She grins and looks over at Loki.

“There! You see? I’m doing just fine. Why don’t you pass me all the ones in your left hand?”

Loki makes a pained expression, but then, with a bit of a wince, he leans over to her. “You might be tempted to press too hard at first,” he warns. “Don’t strangle them, or they’ll get restless and you’ll have to give them right back to me.”

Sylvie takes the entire bundle of timelines from him, her little finger brushing against his wrist in the process. At first, nothing happens… but then, as she firms her grip, the timelines light up with an even brighter green than before — it's almost neon in color. The revitalized timelines slink up her arm and curl around her shoulders like a contented cat.

Sylvie smiles indulgently at them. “There. You see?” She switches hands so that she doesn't have to reach all the way around her own back to hold onto the end. “We’re fine.”

Loki looks mystified, and then turns pink with something that might be admiration. “How are you doing it so naturally? They’ve never done that with me.” He gestures to the way the branches are embracing her.

“They recognize me,” Sylvie says simply. “I created them, after all.”

Loki beams widely, and then… stands up. Takes a step towards her.

The faltering hitch in his gait makes her suspect it’s the first time he’s stood this entire time.

“Here you are, then, mother of the multiverse.”

She senses the hesitancy in his hand as he bequeaths the other handful of timelines to her. Gently, and with a nod of reassurance, she slips them out of his hand.

The multiverse shivers and there’s a flicker of gray that lasts far too long for Loki’s comfort, but not for Sylvie’s. She smiles and gives the timelines the gentlest of pulses, and the bright green energy spirals through them. The new set of timelines curls up in her lap.

Loki lets out a tremulous, shuddering exhalation.

“You’ve got them,” he says. “You really do.”

“I really do.” She smiles.

Loki flexes his hands, stretching his long fingers out straight and wide, then relaxes them. “Make sure you keep your palms on them at all times," he says, keeping a sharp eye on her grip. "If it's just your fingertips, they might—”

“I will, Loki.”

She nods down at the TemDisc on the arm of her throne. “There it is.”

Loki picks it up cautiously and runs his finger over the smooth surface, blinking several times. Sylvie realizes that, save for the timelines, this must be the first physical object he’s held in twenty years.

“I don’t know how to work it,” he says.

“And, on paper, I didn’t know how to work the multiverse. You’ll figure it out.”

Loki appears vexed all of a sudden, looking from the disc back to Sylvie. “I don’t know where to go.”

Sylvie cocks her head. “Where do you go when you astrally project yourself onto the timelines?” she asks. Based on the fact that he doesn't conjure anything, she now suspects that he might very well not do this. But she has inured herself to the idea that he does do it… and has chosen not to visit her.

He shakes his head. “I don’t.”

Oh.

She hadn’t realized how much she’s wanted him to find her these past decades, just like she wanted him to find her when she was working at McDonald’s. Days went by, as she served Big Macs and fries… weeks… months... and eventually she resigned herself to the fact that he didn’t want to see her.

But maybe there was more to the story, just like this one.

No, she shouldn’t be relieved that he’s been stuck, as immobile as the Lincoln Memorial, for twenty years. And yet there it is, right there in front of her: a stubborn, unforgivable relief.

He wasn’t ignoring me. He was ignoring everybody.

This is better, somehow. She chooses not to grapple, at this moment, with the fact that she's been ignoring him just as much all these years.

Sylvie sighs. She thinks about asking him why he doesn’t do the astral projection, but has a feeling it has something to do with his bloody glorious purpose, and restrains herself.

“Well, what’s the first place you can think of?”

Loki reflects upon the question. “Asgard,” he says. “But I’m not sure I can handle that yet. I think I’ll just pick a… field somewhere. Or a mountaintop, or something like that.”

Sylvie nods. “Try this,” she says, reaching out a finger to the TemDisc, Loki holds it out to her warily, looking all the while at the spot on the coil where she has removed her finger. It’s fine, of course, she’s got it under control. She slides her finger around on the disc until the coordinates are mapped in.

“There,” she says. “Now, show me how you open the time door. Go on, you can do it.”

Loki peers down at the disc for a few long seconds, a little crease marring his brow. Then he closes his eyes and shifts his thumb around in a slow oval, then an upward swipe. A time door opens. He looks over at her with boyish surprise and pleasure, which quickly fades into a more neutral expression as he considers the situation.

“I won’t be gone long,” he says. “Just a bit of a walk ‘round, and then I’ll be back.”

“Take all the time you need, really.”

With one final glance at her hands, and then a sweep of his gaze at his domain, he steps through the door.

Sylvie is left with the warm, pleasant satisfaction of being trusted, and the lingering question of whether she would have been able to do the same for him.

Dovrefjell National Park, Norway, 1998

Sky.

There’s sky all around him. Loki squints and holds his hand in front of his eyes to block out the sun, which he’d forgotten was so blazingly bright. But he can’t bring himself to close his eyes, because there is so much to see.

Ostensibly, he lives in the grandest place in the multiverse: right at the center of it, with quite literally everything surrounding him. But despite the fact that he can see every branch of his tree with his mind’s eye, his actual eyes see only what’s directly in front of him.

He’s not Heimdall. He doesn’t watch what’s happening on the timelines, per se; he feels it.

For years — however many it may have been for him — he’s seen only green and black. Perhaps a bit of purple, if one of the further-reaching branches decides to visit him for a spell. But the surrounding space is all darkness, with the light coming only from himself.

He knows, logically, that this is still the case now. All of this only exists because of him. But for all intents and purposes, the sun looks like an external light source. The rocky ground under his feet feels like a foundation that exists separately from himself, holding him up rather than the other way around. The herd of reindeer he can now see in the distance seem to be their own beings, and for once, if only for a few minutes, he doesn’t bear the weighty responsibility of keeping them alive. They munch their moss and stare at him, just another visitor to their territory.

Loki takes a shaky breath. He feels small, for once, a part of a whole rather than the whole itself. It’s terrifying and exhilarating; he’s humbled, relieved, and anxious all at once.

There are no humans around him. It’s just a wide expanse of cool, mountainous tundra. He’s midway up a large hill, and the ground is rocky. Further up, there’s snow; lower down, there’s a lake and some flowery, mossy ground. The flowers remind him of the ones in Sylvie’s hair. In addition to the reindeer, a flock of ducks quack contentedly at the edge of the lake, and a gyrfalcon circles overhead. Experimentally, he takes a step on the rocky ground.

It’s excruciating. He nearly doesn’t remember how to walk, much less on uneven ground.

But he takes another step, and another. The wind whistles in his ears and he hears the call of the falcon as though in greeting… or perhaps in warning, if it recognizes an interloper, one who doesn’t belong in the land of the mortals.

On the way down, he has to take a break to regroup and rest his legs. He kneels and picks up a rock, tapping it, scraping at it, striking it against another. Objects. Things. He used to want lots of things.

You don’t spend your days just conjuring zillions of things up here? I would.

Why doesn’t he? He’s conjured a few objects when he’s needed them; when one of the strands of timelines was unsettled, for example, and he conjured a brush and groomed it like a pet. He created a wooden wedge, once, when a strand was coiled too tightly together, and he nestled the wedge in between the uncomfortable branches. But he never actually touched these things; he did all the work with telekinesis. And he’s never once conjured something for his own entertainment.

Why? Sylvie would ask (although she didn't). And for good measure, why doesn’t he astrally project himself onto the timelines? He could. He’s got an entire multiverse at his disposal.

The answer comes to him easily: these actions would imply that he’s bored, and his glorious purpose cannot bore him.

It cannot, so it doesn’t. But he can’t deny that the simple act of striking a rock against another rock has made him feel like he’s alive again, as though it’s not even himself who has been holding time together, but an abstraction of himself.

He stands up again, letting the rock clatter to the ground. He clings tightly to the TemDisc in his other hand.

When he reaches the lakeshore, he bends down, inspecting his reflection.

He’s never seen this iteration of himself. His horns are large and craggy, not exactly he would have selected if given a careful choice. He’s left his cloak behind, of course, as it’s part of the multiverse itself. None of the rest of his outfit is remarkable. It’s not to his usual taste.

But one doesn’t get to be dapper and dashing, he supposes, in his situation. The multiverse has clothed him in the attire it needs to survive, and he must accept it.

His face…

He looks older.

The last thing he did when he was on a timeline, really on a timeline, without a TVA-related mission on his mind, was to try to take over the world.

Did you get your wish, young Loki?

Was this it?

His reflection has no answer.

He runs his fingers through the still water, disturbing the glassy surface and sending ripples through his image. The ducks quack crankily and flap about.

The water is freezing, and it’s sublime. He dips his fingers in once more, holding them beneath the surface, waiting… wondering… until his fingertips begin to turn blue, not from the cold, but from accessing his Jötun form that rests beneath the surface of his usual Æsir form, which he's grown accustomed to. He pulls them out and blinks at them as the blue fades slowly away.

He hears a brief snort behind him, and thinks at first that somehow Sylvie has joined him. Standing up, he whirls around, ready to ask her what the Hel she’s done with the timelines.

But it’s not Sylvie. It’s a lone musk ox, pawing its feet on the ground idly. He wonders if it will charge him, if it views him as a threat. He gets the sense that it often does charge its enemies. But for some reason, for now, it’s tolerating his presence.

Come to think of it, there is something rather Sylvie-like about it.

“Hello,” he says slowly.

It snorts again. Loki chuckles.

Sylvie…

He still feels the spot on his wrist where she grazed it earlier. He brushes it with his thumb, trying to dispel the tingly sensation. He can’t linger on ephemera like that, he learned as much long ago. But he’s out of practice, and it takes him a long time to uproot the echo of her non-caress.

The last time she touched him, as far as she would remember, was when they fought against the Dox Rebellion together. He’s touched her since, a thousand times, in dozens of different scenarios: an accidental brush of the arm as he ran past her on the way to the loom, a quick pat on his arm when she was impressed with his technical skills, and then… that one time, with her forehead against his…

But he can’t count those among his real memories of her, since she doesn’t share those memories. It doesn’t seem fair. So he’s tucked them all far, far away, and is left only with the sense memory of her telling him don’t overthink it before she took his hand.

If she ever loved him, the love vanished in the Citadel, and it has never returned.

The musk ox is chewing on something, staring at him with cool inquiry. If he didn’t know better, he’d think it was raising an eyebrow at him.

And then it shrugs — no it doesn’t, Loki, musk oxen don’t shrug — and turns and walks away.

With zero warning, the gyrfalcon swoops down and snatches one of the ducks. The flock flaps about, flustered, and Loki recoils in shock. For so long, he hasn't thought about the realities of murder. Confronted with those realities, he's aghast that there was a brief time when he enjoyed it. Bile rises in his throat.

But he keeps watching, and the ducks regroup, and the gyrfalcon brings its lunch to its babies.

He doesn’t know what to make of the world. He’s idealized it, perhaps. And it is wonderful, as wonderful as it is gruesome.

He’s impatient to return; he wants to stay here forever.

I know what kind of god I need to be.

Do I, though?

Yes, yes, of course he does. He takes a quavering breath and looks around one more time. The landscape seems to go on forever.

Time to go.

He raises the TemDisc and, without even thinking about it, knows how to pull up the coordinates for the Citadel. With a few steps, he’s back where he belongs.

Sylvie sits up with a start on her throne. “Oh! That was quick.”

“Yes,” he says briskly. “Very nice. Thank you. How are the timelines?”

“Oh,” she says, struggling to unwrap one from her arm. “I, um… they’re fine. They’re just a bit fidgety.”

“They need me,” he says quickly, pattering over to her and reaching for them. “Here, give them to me.”

“It’s fine, it’s just…”

“Just… come on, hand them over…”

“All right, all right.”

She performs the transfer well, if a bit clumsily, although maybe he’s the clumsy one since he’s grabbing at them so hastily. But all goes well, and he retreats to his throne.

She did it.

He gives her a grateful smile.

Sylvie leans forward on her throne, elbows on her knees. “Well… how was it?”

Loki nods slowly. “Very refreshing,” he says. “It was a good idea. Probably wise for me to have more of a physical sense of what’s going on down there.”

“Great! Well… shall we do it again sometime?”

Loki knows what he intends to say: no thank you, this is where I belong, and I have no need of more escapes.

But what emerges from his mouth is, “Tomorrow?” There’s a tremor in his voice.

She looks pleasantly surprised. “All right,” she said. “Um… do you want to… chat for a bit, or…?”

“Oh. No. You don’t need to do that, I’m sure you need to get home.”

Sylvie lets out a sound whose meaning Loki can’t quite identify. She stands up and opens a time door.

“Yeah. Right. Home.”

Loki narrows his eyes. “Sylvie… you do have a home… don’t you? After all this time?”

Her eyes tell him the answer before she says it. “No home,” she says. And then, as an afterthought, “No postman.”

“No…” It takes him a moment to remember. But he does. No postman.

In another lifetime, this would have made him giddy. But now there’s only melancholy. Not really about her lack of a home, or a partner, but rather the spark that used to be in her eyes when she was fighting the TVA. When she had a purpose.

He’s left her free, and occasionally happy, but purposeless.

She leaves.

And she comes back the next day, and the next, and every day he wonders if he might soon see the spark come back into her eye. But it doesn’t.

Chapter Text

After a week of sharing Loki’s workload, the multiverse feels as much a part of Sylvie as revenge once did.

She has started to see the appeal of keeping the timelines safe. It’s not completely dull holding them, as she’s constantly readjusting her grip and her attitude based on what she senses from the branches. She can almost understand how Loki has been able to keep himself from going mad all this time.

Although… it’s only been a week. He’s been doing it for twenty years. She’s not sure how she’d be responding to it after that long. It’s not long in the grand scheme of their lifespans, but it is nevertheless twenty whole years in a row.

And, she thinks, keeping oneself from going mad is a far cry from living a life.

Loki’s daily timeline trips had been getting longer, but today’s was rather short-lived. He didn’t tell her much about it when he came back, but Sylvie wonders if he’s simply growing tired of it and plans to relieve her of her services soon, thanking her and sending her on her merry way. She can’t help but hope this isn’t the case.

It doesn’t seem like he’s getting bored of the trips. He always seems revitalized… but, then again, maybe she’s reading the situation wrong.

Now they’re sitting opposite each other, both on their thrones. The burden of the multiverse is shared for the time being, and it is becoming exquisitely light for both of them.

Surely… surely he’ll want her to keep coming back, even if he chooses not to keep going back to the timelines.

They haven’t been talking much, and when they do, Sylvie’s usually the one who speaks. She tells him about her adventures and misadventures, how she dabbled in lust and celibacy; heroism and mischief; even superheroism, briefly. (Very briefly.)

Despite Loki’s reserve, Sylvie feels remarkably supported by his presence. No living creature has provided her with so much unspoken comfort in… ever, really. Lyle came close. But it wasn’t like this.

It’s weird that Loki’s not here, isn’t it?

Sylvie flinches as she remembers how callous she forced herself to be about Loki’s fate, long ago, the last time she saw Mobius. She spent years telling herself that Loki’s happy up here, doing whatever he’s doing. But watching his face, his body language, the way his mind seems to be far more alert and alive right after he comes back from a timeline…

How could I ever have thought he was fine?

An old defensiveness kicks in and she thinks How the bloody hell was I supposed to know? I didn’t know how to care about anything.

But she did. If she’s honest, she did know how to care about him back then. She elected not to.

Her thoughts are interrupted by a peremptory “ahem” from across the way. She rolls her head in his direction.

“Yes, Loki?”

“It’s just that… you really shouldn’t braid the timelines together like that.”

Sylvie looks down, realizing that she’s been weaving elaborately with the timelines in one of the strands she’s holding, in defiance of their usual spiral configuration.

She shrugs. “Why not? They seem fine.”

“They’re already in the shape that they’re supposed to be. I’ve never done anything to change it. For all we know, you’re damaging them—”

“You never did it because you never had a free hand! I’m sure there are lots of things you would have done if you had a free hand, Loki.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but his face grows ashen and he looks down, utterly unable to think about sex or self-pleasure. This must be a first, she thinks. A Loki who’s not regularly trying to get some. She considers apologizing, but decides it’s best to just brush past it.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter if I muck it all up, because you could just go back in time and fix it, right?”

Loki sits up straight. “How did you know about that? I haven’t told you about that.”

No, he hasn’t told her much. She knows he’s experienced a lot more than he’s let on to her.

“Oh, I studied a bit about time theory, figured some stuff out,” she says. “I spent quite a while thinking about how you suddenly became tech-savvy.”

He tilts his head at her. “You thought about me?” he asks. His face displays almost none of what he feels. Almost none.

Again, Sylvie’s defensiveness creeps in. “Well. I mean, occasionally.” Sylvie, she tells herself, you’re supposed to be enlightened after all that meditation. Why are you still so prickly?

Loki blinks slowly a few times before continuing. “Well, in short, no. Time reversal doesn’t quite work like that here, with the timelines. If I were down on a timeline, or even at the TVA, I could do it in a heartbeat. And I suspect that if I were standing right here, as an observer, I could perhaps do it. He Who Remains used to do it in this very spot, after all. But I can’t do it while I’m caretaker of all timelines. It doesn’t work like that, I can’t just go back if something goes wrong.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, Sylvie, there are some questions that I don’t know the answer to. Why am I a tree, for example.”

Sylvie snorts out a quick laugh, wondering where he’s been hiding his sense of humor this whole time, before realizing that he’s not quite joking.

“What do you mean, Loki?” 

“Oh. Right,” he says, “You wouldn’t know.”

“Know what?”

Loki suddenly looks rather excited, eager to show her something new about his world. “When I said ‘why am I a tree,’ it was rather too flippant; it’s so much more than that. Shall I show you?”

Sylvie nods cautiously, casting her eyes around in confusion, unsure as to what she could possibly be “shown.” It’s just timelines upon timelines, branching ever more chaotically. At least that’s what she’s assumed. Plus, they can’t really move.

“Okay…” she says. “So… what is it? Where?”

Loki gives her an enigmatic micro-smile. “Everywhere,” he says. “I saw it in my mind’s eye when it was first created. Since then, it’s… not been easy to see. But I’m sure you can, if you look the right way.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Loki.”

“You have to look… beyond what you usually see. Let your eyes go out of focus a bit. And then just look at the timelines… past them, really… and let the entire picture come back into view.”

Sylvie doesn’t have a clue what he means, and she tries to follow his instructions, but all she sees are a bunch of blurry swirling lines.

“Loki, I don’t think I can—”

She feels Loki watching her curiously, and brings her eyes back into focus to look at him. “What?”

Cautiously, he stands up, holding the timelines in one hand. He looks back worriedly at his throne, then, when the multiverse doesn’t implode, he takes a few steps towards her. He kneels down at her feet, his eyes fixed on her hand. “Maybe if I…” He reaches his free hand out to hers, then looks up furtively, as though she might bite his hand off.

She doesn’t.

She nods and allows him to place his fingertips on hers, raising their hands up together with only the barest of touches, and then sliding his fingers in between hers, interlocking them and letting their palms rest together.

Sylvie looks at their joined hands in fascination, remembering the last time they held hands. 

"Don’t overthink it."

Wise advice, she thinks, from her earlier self. She should have known, back then, that those words were for herself as much as for Loki. The fleeting hopes she’d had back in the void, the hopes for something more, had been smashed to smithereens and she couldn’t let herself near them again.

But what about now, Sylvie?

She has no easy answer for herself.

His sight line remains locked intently on their hands. His chin twitches minutely and she sees that he’s holding his breath in his stiff shoulders. Eventually he can’t hold it anymore, and he lets it out in three clumsy shudders.  After another (more stable) set of inhalations and exhalations, he looks up into her eyes.

“All right,” he says. “Now, I believe I can show you.”

“Do I need to, like, enchant you, or is it…”

She doesn’t, as it quickly becomes clear. With a jolt, she finds herself standing, holding Loki’s hand, surveying the entirety of the multiverse from an unknown vantage point. She can’t help catching her breath as she understands his “joke” (that was not a joke at all). For in front of her, in front of both of them, stands a majestic tree, glowing bright green at the trunk, darker green at the roots, lavender at the ends of the branches where the leaves of a typical tree might be. She can’t comprehend the meaning of it at first, until she finally recognizes the snaking movements of the individual components and gasps.

“Yggdrasil,” she whispers. She hasn’t thought of the name in centuries, but it comes back to her with ease. “The world tree. From…”

“From our homeland,” Loki says, turning to her, still clasping her hand in his, which feels quite natural already. “This is why I need to be here, Sylvie. You see? It all exists because of me, because of what I brought to the multiverse. I can’t abandon it.”

Sylvie is as touched by his care for the multiverse as she is annoyed by his crude arrogance. But she finds even the arrogance rather endearing.

“And our thrones are down there, in the trunk, right?” she asks. “Where it’s all green?”

“Yes.”

“Can we go hang out in the purple branches? Could be a nice view for a while.”

“I’ve never really been able to do that… this is the first time I’ve seen the whole picture this clearly, actually.”

They’re stronger together, she knows this now, she’s always known it. She wonders, not for the first time, what might have happened if she had followed him through the blast doors and joined him on this mission.

Again, Sylvie, don’t overthink it.

“Well, I’m pretty sure we can do it together,” she says. She takes a step forward, then another and another, with Loki following her lead. She knows they’re not really doing this — their physical bodies are still sitting back at the thrones, where the Citadel used to be. But this feels almost real, and she perceives his hand in hers with every nerve ending.

As they approach, Sylvie can see flecks of pink among the purple; it’s like they’re walking into a plasma globe. They mosey along, hand in hand. The last time they did this, they were making their way towards the Citadel from the void. After they had used their combined magic, their shared powers, and found that they were stronger together.

It’s still true, it seems.

It takes them a while to reach the branches, although her sense of time isn’t as strong as it is when she’s on the timelines. She has honed an innate ability, over the years, to keep track of her own days and weeks even while timeline-hopping. She hasn’t needed a watch for hundreds of years; she just knows when a day has passed, even if she’s gone to five different timelines and it’s been morning the whole time.

But here, at the end of time, it’s different. A temporal illusion, both real and metaphysical. To reach the branches, it takes them a year and it takes them a minute. Only when they reach the furthestmost branches, all lavender and fractaled and growing by the minute, can she finally regain her grip on her sense of time and gather that it probably took them about half an hour.

Holding hands. Silent. Comfortable. For half an hour.

I still don’t know how to do this.

He still doesn’t know what we’re doing.

Their feet (not really their feet, but whatever) come to rest on one of the branches. Literally, quite literally, they’re branches. I never knew. It lengthens itself underneath her foot, extending and splitting off into two… then four.

“It’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s so much more than He Who Remains ever imagined it could be.”

He nods. “And it almost didn’t happen. This is all possible because of you.”

Sylvie looks at him in surprise; she hadn’t been sure Loki would give her that kind of credit. She gives him a tight smile, figuring he deserves some credit too. “Thank you. But, I mean, you’re the one who’s been doing all the work.”

She sighs and sits down on a branch, swinging her legs as they dangle off the edge. Looking down is breathtaking; she can see so much more of the multiverse from up here than she can from her throne. Hesitantly, Loki follows her, sitting carefully down and balancing himself.

“I almost went with you,” she says. “In the loom room, I…”

“The loom room?”

“You know, the…”

“The TLOC, the Temporal Loom Observation Chamber.”

“...Yeah, I’m going with loom room. Anyway, I almost followed you out there. And then I just… didn’t.” She glances at him, then looks away, gripping the branch tightly with her hands, trying to figure out how to explain why she didn’t go: if it was more that she doubted her powers, or that she didn’t want to sacrifice her chance at a real life. Or that she feared he didn’t want her. They’re all true.

“Loki…” she says, “I still can’t make myself wish I’d joined you. I feel like I should wish it.”

“Don’t,” he says without delay. “You needed to live. I’d already lived.”

“Barely. You’d just spent centuries trying to save us all and we didn’t even know or appreciate it.” Loki raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t comment. “I could have… I don’t know, Loki. If I had gone with you, what if we could have created something together? Something that would have made it possible for you to… I don’t know, not be a tree forever?”

She looks up at him again, smiling sadly. “Even if it is a very nice tree.”

He returns her bittersweet smile. “We’ll never know,” he says. “Either way, I’m glad you’ve gotten to live.”

Sylvie thinks back at her life over the past twenty years. Yes, it’s been worth it.

It’s just that there’s still a piece missing, and she is fighting tooth and nail against identifying what the piece is. But why? Why keep fighting it?

Because I’m so used to having something to fight…

Loki breaks their gaze and looks around in mild concern. “We are still holding the timelines back there, right?” He gestures down at the center of the trunk. “I can’t tell. It feels so tangible, being up here.”

Sylvie shifts her shoulders around; yes, she can still sense the weight of them in her hand, back there in her real body. “Yeah. We are.”

Loki nods, flexing his fingers and taking her hand again. And then her other hand. It happens so naturally that they’re both sitting there with all four of their hands clasped between them. She rests her head on his shoulder. Because she can.

She feels Loki smile, almost in spite of himself.

“Now,” he says, running his thumb idly over her knuckles. “How did you figure out that I spent centuries trying to fix the loom?”

“Well you were really shit at technology, and then all of a sudden you weren’t. That didn’t happen in a day or a month. How much older are you than me now, by the way? I’m pretty sure I used to be older than you.

Loki chuckles softly, nudging her shoulder as he does so. “I really don’t know. I never tried to keep track.”

“You can stop time, too, right? Freezing everything?”

She feels Loki’s jaw move against her head as he opens and closes his mouth. “In theory… yes. I can’t reverse time when I’m here, but I can — again, in theory — stop it. I just haven’t had the need to do so.”

The branch they’re sitting on grows longer; Sylvie loses count of how many new ones it’s already made. At least 128, maybe it’s up to 256 now. Or maybe it’s now increasing by a power greater than two.

“I would never freeze you, though,” he says, as though that’s what she was wondering. Maybe it was.

She lifts her head off his shoulder and turns back to him slowly. “But you have, though. Stopped me. Paused me, like TiVo.” She looks steadily into his eyes, unrelenting, rather enjoying the fact that the all-powerful Keeper of the Multiverse doesn’t know what TiVo is. “Haven’t you?”

“Yes. I had to, I—” Loki takes a rocky breath and looks like he’s about to sob. But he doesn’t. “Sylvie, would you like to see everything? I have so many more memories of you than you do of me. It’s not quite fair. Admittedly, most of them are just me madly pressing buttons or brushing you off as I try to study theoretical physics, but…”

“Yes,” she says, squeezing his hands. “I’d like to see. Please.” She releases his hands and places one on his chest. “Do you mind if I just—”

“Well, hang on, I mean, it’s centuries of stuff, we can’t sit here for centuries just watching it… How do you pull out… the highlights, if you will?”

“Just think about the moments you most want me to see. I won’t go further, for now.”

“I don’t even… I don’t know where to start.” Loki frowns in confusion. “Plus… do you think it will work here?” He looks down at their precarious position, perched on a topmost branch of a temporal tree in bodies that are being quasi-astrally projected. “These aren’t even our real bodies. Can you enchant me like this? Maybe we should just go back…”

Sylvie shakes her head. “I don’t want to go back yet. I like it up here. And yes, I’m sure it will work.” She presses gently into him and sees an echo of herself with her head on his shoulder. She smiles. “See, it works. Just… start with one memory and go from there.”

Loki nods and thinks for quite a few seconds. “All right,” he says eventually. “I’ve got one. I think your memory diverges from a tiny bit earlier than here, but all the other stuff before this was rather dull. This moment…” He winces. “I hated erasing it. But as I got faster and faster, and things got earlier and earlier… it had to happen. So I could try to retrofit the loom.” He’s talking faster and faster. “At the end, perhaps I could have gone back to a later point, but then I don’t know if even I would have been able to survive the radiation, and I had to make sure that I could, because if I ever got—”

“Loki?”

“Hm?”

“Just show me the damn memory.”

“Right. Okay.”

He closes his eyes and Sylvie presses in on his chest, dwelling briefly on the thu-thump of his heartbeat before diving into the memory.

“You’ve got to be kidding me. I took a wrong turn, I didn’t plan on coming to Pie-land.”

Oh, Sylvie thinks. So we had another conversation. By ourselves.

Maybe it was a nice one, after all?

As she continues watching, her hopes aren’t exactly borne out.

“And so we’re clear, I asked for your help and you walked away.”

“Just so we’re clear, no, I didn’t. I’m here, aren’t I? Again!”

It deteriorates, as she might have predicted. Even when he’s praising her actions, he’s only praising the ones that serve his ends.

Listen, Sylvie, you spared Timely’s life, and because of that, the TVA and those timelines will survive. Those people will survive. You spared their lives, too.”

And then he goes back to chastising her for her choices. He talks about hope, and she can tell that even back then, she wasn’t buying it.

"Sounds like whatever we do, we’re playing god.”

“We are gods.”

The conversation ends with a slump and an exit, and there’s nothing significant between them.

She withdraws from the enchantment. “Okay. Good start,” she says, trying to remain positive in the face of bleakness. “Why that memory first?”

Loki regards her. “It’s one of the furthest-back memories for me that no longer exists for you. It was from before I started the intentional timeslipping.”

She nods. “Ah.” She replaces her hand on his chest. “More, please.”

She delves into the enchantment a bit quicker this time (it’s old habit to enchant people suddenly, after all), and his mind is less focused. 

First, there’s the tail end of a scene in a bar, for some reason, which she suspects is also from before he had learned to control the timeslipping.

“I want my friends back. I don’t want to be alone.”

“See, we’re both selfish.”

Friends… yes, well, okay then. Friends. She can't even tell if he's including her in this group.

“Without them, where do I belong?”

"We’re all writing our own stories now. Go write yours.”

Oh. Well. No wonder he only thought of her as a friend, if that’s how she looked and sounded when she talked to him back then. Somehow, she’d had it in her mind that she’d been more open with him. She’s amazed that he even still considered her a friend, rather than a distant acquaintance.

She sifts around for a while and spies a scene she does remember — Loki demonstrating the loom plan to them with a model, running around and acting like a laser-focused lunatic.

“Loki, why are you being so weird?”

And then the same scene again, and again:

“Loki, why are you being—”

“Loki, why are you—”

“Loki, why—”

“Loki—”

It gets quicker every time. He gets quicker, more efficient every time, before he cuts her off.

Another scene, in the loom room. It’s similar. He’s so rapid-fire, the people around him exist to him less and less with every iteration. They’re all objects to him after a while, it seems. She seems like an object to him.

Then there’s a massive jumble, sounds and images cascading from his mind, a mess of overlapping scenes. And Sylvie realizes, after a short while, that they’re all trying to mask one particular scene… but, inevitably, Loki relents and lets it rise to the surface.

“There’s nowhere left to go…”

Sylvie hears her own voice, more afraid than she’s ever sounded since she was a freshly-made orphan of time. And then she watches as her body splinters into thin strips of ticker tape… no, more than watches, she feels it, and it’s gruesome, excruciating, harrowing, half her body is gone, then most of her; she sees Loki reaching out a hand to her, and his face is nothing but pain and loss and—

Her eyes fly open, she’s slipping off the branch, she’s falling, falling, she’s going to plummet to the roots and die—

“Sylvie!”

After she blinks, though, she realizes that she’s in no danger at all. She’s on the floor of the former Citadel, still clutching the timelines unfailingly and unflinchingly in her hand as Loki grasps her other hand. She’s only slid off her throne, not a light-years-tall tree. 

She and Loki are kneeling together, facing each other, their faces an inch apart, breathing hard.

“I’m so sorry,” Loki says. “I wanted to warn you about that one before you saw it. I tried to hold it back.”

Sylvie shakes her head, sitting back on her heels. “It’s my fault. I didn’t give you enough time to prepare.”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. Nothing actually happened. I saw something with my mind and fell off a fake tree in my mind. I’m right as rain.” She knows the phrase “fake tree” isn’t accurate. In some very real sense, they had been sitting up there together. And there’s nothing fake about this Yggdrasil they’ve created: it’s everything she’s worked for in her life, made whole. She tries to feel satisfied about it. 

She wants very much to regroup and have everything be perfectly fine, but she doesn’t retreat to her throne yet. There’s something about sitting here on this floor with him staring at her like she’s the most precious thing in the world that makes her feel safer than ever before. 

“Sylvie… can you handle one more? This is the memory I was trying to access for you instead. It’s the same moment, but… later, for me. Much later. Right before the end, in fact.”

She nods without hesitation, and this time, instead of placing her hand on his chest, she simply twines their fingers closer together and leans into it.

“I’m out of options, Sylvie. I’ve tried everything.”

He’s stopped time, and now, at least, he’s taken her with him. He hasn’t stopped her.

“The only way that anything survives… is if I never kill He Who Remains in the first place. So you have to kill me.”

She walks towards him, gives him a bitter little laugh.

“I’m not giving you my blessing, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”

The laugh doesn’t end in a smile.

“What do I do? It’s the Sacred Timeline, or nothing.”

He’s honestly asking her.

“It’s not enough to protect the Sacred Timeline, Loki. Even down there, it’s full of death and destruction and injustice. Do you really want to be the god who takes away everyone’s free will so you can protect that?”

“But what good is free will if everyone’s dead?”

“And who are you to say we can’t die trying?” she queries. Loki looks down, near defeat. “Who are you to decide we can’t die fighting? You’re replacing one nightmare with another. I grew up in apocalypses, Loki. I’ve lived through enough of them to know that sometimes it’s okay to destroy something.”

(Somewhere, outside of the enchantment, Sylvie wonders if she was talking about them. About her and Loki.)

“If…” he replies slowly, “if there’s a hope that you can replace that thing with something better.”

(And she wonders if he was talking about them, too.)

(Is this better? Better than it was?)

Then Loki is gone, off to fulfill his purpose, glorious or otherwise.

She releases his hand and sits quietly, leaning her back against her throne.

“So that was it?” she asks. “Your last conversation before… what I remember in the loom room?”

He sighs deeply, meditating fleetingly on the timelines in his hand. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, that was it. And then it was all over. I knew what I had to do.” He seems closed off and exhausted, and she thinks that perhaps he’s going to retire to his throne and return to his now-customary reticence, but instead his eyes pierce hers again. 

“Don’t you see?” he asks, with newfound vigor. He doesn’t take her hand, because he’s gesturing fervently with his free hand, making a beseeching palm-up gesture as though expecting her to place her heart in his hand. “I thought the multiverse couldn’t be freed; I thought there was no possible way. That there would be nothing left to protect, and no one left to protect it.”

He struggles and claws for words, and finds them. “But you… you helped me find a way. I wouldn’t have had the courage or the inclination to do this if not for you. If not for asking you, if not for your utmost dedication to your cause, we wouldn’t be here, with a thriving multiverse. You’re the reason I’m here, Sylvie, why it’s all here, why the Yggrasil of our bedtime stories has been made real. Not just because you freed the multiverse, but because you didn’t let me compromise its integrity. Everyone in existence owes you everything, you’re—”

And then his breath catches and he looks embarrassed, as though he’s said too much, gone too far. He looks down, then backs away from her, to his throne, and sits upon it.

“Well, anyway,” he says. “I thought you should see that one.”

There’s a tear in the corner of Sylvie’s eye and she clumsily makes her way back up to her throne. “Oh,” she says. “Thanks for that. I’m, um… glad I was helpful.”

She wants to say more, but she doesn’t know what. She’s reeling from being in such proximity to him, both here and in the scene she just witnessed. And she’s grateful — so, so grateful for his words. She feels seen.

(Ages ago, when he found her in Broxton, she didn’t feel seen.)

And in the silence and stillness of the moment, she notices something. There’s a wide green ring around them that she never noticed before, and she would have sworn it wasn’t there before. It looks almost like a fine moss, richly planted over nutritious soil. Like a fairy circle, perhaps.

With a sidelong look at Loki, she sees that he’s looking at it too, with curiosity and, perhaps, concern.

But almost as soon as they catch sight of it, it dissipates into nothingness.

Loki opens his mouth, and she assumes he’s going to ask her about it, but instead he says, as though nothing is out of the ordinary at all, “So. What’s on your agenda for tonight? Trout fishing? Cave diving? Taking over a trampoline park after closing time?”

Sylvie wets her lips and considers where she wants to go. A million places, really, but they’re all missing the one thing that could ever make them feel like home.

“I think I’ll stay here for a little while longer, if that’s all right with you.”

Loki nods. “Of course,” he says, and Sylvie flatters herself that she thinks he looks pleased and relieved. “Stay as long as you like.”

She stays for quite a while. They don’t talk much more. But it’s the only place she wants to be. And now, finally, she thinks she might understand why he’s not thrilled with his trips to the timelines. Maybe — and she can only dare to hope this is the case — maybe it’s because she’s not with him.

Chapter Text

It’s been more than a day.

Loki doesn’t do days, of course, but he knows that it’s been longer than usual since Sylvie has visited him. Maybe even more than two days.

She left him, last time, with the enigmatic statement that she might very well come back with a surprise.

He wonders if the surprise has something to do with the ring of magical energy they somehow produced the other day. He knows that she has hopes for it; he could tell by her face that, even minutes after spying it last time, she was already formulating intricate hypotheses as to how it could be used to Loki’s advantage.

Because she thinks he doesn't want to be here anymore, doing this work. She wants him out of here. Permanently.

A week ago, he would have been shocked and offended at the notion, because this occupation is obviously what he was always destined to do. But he’s been struggling against selfishness (and particularly Sylvie’s accusation of selfishness) for so long. It might be time to admit that she was right. The dual indictments ring in his mind far more often than he likes to admit:

“See? We’re both selfish.”

“You deserve to be alone, and you always will be."

By fighting against Sylvie’s accusation, he’s proved Sif’s true.

He’s selfless and alone.

Maybe it’s time to call a cease-fire to his own struggles. To admit that he is a bit selfish, and that he might actually be worthier for recognizing it.

Because the other thing on his mind is this:

The timelines are not thrilled that Sylvie is gone. They flourish more when she’s here.

Maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t have to do this alone. Maybe it’s better if he doesn’t.

But what does that mean for Sylvie? He can’t ask her to give up her life to join him here. Surely she’ll get bored, soon, of sitting around with him at the end of time. That can’t be what she wants, not after literally all of time has been made available to her.

And if she has some innovative idea involving the energy field, he’s afraid she’s sorely mistaken. The timelines need energy from living creatures in order to thrive. How they survived prior to Nathaniel Richards’s multiversal war, he doesn’t know — but now, the reality is that they are people-powered.

Loki-powered, specifically.

And that’s when he gets an inkling of what she might be doing. He sits up a little straighter. 

“Sylvie…” he says to the empty air, “you can’t be serious.” He’s been respecting her privacy as usual, not listening closely to the conversations he knows she’s having, but accidentally he opens his mind to her just a smidge…

“So just sit tight here, until I…”

He shuts it down again. He’ll know soon enough what she’s planning. 

And sure enough, she walks through a time door a few minutes later, with a nervous, anticipatory glint in her eyes. She leaves the time door open behind her. He’s about to ask her what the surprise is, but the status of her wardrobe compels him to ask her, “Why are you covered in paint?”

“Am I still? Oh,” she says, looking down. “I accidentally went through the paint universe when I was looking for Lo— when I was looking for some stuff. It’s frustratingly close to the universe that I was aiming for.”

She flicks the paint away from her armor with a swish of her wrist. She’s not as subtle about it as he is, but she’s gotten to be incredible at the types of magic that have been second nature to him for centuries. Remnants of the paint dimension are, he suspects, much more difficult to dislodge by magic than typical, everyday grime. (Not that he would know, never having been there.) 

His mouth twists into a proud smile before he extinguishes it; she wouldn’t want him to be proud of her, she’d consider it patronizing. 

There’s one more speck of green paint on her belt that she tries to magick away again, frowning at it and blinking intently before attempting to scrub it off with her fingernail, then shrugging and giving up. Loki refrains from offering to help.

She still doesn’t have new armor, he notices. She’s mostly been wearing Midgardian garb when she comes to see him, but this time, she’s got on the ragged armor she’s had for ages and ages.

“You could conjure me a new outfit.”

He’d tried that a few times during his temporal reboots, conjuring her everything from fuzzy pajamas to a knight’s chain mail and shield. Nothing stopped her from killing He Who Remains. He tries to determine what it means that she hasn’t conjured or crafted one for herself in the intervening years, but stops his train of thought before he lands on an answer.

She bounces on her toes for a bit, hands clasped behind her back.

“Yeeesss?” Loki asks, raising a curious eyebrow.

Lightly, airily, she says, “It might be nice, y'know, if we could take a quick jaunt down to a timeline together.”

The way she turns red immediately tells him that she hadn’t meant it to sound quite so much like she’s asking him out on a date. She bites her lip, frowning again, and stares skyward (metaphorically speaking, since sky is an irrelevant concept here).

“That does sound nice, Sylvie,” he says, trying to help her save face by not drawing attention to her phraseology. “But I must ask you how in blazes you think it would be possible.”

“Well,” Sylvie says, looking back at him, “how do you think we could do it?”

“Two possibilities come readily to mind,” Loki replies. “Number one, expanding that energy field we manifested last time and using it as a power source. Number two, finding a Loki variant who is willing and able to hold the timelines for us. As to the first, it’s a stretch to imagine we could pull that off, especially without knowing the exact nature of its metaphysical properties, and given the fact that I haven’t exactly been using my scientific knowledge of late and I’m rather rusty.” 

Sylvie appears surprised, as though she hasn’t fully considered this possibility and is growing excited about it. But he presses on. “As to the second… Sylvie, of all people, I should think that you wouldn’t want to take someone away from their life on a timeline in order to do this. Not to mention that I cannot imagine that you could find a Loki who is both qualified and willing.”

“Well, the thing is—” Sylvie says. A phantom foot begins to step through the time door; Sylvie scrunches up her nose and kicks it away. Loki leans forward with interest, blinking obnoxiously (yes, he knows it) and cocking his head at Sylvie.

“And who might that have been?” he asks.

“Look. I did find a Loki who’s more than willing. The thing is, I’m not sure you’re going to like it, but I promise you I vetted him really well, and—”

Loki has a premonition; he leaps to his feet and says, “Oh, Sylvie, it’s not—”

The foot reemerges, interrupting him, and before Sylvie can punt it away again, Loki glimpses his own leering face bursting through the time door.

The variant is wearing a dapper dark gray suit… Emerald vest and tie… gold tie clip… ostentatious horns… Red, white, and blue button with his own name in the middle… 

Oh, FUCK. It really is him.

“Your savior is here!” President Loki declares, arms stretched out wide. “Greetings, Lonely Loki, clad in the saddest excuse for a fashionable garment I’ve ever seen. I am Candidate Loki, soon to be elected President of all Seventy-Four United States of America in defiance of custom, precedent, and the Constitution itself. I am here to ease your burden for a spell. Now. Where is the throne, and where is my glorious, albeit temporary, purpose?” 

And without another thought, he flops himself down upon Loki’s own throne, lounging lazily and nudging Loki away from it with his foot. “Move along, then, I’ve got no room.”

Loki turns back to Sylvie. “Not him,” he says. “Anyone but him.”

Sylvie looks anxious but hopeful. “Loki, I wanted to explain before he barged in, but here we are, so I’ll explain now. I know you met his timeline variant in the void, you told me about him in colorful detail back then. But I promise you this one’s different. That one had been corrupted by ages and ages in the void, but this one is just… a really, really hard worker. He’s ambitious, yes, but he’s not power-hungry. I’ve spoken to dozens of them in the last three days—” 

Three days! No wonder it had felt so long… 

“—and he’s the best I could find. He really cares about making things better, honestly, and his magic is powerful and sophisticated. He showed me some impressive image projection. Made me believe a massive crowd was about to listen to me give a speech.”

She shoots their visitor a stern glower. “Plus, I’ve drilled it into his mind that his Presidential aspirations will literally turn into spaghetti if he slacks off in his duty. And then I’ll chop his balls off to boot.”

President Loki (ugh, Loki wishes he could think of another name for him) sits up straight, suddenly looking quite serious. “My dear, steadfast, sartorially compromised variant, I understand your concerns. I used to be dreadful. Back on Asgard, before I was exiled, I tried multiple times to usurp the throne from Odin, and then from Thor. But I’ve learned the errors of my ways. I have dedicated my life to gaining influence in an honest way, and I am determined to be voted into office with no mischief or violence whatsoever. Well, at least no violence, scratch the mischief part.

He sighs wistfully.

“It’s been a long, slogging process, but I’ve been practicing doing good, selfless deeds, and this mission seems like an excellent way to keep up that track record.” The would-be President places his hand on Loki’s arm. “I swear to you. I am highly trustworthy.”

Loki spins back around to Sylvie, fully intending to nix the idea firmly and decisively.

But he’s met with Sylvie’s steady gaze, nodding at him calmly and reassuringly

Before she came back into his life, no amount of words from anyone (much less one single look) could ever have convinced him to do anything so rash and improbable. Even a few days ago, this wouldn’t have been enough for him. But now, an avalanche of trust tumbles out of his soul and into Sylvie’s waiting eyes.

“You’re sure, Sylvie? You’re absolutely sure?”

A crinkle forms in her brow. “Look, Loki, I can’t be absolutely sure of anything in this world. Not after the life I’ve led. I can’t promise you certainty. But I can promise you that this is the best chance we’ve got, at least for the time being. And Loki…” 

She moves towards him quickly, then stops short, a foot away from him. “I want us to try. If it doesn’t work, we’ll know before it gets bad. We’ll go to one of the furthest timelines from him, the ones most likely to be affected first. If things start to go to shit, we’ll know right away and we’ll rush back. The spaghettification starts with insignificant things, right? From what you’ve said? Small inanimate man-made objects?”

Loki nods slowly. “That’s right,” he says. “You… really want to go? With me?”

She’s not special, she’s not special, she’s just one of nonillions of souls whom you care about equally, she’s…

Sylvie gives him a crooked grin. “Yeah. I really do.”

It’s useless to pretend otherwise; Loki has never wanted to do anything more in his life.

President Loki clears his throat behind Loki. When Loki turns around, his variant is holding his hands out expectantly. “Ready when you are, my glorified cardboard cutouts.”

Loki closes his eyes, praying to all 3,002,109,246 Norns in existence that he won’t regret this.

London, Earth, 1974

Sylvie settles herself into a booth and Loki into the chair opposite her, in a quaint little coffee shop in Covent Garden.

Although “coffee” isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind as Sylvie pays for her drink.

This is one of the newest branches, and Sylvie is surprised to note that it feels almost exactly the same as the Earths she usually goes to. She would have expected it to be more different, being so far removed from the former Sacred Timeline. The only thing that’s unfamiliar is that the food staples are entirely different, despite having the same names. When she catches a glimpse of her Americano in her mug, it’s blue and sludgy. She blinks at it for several seconds as Loki tries to figure out what to do with his biscotti, which looks like a styrofoam snowman with porcupine spikes.

“Interesting,” Sylvie says, as she takes a sip of her “coffee.” It’s not bad, actually.

Loki puts his biscotti down on his plate. “I’ll just… save this for later,” he says.

Sylvie gives him a look. “Not bloody likely, since you don’t eat up in Tree-Land."

“No, I don’t. But I have been eating on the timelines. I could save it for then.”

“Doubt it,” Sylvie says, although she’s pleased that he’s been eating. It makes him seem more human. Well, not human, of course; she’s just spent so much time on Earth and she feels rather a kinship with their particular failings. It’s nice to think of Loki as having human-like failings.

Sylvie watches Loki from behind the safety of her mug; he’s staring at a man calmly eating a banana loaf that’s been infused with something fluorescent and holographic. Then Loki looks back at her and smiles. “This is nice,” he says. She sees his hand shake, and he steadies it.

“How afraid are you of what’s going on up there?” she inquires.

He takes a moment before replying, “Terrified.”

She puts down her drink; the aftertaste is starting to hit her, and it’s not good, not good at all. “He’ll be all right,” she says. “We told him fifteen minutes, right? Fifteen minutes isn’t long enough for anything dreadful to happen.”

Loki nods in concurrence, plucking a spike out of the biscotti. “Let’s hope so.”

Then there’s a bit of a silence, during which time he continues denuding his food. Sylvie tries to take another sip, but eventually pushes her drink away and rests her chin on her hands in front of her.

“This is awkward,” she says. “I was hoping it wouldn’t be.”

“Well, Sylvie, our circumstances have never exactly been normal.”

“No, but things are fine up there. I quite like being with you.” It’s more than she intended to say, but she juts her chin out further and stands by it.

Loki’s mouth twitches, and he takes a long breath. “We’re idle here,” he says. “Idleness doesn’t suit us.”

“What do you mean? We’re idle up there. We just sit around. Here, we can do whatever we want. We could instantly teleport to an amusement park and just… do that.”

She knows Loki’s response even before he says it. “Purposeless,” he says.

Sylvie gives him a look. “You know, Loki, I’ve visited your life on the Sacrilegious Timeline — sorry, that’s what I call the ex-Sacred Timeline now — and… are you aware of what you would have ended up doing when you gained the throne? You sat around eating grapes and watching self-indulgent plays that you wrote yourself. You seemed pretty happy.”

Loki looks indignant. “But that wasn’t me, not really! I made a different choice, one that led me to where I am right now. I’m a variant, after all. And moreover,” he says, his face changing, “I believe he actually made things better in Asgard for a while, wouldn’t you say? He must have been doing enough in terms of diplomacy and defense in order for the arts to flourish.”

“The term ‘art’ is a bit of a stretch for what I saw.”

“My point stands. I believe that Loki, while pretending to be Odin, was quite industrious.”

“So which one is it, Loki? Are you distancing yourself from him because of his laziness, or defending his hard work?”

Sylvie thinks she may have broken Loki’s brain, and he sputters for a bit, trying to land on an answer that’s not a contradiction. She softens and says, “Either way, it seems like he was pretty happy with some free time. Don’t you think?”

Loki pushes his plate aside and reaches across the table for her hand, leaning into her. Her heart stirs. “Sylvie, I don’t know what we’re doing here, and I never have, but what I do know is that I can’t be without a purpose. Not some other hypothetical version of me, but me, this one, sitting here in front of you. And unless there’s something that I can identify that’s more important than safeguarding the timelines, I can’t just leave it, even if it’s possible to do so.”

His expression tells her that he’s not ignorant of the sentiment hanging between them — unspoken, as it always has been: I could be your purpose, and you could be mine.

But she nods; that’s never been enough for either of them.

She tries to find words that express her deep and profound understanding of this sentiment, and her belief that they can work through it nevertheless. But she feels an old, familiar, and burdensome barricade around her heart that she’s never been able to dispel, preventing her from finding words and phrases that would be passionate enough for him. Passion could shake him, she thinks, if she declared her love in grand, sweeping sonnets from the mountaintops.

But she just doesn’t have that in her. She can’t even locate the love that’s hiding somewhere in her body or mind. She’s checked everywhere, but she can’t catch it and it just sits there, unable to be either ignored or utilized.

“I know,” she says simply. “It’s all right. Coming down here together... it was just something to try. We don’t have to do it again.” She starts to withdraw her hand, not brusquely, just matter-of-factly.

“No, that’s not…” Loki keeps hold of her hand. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, it sounded like it.”

“I’m just thinking out loud, Sylvie, I don’t know what I want.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to. You have no recent practice of wanting things.”

“I actually think…” He glances up at the clock on the wall, and then starts speaking more quickly. “I think that what you’ve done might actually be… necessary. Now that we’ve…” He screws up his face, trying to find the necessary words. “I think the timelines have grown accustomed to having input from multiple people. We may have the same temporal aura, Sylvie, but as you so memorably put it once, I’m not you.”

Sylvie’s heart drops to her feet momentarily, but he’s not trying to hold it against her, it’s just an observation.

“So…” she says, “I fucked up your system. Right?”

“No,” Loki says. “I mean, well, maybe you did. But maybe it needed to be… fucked up. Maybe the timelines would flourish even more with a greater variety of inputs.” He turns his attention out the window and gets that metaphorical look on his face. “It’s like the multiverse has been Rapunzel locked in her tower, and I’ve kept it there, all to myself. I may not have realized that… it needed more. More than I alone could offer.”

Sylvie raises her eyebrows. “Sounds to me like it’s more like Audrey II. You give it a little taste and it just wants more.”

He turns back to her. “Audrey II?”

“Carnivorous singing plant from Little Shop of Horrors. ”

“I’m unfamiliar. Is it an opera?”

“Not exactly.”

He tightens his grip on her hand. “Sylvie, I’m not blaming you. You were right to come and help me, and we couldn’t have anticipated the consequences. But we need to figure out what to do if the timelines continue to want more and more input from more and more people. Surely we can’t recruit every Loki variant in the multiverse, there’s no possible way they can all be trusted.”

Sylvie certainly agrees with that, but she knows that’s not the only thing he’s concerned about. Basically, he doesn’t want to lose his job.

But maybe… he could go part-time.

Sylvie sets his hand down on the table and resolutely downs her coffee. It’s actually better when drunk all at once.

“What do you want to do, Loki? If you want to talk about purpose, I currently have none besides this. This is it, figuring out what to do about you and this thing we created. Do you want to try to use our last few minutes to figure it out?”

Loki regards her for ten precious seconds before leaving his seat and coming around to sit in the booth with her. “No,” he says. “I’d rather just sit here with you, if that’s all right.”

Sylvie grins up at him and nods. “I can do that.” She slides the biscotti between them and picks it up. “But if we’re doing that, then we’re trying the porcupine snowman.”

“Oh, no, Sylvie. Both of us?”

Sylvie breaks off two chunks, one for each of them, each containing one of the unplucked spikes. “Go on,” she says, “it’s a dare. I dare us both.”

And a look of boisterous mischief crosses Loki’s face, a look she’s rarely seen. She likes it. Quite a lot.

“Well, if it’s a dare.” They clink the pieces together like champagne glasses and put them into their mouths at the same time.

It’s wretched.

But it’s funny-wretched, not tragic-wretched. Sylvie’s got her hands over her mouth to keep her from swearing loudly and inventively, and Loki’s head is down on his hands on the table, but they’re both shaking with laughter and leaning against each other.

“Oh my god… oh my god,” she says, and leans her face in his shoulder to muffle herself. They’re getting some weird looks.

“Sylvie,” Loki says, lifting his head, his face eager and bright. “Sylvie, I dare you to conjure a regular coffee and biscotti and leave them here on the table. Just as a joke. Just to confuse everyone…”

But then the second hand clicks down and his face changes, and the pall of solemnity falls over his face again. “Or… never mind,” he says. “Silly idea.”

He stands up and dusts off his pants; he leaves the coffee shop and heads out to the alley where they had entered through the time door. Sylvie sighs in mild frustration.

They’d been having so much fun. And then he had to go and be all mature about it.

It’s fine. He laughed more than she’s ever seen him laugh. Baby steps.

When they return to President Loki, all is well. He gushes about his experience and makes it sound like he had numerous close calls that he was able to salvage using only his singular merits. The expression on Loki’s face tells her that nothing he’s describing is remotely concerning in any way. But they humor the good candidate, and he leaves them with assurances that he’ll come back any time they like.

Loki curls in on himself a bit as he settles himself onto his throne, both hands holding the timelines protectively.

“So,” Sylvie says, “should we take him up on his offer? Go again, maybe a bit longer?” At this point, she really has no idea what his answer will be.

But after a few moments spent in a private reverie, he looks into her eyes and nods firmly.

“Yes, Sylvie,” he says, and his face is a wild mass of contradictions — guilt and doubt and elation and gratitude. But gratitude, or maybe something close to it, seems to be winning out. “Longer next time.”

Chapter Text

Loki watches as President Loki settles in, trying not to roll his eyes as his variant poses and preens in front of a mirror he's brought in order to admire the nobility of his own brow as he holds the timelines. Loki and Sylvie are preparing for their second trip to a far-off timeline, and although Loki still isn't terribly thrilled with this arrangement, he can't imagine ceasing his trips with Sylvie now. The prospect of being with Sylvie, together on the timeline, as a certain sentient clock had once tempted them with, is rapidly becoming his main source of joy and anticipation.

They’re about to leave through the still-open time door, when another figure comes barrelling through it and almost smashes into them with his large shield.

“I’m here!” says a wholesome American voice, stopping himself short. “I’m here. Here to help.”

Loki presses his fingertips to his brow. If there’s anyone he would have wanted to see less than President Loki, it’s Steve Rogers. This isn’t rational at all; he’s ostensibly no longer a villain and his distaste for Captain America stems directly from his thwarted attack on New York. But he can’t help it; the last time he truly lived on a timeline, he disliked the man, and it all returns in an avalanche of distaste.

“Now what is he doing here, Sylvie?” Loki can tell by Captain America’s uniform — there’s more gold than he remembers — that this is not the same Steve Rogers he fought against. But it’s close enough. “Aren’t there other Captain Americas, if you had to bring one?”

“Ugh!” says President Loki on the throne. “Not him. Anyone but him.”

The candidate’s tone of disgust makes Loki want to erase his own.

“Look,” says Sylvie testily, “He couldn’t help finding out about this whole operation, given how closely involved he’s been in Candidate Loki’s campaign — monitoring it for corruption, you know. I tried to tell him he wasn’t needed, but he’s really hard to dislodge, and now that he’s here, I actually think he could be a useful part of our experimentation process. To find out if non-Lokis can do this.”

“Fine,” Loki and President Loki say together, with an identical folding of the arms. Loki is mortified that he so closely resembles this particular variant.

Sylvie clucks her tongue at them and turns to Rogers. “All right, Stevie-boy. Sit over here, on my throne, and Loki will hand you a set of timelines.”

Cautiously, far more so than when he handed them over to either of his variants, Loki passes a handful of timelines over to Captain America.

Absolutely nothing happens. Rogers frowns… Loki bites his lip… President Loki makes an exaggerated cry of distress… 

No, no… The timelines start to turn gray…

Loki can’t wait any longer. “Give them back, now, quick—”

But before he can yank them back, Sylvie grabs his hand. “Don’t think,” she says, and before he knows what he’s doing, he and Sylvie are blasting Rogers’s wrist with their shared seiðr. It has always been more powerful, and more mysterious, together. This is no exception. A band of verdant energy surrounds Rogers’s wrist, with twigs and tiny flowers branching out of it. As it strengthens itself around Rogers’s wrist, a strand of red, white, and blue energy twines down through the timelines, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

Loki gasps in astonishment as Sylvie smiles proudly. “Knew it,” she says.

President Loki scoffs behind them. “Don’t let him stay there too long,” he says. “He’ll Americanize the whole multiverse. Gross.”

Rogers glowers at him. “Aren’t you trying to be President of the United States? Shouldn’t you hold my country in higher respect?”

President Loki shrugs. “Eh,” he says.

They watch in fascination as Captain America proudly holds the timelines in one hand and his shield in the other. It’s working, it really is. Loki suspects it can’t last long, however, and he’s right; the energy band begins to fade away, and the energy exuding from Rogers subsides.

“No,” Rogers says. “I can do it. I can… if I just try… and believe…”

“No use!” President Loki says, hopping over and snatching the timelines from Rogers. “Mine now. Ta-ta, we’ve no use for you.”

“Now, hang on,” Sylvie says snippily, then turns to Loki with animation in her features. “That was good, right?”

“Yes. Brief, but good.”

“There’s got to be a way for non-Lokis to do this. Come on, you’ve got to admit that Captain Americas are on average more trustworthy than Lokis, wouldn’t you say?”

Grudgingly, Loki remembers the melee he observed in the void long ago, and has to admit this is true.

“So maybe we let him stay here and observe,” Sylvie continues, after his nod. “He can keep the other Loki in check and honest, and maybe he’ll learn more about how to lend his energy to the timelines.”

Loki feels a bit guilty. Sylvie’s been doing all this work and devoting all her mental powers to figuring this all out, while he’s done very little to help. He’s grateful to her, because he knows that he doesn’t have the organizational capacity for it at this point. And he still isn’t sure how any of it is supposed to work long-term.

Sylvie settles them in. Loki watches, mute and unassertive, until she seems satisfied that President Loki is well-adjusted and Captain America is capable of observing without interfering.

“Right,” she says, “Let’s head out, Loki.”

“Enjoy fornicating!” says President Loki with a prurient wink as they’re about to step through the time door.

Loki’s body is wracked with contradictory impulses. His gut jolts with heat at the suggestion, but he also puts up an icy, defensive mask. “We’re not!” he says. “Why don’t you mind your own—”

“Whatever, Loki, just come on, he can assume what he likes, it doesn’t affect us,” Sylvie says, tugging at his elbow.

They leave Steve Rogers frowning disapprovingly at the self-satisfied Loki-in-Chief, and Loki tries to forget the brief image that had flashed through his mind at the suggestion that he and Sylvie might be… might be…

He can’t even form the words in his mind. He’s utterly out of practice.

Aladna, 1965

“Cheers,” Sylvie says. Loki had been worried that their variant’s lewd comment would make things awkward between them, but Sylvie’s so blasé about the whole thing that it both puts him at ease and suggests to him (once again) that she never actually thought about him in that way. That she just wants them to be very good, very precariously situated, friends.

“Cheers,” he responds as he clinks his glass with hers. They’ve settled in at a gorgeous restaurant on the Aladnan coastline. Rather than on chairs opposite one another, they’re seated side by side on floor pillows, reclining against a cushioned wall, a low dinner table in front of them. This position allows them both to watch the ocean in front of them. Upon arriving, they’ve conjured outfits for themselves that fit the surroundings: bright, elaborate, floaty, and long-skirted. Loki has a long, embroidered teal tunic; Sylvie has a simple and practical but eye-catching chartreuse ballroom dancing gown. Both of them have some hair adornments and jewelry, as seems to be the fashion.

The champagne is spectacular, as are the crispbread appetizers. Loki’s taste buds wake up; his palate hasn’t been activated this much in all his visits to the timelines.

“My word, Sylvie,” he says, “I wonder if this meal might turn me into a snob again.”

“Good thing if it does,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with being snobbish about good food. I was never able to do that in my life, and now that I’m able to, I’m owning it.”

Loki raises an eyebrow at her.

“Didn’t you eat mostly McDonald’s for a year?”

“I’ll have you know, that shit is good. Have you heard of the bliss point?”

The phrase ‘bliss point’ makes him think of things that are decidedly un-food-related, and he blinks a few times. “The… um… I’m sorry?”

“It’s the combination of salt, sugar, and fat to optimize the yummy factor in food,” she explains, crunching on her crispbread.

“Oh. That kind of… bliss.”

“Well, McDonald’s gets it right, I must say.”

“For you, perhaps. For me, I prefer…” He peruses his menu and makes a decision. “...a well-seasoned roast pheasant with parsnips.”

Before Sylvie can answer, the waiter reappears at their table.

“Did soooooomebody sayyyyy PAAAAAAR-snips?

Ready to order? Would you like some chips?”

He’s clad in blue and turquoise and singing merrily, as the language of this planet is entirely melodic. Loki is still getting used to the whole singing-to-speak thing, but it’s actually coming rather naturally to him. He tries his hand at it:

“Yes, please, I beg you, I’ll order these,

But only if you add a sprinkle of cheese!”

He hands the menu back to the waiter and turns expectantly to Sylvie.

“Hm… um… yeah. This one, then?” she asks, pointing at the menu.

The waiter shakes his head, not understanding her prosaic words.

“Oh, bloody hell,” she mutters under her breath, and tries again, fairly tunelessly.

“I’d like to have the lobster rolls, um…

It’s a lot better than eating voles.”

The waiter nods slowly at her, sings his dazed and befuddled response, and foxtrots away.

“How are you so good at that?” she grouses. “Have you been singing up there?”

Loki shakes his head. “No indeed. Just comes naturally to me.”

“Well, not to me. Yet again, I must inquire how exactly you are my variant.”

She nibbles on her crispbread and gives him a sidelong, thoughtful look. “Loki… speaking of McDonald’s…”

The waiter reappears with a pirouette.

“Voilà ! Your food is here at last!

May you enjoy your fine repast!”

“How the bloody hell did that get cooked in like five seconds?” Sylvie asks. “That’s faster than flipping burgers.”

“It must be a proprietary technology,” Loki says, laughing. “Don’t be jealous.” He starts to bite into his parsnips. “Delectable,” he says. “Try a bite, Sylvie.”

It happens so naturally, passing a piece over to her with his fork, grazing her chin with his finger as he steadies her for the bite. He doesn’t fully process the casual intimacy of this gesture until it’s complete, and she chews pensively as he pulls away with his heart beating more rapidly.

“Okay,” she says of the parsnips. “They won’t replace french fries, but I’ll concede they’re well done.” She brushes her unkempt hair away from her face.

Since they’ve already broached physical touch, Loki inspects one of the flowers in her hair. “How did you land on this hairstyle?” he asks. “It’s not what I would have predicted for you.”

“It’s not a style, it’s a reality,” she says. “During the years I spent as a hermit in a cave, the kids would bring me flowers sometimes and stick them in my hair while I was in a meditative trance. They were trying to mess with me — good kids, I loved them; but they were full of mischief, so naturally I loved them even more. I was so good at it, though, I never broke the trance. But the flowers just sort of… stayed there. Maybe it was something about the nature of the trance, I don’t know, but I think they’re kind of… part of me now.”

Scrutinizing them more closely, Loki sees that the flowers have tiny branches growing out of them, twined around each other in places. They almost look like the branches of Yggdrasil that he’s become so familiar with.

Almost as though she felt connected to me during that time…

To the multiverse, Loki. Not to you.

“And you? You must have gotten brilliant at meditation, with nothing else to do,” Sylvie says bluntly.

“Um… not exactly.”

“But I saw you in a trance when I first came to you…”

“It was a magical trance, not a meditative trance. There’s a difference. From how you’ve described meditation — watching your thoughts go by and such — no, I can’t say that I’ve done that with any systematicity.”

Sylvie scoffs. “No wonder you’re such a mess. Who would have thought I’d be more enlightened than the god of… what are you the god of now, exactly?”

“I call myself the God of Stories,” he says, and then almost regrets it. It feels quite personal.

Sylvie stares at him blankly. “But you never communicate with anyone,” she says. “Until quite recently, that is. How can you possibly be the God of Stories?”

“Well…” He flails for the meaning; it has made sense in his head. “I like to think I hold all the stories of the multiverse in my hands. I’m the god of all possible stories on all possible timelines.”

“Huh,” Sylvie says, chewing thoughtfully. “Well, personally, I like your real stories better. Your out-loud stories. Like when you told me about your mother. Or the one you told me in the void under that stupid tablecloth, about turning into a snake and then stabbing Thor. Or the one you showed me in your memory, when you talked about his banishment, and how he changed.”

“Those are all just family anecdotes, Sylvie, they’re not really stories. You can’t be the God of Family Anecdotes.”

Sylvie shakes her head and her fork in unison. “It’s more than that, though. You have a gift for telling stories well. I might even suggest to you that it could be something to consider if you ever, for whatever reason, find yourself in the situation of needing a new, or maybe just a supplemental, glorious purpose.”

Loki nods slowly and warily. “I see.”

She exhales sharply through her nose. “Look, it’s not easy for me to admit this, okay? I’m the person who was subjected to you comparing love to an imaginary dagger. The thing is, it may have been a terrible metaphor, but it was a well-told story. Same with those damn plays your variant staged: dreadful content, but somehow spellbinding in the execution. And you’ve got a lovely voice, and…”

Sylvie breaks off and suddenly becomes very interested in her lobster roll.

“A lovely voice?” he says, trying not to adjust the timbre of his voice to be more low and melodious. But he does, and it makes him cringe at his own narcicissm.

“Yes, I said it,” she says. “I paid you a compliment. Enjoy it.”

He does, as he sits back next to her and they eat their food contentedly for a while. The sun has begun to set; purple and orange rays of light paint the dining room with broad brushstrokes. As the lighting changes and the scenery outside becomes less visible, dancers make their way into the large open space between the tables. Everywhere, there’s singing: casual, formal, functional, and poetic.

It’s so easy to sit with Sylvie and watch it all. To eat with her, to rest with her. They never got to eat together before. He likes the way she screws up her face in concentration as she decides where to take her next bite.

When they’re done, the waiter brings (and sings) a bowlful of candy. They don’t even have to ask for it; it just appears.

“Score!” Sylvie says. “This is what I live for.”

Loki gives Sylvie a nod of approval. “That rhymed, you know. This planet may be rubbing off on you.”

“Not bloody likely,” she says, opening the wrapper of a blue-and-yellow striped taffy. She bites into it and revels in the sugary goodness momentarily before her expression changes to one of thoughtfulness.

“Loki,” she says, through a sticky mouthful of taffy. “I was wondering about…”

Loki averts his eyes. “Just… can you wait until you’re done chewing?”

“Sorry. Old habits.” She swallows the bite before continuing. “I’ve been thinking about something, and I might know the answer already, but I’d like to be sure. I don’t like living in uncertainty if I can help it. So I put it to you: Do you know how long it was for me at McDonald’s, before you found me?”

Loki feels an old ache returning. Realizing the amount of time she’d been away from him, forgetting him… It had wounded his heart beyond measure, but it wasn’t her fault…

“Um… I think I estimated that it must have been about a year.”

“Close. It was about eight months.” The pained look on her face tells him she’s facing a new truth right now. “So that confirms that it wasn’t the same amount of time for you.”

“Goodness, no. I thought you…” But no. He’d told various other iterations of Sylvie about their temporal discrepancy, but not this one. It had never mattered to the other Sylvies, and he’d long ago abandoned the idea of telling her about it, because he had determined it wasn’t useful information to her.

But those were the long-ago Sylvies, lost to time, with different goals and agendas than the Sylvie sitting in front of him. To this Sylvie, with more life under her belt, it seems that it might make a difference.

“No,” he says again. “Not eight months.”

She flicks the taffy wrapper idly away. “So. How long, then?”

Loki gazes steadily into her eyes, preparing her. “You know how it is in the TVA,” he says quietly. “I can’t say for sure. But it was no more than a few days, and the entirety of that time was spent either trying to find you, or desperately wanting to.”

Sylvie closes her eyes and leans back against the cushioned wall. “I should have known,” she says. “I thought you weren’t looking for me.”

Loki feels his eyebrows raise defensively, even as his heart goes out to her. “It doesn’t seem as though you went looking for me.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Loki. I felt like you were the one who should do the looking under those particular circumstances. Maybe that was unfair of me, especially given your impassioned little speech about wanting me to be okay, and especially with hindsight telling us that you were right to have concerns about the consequences of freeing the multiverse — not that I would ever do anything differently, mind you.”

“Believe me, I know that,” Loki murmurs.

“Anyway,” Sylvie says, shoving a taffy in his direction, “thanks. For wanting to find me. I wish you hadn’t shown up with the damned Cavalry, but… thanks.”

“Mobius wasn’t the Cavalry. He wanted to be your friend.”

“Well, I didn’t really know that. And there was that other asshole, too.”

“Yes, he was indeed quite an asshole.”

“But you showed up,” she says, looking squarely into his eyes. “You found me. And I didn’t give you enough credit for wanting to find me for me. I thought it was all business.”

Loki glances down. “I didn’t do much to dissuade you of that opinion,” he admits. “I thought you wouldn’t want to see me, so I…”

“I didn’t.”

Loki lets his head fall into his hands. “Balder’s beard,” he mutters, “this is impossible.”

“No it’s not,” Sylvie says, and she lifts his chin up. “It’s actually quite simple. I didn’t want to see you back then. But I do now. You wanted me to listen to you back then. I’m listening now. We’re here, Loki, together, and I’m so glad of it.”

She presses the taffy into his palm. “Eat it. Really. It’s divine. I want to see your face when you taste it.”

It’s impossible to remain dejected when that face is looking at him, entreating him to eat candy. He peels off the wrapper and pops the blue-and-yellow bonbon into his mouth, expecting not much — it’s candy, after all, not something for a refined palate like grapes or nuts.

But it’s brilliant. There’s a fruity zing that dances around his tongue and leaves him nearly hopping with enjoyment.

“Damn,” he whispers.

“Right?”

There. For a second, he glimpses that spark of purpose that has been missing from her eyes. It dazzles him, makes her radiant. Surely her spark can’t return just from sharing her enjoyment of candy with him.

Or maybe it can, he realizes. She’s told him about her weakness for passing out Kablooie to the children she encounters in her travels. He knows that she has been a healer in wartimes throughout time and space, and that she gets pleasure out of the healing, to be sure, but also from dispensing sweets to the invalids after their lives have been saved.

Surely there is more to her purpose than passing out candy. But…

But maybe, right now, there is something special about making him happy, the same way she’s cheered up countless souls throughout her travels.

He feels the past falling away in great swaths, unveiling a less burdened future for them. He doesn’t know what it looks like, and he knows it can’t be sustained while relying only on the help of one self-absorbed Loki variant, but that future feels suddenly lighter and brighter and more possible than ever.

He holds out his hand to her. “Dance with me, Sylvie,” he says.

She gives him a look. “I only dance filthily. I’m not elegant. I think you’re supposed to be elegant here.”

“Just go with the music,” he says. “It’s part of the DNA of the planet. I’m pretty sure if you let the music overtake you, it’ll teach you the steps.”

“I can do the Macarena. Reckon it’ll be the Macarena?”

“I really, really don’t.”

Laughing and rolling her eyes, Sylvie lets him take her out onto the dance floor.

It’s true: the music really does guide them along as they grow accustomed to its rhythms. It comes naturally to Loki, even after centuries spent without engaging with the arts at all. Even Sylvie manages to do something other than grinding or the Macarena. He dips her; she twirls into his arms.

“You know you want to, Loki,” she says, one moment when she’s curled into his arm.

His stomach turns over. “Want to… what?”

“Sing to me,” she says.

Oh.

Actually, he does.

He simply opens his mouth and lets the words pour forth in tone, rhythm, and rhyme. It’s so easy for him. It feels wonderful.

He doesn’t pay too much attention to the words he’s singing, other than to note that every time his rhyme is particularly good (or particularly cheesy), Sylvie smirks and her eyes twinkle. She particularly seems to like his meta-commentary bit about the singing itself:

"And when I speak so fluently in song,

I’d love for Sylvie’s voice to sing along,

But oh, I daren’t ask for such a favor

I would, if I were only a tad braver

You see, the risks of asking her are legion

Not least that she might kick me in the nether region…"

The ambient music changes with his final two words, slower and more deliberate. There’s a slight fermata and a move to half-tempo, as though the accompaniment itself has anticipated his need for two extra syllables and dramatic effect. She responds with a nod and a tip of an invisible hat, and Loki bows. Then he takes a break from singing for a spell, so as to better enjoy the slower-paced, sultrier feel of the new musical style.

His hand rests on the small of her back. Sylvie’s head drops to his chest. He feels a little like he’s at a Midgardian prom, and he doesn’t mind at all.

“Lemonade and mutton,

Can a fellow cut in?”

A gruff-looking man in a yellow headdress has elbowed his way to them, and is offering his hand to Sylvie. Sylvie raises her head, shrugs, and says, “Sorry, not interested.”

“In song, Sylvie,” Loki reminds her.

“Oh, can you just do it? Tell him I smell bad and he wouldn’t like me anyway.”

“I wouldn’t dream of maligning you like that.” He clears his throat and sings back:

“Thank you for your inquiry,

But the lady doesn’t require thee.”

The man bristles, gets up in Loki’s face, and starts singing a surly tune that doesn’t fit the accompaniment at all, all about how he’s the best dancer in the room and the lady will surely regret it. Loki is in the midst formulating an appropriate, but melodic, response, when Sylvie rolls her eyes at the man and hisses like a cat. Apparently that is a universal language; he leaps back a pace.

And Sylvie sings:

“I’m not a fan of you, sad sack,

Plus you sound like Nickelback.”

The man, while knowing no more about Nickelback than Loki does, clearly gathers from context clues that this is not a compliment. He sputters for a moment or two, then makes a gesture that Loki can only assume is rude on this planet, turns on his heel, and leaves them alone.

“I dare you to turn his hat-thingy into a duck,” Sylvie says, grinning as she twirls a stunned Loki around.

“I shouldn’t, Sylvie, it would be messing with the timeline, introducing a species that I can’t be certain is native to this planet.”

“Then make it disappear after a few minutes! Loki, you can have a little fun here. You’re stuck in Sacred Timeline thinking, where anything could cause a nexus event and a branch that needs to be pruned. If a branch forms here, it’s fine! Look, if anyone cares about the continued flourishing of the timelines, it’s me, and I’ve gotten used to knowing what’s harmful to them versus what’s just having a bit of fun. This would be just having a bit of fun.”

A bit of fun.

With Sylvie.

Yes, he would like that very much.

He raises one eyebrow and one finger. The churlish man squawks and complains in flustered song as the newly-minted duck quacks and flaps in his hair.

Sylvie rests her head on his chest again as she laughs.

Loki can’t help feeling as though the fellow deserved it, and then he wonders if this is a fit thought for the God of Stories to have. What happened to loving all living creatures and wanting the best for them?

But ultimately, is that really Loki? He’d been content with his moral progress before he tried to be an all-beneficent god. He was good, mostly… but flawed, and still rather mischievous.

He turns the duck back into a headdress before it can cause too much commotion. But he can’t quite be sorry he did it.

“How was that for you?” she inquires, still leaning against his chest.

He strokes her hair and tut-tuts his tongue at her. “What have I done to my multiverse, Sylvie? I’m not sure it shall ever recover.”

She raises her head and peers up at him. “It’s my multiverse, I believe,” she says, flicking her eyebrows at him challengingly.

His body, so close to hers, starts to respond to her touch and to that look in ways it hasn’t in absolutely forever. He interlaces their fingers more tightly and rubs his thumb down the center of her palm. “It’s our multiverse,” he says, deadly serious. “Both of ours.”

He feels the slightest inclination of his head, no, no, she doesn’t want to kiss you, she thinks of you as a friend… But no… her head is moving towards his, too, he can’t ignore it… What is happening… 

Could it possibly be…

Their lips are inches away from each other...

But then the oddest thing happens: a thin strip of blue swims in between their faces.

Followed by a strip of yellow.

It’s a sensation he now knows as well as Sylvie: feeling a world on the brink of destruction.

He smells the taffy before he realizes that their entire bowl of candy has turned into cosmic spaghetti in front of Sylvie’s stricken eyes.

Chapter Text

Loki’s hand is at Sylvie’s wrist before she can fully comprehend what’s happening; clawing at the TemDisc, he opens up a time door right there on the dance floor and stumbles through it. Sylvie remains among the startled dancers long enough to mutter “sorry about this” and toss some Aladnian money at their abandoned table before following after him. The disappearance of one bowl of candy has hardly caused a stir; the multiverse has been kind enough to give the two of them a heads-up before anyone else noticed. Everything seems just dandy to the befuddled people who can only see a giant orange portal in their midst.

Sylvie ducks her head and hastens after Loki, wondering what horrors she’ll witness upon their return.

It’s mayhem, of course: two Lokis and one Captain America all in a tangle on the floor of the ex-Citadel, all shouting, none listening.

“Just let me finish my broadcast! The world needs to know about my selflessness!”

“Don’t you dare, you egotistical madman!”

“Give me the bloody timelines or I’ll vanish you both into my pocket dimension!”

Sylvie cringes; Loki is losing decisively, he hasn’t been in a physical fight in ages. Fortunately, he has other powers that he’s surely going to use… any second now… No, Loki?

“Loki!” Sylvie cries out as Loki is kicked in the ribs by his variant. “Are you kidding me? Stop time!”

Loki glances up at her. “What? Oh. Right.” Loki flicks his fingers, ending in an upward pointing gesture.

Stop.

Sylvie catches her breath; in theory she has imagined this, but the reality of it is staggering. For one thing, there’s a tangible sensation that accompanies it: a brief hitch in her body, during which she fears she’s being paused, too, but then she actually feels Loki overriding his mental command, making an exception for her, and she can move easily again. The other two men are petrified like statues; Rogers is practically in mid-air, with his shield raised, about to smash it down on President Loki's midsection. Every single timeline, usually in winding, fluid motion, is utterly still. It’s eerie and unnatural, but stunning nonetheless.

The time door is still open behind her, and in the quiet stillness, Sylvie takes a curious step back through it and peers around. Her suspicion is confirmed: everything in Aladna has been immobilized as well. The rude man with the yellow headdress is frozen in an obnoxious taunting gesture at another couple. A stream of wine that’s being poured into a glass looks like a stalactite. 

Loki can stop the whole multiverse.

She has to admit it’s impressive — even more so for the fact that he has resisted doing it for his own amusement. Most Loki variants would have no such restraint.

She returns and closes the time door. Loki is plucking individual timelines out of President Loki’s grasp and off of the floor where some of them have fallen. Gravely, he asks, “Is Aladna still standing?”

Sylvie nods silently as she watches him give an extra pulse of energy to the timelines, which glow mint-green in response. He looks up at her for confirmation, and she says, “Yeah. It was fine. I didn’t see anything else spaghettifying.” 

He flinches at the word. “So foolish of us,” he whispers, and raises his hand to restart the workings of time.

“Wait,” Sylvie says, trying not to be wounded by his word choice. She hooks her foot around President Loki’s recumbent form, his face set in a howl of defiant horror and his fingers curled like claws, and rolls him out of the path of Captain America’s shield.

“Okay,” she says, “go to it.”

Loki flourishes his hand and everything regains mobility. Sylvie should have given Captain America more credit for nonviolent impulses; his shield comes swishing down almost to where President Loki would have been situated, but stops just short of where it would have injured him.

“Consider that a warning, you— wait, what?” Rogers flashes his eyes around in confusion as President Loki cowers in a ball, suddenly several feet away with no explanation.

“Up,” Loki says shortly, looking from one to the other. “Don’t bother asking how he got there. What happened?”

They both start talking over each other.

“Loki took out his phone and tried to start a YouTube livestreet down to our timeline—”

“Livestream, you out-of-touch fossil! I was minding my own business, just doing a little harmless self-promotion—”

“He had his fingertips off the timelines as he was trying to press the—”

“And he just ran over here and attacked me, I was helpless to defend myself—”

“I was trying to steal your phone and hold your hands in place, you buffoon—”

“I wasn’t doing any harm, none at all! He made me drop the—”

“Oh my god!” Sylvie cries out. “Less-Important Loki, did you actually think there would be cell reception from the end of time?”

Loki clears his throat quietly. “Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is. There’s quite a lot of radiofrequency energy up here.”

President Loki fishes his phone out of the crotch of his pants, where he apparently stashed it during the fight, and brandishes it in Sylvie’s face. “Full bars,” he says. “I noticed it the last time I came here. How could I pass up a chance to let voters know that I’m literally holding the entire multiverse together?”

Rogers shakes his head furiously. “Most people don’t even know what a multiverse is. It would be destabilizing for them to find out in this way, you’d cause total chaos in our timeline—”

Less-Important Loki seethes. “Of all people, you shouldn’t be talking right now. You’re the one who ripped the timelines out of my hand, trying to stop me from doing something utterly benign!”

“That was because you—”

“Silence. Both of you.” Loki’s voice is more commanding than Sylvie’s ever heard it. He’s still standing, as is she, and they tower over the men on the ground.

“Gentlemen, thank you for your assistance,” Loki says icily. “I don’t believe we will be requiring your services anymore.”

“Let me try again! Please!” begs President Loki.

Loki appraises him without pity. “You’re not to be trusted.”

“Then I… let me try again, with the assistance of your magic…” says Rogers.

“We are fine here. Thank you.” And then, looking at their ashamed faces, he softens somewhat. “You’ve done… perhaps not your best, but… something worthwhile, temporarily. And I thank you for it. We do.” He turns to her. “Sylvie? A door, please.”

Sylvie feels a knot in her stomach, but she waits until both men have left before she says anything. President Loki struts away with a toss of his hair; Rogers insists on shaking Sylvie’s hand and making one more plea to help, which is rejected.

And then they’re gone.

“I wish you’d consulted with me before making the unilateral decision not to invite either of them back,” Sylvie blurts out as she closes the door. “I thought we were supposed to be in this together.”

Loki looks weary. “Well, Sylvie, after centuries of making decisions all on my own, it’s not easy to shift modes. I imagine you understand this.”

“Are you giving up? No more shared timeline trips?”

“I don’t know, Sylvie. This was a dreadfully close call. It terrified me, and I should think it would have terrified you, too.”

She nods. “And I suppose you blame me for what happened.”

She knows this will get to him, and it does; it was more dramatic than she intended it to sound. But sometimes she just needs to make him feel.

Loki lets out a noise of sharp exasperation. “No, I don’t blame you, which I think you know. Leaving the multiverse in the hands of those two was my choice as much as yours. And I know you only started this whole process because you wanted to give me a break.” Taking a step in her direction, he holds out the branches in his right hand. “And I’m grateful for it.”

She accepts the timelines. “To give us a break, Loki. Together on the timeline, like bloody Miss Minutes offered us eons ago. I didn’t care enough about then, but I do now.”

Loki gives a hollow laugh, looking at his shoes. “So… what, you have feelings for me now?”

The easy answer would be yes, but it’s not quite true. She tries to collect her thoughts.

“I want to,” she whispers.

He swivels his head to hers. “You… want to.”

She purses her lips and starts to pace back and forth, trying to come up with the right words. “I don’t have the full capacity to feel, Loki. I’ve taught myself how to have casual friendships over these last years when I haven’t been bombarded by incessant death, but I went so long without caring deeply about anyone that I can’t make it happen now. No, Loki, I see that you’re about to say something, but you don’t understand — I had to actively stop myself from feeling love. It was self-protective. I became an expert in it, the way you became an expert in conjuring and duplication casting. And I’m aware of it now, but I still can’t break the spell. I can’t feel true love, no matter how hard I want to.”

“You did.” The words come so quietly that she barely hears them.

“I’m sorry?”

“You did feel love. On Lamentis. Enough to cause a nexus spike, because I felt it, too. You can’t argue with a chronomonitor, Sylvie.”

This surprises her, even though on paper she already knew it. She’s never really connected her brief flare-up of true love with the image she’s always had of her sealed-up heart. The truth of what he says is so palpable that she can do nothing but deflect with humor.

“Oh… I could argue with a chronomonitor.”

Loki laughs aloud and gives her that look that only he can. “I’m sure you could.”

She shakes her head, knowing she needs to do better than that. “I want to love you, Loki. I do. There’s a… when I was young, I imagined a steel lockbox around my heart, keeping it safe. It became so real to me that I can truly envision it there, to this day. And I don’t know how I broke free of it on Lamentis, I really don’t know.”

Loki is contemplative for a while, frowning in concentration as he molds a rope of branches into a more supple configuration, massaging more life into them. “Well,” he says, “If it’s any consolation, I may be in the same boat with you.”

Sylvie looks up, furrowing her brow. “What do you mean?”

He’s adjusting strands here and there, but his movements don’t seem urgent anymore, he’s just trying to avoid looking at her. “I love you, Sylvie, as one of my most cherished beings on the timelines. You must understand, though, that it’s been so long… so long, Sylvie, since Lamentis, since the void, since the—” Since the kiss. He doesn’t say it, but she hears it anyway. “If I really had to estimate, I’d say it was three hundred and fifty years that I spent trying to fix the problem of the loom. Maybe longer. That whole time, all I saw was a Sylvie who seemed indifferent to me. And then then I had twenty years more, alone, without you. I cherish you, Sylvie, but…” 

His voice catches in his throat; the moment hangs in the air between them, and Sylvie is almost terrified of the end of the sentence.

“...but you taught me not to love you.”

It hits her like a battering ram, and she knows it’s true. Sylvie feels her chin quavering, shaking her head. “What a bloody mess.”

Finally, he turns his eyes towards her. “If you’ve got a steel box around your heart, I’ve taken my heart and split it into an infinite number of pieces, trying to care equally for everyone in creation. And maybe I haven't been quite as successful as I’d thought, but the attempt has fractured my heart rather thoroughly.” 

He clears his throat. “So I’d say it’s a bit of a doomed endeavor, isn’t it? Spending time together, trying to make this happen, if that’s what we’re doing.” He flicks a set of timelines in her direction; they wriggle momentarily and then shake off some dust.

She sniffs, a tear rolling down her cheek.

“Fuck this,” she says. “Fuck us. What the hell have we done to ourselves.”

“It’s all right, Sylvie,” he says, smiling. “We know that ‘together on the timeline’ isn’t possible now. I don’t know that I’m capable of figuring out how to love while I’m bound to this place and to this work. And I don’t trust any other Loki variant with this task. Just you, and me.”

The fact that he includes her so easily in this statement gives her chills, but she tries to stay focused. “There must be someone. What about the old man, the one from the void… He was certainly trustworthy, and sacrificed himself nobly… There must be another older Loki like him who…”

“I don’t want another Loki to have to sacrifice themself!” Loki cries out, a tear on his cheek now. “Even for a second or a day. I want all the rest of our kind to live their lives, trying to make something of themselves without the burden of destiny pulling them either towards chaos and evil or towards martyrdom.” He lets out a forceful exhale. “And really we must acknowledge that it’s quite difficult for us Lokis not to succumb to the temptations of power. So as much as I’d like to, I don’t trust them. Not even the old man. It’s you and me, Sylvie, and it always has been.”

You and me.

The box around her heart is still firmly in place, but she takes an axe and chips away at it, just a smidge. She remembers how she felt when they were dancing, only minutes ago, and wants desperately to feel like that again. It wasn’t love, not yet, but oh, it was divine.

She takes two steps to him and places her free hand on the back of his neck. “You may be right,” she says. “It might be a hopeless endeavor.”

Loki’s eyes are full of sadness and yearning — not for her, she assumes, but for an emotion he can’t quite manufacture. “But?” he asks, and now he adds a drop of hope to the potion of his gaze as he lets his unencumbered hand rest upon her waist.

“But… oh, I don’t know, Loki, I don’t have a witty remark for this. Just kiss me.” She stands on tiptoe and he meets her halfway.

It’s polite and respectful, and only a few seconds long. Their hands don’t stray beyond the confines of his neck and her waist. But this kiss is enough. It’s not passionate, and Loki’s lips don’t seem to know what to do, but Sylvie nevertheless feels the essence of Loki — the man, not the god, which is what she wants, after all.

“There. You see?” she says, after she pulls away. “I want to.”

Loki’s lips work for a while, and he touches his fingertips to his mouth as though to make sure it really happened. Sylvie tries to figure out what he’s thinking about — does he regret the kiss? Is he overwhelmed by it? Whatever his feelings, he’s not ready to talk yet, so she takes a few steps back and tries to forge ahead, to avoid awkwardness.

“So maybe we can just figure out how to work with this energy we’re able to create, and we—”

But is shaking his head, not hearing a word she says. “Sylvie, stop—”

He rushes to her, his lips are on hers again, and this time there’s nothing polite about it. He’s got his free arm wrapped fully around her waist… he mouth is open, lips searching, tongue wandering… his face finds new angle after new angle, nose nudging against hers…

After a few beats of numb surprise, Sylvie responds in kind, bringing her own hand to his chest and then sliding it up and curling it around his neck, then upwards to twine through his hair. His lips travel down her jawline and come to rest at the base of her neck, and Sylvie gasps, feeling more alive and animated than… perhaps ever.

He clutches her close, shuddering, and pulls back, moving his hand to her cheek. “I want to love you, too,” he says.

She nods fervently. “And what else?” Instinctively, she knows there’s more.

After seeking words for a few moments, he bores his eyes into hers. “I don’t want to be immortal,” he says. “And I’ll never abandon my duty, not fully, but I want to have a life that’s more than this. With…”

He stops short of saying the with you. But she knows.

“Then let’s make it happen,” she says. “We’ll start with the life thing, and we’ll see if the love comes. The life thing is… more important.” She tries to believe this, and mostly does.

He shakes his head. “But I don’t know how we can possibly manage it. We can’t trust other Lokis. Apparently we can’t even trust Captain Americas, which probably doesn’t bode well for us. How can we possibly do this?” He strokes her cheek.

“Loki, I think the answer is clear. You need me. You needed me from the beginning, in fact, and I wasn’t there with you. I still can’t regret going to live my life, but if I had left the loom room with you…” She swallows hard. “Well, I wonder if you might have not ended up stuck here. What if we had been able to create something?” she asks, bringing her hand to his and clasping them together in between them. “What if, together, we might have been able to use the energy of that particular moment and crafted something sustainable, something that would have allowed us to repair the multiverse and still leave and go back to our lives? Together, at long last?”

To prove her point, she squeezes his hand and the unique magic that has always been right at their fingertips, and so much stronger together, begins to manifest. A ball of green energy grows in between them, small at first, then increasing to the size of a yoga ball. They move their hands away from each other as it grows, both holding it in place like a fragile bubble. When Sylvie is confident it’s large enough, she holds her breath and threads her bundle of timelines into the center of it.

“Try it,” she whispers. With a tremor in his jaw, Loki follows suit.

“Together,” she says.

At the same instant, they release their hands from the branches and pull them out of the energy field. 

Loki gasps and steps back, looking down at his hands and then back at the glowing orb. It’s unmistakable; life and vitality are being infused into the timelines from the energy core itself.

“Will it last?” he asks.

Sylvie shakes her head. “I don’t know, Loki. You tell me. I’m not even sure if this is magic or science, but you’re supposed to know more about both.”

He huffs out a little laugh. “Right now I know absolutely nothing.”

“Let’s just watch, then.” She takes his hand.

Together, they stand shoulder to shoulder and watch, in total silence. Gradually, the core grows smaller, until it fades away so much that Loki rushes to the branches to rescue them before they lose any energy. It’s gone, to be sure, but it wasn’t fast. Sylvie’s internal clock tells her it took a little over twenty minutes for it to dissipate.

Loki doesn’t appear discouraged as he holds the branches in his hand, and Sylvie does the same. He looks at her with steadfast hopefulness.

“We can get it to stay in place longer,” he says. “I’m sure of it. Maybe not forever, but… longer. Don’t you think, Sylvie?”

Nodding, she says with intensity, “I know we can.”

Chapter Text

After two(ish) weeks, their magical energy field can be sustained for two(ish) hours. Sylvie keeps kicking him out as she solidifies it:

“Go away, Loki, you’re distracting me.”

“I could help—”

“You really can’t. Get better at enchantment and then we’ll talk.” The energy field is simple for them to create together, but it turns out that her enchantment powers are the best way to hold it in place.

So he obeys, skipping off to various timelines and watching other Lokis. He has an inkling that if they’re going to try to make a life for him, away from the end of time, it’s going to involve more of their variants, in addition to the energy core. He has only the haziest of ideas how this will work, but it seems important to keep tabs on the Lokis.

So he observes. And what he sees is an endless display of a predictable cycle: mischief, violence, redemption, sacrifice. Sometimes, if the sacrifice isn’t fatal, the order of events varies. But he can’t help thinking that his efforts to give all these Lokis a chance for a different kind of life have failed miserably. There are none who have, say, settled down with a nice partner in a nice cozy house with a garden and while making their living directing cheesy plays. (Well, there’s one who comes close, but then he throws himself to the jaws of Fenris the wolf after inadvertently getting Thor killed.)

It never stops.

Today, after he returns to her, Sylvie greets him with an abrupt “shh!” Her fingertips are embedded deep in the energy core and her eyes are closed. She’s enchanting the timelines themselves, programming them to absorb strength from the orb, as they would from Loki and Sylvie themselves.

Loki sits meekly on his throne, grateful that she can’t see his face. He’s just witnessed his ex-Sacred Timeline death at the hands of Thanos (while safely hidden, of course), and he’s not in a fit state for conversation.

That would have been my fate.

But no, it never could have been his fate, because he made a different choice that put him on another path. A path which, coincidentally, also involves sacrifice.

But not death. Not yet.

Do we ever survive? Has a Loki ever died at a ripe old age of 5500 or so and just… passed peacefully in their bed?

He’s trying not to believe it’s a hopeless cause, just after he’s allowed himself to hope for it.

“There!” Sylvie says, panting heavily. “Done. I gave it my all there at the end, so that should give it a few extra minutes. But I didn’t want to go too crazy. We’ve got a good thing going here, and if I mess with it too much, we might ruin it and have to start over.”

Loki skims his hand along the surface of the luminous sphere. “So… we’ve got about two hours?”

Sylvie nods. “That’s what we’ve established. Let’s call it two hours and four minutes.”

Given how strenuous it’s been to increase the time (it went quickly for a few days, then plateaued at two hours and hasn’t budged much in a week), Loki knows they can’t get it to a point where it’s permanent. Not without some other sort of intervention. But Sylvie is now confident enough that they’re going to risk their first trip to a timeline together with absolutely no sentient beings minding the store.

“So,” she says briskly. “Ready?”

Loki’s not sure how to answer. They have had zero discussions about what they’ll do today. They haven’t kissed since that one day two weeks ago — they’ve gone into all-business mode, working on expanding and bolstering the energy field. But he’s thought about that kiss (those kisses) every day. And there have been moments when Sylvie’s hand has lingered on his a little longer than necessary while they turn over the timelines to each other, or when she’s trained her eyes on his lips as he talks. He has a sneaking suspicion she’s been thinking about the kisses, too. And that she wants another, and perhaps… more.

But. They’ve already established that their hearts are damaged possibly beyond repair, so… is there a point to any of this?

There must be.

“Clock’s ticking, Loki.” She inclines her head at the orb.

“Er… yes. Where did you have in mind?”

She shrugs. “I’ve made no plans.”

“Nor have I.”

“We probably should have talked about this earlier.”

“Yes, we probably should have.”

“Fine. I’ll take us back to bloody Earth. It’s not very original, but I’m most comfortable there. London again, since that’s where our accents fit in. Sacrilegious Timeline, nothing fancy.”

With a herculean effort, Loki resists looking back trepidatiously at the energy core that’s doing his job for him. Because he knows how he and Sylvie work together, and it’s incredibly effective. And he trusts it.

London, Earth, 2025

“You’d best hide your face, in case anyone recognizes you. You’re supposed to be dead, after all.”

Sylvie has taken them to the lobby of a fancy hotel that proclaims itself to be the Savoy. She looks up at him askance. “This okay?” she asks, nodding in the direction of the concierge’s desk. “Or am I being presumptuous?”

Oh. I see.

He purses his lips in amusement. “You are,” he says. “But I think you’ve got a right to be.”

“Well, we’ve only got two hours,” she says matter-of-factly. “Figured I’d speed things along. If nothing else, we can just lie on a nice bed and take a nap. Have you slept at all, during any of your timeline adventures?”

Loki shakes his head. 

“What about when you were timeslipping?”

“Oh, I had to sleep occasionally back then. You all thought I was mad, just dropping off in the midst of the chaos. O.B. kept screeching in my face, and I’m pretty sure Mobius slapped me a few times. But I learned to sleep through the shouting. And the slapping. And the kicking — that was you, of course.” He yawns as he thinks about the empty TVA office he’d finally found to use as his nap room, where they never seemed to be able to find him. “Frankly, I believe I’ve actually started to accumulate some tiredness recently, taking these excursions away from the end of time.”

It would probably be prudent to simply take a nap.

But…

“Well, we’ll see what happens,” she says, and she heads off to the front desk to make a reservation as Loki remains unobtrusive behind a large potted plant. He could shapeshift into someone else, he supposes, but that doesn’t come as naturally to him as it once did. He doesn’t want to end up with his head sticking out of his elbow by accident.

When Sylvie returns, she has a key card in her hand, which Loki stares at with interest.

“Well, unless you want to go to the fancy tea room instead, we can head up. I declined the personal butler that comes with the suite, if that’s all right with you, and we don’t have any luggage, so I said we’d just show ourselves up.”

“Personal… butler?”

“I managed to snag the Royal Suite,” she says offhandedly.

“Sylvie… did you enchant the concierge?”

“No!” she says. “I mean, I was tempted. I did flirt with her. That’s often just as effective.”

“Ah.” Loki wonders what Sylvie’s “flirting” entails, since he’s pretty sure he’s never seen it directed at him. He used to think their conversation on the train at Lamentis might have involved some flirting, but he talked himself out of that ages ago.

As they make their way to the lift, his breath starts to quicken and he has a burning desire to ask her flat-out what precisely she wants to do in that suite upstairs. But he feels like that would ruin the moment, whatever the moment is, so he fumbles around for a topic of conversation and stabs a pin in the first thing that comes to mind.

“How, um… how do you always have money, Sylvie?”

She raises an eyebrow in surprise, and he realizes that he is genuinely curious about this question, so he elaborates.

“You’ve never mentioned… work, or anything. Not at McDonald’s anymore, I believe. I’m just curious.”

She gives him an approving good question! nod. “I’ve got a stash on quite a few timelines. The Sacrilegious Timeline is where I’ve built up the most, hence why we’re here.” Sylvie reaches for the “up” button, but another hotel guest has already pushed it. She gives him a friendly grin.

“A… stash?” Loki asks, trying to make sense of this.

She nods. “In apocalypses, I’d usually steal food or just not pay. I didn’t feel bad because everyone was going to die anyway.” The man waiting next to them gives her an odd glance, which she ignores. “I taught myself conjuring while I worked at McDonald’s. After I quit, I just conjured money non-stop. I’m pretty sure I caused substantial inflation on a couple of timelines,” she says, almost smugly.

The lift door dings and they board it, with their fellow passenger joining them after a moment’s hesitation. Sylvie hits the button for the 5th floor, and the unnerved man presses 4.

“You’re proud of causing inflation?” Loki says, thankful that his prying mind is keeping his nerves at bay for the time being..

“Not proud, per se, but… it’s just kind of funny, isn’t it? I mean, how have you been getting your money on your timeline trips?”

“Well, I conjure it, but…”

“See? Inflation. You’ve caused it, too.”

“It was only a few measly coins here and there! Surely not enough to—”

“Anyway, when I started to feel bad about it, I found a couple of gigs on various timelines that I can do over and over again. Stuff that pays well — bricklaying is surprisingly lucrative. Then I just shove the money in a well-chosen bank and pick it up a few centuries later and I’ve got a few thousand bucks or Euros or packets of Xandarian gold dust to play with.”

The man on the lift with them smashes the “open door” button rapidly at the fourth floor, eyeing them warily as he scurries out. Sylvie shrugs as the doors close behind him. “Whoops. I still sometimes forget that everyone around me isn’t doomed and it matters if I freak them out. Sorry, guy.”

They drift up one more floor, and Loki waits for the doors to open again. But they don’t, not until Sylvie inserts their key card into a slot.

“There. All ours.”

“We have the whole floor?”

“The whole floor. Say hi to the Thames.”

Loki actually lifts his hand and waves his fingertips at the stately river, which is visible through the massive windows; this is starting to feel like an out-of-body experience. He casts his eyes about and wonders briefly if she’s taken him to his living quarters in Asgard by mistake. The suite is grand, the furnishings sumptuous. Ceiling-high potted plants are arrayed in the main room. there are antique trinkets on every flat surface, and each seating unit is draped in cashmere. He spies multiple chocolate truffles dotting the environment; Sylvie’s eyes light up as she grabs one off the coffee table and eats it in two bites.

“Why did you get a suite if we’re only going to… nap… here for two hours?” he asks.

“Well. I can come back and use it myself, can’t I? Or you can, if I stay up there. And I…” She traces her fingertips along the edge of a tasseled throw pillow. “I wanted it to be nice for you. Your first… nap… in ages.”

Oh, he doesn’t want to nap.

She takes his hand. “Bedroom?” she asks.

The situation seems more real and less real all at once. Wordlessly he follows after her. For the first time, he notes the outfits she’s conjured for them. She’s in a tank top and jeans — simple enough, although they look like an expensive tank top and jeans. Her hair is tied back casually, with strands falling down her face. While she doesn’t usually go in for jewelry, this time she’s got twinkling emerald studs in her ears.

She’s chosen Loki’s outfit, too, and she’s dressed him in…

Oh.

She’s got him in his TVA dress shirt, skinny tie, and brown trousers.

This surprises him. He would have thought she wouldn’t want anything to do with the TVA.

But if she’s trying to recapture something, something that may have existed for a fleeting moment, it makes sense that she would dress him this way. Thankfully, she’s omitted the rips and bloodstains.

She sits down on the edge of the bed, the white bedspread tucked in to perfection. She frowns. “This is too neat,” she says. “It’s bothering me. Help me mess it up.”

She starts yanking at the sheets, tossing the throw pillows and decorative coverlet on the floor. Loki tries to help, mussing up the remaining pillows a bit, but really he just likes watching her create chaos. “There,” she says. “Vast improvement.” She kicks off her shoes and flops her whole body down, curling onto her side and resting her head on her hands. “Join me?”

He follows suit, slipping his shoes off slowly and deliberately and placing them on the stool at the foot of the bed. She chuckles in amusement at his fastidiousness. He sits gingerly on the edge of the bed.

“Is it comfortable?” he asks.

“Of course it is. It’s a bed. How could it not be?”

“Easily. Some beds are atrocious.”

“Well, not to me. And I’m willing to bet that after two decades of no beds, you’ll feel the same.”

He smiles, takes a long breath, and lies down.

A bed. I am lying in a bed with Sylvie. After hundreds of years of knowing her (at least in his experience) this has never happened.

“So,” she says, her expression rather opaque. “Shall we sleep, or…”

Loki’s mouth is dry. “I don’t believe I want to sleep.”

“You probably should, in all honesty. You’ve probably been out of Tree Town for an accumulated total of more than twenty-four hours at this point, with no sleep stored up… It can’t be good for you.”

It’s times like this when he doesn’t know if Sylvie wants him at all. He’s given her an opening and she’s shrugged and wandered away and let the door close itself. Maybe he should just sleep and admit defeat.

“All right,” he says, and rolls onto his back, closing his eyes.

“Loki,” she says. He opens his eyes, and when he does, she’s raised herself up on one arm and moved rather close to him. “Loki, it was just a statement of practicality. It doesn’t mean that’s what we have to do.”

He swallows. “Okay,” he says. He almost doesn’t remember how to be flirty, how to do innuendo. “So… you want to… not sleep, too?”

She nods. “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

He wants to draw himself up straight and tall, roll her onto her back, kiss all the way down her body, all the while saying things to her that are as poetic as they are filthy. But he’s stuck, and doesn’t know how to start.

“You take the lead, then, Sylvie.”

She narrows her eyes and considers him. “You’re not used to this at all, are you.”

“I must admit, it’s been quite a while for me.”

“In your hundreds of years of timeslipping, you never just fucked off one time and had a fling?”

“I took a few breaks. But no, I never had a fling. What about you? Your shagging marathon, as you call it, ended some time ago. Have you done it since then? Or were you too enlightened?”

“Oh, not at all. I screwed someone the day before I found you again.”

He realizes his hand is at her waist. This, at least, feels familiar. “And… after you found me?”

She shakes her head. “No. Nobody since then.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you had.”

“Yes, you would.”

“Well. In theory, I wouldn’t mind.”

She looks at him tenderly for some time, then places her hand over the top button of his shirt. “I’ll take it slow,” she says. “Get you back into the swing of things. Nice and gradual.”

With this, she undoes his top button, then his second. She caresses her knuckles over the skin of his chest, and he nearly seizes up with the shock of it. It’s not even sexual; he just hasn’t been touched like this in so long.

“You’re all right,” she says. “I’ve got you.” She undoes another button, then another, until his shirt is hanging open. Loki watches his own chest rise and fall rapidly.

“Here,” she says, straddling him. “Is this comfortable?”

He nods. There’s a stirring in his groin, but he’s trained himself not to have erections, and his body shuts it down with an echoing thud in his mind. But Sylvie won’t let that stand; she leans down and plants kisses all the way down the midline of his chest. He gasps, and when she reaches the point where his skin meets his trousers, he closes his eyes and wills himself to lift his own prohibitions.

As Sylvie discerns the movement in his pants, she lets out a satisfied hm! and slides her hand up his thigh.

She rests her chin on his belt buckle and peers up at him. “I’m going to touch you here,” she says, hovering her hand an inch away from his clothed groin. “Are you ready to feel it?”

Loki nods, jaw trembling, and she brings her hand where he wants it to be.

Loki hisses in astonishment and breathes hard. She hasn’t even done anything yet, just rested her palm on his hard but covered member, and he feels like he could spill in her hand. 

Instantly, he starts bucking himself up into her light grasp.

“Sylvie… oh, I might… might be too fast…”

“Well, then, let’s get you out properly, so we can have a bit more fun before you come. Shall we?”

“I want to last longer for you, Sylvie.”

“It might be best for you to come this way at first. Your heart might not be able to handle the other yet.”

“No, Sylvie, I can… I can…” But he can’t elaborate anymore, because she’s tugging his trousers down past his hips and now his cock is exposed to her.

Cock. He hasn’t thought of himself this way in so long. But the desire is rushing back to him more quickly than he ever would have thought possible.

She massages the area around his cock for a few long beats, then asks, “Are you ready?”

“Y-yes.”

Locking eyes with him, she licks the tips of her fingers and strokes delicately down his shaft.

“Do you ever get hard when you’re up there?”

The sensations are so cataclysmic that he can barely answer. But he recognizes that she’s trying to help him keep his orgasm at bay, so he focuses as best he can.

“I… used to. At first. Just randomly sometimes, out of habit. And…”

She pauses and looks at him. “And when, Loki?”

“When I heard your voice, Sylvie,” he pants. “It was part of why I taught myself not to hear your words. I couldn’t let myself feel like that when I was up there, especially about you.”

“But you wanted to.”

“Yes. Always. I wanted to.”

She lowers her head and licks a long stripe up his shaft; he shudders and begins to gasp for air like he’s never breathed above water before.

“You wanted me.” She traces circles around the head of his cock with her tongue.

“Yes! Sylvie, I wanted you. I’ve always wanted you. I thought you didn’t want me, I…”

Tears sting the corners of his eyes and shuts them to try to disguise it, which only makes it more obvious. He feels Sylvie move, and her lips are at his eyelids, kissing one, then the other. Kissing the tears away.

He opens his eyes and there she is in all her loveliness. The afternoon sun shines on her face.

“I didn’t know how to want you. But I do now.” She lets out a shaky exhale. “Let’s focus on the task at hand, though, or we’ll fall apart.”

Loki nods and she crawls back down his body. With his eyes wide, he watches as she locks eyes with him in a questioning look; he nods again, and she opens wide and devours him.

Immediately, he’s driving into her and she’s laving him with her tongue; she lets him spear her, taking him into the back of her throat. A tingling, prickling sensation travels through him, he can’t tell which direction it’s traveling: up or down, into his core or out towards Sylvie. Everything is new and unfamiliar, as though it’s his first time doing this, when it used to be an ordinary feature of his life as a prince.

I never knew. I took it for granted.

“Sylvie! Sylvie, Norns, Sylvie, I need… need you…”

She draws herself up slowly, coming to rest at his cockhead and lightly touching her tongue to his tip. A long strand of precum travels with her as she raises her head up fully and sits on his thighs, still fully clothed. He flinches at the feeling of her jeans against the base of his cock; he yearns for her heat, her wetness, gliding up and down against him.

Loki’s brain rebels against him: Use your magic. Strip her. See her naked, now.

He almost does it, too, before he tenses up his chest and stops himself. Sylvie flicks her eyebrows up and down.

“Good boy,” she says. “Not that I’d mind, usually. But given that this is your first time in a few hundred years, no magical removal of clothing, I think.”

Loki nods, trying to keep his breathing in check. “Shall I…?”

“Please do.”

He sits up and holds her around the waist. Her hands come to rest with casual intimacy on his shoulders. Their faces are at an even level with each other.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hullo.”

After a delicate dance of noses, she kisses him. Or maybe he kisses her.

They kiss.

And as they do so, he slips his hands beneath the bottom of her tank top and begins to pull it up. She lets out a few throaty vocalizations as his fingers remember how to be deft and agile, rather than almighty. He likes this process: the working of her arms through the straps, the getting stuck on her bra. It’s messy, and every hitch is an opportunity to touch her in a new way. He learns that a light touch at the base of her spine makes her jump and cry out and nip at his ear. He learns that her bra is simple and black, and how to unclasp it. He learns that her breasts are perfect. But this is unsurprising information.

She sits up tall, with her chin jutted out. “Like them?” she says.

Loki almost chuckles. “You know I do,” he says. “You’re proud of them.”

“Of course I am. Look at them.”

“I'm looking.”

She takes his chin in her hand and brings his mouth back to hers, then whispers into his lips, “Down, now.”

Trembling, he lowers his head as she arches her back to lift her pert nipples up to him, and they meet in the middle. He takes one in his mouth and tastes her — oh. He loves the roughness of the nipple, the way it battles his tongue as he tends to her. He raises a hand to her other nipple, pinching, rolling… 

“Ah,” Sylvie squeaks, a sound he never could have imagined coming out of her mouth. She squirms and starts rocking her hips, seeking him.

He lifts his mouth from her and watches her thrashing her head restlessly as he rolls her nipple with his hand. This is the first time she hasn’t been in absolute control of the situation. “You want more,” he says, and it’s not a question.

“Yes, Loki, get these jeans off…”

She raises up on her knees and, together, they work her pants down, past her knees, kicking them off the ends of her legs. Her plain black underwear matches her bra, and Loki’s hand drifts there as though conveyed by magnetism: grazing upwards, basking in her heat through the cotton, pressing gently to feel how her wetness soaks through.

“Ah, fuck,” she mutters, canting her hips back and forth to stimulate herself on his fingers.

“You want it?” No, that’s wrong. His growly voice sounds like it’s someone else’s, someone from long ago. He closes his eyes and remembers where he is, when he is. Knows himself. And he tries again: “Sylvie, do you want me?” And it sounds like himself. Now, here, after everything. His most current self.

She nods, fighting to keep her eyes open. He plucks her underwear away from her center, down to mid-thigh, and slides two fingers into her slick warmth. Her cunt, Loki. You can think of it like that now.

He can’t tell if it’s her cry or his, or both. He keeps his fingers inside her for a time, buried and at home. Learning anew what this feels like, to engage with the essence of another. And then he starts to piston his hand back and forth, in and out.

It’s wild, it’s madness, the way her heat burns his fingertips and he can only crave more.

She has rested her head on his shoulder; they’re still both on their knees, and he wonders if she can come in this position. But she’s Sylvie, and he suspects she can come in any position; the possibilities that burgeon in his mind cause him to grunt and increase his pace. 

And more: He brings his other hand up to find her clit. He’s clumsy about it at first, thinks he might have forgotten how to tease it out of hiding, but then with his thumb he urges it out of its hood and he can tell he’s successful when her hips jerk forcefully at his lightest touch.

There’s an intrusion, the brush of a hand against his. Oh. She’s brought her own fingers to her clit, shoving out of the way as she frowns down at their junction point.

“You won’t be able to,” she whispers as she straightens her head and squeezes her eyes shut tight. “I have to do it.”

Loki feels an ancient pride surge up inside him, a sense of honor: I must do this. But it’s about more than pride. He wants so desperately to give her pleasure.

“Please, Sylvie,” he pleads, and the tone of his voice must have affected her because her eyes flutter open and she meets his gaze. “Please, I want to try.”

She gives a philosophical little sigh, as though to say waste of time!, but she lets him give it a shot.

The thing is, his muscle memory in this particular arena seems to be working quite well now. He adds a third finger to her sex, and as he does so he feels an automatic clenching of her walls around his hand that gives him a new burst of energy, and he nudges the mysterious bud with the thumb of his other hand, prodding it lightly all around, finding the spot that makes her body jolt. There. There it is, and he works that one supple spot nice and slow, maddeningly so for her, probably, but with intense pressure that he knows will be effective.

And he keeps his other hand pumping into her, incessantly. The contrast in speed, he remembers, can work well sometimes. But only if he gets the rhythm just right.

He has to tune into her.

He’s been holding back, he realizes, still in his head and cautious. This isn’t all he is capable of. At his best, he’s almost clairvoyant about his partner’s needs; even at his most selfish, this used to be the case. It’s why he was loved and why he was despised: he could make people believe they were needed and appreciated, and then he would discard them. Why oh why had he so rarely brought this generosity out into the world? Not enough, never enough…

He closes his own eyes and simply feels her.

Her energy radiates off of her, he senses it all over, with a concentration right where he’s working her. But there’s more, she needs a light touch somewhere else… her inner thigh, perhaps, or…

Behind her cunt, right there… yes, that’s it…

With the little finger of the hand that’s fucking her, he makes a swiping gesture right at the confluence of her slit and her perineum, and Sylvie convulses with shock, clutching his shoulders. This is what she needs.

But he can’t get complacent. He must still use the necessary technical skills on her clit, and he sees that it really will be difficult in this position, he can’t use the requisite force without knocking her over…

“Hang onto me…” he says, and when she throws her arms around his neck he brings her down onto the bed, positions himself over her, never letting up his ministrations, and now, finally, he can do what he needs. He thrusts hard with his fingers into her cunt, which is starting to flutter, his little finger moves against her perineum — unbridled, feather-light — and now he switches, in his other hand, from his thumb on her clit to his index and middle fingers, going at that same angle but harder, more controlled, just a tad faster but not so fast that he can’t catch every wave as it passes through her and utilize it for all it’s worth. Sylvie quakes and shivers on the bed, her head tossing from side to side, her hips bucking up into his hand, together they find a rhythm that matches each other…

“Sylvie… Sylvie…”

“Ah…”

Her clit twitches, her insides clamp down, and he’s utterly crushed by the strength of her release. His hand is drenched, she’s so wet, but he doesn’t let up even as he starts to lose friction in the face of the divinity that’s dripping from her, that he’s wrenched out of her.

How have I done this for her? I thought I couldn’t, or shouldn’t.

In the midst of the aftershocks, Loki feels a deep swell of gratitude that he’s been able to give this to her. It’s intoxicating, the feeling of her detonating around him. He can only yearn for more.

“More, Sylvie, again.”

“Fuck—”

Her hips raise off the bed and she writhes as she spurs herself through another orgasm, this one more uneven and feral; she claws at any part of him she can reach. He hears his own name emerging from between her clenched teeth and striking him right through the heart, which suddenly seems more tangible than ever.

In this moment, he could almost believe that this is enough. His glorious purpose. Just this.

But he can’t let his mind travel too far down that path, so he directs his attention entirely to Sylvie’s well-being. She’s whimpering — yet another sound he could never have fathomed from Sylvie — and it makes his heart fill with tenderness.

Moreover… There’s something else that’s stirring, a restless need, an itch that must be scratched and satisfied.

But he waits, watching her, until her eyes blink back into focus and her gaze travels down to his cock, jutting out between them, a bead of precum at its tip.

“Loki,” she says, and then her expression becomes wanton. “Need you. Now.”

She pulls at his hips and he loses his grip on everything except the sensations at hand: his fingers leaving her, her palms on his hips, his cock being drawn inexorably towards her…

“Oh, Sylvie,” he says, swimming through the murky depths of desire and trying to see clearly. “Do we need protection… I mean, I could conjure something, but a real one’s better…”

She shakes her head. “I do a self-enchantment. Don’t think about it or you might mess me up.”

Her hands have settled on his ass, and she lets out a little “mm” at the feel of it. She gives him a gentle, two-handed slap and brings him closer to her, notching him in between her thighs as she opens herself to him.

When he catches her eye, he sees that she’s got mastery of herself again. But she’s not in control anymore. And neither is he.

They’re in this together now.

“Ready?” she asks.

He nods, and she waits, one, two, three, and then pushes him in all the way, all at once, filling her to the brim. Her folds envelop his cock, and the lingering tremors in her core are kneading him to distraction.

Their faces meet, not kissing, just noses and lips brushing against each other in fervor and ecstasy and affirmation: Yes, this is happening. Yes, this is real and good.

He’d told himself he would never need this again.

And maybe he wouldn’t have, if not for Sylvie. But here she is, she’s real and he does need this.

He starts to undulate his hips, slowly, gradually, and then he’s rutting into her like an animal.

Oh, oh, oh, it’s never felt like this. How can something be so new and so lived-in at once? We’re variants, he reminds himself, as he does tend to forget sometimes. But right now, he can tell. They’re not the same — no, not at all — but he recognizes a familiarity within the patterns of her pleasure and it’s frighteningly easy to regulate his body with hers, to match her. 

But also, every second is a revelation. Every inch of new terrain he maps is a marvel.

This time, when her own hand flies to her clit, he doesn’t beg to be involved, because he needs both hands to hold himself up; he’s ramming himself into her, and the sultry smile at her lips tells him this is just how she likes it, hard and commanding (although he suspects she’s usually the one doing the commanding, but she’ll take it this way, too); he snaps his hips at a breakneck pace, his balls tighten, he lowers himself a bit so that his chest roughs up her nipples — she cries out and works her clit furiously until she’s about to come again — 

There: she contracts around him in a now-familiar way but now it is on his cock, he can’t take it anymore, his balls tighten and then he explodes inside her, seizing violently and painting her walls with his spend.

Within, throughout. Everywhere. In Sylvie.

He doubts he can ever bring himself to pull out. He could stay here forever, locked inside her. Forever means something new now.

They shudder together, making it last, until the final thread snaps and his energy is utterly depleted. He falls on top of her, holding himself up enough to give her room to breathe, but she wraps her arms around him and pulls him down all the way, his full weight on her. He lets the situation stand for as long as he can, but when he’s too afraid of crushing her, he rolls away, trying to regain a steady breathing pattern. He fumbles for her hand and takes it in his.

“Do you want to debrief?” Sylvie asks, after some time.

Loki barks out a quick laugh. “I’m not sure I want an assessment, frankly. I’m a little rusty.”

“But you’re okay?” She supports herself on an elbow and scrutinizes him, appearing genuinely concerned. “You haven’t done that in a really, really long time.”

He’d kind of expected her to reassure him that he was a wonderfully skilled lover and she’d never had anyone better. He blinks and lifts his head. “Did I… do okay?”

“Oh! Yes. Bloody hell, yes. I just want to make sure you didn’t overexert yourself.”

“I think I’m… all right,” he says, relaxing back on the pillow. “But… Norns… I’d forgotten how tired this makes me…”

“No wonder. Sleep is another thing you haven’t done in quite a long time. We should still have some time, let’s get a nap in.”

She pulls the rumpled sheet over her and Loki feels an unexpected anxiety.

“Should we, um… talk at all?” He clears his throat awkwardly. “Not about... that. About us?”

Sylvie closes her eyes and then opens them again. “Probably. But I feel like our brains are at a diminished capacity right now. I’m not sure I even remember what we should be talking about.”

She has a point. All Loki’s conscious mind is capable of thinking is that everything is perfect and nothing has ever gone wrong in his and his and Sylvie’s relationship at any point in time, and the road ahead is pure smooth sailing.

But beneath the post-orgasmic haze, he knows that there’s more. So much more. With this encounter, they’ve taken a monumental leap forward in their level of physical comfort with each other, but they’ve solved none of the problems of their hearts.

“Come on,” she says, draping her arm over his chest. “Sleep. I’ve never needed an alarm clock; I’ll wake up in a bit and go back to take the timelines, you stay here and rest.”

“Of course not, Sylvie…” But he can feel his lids drooping and his conscious mind drifting away. “We’ll both go…” It sounds feeble, even to him.

“Nonsense. Get some sleep, Loki, you’ve earned it. Just… close your eyes with me now.” Her face is flushed and receptive, and… happy. She looks happy.

“All right,” he says. Seeing Sylvie at peace can only be a balm to his soul, in the midst of any level of turmoil.

As he falls asleep wrapped in her arms, submersing himself in the lustrousness of slumber for the first time in over twenty years, he defies fate and allows himself to be perfectly content.

But hours later, when he wakes up to the orange rays of sunset and no Sylvie next to him, his thoughts inevitably meander to the doomed, vindictive Lokis he’s been spying on lately.

The energy field he and Sylvie have created is a miracle, but it’s not perfectly sustainable. Just like all of this, perhaps.

Is it possible for even one Loki to have a happy ending, much less two?

Are we, in fact, destined to lose?

Chapter Text

Asgard, 3024 BCE

Pre-First Dark Elf Conflict

Iðunn Peak happens to be one of the smaller mountains in the Asgardian range, and one of the closest to civilization. In fact, when one lays out a picnic about halfway up the mountain, it provides a lovely view of the bustling city as well as the fields and villages at the outskirts — and a way to see without being seen.

And even though it’s well before their time in Asgard’s history, Loki and Sylvie would rather keep this visit to themselves.

Everything is achingly familiar to both of them, although Sylvie’s memories of Asgard are marred by destruction, as she’s returned to it more often during Ragnarok than at any other time in its abbreviated history. 

This is the reign of Loki’s grandfather, Bor. Sylvie, of course, also had a grandfather named Bor, but his appearance was different, as is that of everyone on her timeline. But although the fashions and dialect are archaic and they wouldn’t recognize any of the inhabitants, the landscape and architecture remain constant. From their on-high vantage point, Sylvie and Loki can’t detect any of the differences, and all they can see is their homeland. The rainbow bridge glints and winks its variegated surface at them, and the simmering hubbub of life thrums far below them.

Sylvie breathes in the temperate air. Even up here on the mountain, it’s never too hot nor too cold. And the scent… home. She could never forget that.

They’ve got a picnic blanket under them (“a blanket, Loki, this is what a blanket looks like”) and a basket of plums and walnuts they gathered from the plentiful trees in the woods below, before teleporting to the rocky outcropping where they’re having their picnic. She’s conjured up Loki’s TVA outfit again; she wishes she had more imagination, but she doesn’t: this is how she always thinks of him, and when they’re on a timeline together, she really doesn’t want him to wear his shapeless medieval robe that seems to scream “I don’t want to be fallen in love with.” (She’s familiar with this particular stylistic intention, though, having once made the decision to sport a mullet.)

“There,” Loki says, nodding down at a spot below them. “The rock quarry. What do you think?” 

They’ve invented a game wherein they ask each other to guess what mayhem befell them at a particular spot during their lifetimes. Of course, Loki has a lot more experiences to cull from, but it’s actually a wonderful game because it’s eliciting memories of Sylvie’s childhood that had been thoroughly locked in the depths of her mind.

She bites her lip, thinking. “I’m gonna guess… you and Sif got into a fight about the proper way to season a herring, and you lobbed boulders at each other until you knocked each other out and Thor had to drag you both to the healers. Am I in the ballpark?”

“Not in the slightest, but it would be on brand for Sif and myself. No, Thor and I were young boys, and he brought out our toy soldiers to play with in the quarry. It started out as a battle, but somehow it ended up as a tea party. I honestly don’t know how that happened.”

Sylvie chuckles. “That was… unexpectedly adorable.”

“Mm, I’m not done. I started pretending that my soldiers had poisoned the tea and the entire armistice was just a battle strategy. All of Thor’s soldiers were struck down.”

“Oh dear. I should have seen it coming.”

“And then Thor brought in reinforcements and they just bashed my troops to smithereens.”

“Yes, that tracks.”

“It does, doesn’t it? God, I miss Thor.” Loki looks into the distance for a short time. He almost never talks about Thor, and Sylvie never does. But she knows their respective brothers loom large in the backs of their minds.

When Loki looks back at her, he smiles brightly. “Now you. Unless…” He grows hesitant. “Unless you’ve… reached the end of your memories?”

Sylvie had had trouble coming up with the previous memory, but she screws up her face and concentrates on the apple orchard below them. Her foremost memory is of it going up in flames, but she focuses and reaches further back in her consciousness, almost enchanting herself.

Enchanting… oh, of course.

“Down there. Apple orchard.” She glances at him. “It’s not a very chaotic or mischievous memory, I’ll warn you.”

“The apple orchard.” Something indefinable passes over Loki’s face, briefly, but it’s gone before Sylvie can catch it. “Is it just… picking apples?”

“No. Is that really your guess?”

“I can’t think of anything else.”

“Stellar imagination, God of Stories. Well. That’s where I accidentally did my first enchantment. At least I think it was an enchantment. It was completely unexpected and I didn’t know what was happening. I just touched an apple and all of a sudden I could remember it… sprouting. From its seed, you know. I could see it. Did you have any idea apples could be enchanted? I’ve tried it with other plants since then, and it’s never worked. Must be the kind of thing that can only happen to a child by accident.”

“That’s incredible,” Loki says, tilting his head and considering the story. “You really must teach me some enchantment.”

Sylvie sits up straighter. “Right, then, let’s do it.”

Loki’s brow furrows. “Have we time enough?”

“Yes, there’s still an hour left.” Sylvie tries not to think too much about the fact that they’ve made virtually no progress in increasing the lifespan of their energy core. It was at two hours a week ago, and it’s at two hours now. If one day they get it to two hours and two minutes, the next day it dips back down to slightly under two hours. The average time isn’t increasing, and it takes a whole day to get it up and running again.

They’d been waiting to go on another timeline excursion until the length of time increased, but since it hasn’t… well. They’ve just decided to come here. But they’re just delaying the inevitable: admitting that they can’t make a real life for Loki like this.

(Well, actually they could, if Loki and Sylvie were to split their time in the former Citadel. Maybe what they’re afraid to admit is that they can’t make a real life together like this.)

“Come on, then,” she says. “Put your hand… somewhere. On me. Wherever you want to put it.”

Loki’s mouth does something highly amusing as he ponders whether or not to make a crude joke out of this. Sylvie finds herself unexpectedly delighted that they have this delicious secret between them now: the memory of true intimacy, something that can never be taken from them. She’s still not sure if it will happen again, but it hasn’t made anything feel strained or awkward between them, which has been even more astonishing to her than the event itself.

Wisely, probably, Loki refrains from making the bawdy joke; it would have been redundant. Instead, he places his hand over her heart, pressing in slightly to feel its beat.

“Now, now, don’t get emotional about it,” Sylvie says. “Learning to enchant is a technical process.”

Loki eases up on the pressure.“Right. Okay. But what do I do?”

“You have to draw it out of me: the memory or the thought that you’re aiming for. It starts in the gut — you have to feel it there or it won’t work — and there’s a through-line that runs along your nerves, all the way to the center of your palm. It’ll feel magnetic when you identify it, there’s no mistaking it. Then once you’ve got hold of something, that’s when you use your mind; you cull it and uproot it and the memory travels up and settles behind your eyes. At first, it’ll probably just play like a projector on a screen; it’ll take time before you can insert yourself into my memory or control my body.”

“Control your… what?”

Sylvie smirks; she’d hoped that would throw him for a loop, and it has. “Like I did in Roxxcart,” she reminds him. “Surely you haven’t forgotten Randy.”

“Oh,” he says, smiling slightly. “Randy. Of course not. He was rather charming.”

“Thank you.”

“You really think I could control you through enchantment?” 

“Pshh!” Sylvie scoffs. “Not any time soon. Frankly, while it’s possible, I doubt you’ll ever get good enough at enchantment to have that kind of control over me.”

“And I suppose you think you could do it to me.”

“Of course I could. I could—” The thought of them having control over each other’s bodies sends Sylvie’s mind down a very brief and distracting spiral, and she meets his eyes. His face has grown a bit red and it’s clear that he’s having similar thoughts.

“Um,” he says. “We’ll just keep it simple for now. Right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Of course.” Sylvie shakes off the images that have flourished in her brain — surprisingly detailed for having existed for only seven seconds or so — and adjusts his hand, shifting it away from her heart. “The center of my chest might work better for you. Midline keeps you grounded.”

“Okay. What am I looking for?”

“At this point, you probably won’t be able to find any memories I’m not offering you. I’ll just pop a memory at the forefront of my brain and let you see it. Now just… raise up your palm a bit and place it down again, nice and firm.”

Loki follows her instructions… Sylvie moves the memory of enchanting the apple front and center in her mind, ready for him to find it…

It’s the oddest sensation; she’s never been enchanted before. There’s a great swooping feeling, like a cold wind within her brain, and her own memory turns sepia for a moment as he conveys it into his own mind.

He rears back in astonishment. “That was amazing!” he says. “I saw it. I saw you in the apple orchard. It was kind of blurry, but it was there.”

She grins. “Excellent. Try again.”

Feeling mischievous, she brings up another memory, and Loki dives in again.

Flickering lights, appliances and household goods all around them…

“If you could possibly sheathe your smarm for a moment, I have an offer for you. That’s why I found you.”

“Go on.”

The sound of pounding rain and raging winds outside, and the sense that Roxxcart could be blown away like a house of cards at any moment…

“I’m going to overthrow the Time-Keepers. And, ah, cards on the table, I could use a qualified lieutenant.”

“And I assume you mean… me?”

Sylvie can feel Loki smirking even through the enchantment.

“What say you… Loki?” That WINK of his…

“Ugh. Don’t call me that. You can call me… Randy.”

Sylvie takes a step into her own memory. “I’m relaxing my mind,” she tells him, watching as she eventually switches bodies, to a big beefy guy, and Loki’s younger self gets soundly pummeled. “You can try to find another memory if you’d like.” 

This is hard for her, giving him permission to explore her mind like this. But she finds that she’s not worried about placing her trust in him.

Still, he lingers here for a while, until the younger Sylvie appears in the memory, with her beloved and long-lost horned crown, and waltzes off through a time door with an impish wave. 

Loki’s face… wow. Sylvie hadn’t realized back then how smitten he had been with her, even moments after seeing her.

She’d had other things on her mind.

“Well?” she says, to the brain of the present-day Loki. “Give it a try.”

Her memory slips to the side and gets woozy; she feels a bit drunk as Loki attempts to find something else to witness. But just as she thinks he must have found something interesting, she realizes that no, he hasn’t found a memory of hers — he’s accidentally stumbled into one of his own memories.

They’re in the loom room, Timely is gone, fear is palpable, it binds them all together but keeps them isolated in equal measure… 

The loom explodes. Everything turns flame-orange, then yellow, then white, it burns, the heat is unbearable, it’s all ending, she feels Loki’s pain and despair and sorrow and regret and—

Loki snaps his body away from hers. “Sorry,” he says. “I don’t know why I… sorry.”

Sylvie’s breathing has quickened. “Don’t be,” she says. “That was… um. Intense. I didn’t know… that. I mean, I figured you must have seen something dreadful in order to make you so hell-bent on fixing the loom, but… seeing it like that…”

“I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I thought of that.” Guilt, probably, thinks Sylvie; his subconscious is trying to shame him into hurrying dutifully back to his throne in case he destroys the world again. “I didn’t want you to see that.”

Sylvie bristles. “Why not? Didn’t you say you wanted to share all your memories with me, so it would be fair? I’m glad I’ve seen that one. It helps me understand you more.” She purses her lips. “Why didn’t you just show that to me during your epic timeslipping extravaganza? Maybe it would have persuaded me.”

Loki almost rolls his eyes and definitely bites his lip. “I did,” he says, slowly and precisely. “Many, many times. I tried everything, Sylvie.”

A lone hawk circles over them, giving them an accusatory look, as though it knows they don’t quite belong in Asgard right now. Sylvie gives it an arch look before coming to a decision.

“Show me more,” she says, knowing she might regret it, but unable to resist.

“I thought this was my enchantment lesson.”

“Got greedy, sorry. To be continued.”

After steeling himself, he shows her, vignette after painful vignette. It’s frustrating beyond belief to watch herself refuse to believe him over and over, and yet even now, after witnessing the loom explode, after over a month of breaking down her barriers and learning to trust him, she still believes (knows) she did the right thing in killing He Who Remains.

“There,” he says. “You see? I showed you. In all sorts of different scenarios. Never worked.”

Sylvie places her hand on his chest, crinkling her brow. “I think you skipped over something,” she says. “Can I go back?”

Loki looks the slightest bit apprehensive, but says, stiffly, “Go ahead. I’ve offered you the memories, they’re yours for the taking.”

There was something she’d seen, only a microsecond, back in the Timekeepers’ chamber, but she knows there’s more to it. She searches around until she finds the memory again — it’s just after she discovered that the Timekeepers were a complete and utter sham, a smokescreen.

“Not another pep talk, please.”

“No, I have to tell you something. We will—”

Sylvie watches as his body recoils; clearly his future self has just timeslipped into this moment.

"Oh! Where is she, where—” Loki whirls around and locates Renslayer’s prone form. Without hesitation, he picks up a spear and stabs her through the heart. 

“There. That’s done,” he says.

Sylvie raises her eyebrows, minimally impressed. “Great. She’s dead. We’re still absolutely nowhere.”

“Really, Sylvie, you should have just killed her. Why didn’t you kill her?”

“Didn’t seem worth my time.”

“Well, it really, really was.”

He takes her by the shoulders. 

“Sylvie… Sylvie, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something, and I really need you to hear it.”

“What? Loki, what is it?”

“You must believe me when I tell you that I love you. Heart and soul, with every fiber of my being, I— dammit. I sound like a romance novel. I don’t know how to do this… sorry, that’s your line from later… but it’s true…”

Sylvie looks at him in utter confusion. “What the hell do you mean, ‘my line from later’?”

Loki looks wounded to the core. “Can you try to focus on the whole ‘I love you’ bit? That’s the important bit!”

She gapes at him — (For a single, otherworldly moment, present-day Sylvie can see herself thaw and accept his affections with amazement. But it quickly passes; she hasn’t been loved in over a thousand years, after all, and she has no idea how to receive it.) — “But we’ve… only just met…”

“Do you feel it, too? Anything? Please, please tell me…”

“Loki, I…” Sylvie’s face is a mess of confusion. “I don’t know what to say.” She thinks hard, casting her eyes over Renslayer’s bleeding body, and then turns back to Loki, her face growing stern. “No, really, what did you mean that it was ‘my line from later’? Are you plotting something against me?”

“No! No, I just… love you.” His voice breaks. “And I thought you should know. In case it makes… any sort of difference.”

She stares at him warily. “I don’t know,” she says shortly. “I can’t think about that right now.” She strides up to the Timekeepers’ pedestal, taking the stairs two at a time. She retrieves her sword and sheathes it. “We can… figure that out later, if we need to. Right now we just need to find out who’s behind the TVA.”

Loki sighs, defeated. “We have to prune ourselves. Takes us to the void. Void goes to the end of time, where we—”

Sylvie draws her sword and points it straight at him. “Now I know you’re up to something. How the hell do you know all that? What are you trying to get me to do? You want me to prune myself after spending my entire life escaping pruning? You’re a liar, Loki, and you—”

As she continues her tirade, Loki sighs and fixes his eyes on the floor. Even though past-Sylvie can’t hear him through her spouted invective, Loki whispers to himself: “I really do love you.”

And then: “Again.”

The scene fades away, lost to the sands of timeslipping.

Sylvie pulls away from Loki, breathing hard now. “Oh,” she says. “I see.”

“That was only the first of many times,” he says. “Confessed my love on Lamentis, in the void, all sorts of places. I thought that maybe, somehow, causing another nexus event would work. That it would break reality enough to save reality, that maybe we wouldn’t even have to bother with Victor Bloody Timely or the blasted loom.

“That was early days, though, before I gave it up. I felt the love constantly for quite a while, so I figured I’d try to make it useful… until it got rather knocked out of me.”

This is a gut punch to Sylvie, even though she knows she’s the one who knocked it out of him, and she doesn’t know how she could ever have done otherwise (so much for free will, she thinks bitterly, even though she doesn’t believe herself).

“Eventually, I accepted that sudden declarations of love weren’t your style,” he says, “so I just got to know you. I sat and I listened, learning about you. You can’t imagine how many times we had the conversation under the blanket—”

“Tablecloth,” Sylvie whispers out of habit.

“Just watch, Sylvie…”

They’re sitting under the tablecloth in the void; she says something totally inane, and he simply watches her in admiration.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

He shakes his head. “No reason. I just like being here with you.”

And then it starts over, concluding with:

“No reason. I just… like you.”

Again, and then again.

Back on Iðunn Peak, Loki smiles at her. “For about twenty years, this is what I did when I needed a break,” he says. “Not a sleeping or eating break, but a break for my… mind. My soul. I came to the void and sat with you. And it was always rather lovely. Especially after I stopped trying to turn it into anything… significant.” After he gave up on me. “I returned quite a few times, with no purpose in mind other than to be with you.”

His eyes have taken him far away. “But then I stopped that, too.”

“What made you stop?”

He shrugs, thinking hard. “Here,” he says finally, making a decision. “I may as well show you.”

“Show me what?”

“The last time. I had figured out how to get us to the void much earlier, so we had hours and hours to talk.” He looks chagrined, like a reluctant wolf about to expose his vulnerable underbelly to her in exchange for a treat. “I didn’t go into this exchange thinking about saving the loom, I promise. It just… happened.”

He takes her hand and places it on his chest.

They’re back in the void, not even under the blanket now. Running together, laughing, skittering towards an old arcade game.

“Here it is,” he tells her. “PacMan, your favorite.”

“Oh my god! It’s just as I remember it. I found an arcade when I was a kid, before I—”

“Before you had figured out about the apocalypses, yes.”

“Yes! And I played it for as long as I could, until the TVA found me and I had to run away again… I’d completely forgotten about that … does it work?”

“It does if I do this.” Loki waves his hand and the unplugged machine groans itself into full electrical power.

“Aaahh!!” Sylvie shrieks with delight. Then she looks around guiltily. “Shouldn’t we be… preparing for Alioth, though!”

“The kid did the calculations. Alioth won’t show up again for another hour. We have time.”

Sylvie grins mischievously and starts playing PacMan, the little circular creature eating the dots and fruit, evading the ghosts, and generally being awesome. 

(Present-day Sylvie’s heart leaps and her fingers twitch, wanting to play it.)

When she finally defeats the ghosts, she screams, “Fuck, yeah!” and throws her arms around Loki, laughing. There’s a flicker of green and the machine shuts down; she realizes that Loki has been holding the electrical charge in place this whole time, constantly using his magic to sustain it.

“Thank you,” she murmurs through her laughter, resting her head on his forehead, and this time, her thank-you sounds easy and well-oiled, not forced.

Their hands twine together, and Loki starts to speak again. “Sylvie. Do you remember what happened on Lamentis?” He catches his breath, like he hadn’t realized he was going to say that.

“Of course. It was like twelve hours ago.”

“We caused a nexus event because… we had feelings for each other. Mobius told me so, he said it’s the only explanation. Strong feelings, perhaps even… love, dare I say it.”

Sylvie pulls back from him a bit, but she doesn’t turn away or seem afraid. In fact, her lips creep upwards in a little smile of recognition. (Present-day Sylvie can tell, by their current level of comfort with each other, that they’ve made some real strides during however long it took them to get to the PacMan moment.)

“Oh,” she says. “I… think I can believe that.”

Suddenly Loki’s eyes grow wide and a look of urgent hope appears on his face. “If we go to a timeline right now with that TemPad you’ve got, maybe we could bypass all of this. We could break reality… maybe we could just… stop all of this in its tracks. My god, maybe the loom would…”

“The loom?”

“I mean… who knows? It’s an idea, right?”

She takes another miniscule step back from him. “You mean… not try to find the person who’s controlling the TVA?”

“Not now, I just think that maybe this could—”

Sylvie breaks away from him and shakes her head. “No,” she says. “If there’s something between us, we can figure that out later. Right now, we need to get to the person behind Alioth.” She turns away and starts to walk back to the shed where their allies are waiting.

“No, no, I don’t mean just to explore our feelings… I mean strategically! I mean this could really be something…”

“No.” She looks back at him — kindly, but with certainty. “Enchanting Alioth our best option. I’m not giving up on this, no matter what. Are you with me?”

Loki’s face falls. “I’m with you.” She nods with satisfaction and turns away from him, leaving their feelings as forgotten as the PacMan machine. Loki, dejected behind her, repeats his refrain:

“Again.” Then he revises it: “No— not here. Back to the library.”

They return from the memory and sit in silence for a few moments… but not too long, because they both know that they’re running out of time.

“That was about thirty years into it,” Loki says quietly. “I’d learned so much about you… So much, Sylvie, I don’t think you can comprehend how much I learned and how much more each moment made me care for you. I knew the apple enchantment story already — I’m sorry I pretended I didn’t. It still feels so wrong to have all these memories of you, when I can never hope to have enough time to pass them along in full.

“Anyway — I saw an opportunity to tell you I loved you again, and this time, miraculously, you seemed receptive. We’d had quite a few hours together by that point, you see. And then… why couldn’t I just leave it there? I had to make it about saving the loom.”

He sighs. “I’d gotten us as close to love as possible, but at that point, neither of us could discuss feelings without getting them confused with our respective missions. It all felt so hopeless. And it’s when I stopped trying, not just to love you, but to be close to you at all.”

Sylvie surveys the whirlwind of Asgardian life below them. From this distance, the inhabitants resemble the charming little PacMan creatures, moving in tandem with each other in a never-ending push and pull of coexistence. 

“I don’t know what to say,” she says. “I’ve told you I was incapable of love. It grieves me to see it now, because we’re….”

We’re what?

Idiots, that’s what. They still can’t define it beyond “wanting something more together,” and this feels cowardly to her, but they can’t manage to be specific about anything yet. 

Her heart beats reproachfully inside its lockbox in her chest, taunting her. She’s resentful of it, and of herself, and of Loki. All her mindfulness training is gone and she’s a tangled snarl of every emotion except love itself.

“Anyway,” she says. “I don’t think you could ever have gotten me there. I’m sorry.  But it’s still nice to hear it. Nicer now… now that I really know you.”

The word “nice” is woefully inadequate and she thinks he might despair at hearing it, but instead he smiles. 

“It was a godsend to hear you laugh like that, at the PacMan game” he says. “It took me so many tries to get you to that point, where you laughed genuinely.”

His word choice rankles Sylvie, and she crosses her arms. “You must know that’s kind of annoying for me to hear. It’s like you…”

“It’s like I was learning how to manipulate you and you had no way of preventing it?”

“Yes, rather.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I never tried wooing you again. After the first fifty years, it was all business.”

“That’s not a consolation, Loki, that’s just bleak.”

His lip twitches in regret. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry I…” She watches him try to formulate the words, but it’s kind of hard to spit out “sorry I ran a simulation of you over and over again for years until I figured out how to bulldoze you into liking me for a hot second.” So she doesn’t make him spit it out. Instead, she shrugs and brushes the hair off his brow.

“I would have done the same.” She peers at him for a long time as he tries to hold her gaze, but ends up lowering his eyes. “Sometimes, Loki,” she says, “I can’t wrap my head around it. If we’re perfectly alike or catastrophically different.”

He looks up at her from under those long lashes of his. “Either way, I’m rather fond of you.”

Their foreheads meet, just as they had done in the void, and Sylvie goes further, allowing their lips to brush together. They haven’t been kissing each other at the end of time, not since that first kiss; the phrase “all business” could be applied to her here as much as to Loki during the remainder of his timeslipping days. But she lets it happen now, against the prismatic glow of the ancient Asgardian sunset. It’s light and feathery, all in the lips, but it lasts for a while as she lets his shared memories permeate her consciousness:

Strong feelings, perhaps even… love, dare I say it.

Heart and soul, with every fiber of my being…

She pulls back and drinks in the sight of his eyes. “Did we ever kiss again?”

Loki looks concerned. “Don’t we need to get back?”

“There’s time. Ten minutes. Come on, tell me.”

Loki lets out a shaky breath. “There was once when we almost did. But no.”

“After what you just showed me, or before?”

“It was after. Long after.” His voice has dropped to a whisper.

“I thought you said you stopped trying.”

“I did stop. This was a surprise to me. I was just so weary, during one of the iterations of our fight in the Citadel, and…

Sylvie presses into his shoulder almost accidentally, slipping into his mind, and he allows her in.

“Sylvie, wait…”

She’s about to raise her sword to kill He Who Remains, but Loki’s hand is on her arm.

“What? What could possibly be the delay?”

Loki’s panting heavily; in fact, present-day Sylvie suspects he just returned from another version of this fight. “We should… I need to…”

“WHAT?!”

His eyes nearly close from exhaustion, and he moves his hand away from her. “Never mind,” he says, “Go ahead. Just… just this once.”

Sylvie completely ignores Loki’s odd phrasing and blasts the desk to the side, her telekinesis stronger in this adrenaline-rushed moment than it has ever been before. Triumphantly and without compunction, she lifts her sword and buries it in the madman’s chest. The dying man chuckles and starts to say a pithy “see you soon,” but Sylvie cuts him off by punching him in the face.

When she’s satisfied that the life has drained out of her archnemesis, she spins around, beaming at Loki.

“There. Was that so hard?”

He shakes his head, leaning over the back of one of the chairs. “No. It was fine.”

“Fine? We’ve won! Loki, this is it! We’re free!” She grabs his hands and pulls him to the center of the room awash with excitement. “We can do anything now… We can…” Their bodies move closer to each other, and her hand moves to his cheek. “Loki… we really can figure it out together now.”

With a radiant look on her face, she brings her lips closer to his…

Loki’s face is wracked with a thousand emotions… he closes his eyes…

“No… No. Again, again, now!” he says, shaking his head and dragging himself away from her embrace.

And then it’s all gone.

“No more, Sylvie,” Loki gasps, “no more enchantment. I can’t. No more.”

“I know, I know, Loki. It’s okay. I know. You’ve done so much.”

She holds Loki in her arms for a moment, resting his head against her shoulder.

“So,” she says, after a precious thirty seconds have passed. “Looks like I would have fallen in love with you if you’d just let me have my way?”

Loki lifts his head, letting out a sad little laugh. “Apparently.”

“Well, that’s good news, Loki. It means I cared about you, at least enough to want to be with you if I was happy and free and I didn’t think you’d betrayed me.”

“You didn’t know that about yourself already?”

“Nope. Self-awareness was not my strong suit at that point.” She rubs Loki’s temples, a remedy for enchantment fatigue, and recalls Loki’s exhaustion in the memory. She wonders how many times he had to relive their duel. Hundreds? Thousands? More? 

“How close did you come to killing me?” she asks, trying to sound nonchalant.

Loki, whose eyes have drifted closed, opens them again. “Oh, Sylvie…”

“Sorry. I just saw that awful man, and I know he must have told you the only way to stop it all was to kill me, and… I can’t help wondering. You don’t have to answer if you don’t—”

“I never once considered killing you.” His eyes are clear now.

Sylvie stops rubbing and regards him evenly. “Not even when you came to ask for my blessing to do it?”

“I wasn’t asking for your blessing. I knew that, just by talking to you honestly, I’d figure something else out.”

“But what if you hadn’t thought of something else?” She knows that he’s tired, and that they have so little time left and she should just let them enjoy the Asgardian scenery for the remaining minutes, but she can’t help herself. “Would you have killed me then?”

He shakes his head with a chaotic bark of a laugh. “I would have let it all burn.”

“Everything, Loki?”

He grips her arms. “Every atom, rather than just you.”

It might be true; it might not be. But what matters to Sylvie is that Loki believes it right now, in this moment. And he does.

She kisses him again, falling backwards onto the blanket and pulling him on top of her. She knows they’re running out of time — they’ve got two minutes left — but suddenly she needs this to happen, and needs it to happen here, in their magnificent homeland with the scent of apple blossoms in the air, not in the vacant space at the end of time that’s haunted by the ghost of the man who took her life away.

Loki feels it, too; he trusts her enough not to ask how much time is left. His eyes pierce hers, and he nods. This is pure, protective, life-giving.

“Turn over,” he breathes, and the gruff desire in his voice makes her surge with a warm wetness that takes her by storm. She catches her breath — flips around onto hands and knees — tugs her pants down just enough and parts her legs for him. 

There’s a rock under her knee, but there is simply no time to be bothered about trivialities like that. As Loki shucks his trousers down past his hips, Sylvie cranes her neck backwards to watch the tantalizing sight of him freeing his cock.

She’s almost managed to convince herself that he’s not absolutely massive. But it’s in vain — he’s tremendous, and she lets out a covetous little moan in anticipation of being stretched by him.

And with a single swipe of his finger through her folds — “perfect,” he whispers to himself — he knows she’s ready.

She feels the head of his cock meet her entrance once, twice, imploring her for access, and she spreads herself with her fingers to help him inside. With a groan of relief, he plunges into her, rooting, and then thrusting hard and deep, pushing past every barrier to fill her with his length and breadth.

This time, he lets her take the lead and work her own clit. She feels the intensity build within her with the speed of a wildfire; it’s easier this time, to let herself ignite — now that she knows what he’s capable of doing to her body, she craves it even more. She lets her cunt pulse out her arousal around his cock, urging him on as he fucks her, seeking her release and his. 

There’s no need to draw it out; in fact, it’s imperative that they don’t. He knows it, too, and she can feel his cock jerking inside her already as he begs to unleash his cum deep within her. She reminds herself, suddenly, to perform her self-enchantment that stops the seed from creating life within her, no matter how tempting that prospect might seem in this moment.

Then he speaks:

“I… Sylvie, all those things I said, I… still…”

No, no, not yet!

She screws up her face and works herself feverishly so that she starts to clench around him, chasing a wild, desperate orgasm that will forestall his words — she’s terrified that she’s not ready to receive them and can’t bear to break his heart for the thousandth time — 

yes, 

yes, 

she’s coming with calamitous ferocity around his cock, all the stronger for how safe and secure she feels in his presence.

Loki gasps and loses his words, and then he’s coming, too. Sylvie nearly loses her grip on her self-enchantment as the velvety warmth of his seed coats her walls, imbued with his devotion.

She sobs once, then muffles it.

It’s the most real thing she’s ever felt, even more so than their first time, because this is raw and unpremeditated. It’s the first time she’s ever had passionate, spontaneous sex with someone who gives a shit about her.

He pulls out, heedless of the mess, and hugs her close to him, kissing her temple.

“Back… we’ve got to go back…” They both mutter their own incoherent versions of this truth as they clean and clothe themselves with haste, vanishing the evidence of the picnic. Sylvie takes a long, last look at the solitary hawk circling the Palace of Valaskjalf before opening a time door and stumbling through it, with Loki at her side.

There’s still a sliver-thin sphere of green energy surrounding the timelines, but they waste no time in taking hold of the branches before collapsing on the floor next to each other.

As they regain their breath, return to sanity, and give life to the multiverse, the reality of what just happened cascades over Sylvie:

Loki, God of Stories or more accurately God of Holding Stuff, just fucked me from behind on an Asgardian mountain. A year ago, she would never have believed it.

Fleetingly, she wonders if she should be concerned about the narcissism of fucking and falling for her own variant, but she can’t bring herself to give a damn about it. They’re emphatically not the same person, and to believe they are would be to give in to a narrative about destiny that she rejects entirely.

Falling for him… She is. She really is.

He slides his free hand over to hers. “More,” he says quietly, addressing the marble beneath his feet. “I want more.”

“I know. We need to get you out of here,” Sylvie says.

He looks back at her. “Well, don’t say it like it’s a prison, it’s actually quite fulfilling, the timelines need my—”

“Loki!” she practically shrieks. “Either you’re in or you’re out. I know you’re connected to the timelines, but you can have a connection without giving up your entire life to them. Do you want a life or not?”

He blinks, then nods, chastened. “I do. But… how? We can’t get the energy core to last any longer, we’re completely stuck.”

Sylvie sighs. “I never thought I, of all people, would be the one to say something like this, but… I think it’s time we get the old team back together.”

Chapter Text

“Are you ready?”

Loki firms up his horned crown atop his head. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“So… not ready at all.”

Of course Sylvie’s right, and Loki knows it. “No, not in the least,” he admits.

“Because we should probably make sure we’re fully mentally prepared,” Sylvie says. “We’ve got to be able to explain ourselves: the exact nature of the problem, and how we want the TVA to help us solve it.”

“I’ve got the first part down, but I can’t be exactly sure of the second. How can we request a solution when we don’t know what the solution is? That part is more of a ‘help us figure this out’ situation, isn’t it?”

“Fair enough.” Sylvie purses her lips as she appraises his thick, shapeless robe and lengthy horns. “You’re sure you don’t want to wear your TVA suit? You’ll fit in more.”

He shakes his head. “I’m the God of Stories to these people. They’ll expect to see me in this role, not as one of their ranks.”

“Pity. You know I like that suit on you.” Loki feels himself flush, but these garments really are his armor now. They won’t protect him against any kind of physical attack, but they have served to protect him against his own desire for more. They’ve kept him tethered to his role here, as the wise sage on the mountaintop. Until now.

“I just hope they don’t kneel,” he says. “I don’t crave that anymore.”

Sylvie raises an eyebrow at him. “I think you may be overestimating how much they’re going to, like, revere you.”

Loki blinks. “Why wouldn’t they? They used to revere the Timekeepers.”

“I don’t know. Just… keep your expectations in check.” Sylvie cocks her head at him as she adjusts the folds of his robe. “Do you communicate with them in any way? They must know about you… When I met up with Mobius all those years ago, he seemed to already know you were a…” She gestures around at everything and continues, “a… metaphysical time tree. How?”

“They do know, you’re right about that. And I know a bit about what’s going on there, too. I can’t explain how. Well, actually, I could explain it, but it would require me to brush up on a lot of quantum theory that I frankly allowed to seep out of my brain after I spent centuries cramming it in.”

“I don’t blame you,” Sylvie says. She bounces on her heels for a few moments, then purses her lips and narrows her eyes in Sylvie-is-focused mode. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They’ve waited until the last moment to create the energy core that holds the timelines in place, which they do now with nimble efficiency. Crafting it has become easy for them, but getting it to stay for more than two hours still eludes them.

When it’s ready, they both hover at the threshold of Sylvie’s time door, neither one making a move. Sylvie has been wearing leggings and an oversized Van Halen sweatshirt, but with a ripple of her shoulders, she impulsively changes into her old beat-up armor.

“You go first,” Loki says, after a beat.

“Nuh-uh. You.” She jerks her head in his direction. “You’re their ultra-battery or whatever. They’ll be thrilled to see you.”

“You don’t think they’ll be thrilled to see you?”

Sylvie gives him a look like he’s a naive little squirrel. “Not since I cheerfully murdered a bunch of their colleagues, no.”

“But that was so long ago.”

“I’m sure they have long memories.”

“It’s all changed, Sylvie. The people who work there now, they know exactly what the TVA used to be, and they whole-heartedly reject it. I’m sure they understand your actions now. And anyway, we’re primarily going to see B-15 and Casey and O.B., not anyone else. They’re your friends! They know you.”

Sylvie shakes her head. “Even after all this time, Loki, you still tend to forget that I didn’t actually experience everything you did. I barely know those people. Like seriously, when you say O.B., I only sort of know who you’re talking about.”

Loki clears his throat uncomfortably. She’s right; even after all that time spent giving her his memories, he makes this mistake sometimes. “Well,” he says, “You did give B-15 her timeline memories. You shared such a nice moment, you told me all about it.”

“Yeah, it was nice. It was also ages ago.”

They stare at the saffron glow in front of them. “We’re both stalling,” he says, glancing back at the energy core, and then turning his attention to Sylvie. “Are you… okay going back there?”

Sylvie growls grimly in the back of her throat. “It’s not exactly my favorite place in the world. But it’s changed, bla bla bla. Or so you tell me. And… if it will help you…”

He smiles. “Thank you, Sylvie.” He takes her hand. “I’m nervous, too.”

“I’m not nervous,” she says, reflexively defensive, then squirms and looks at him guiltily from under her lashes. “Let’s just go, okay?”

This moment is more nerve-wracking for Loki than any trip to a timeline; suddenly, he’s venturing somewhere where people will know who he is — who he is, not who one of his variants is. And they’ll have expectations of him, will presume him to be great and powerful… perhaps they’ll be in awe of him…

“Count of three,” Sylvie says abruptly.

It’s all right, he practices saying in his head, picturing a crowd of brown-clad worshipers gawking at him as he stands on an elevated platform in front of a chronomonitor. There’s no need to bow before me. Please, do stand. The horns? No, they’re not a crown, per se…

“One, two, three.” 

He gets the urge to stop time.

But he doesn’t, and Sylvie tugs him through the door.

No, you needn’t think of me as a god, I’m just like all of you…

Loki draws himself up to his full height and prepares himself for the gasps and possibly kneeling stances of a horde of TVA employees.

But instead, as he lands in front of the central chronomonitor, he sees about five unfamiliar faces thoroughly engrossed in their work, along with one face he recognizes. The eyes meet his, and Loki raises a beneficent hand.

“Fear not, good Ouroboros, for I have—”

“Loki!”

Apparently, O.B. is in no way daunted by the presence of a god in his midst.

He runs at Loki and hugs him around the waist. Loki’s horns teeter on his head and crash to the ground behind him, making quite a racket. He hadn’t realized how unstable they were on his head; their balance has never been challenged like this. The TVA staff look up with mild interest at the new arrivals and the commotion they’ve caused

As O.B. continues hugging Loki, Casey sticks his head in from the hallway. “Hey! You’re here!” He hurries over to Loki. “Awesome. Missed you, man.” He holds up a hand for a high five, which Loki bemusedly gives him.

“Ah. Just the person I needed,” B-15 says briskly as she strides into the room with a clipboard. “I’ve assumed you’d stop by someday, and as such have been saving up questions and comments for you. But first, there’s a mountain of paperwork I need your signature on.”

Loki looks in bewilderment at Sylvie. She’s got her arms crossed over her chest and is hanging back behind him, warily scrutinizing her surroundings. But even in the midst of her habitual guardedness, she throws him some snark.

“Told you they wouldn’t kneel.”

“Good lord. Please tell me that’s all of them,” Loki says, shaking out his wrist after signing about 4,000 forms and piling them up on the long conference room table. “That must be all of them!”

The anti-magic dampeners have been disengaged for years, so Loki has magicked himself back into his TVA attire; nobody seems to expect him to be anyone other than Loki, which is a relief, so the wizard-like outfit seems unnecessary. (Sylvie has kept her armor, he notices.)

Of course, even with magic enabled, B-15 — no, Verity, he reminds himself, she goes by her timeline name now — informs him that the TVA documents have been particularly resistant to reverting to magical receptiveness, and indeed, when Loki tried to sign them all with one fell swoop of his hand, the documents simply scattered all over the room and he had to gather them up with a hasty spell. “Just sign them, please,” Verity had said. So Loki did. And now he is done.

“Excellent,” Verity says crisply. She has a new outfit, he notes, a well-tailored black suit. There are no identifying marks or insignia on her, but something about the cut of the suit suggests I am in charge here. He’s not sure what her new title is, but she must be quite high-ranking. 

“The deadline for most of those signatures is 300 years from now,” she explains. “No rush in theory, but I was afraid we’d start cutting it close. Fortunately you showed up before we expected you to. Oh… I suppose I should…” Now that all the items on her agenda have been accounted for, she smiles warmly at him. “Thank you for everything you’ve been doing, Loki,” she says, shaking his hand. “I’m not a hugger, if that’s okay with you.”

“I think O.B. hugged me enough for all three of you,” Loki says, chuckling. O.B. gives him a thumbs up without glancing up from the notepad that he’s been scribbling on; Loki has, of course, been talking as he signed the paperwork, and O.B. has been taking notes on all of it, accompanied by various mathematical calculations and rough sketches of devices to be constructed.

As Loki has been talking, looking periodically around at the four in the room with him — Verity, O.B., Casey, and Sylvie — he can’t help feeling that there is a devastating absence of a certain presence in the room. It’s not the TVA without Mobius, not really.

But there’s nothing he can do to change that situation, so he does his best to push it out of his mind. Long ago, he’d accepted that he would never see Mobius again, and being back in the TVA shouldn’t change that for him.

“Now,” Verity says, “Let me make sure I have all of this straight. You and Sylvie…” She nods at Sylvie, who is sitting next to Loki, her posture rigid and her eyes watchful. “...have been able to create an energy core that keeps the multiverse stable, from the end of time, for approximately two hours without the assistance of Loki or any Loki variants. Thank you so much for clearing that up for us, by the way; it has been one of my main questions: whether your variants, who share your temporal aura, could do the job, or if it had to be you.”

Verity looks excited and relieved to have such a vital piece of information. Loki nods at her. “Glad to help.”

“Anyway,” Verity continues. “You want to make the core permanent, or at least semi-permanent with periodic renewals, so that you have more freedom to roam the multiverse—”

“To do anything besides holding a giant tree in place!” Casey bursts out, shaking his head. “It’s just crazy how one person is expected to do all of that. It’s not right!”

Verity inclines her head to him. “Yes, thank you, Casey.” Loki gets the sense they’ve had conversations about this before.

“I mean,” Casey continues, “I always kinda thought it wasn’t fair, but the data we were getting from you didn’t indicate that you were in distress… but now, seeing you, it’s just like… come on! You’re just one guy!”

“I know,” Verity says placatingly. “Believe me, Casey, I share your concerns, and I have done for some time, but the sensors indicated that it would be dangerous for both the multiverse and for Loki for us to interfere.”

“Yeah, it’s just… I’m an analyst now, and my analysis of the situation was that it sucks for him!” Casey says stridently. “I’m glad you got out, Loki.”

Loki is touched; they had actually been considering his welfare! Of all the people in the multiverse whose thoughts and words he can hear at will, the TVA members are the one group he hasn’t been able to hear — because technically the TVA doesn’t really exist in the multiverse, it’s outside of time. So he never really got a sense of what it has been like here. He has sort of assumed that, beyond thinking of him as an all-powerful, sacrosanct god (wrong there), they haven’t really cared about him as a person. He’s pleased to discover he’s been wrong about that, too.

“Thank you, Casey,” he says. “I really am quite well. But… thank you.”

Loki casts his eyes to the poster on the wall, which reads Let’s Grow Together: Nurture Our Nature for a Stable Future. There’s a tree drawn on it, woven into a twist that is reminiscent of the arrangement of the multiverse. Two happy people are tending to it, watering it and raking the ground around it.

He dares to steal a look at Sylvie, who hasn’t spoken much at all, and sees that her eyes are trained on the same spot. He catches her eye and smiles at her. She doesn’t quite return the smile, but she relaxes into her chair a bit more. He melts with compassion for her; he had considered how this must feel for her to come back here yet again, but he finds that he hadn’t fully appreciated the gravity of it for her. Even after all of this time, after all of her experiences and training, nothing can erase the centuries of suffering she endured at the hands of the TVA.

He places his hand palm-up on his leg, as an invitation… and she takes it, holding his hand under the conference table. Loki sighs contentedly and suddenly feels much more like himself.

“I have taken great pride and pleasure in my work,” Loki says, since the group seems to be expecting him to expand on his thanks to Casey. “And let me be clear: if there is truly no way to reconfigure the system, if I am required to remain at the end of time, then I shall do it. I’ll not let the multiverse suffer for my selfish desires.” Sylvie’s hand stiffens, and he holds it more tightly.

“That shouldn’t be necessary,” says Verity. “Even if we can’t make the core permanent, we could recruit willing Loki variants and set up a schedule, providing them with chaperones if necessary to keep them honest and on task, and—”

“Doesn’t quite work,” Loki and Sylvie mutter together in unison.

“But could you really do it forever?” Casey asks, his brow furrowed. “Is your lifespan actually infinite? Jötuns only live for about 5-6,000 years.”

“I believe I am. And that’s one reason I’d prefer not to do the job indefinitely. I don’t want to live forever, and if my primary occupation is tending to the timelines, I don’t think I can lose my presumed immortality.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t be forever,” O.B. says chipperly, popping up temporarily from his notepad. “Without any intervention from us, it’s probable that eventually, after a few thousand years, Loki’s hold on the branches would become insufficient and he’d either implode or explode, I haven’t quite worked out which, and it’s not clear to me if that would actually destroy the multiverse or save the multiverse. It’s quite an interesting theoretical proposition.”

Loki blinks several times at O.B. He’d had a feeling that his situation might not be perfectly sustainable, but hearing it phrased like that is stomach-turning. “Implode… or… explode?”

“Don’t know which! Maybe both at once!” O.B. grins. “Of course, the TVA would have stepped in long before then, but it’s probably for the best that you came to visit us first. At the very least, we’ll be able to give you a boost.”

“A boost,” Sylvie says, frowning. “Like, extra power, but with him still in the tree? That’s not enough, he needs freedom.”

“There is one thing,” O.B. says, flipping back through his notes. “Eventually, with this boost, the multiverse could be able to go back to the way it was before the loom, with the timelines free and not in need of an external energy source. But they’ve been so damaged by the loom and the pruning that they will need a bit of time with the external source before they get there.”

Loki leans forward, alert and intrigued. “How long?” he asks. “Should I just stay, if the multiverse will heal itself naturally in time?”

“Oh, not that long,” O.B. says. “Just a few million years. Not much in the grand scheme of things.”

There’s a long silence, until Sylvie says, with more pluck than at any point thus far, “Let’s try to find something a bit more efficient, shall we?”

Loki gazes at her, so grateful for her steadfast resolve to help him. He’s missed her so, so much, and the emotion threatens to overtake him until he remembers where they are, and that they have limited time.

“Time check, Sylvie?”

“Half an hour left.”

“Right,” Loki says, standing up so he can focus, as the sensation of Sylvie’s hand is making him tingly in a way that is using up a few too many of his brain cells right now. “What else is the TVA working on right now? Will this project use up too many of your resources?”

Verity straightens up, looking proud of her work. “Most of our attention is focused on tracking variants of He Who Remains and preventing them from mobilizing into militant action.”

“Thanks for that,” Sylvie says, and then rolls her eyes at herself. “I know that probably sounded snarky, but I really mean it. Thank you.”

Verity gives her a long look and a nod of understanding. “Thank you for being the one who set us on this path. You gave us the truth, Sylvie, and you deserve more credit for that than you usually receive around here.”

Sylvie opens her mouth, then closes it again. Instead of speaking, she opts for another nod, and Loki sees her posture grow a bit less tense.

Verity continues her enumeration of the TVA’s duties. “Obviously we no longer prune timelines, but occasionally people become detached from their timelines and end up here as a glitch; we help to return them as quickly as possible. We monitor and patch incursions. We recruit new employees for the TVA, giving full disclosure as to the nature of the work. People are free to come and go as they please. Eternal service is no longer required, although it seems to suit the three of us.”

“Don’t forget the void,” Casey says. “That’s my pet project.”

“I wasn’t going to forget it,” Verity assures him. “We’re working on evacuating anyone who wants to leave the void. For most of the inhabitants, we’ll never be able to reinsert them into their lives, since those timelines have been long pruned and they can’t replace the current versions of themselves in comparable timelines. But we find them homes in other timelines, ones without identical variants of themselves that would just lead to confusion.”

She sighs. “It’s a daunting task and I doubt we’ll ever be able to locate everyone who’s been pruned, since most of the void denizens have made homes deep in the ground or in caves that we’ll never find. Alioth has been particularly resistant to subduing and we have yet to find a way to kill him, so he presents problems as well. But we’re doing as much outreach as we can.”

“I like to think my newfound tunneling expertise has helped there,” Casey says. “Ever since finding out I was an escaped prisoner, I’ve been re-learning the skills of theft, stealth, and reconnaissance. For the greater good,” he adds quickly, as Verity casts him a sidelong glance.

“All this is to say,” Verity concludes, “that we certainly have no shortage of work to do, but we always take on whatever additional work is necessary. And it sounds like this is necessary work.” She shakes her head. “This could never have been a permanent solution, Loki. I wasn’t sure before, but I realize that now. I’m glad you found us.”

“I still want to be involved,” Loki says quickly. “I’m not abandoning my post. I just want my role to be… different.”

“You don’t want to be tied down,” she says. “I understand.”

The whole thing still feels wrong somehow to Loki, but when he glances over at Sylvie, it puts him at ease. Even if leaving the end of time feels wrong, Sylvie feels right, and that’s what matters more.

“What’s our first step?” Loki asks.

Verity looks to O.B. “That’s your department.”

O.B. puts down his pen and stares placidly at Loki. “First, we’ll need to duplicate your temporal aura a few thousand times so that I can make enough crash test dummies.”

Loki blinks. “Oh,” he says. “Right. Crash test dummies. Of course.” He figures he should know why crash testing is required, but even after centuries of studying, he’s no O.B. His knowledge is specialized and loom-focused, and he’s lost a fair amount of it, anyway, from disuse. “Um… why?”

“The explosions, of course!” O.B. says. “Your new energy core seems to make use of quantum entanglement, which will require measuring the quantum waves.”

“How difficult is that?” Verity asks.

“Not difficult.”

“Great! Then—”

“It’s not difficult, it’s impossible,” O.B. clarifies, causing Verity to throw up her hands as he explains. “ Measuring a quantum wave results in the entirety of that wave suddenly appearing in a single location. Weird, right? So beautiful, yet and so frustrating…   Anyway, according to my calculations, we’ll need to simulate quantum bounce several thousand times before we get the necessary calculations—”

Loki tries to keep up. O.B. seems to have learned exponentially more while Loki has been at the end of time, while Loki’s own learning has atrophied. “Quantum bounce is when you… can turn a black hole into a white hole, so it’s expanding instead of contracting?”

“In layman’s terms,” O.B. says, his pen scratching at the paper again.

“And it also… has the potential to cause explosions?” Casey says, looking worried.

“Oh, yes.”

Sylvie stands up and goes to the wall, inspecting the tree poster.

“Never mind all the theory,” Verity says, with a “speed it up” gesture. “What’s Step One? We need an action plan.”

“We can’t form an action plan until I fully understand what is required,” O.B. says.

“What do we need to figure out?” Casey chimes in.

O.B. shakes his head. “This is why my timeline self never had success as a writer,” he muses, gazing into the distance. “I knew the science, but not the poetry.”

“Who said anything about poetry?” Verity says. “Why does that matter?”

“We live in a world where magic exists,” Loki finds himself saying, as he rests his eyes on Sylvie. “Variants, for example, play roles in a magical way, not just a scientific way. Something about reality wants our souls to exist across time, to keep telling our stories in different permutations and with different outward forms. And it’s the same with this problem here,” he says, looking at everyone in the room in turn. “The energy core wants something that we’re not giving it. It pines and hungers. But for what?” 

Sylvie is still studying the image on the poster, of the two people caring for the tree. “Who designed this?” she asks, seemingly out of nowhere.

Casey straightens up. “I did.”

“What were you thinking of when you designed it?” she asks.

“Oh. Just… I mean, we figured out that time was shaped like a tree now, so… I made a tree. And a tree needs water, sun, soil… you know. The basics.”

Sylvie locks eyes with Loki. “You’re the poet, not me,” she says. “But I feel like there’s got to be something there.”

Loki nods. “The roots on the temporal Yggdrasil are decorative, artistic. They’re not real roots.”

“But our energy core…” Sylvie says, nodding. “It acts like soil, grounding the entire multiverse from the center outwards.”

“Exactly,” Loki says. “And soil isn’t enough. We just have to figure out what the metaphorical water and sunlight are. If we can determine that, we’ll know how to sustain it. And it’s clear that we, ourselves, aren’t enough.”

“Adding power from the TVA is probably the water,” O.B. says. “Or maybe the sunlight? I don’t know. He sighs. “I was told, on the timeline, that my writing was seriously lacking in compelling metaphors.”

Verity still seems highly impatient with all of this. “Is there anything I can actually start doing?”

“We’ll need to get the energy core connected to the TVA, right?” asks Casey. “That seems like something technical that the non-experts could work on. We could do it from the T-TOC.”

“T-TOC?” inquires Loki.

“The Temporal Tree Observation Chamber,” Casey explains. “Used to be the Temporal Loom Observation Chamber. We can’t see the whole tree at once, of course, but what we can see… wow, Loki, it’s so pretty! So much prettier than the loom was. Sometimes I just sneak down there to watch the branches waving around…”

“Yes! Thank you, Casey,” Verity says, rising determinedly. “We’ll head down there right now. Might as well start playing with the settings to see if there’s anything that makes the TVA more compliant with an energy ball rather than a Frost Giant sitting at the center of the time tree.”

Casey looks up brightly as he stands to follow her. “While we’re making adjustments to the TVA, can we do some remodeling? The orange really gets on my nerves sometimes…”

“One thing at a time, buddy,” Verity says, as they leave together.

The three of them scatter, leaving Loki and Sylvie alone together in the conference room. He takes her hand. “Are you doing all right?” he asks quietly.

She nods. “Surprisingly, yes. My mindfulness training is allowing me to witness the inferno of latent rage inside me without it overtaking me. Pity, though, since it’s an impressive inferno and I’d love to let it loose.”

Loki chuckles, running his thumb over the back of her hand.

“It was nice what Verity said, though,” she says. “I have to admit that this place has changed. Dammit. I really wanted to have permission to hate it forever.” She peers up at him. “What about you? Missing Mobius?”

He turns to her, surprised. “When did you get so perceptive?”

“I’m not, really, it’s just obvious that you’d miss your favorite fascist time cop buddy.” She gives him a sly grin, letting him know she’s not serious.

“Of course I do,” Loki says quietly. “But he’s living his life. He doesn’t want any part of this anymore, and I can’t truly wish he were here, since it’s not what he wants.”

She nods. “And your glorious purpose? You’re not freaking out about relinquishing some control over it?”

He could easily freak out. He really could. But instead, he curls a strand of Sylvie’s hair around his finger. “I’m doing okay.”

As they are now alone in the conference room, she places a hand on his cheek and reaches up to kiss him. He feels it like a cool breeze in this windless place, the breathy wisps traveling throughout his body as he basks in the feel of her lips on his.

But it’s over quickly. She’s the one who stops the kiss, and as Loki studies her face, he still can’t be sure if her desire for him is more than just physical. There are hints of thawing in her expression, sometimes, but at other times, she still looks as matter-of-fact about their relationship as ever.

His love-damaged heart, he reflects, is being mended at a much more rapid rate than hers.

When she catches his eye, she seems to intuit what he’s thinking. She sighs, takes his hand, and leans back against the wall. He does the same. She squeezes his hand; he squeezes back.

We’re doing our best with an impossible situation.

He nudges her shoulder gently, wincing a bit as he has an unflattering revelation. “I think I did want people to kneel. Just a little bit.”

She gives him a reproving look. “You don’t say,” she says, unsurprised.

“But it’s not because I wanted to be worshiped,” he continues quickly, “it’s because… I wanted to prove to you, and to everyone, and to myself, that I didn’t want to be worshiped. I wanted to be the person who rejects the reverence when it’s offered.”

She shrugs and tucks his hair behind his ear. “You don’t need to be that guy,” she says. “You can just be whoever you are. I kind of like you, you know.”

He grins at her. I “I’m really not freaking out, Sylvie,” he affirms. “Not when…”

She looks up at him. “What?”

Her face is curious, her eyes wide and blinking. It’s just like the first time he almost told her he loved her, all those eons ago. She really didn’t know what he was going to say back then; how does she still not know?

But then, he realizes, he doesn’t even know how to express it himself. So why should she?

He does his best:

“Not when you’re here, keeping me grounded.”

She does keep him grounded, truly. While they may not yet know what his metaphysical Yggdrasil needs to nurture its root system, Loki is certain of what he needs.

All he needs is Sylvie.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Sylvie?”

“Hey, Casey?”

“What’s a fish’s favorite brass instrument?”

Sylvie looks at him over a tangle of wires and tools. “I don’t know, Casey. Why don’t you tell me?”

The look he gives her is almost nervous, like he knows it’s one of the silliest things that’s ever been said and she might slice his head off, but he just can’t not say it.

“It’s… the saxa-fin.” He giggles in spite of himself. “Get it?”

Whenever she encountered jokesters during apocalypses, Sylvie had no patience for them. She would shove them out of her way without compunction. But now? Dammit, she really likes Casey’s fishy witticisms, delivered with bubbly glee.

As Sylvie laughs out loud, she is shocked to discover that she’s actually having fun at the TVA.

“That was your best one yet, I think.”

“Thanks.”

“Why fish, though?”

“Well, I used to not know what they were. Then Loki over there” — he nods in Loki’s direction — “threatened to gut me like a fish, and I became obsessed with researching them. Now I know way too many species. And way too many puns.”

Sylvie smirks, fascinated to hear an anecdote from back when Loki acted more like, well, a stereotypical Loki. In some respects, he’s changed so much… and yet he hasn’t, because he always had this magnanimous, sensitive soul inside him.

“Well, I like your puns. Here, hand me the pliers.”

They’re working to rewire the now-obsolete loom monitoring devices, to adapt them to delivering a charge to their energy core at the end of time. Sylvie’s got more mechanical engineering experience, after jump-starting everything in creation, and Casey knows what alterations need to be made. They make a good team.

And dammit, he makes the TVA sound like not such a bad place, at least in its current incarnation. She really wishes she could keep hating it.

They really are good people: Casey, O.B., and Verity. She had barely paid attention to any of Loki’s companions the last time she was in the TVA, even Mobius and Verity, whom she’d met before. She’d been a little preoccupied by having her life disrupted and by the threats to the multiverse. But all three people are rather soothing to be around, and she understands why Loki likes them.

“If we connect the blue wire and the green wire, then we’ll get it in the right configuration. You don’t wanna know what happens if we solder the blue to the red,” Casey says.

“Try me,” Sylvie challenges him.

His expression turns grave. “All the pie slices in the TVA would come flying out of their compartments. They’d become airborne and weaponized, and would start attacking timelines at random with pie bombs.”

Sylvie stares at him for a long while, scrutinizing his face. One solitary muscle twitches in his cheek.

“Bullshit,” she says, and he breaks into laughter.

“Dammit! How’d you know? The TVA has some weird hacks and failsafes that I’ve told you about, and those were all true!”

“Yeah, but this one was just too ridiculous. I readily believe that there’s a mechanism for removing the concept of time from a timeline, that’s just macabre enough to be true of the TVA. But I draw the line at weaponized pie. Only you could think of that.”

“You got me!” He laughs. “Okay, but seriously, if you join those together, you might cause all planets that begin with the letter Q to spontaneously combust, so you’d better steer clear of it.”

“Now that I believe, for some reason.”

“Yeah, this place is weird. But we’re fixing it! That’s a good thing, right?”

She nods. “Yes, it is. Thanks, Casey.” She concentrates and solders together the correct wires.

“We good?” she asks when it’s done.

Casey presses a small yellow button. “All set! Q planets are safe, and there are more of them than you might think.”

He grins at Sylvie and offers his hand for a high five. Surprised, Sylvie raises hers and slaps it. She hasn’t been offered many high fives in her time.

She feels a pair of piercing eyes on her and casts her eyes over to Loki. Ostensibly, he’s engaged in conversation with Verity, who’s flipping through pages on a clipboard, but in reality he’s saying a few absent-minded “mm-hm”s while gazing at Sylvie herself, a soft smile on his face. When he meets her eyes, he flushes and gives her a little wave.

Her heart tries to leap, and clatters around inside its cage. This happens a lot. Of the two of them, it’s patently obvious that Loki is being more successful at defeating his obstacles to love. She’s frustrated with herself. She really and truly does want to love him. But centuries of stifling that particular emotion are proving incredibly hard to undo.

“Hey!” Verity snaps her finger in Loki’s preoccupied face. “Focus!”

Sylvie realizes she needs to focus, too. Those eyes of his…

From somewhere below them comes the now-familiar sound and rumbling of a large explosion. Verity speaks into her earpiece: “Is he okay? Okay. Thanks.”

Right on cue, forty seconds later, O.B. enters the loom room, hair singed and holding out his glasses for Loki to fix, which Loki does absently, using his magic.

“Any luck with the quantum bounce?” asks Verity.

O.B. looks at her, his wide eyes blinking. “We’re making progress,” he says. “I survived, didn’t I?”

They have an agreement that if O.B. dies, Loki can turn back time just long enough to bring him back to life. And it’s a good thing they made that arrangement, because O.B. has died quite a few times over the course of the past week. Sylvie is impressed by his cheerful devotion, and the levity with which he discusses his own recurrent deaths.

Sylvie, if she’s honest, is slightly bothered by the fact that Loki can turn back time. It’s different from her own adventures as a healer and a defender of the weak on the timelines, during the years after Loki turned himself into a damn tree. When she saved people during battles, she would just create new branches, rather than changing events that had already happened. 

But this? Does anything matter, if Loki can just fix it? She should be happy with his ability, she supposes, but it does feel rather like the usual stakes of life have been removed. 

Timeslipping is such a mess, she thinks. Unfortunately, it’s a necessary evil right now.

She tries to put it from her mind as she and Casey make their way over to where O.B. is discussing the situation.

“I’m close to working out the solution,” he says. “I may not even have to die anymore! Now, here’s what I think you’ll need to do, Loki. It involves timeslipping far into the future. Have you ever done that?”

Loki shakes his head. “No. I’ve never needed to try… and I don’t think it’s possible, at least from how it feels in my body.”

“Well, with the quantum bounce working, it should be possible. Remember how I mentioned that point thousands of years in the future where you’ll be at the threshold of imploding or exploding because of temporal decay?”

Loki winces. “Don’t remember the term temporal decay, but the rest of it… regrettably, yes.”

O.B. gives him a thumbs-up. “You’ll have to go forward in time to that point in time, it’s the point at which you’ll be most vulnerable to relinquishing your role as the timelines’ primary protector. That’s when change can be made. Your body will take on the characteristics of that moment in time, and you’ll return to us in that altered state. If we’ve made the necessary modifications to the TVA, it will be ready for you, and you can transition your temporal energy to the TVA’s mechanisms.”

Sylvie is now standing quite close to Loki, and puts a protective hand on his arm. “That sounds dangerous as fuck.”

“I know! But it’s the only option we have,” says O.B.

“I don’t like this whole ‘implode or explode’ thing at all,” she presses. “Why can’t he just timeslip even further forward, to the point where he’s able to release the multiverse back to functioning on its own?”

O.B. shakes his head. “No, sorry, if he timeslips that far ahead without dealing with the first point, there’s no guarantee that he or the multiverse would have survived the implosion. Or explosion. We don’t know what would happen to him. He might timeslip past a point when he has already died or the multiverse no longer exists, and then I don’t know if he would be able to come back alive.”

“Fuck,” Sylvie says, gripping Loki’s arm more firmly. She looks up at Loki and checks her internal clock; their two hours are almost up for the day. “How do you feel about all of that, Loki?”

He nods sagely. “If that’s what we have to do, then that’s what we have to do.”

“Ugh.” She glares at him fondly. “Practice first. I don’t want you risking yourself unnecessarily.”

“I promise, Sylvie, I won’t do anything rash.”

“This whole thing is rash! I’d rather have you stuck as a tree than dead, you know that, right?”

His expression goes quite soft, his eyes misty. “Oh, Sylvie…”

“A- hem.”

Verity nods in their direction; Loki turns red and Sylvie feels her stomach lurch as she realizes they are all over each other. Her hands have landed on his chest, and he’s stroking her hair with one hand while sliding his other hand up and down her back. They snap away from each other.

“That’s it,” Verity says. “You two are taking tomorrow off. O.B. seems to have things under control, and the rest of us could do with a break from all the PDA.”

“All the PDA?” Sylvie says. “Come on, it’s not like it’s constant… Casey, back me up here…”

“Um…” Casey’s eyes shift around. “Well, when you’re not right next to each other, you’re not touching, but otherwise… if you’re within a few feet of each other… it’s… kind of… constant.”

“Oh.”

“It’s why I made you Casey’s partner, not Loki’s,” says Verity. “Didn’t you know that?”

She really, really hadn’t realized.

“Well,” Loki says awkwardly. “One of us has to go back to the thrones now. Do you want to, Sylvie, or…”

“I still need her for more rewiring,” Casey says. “Pretty please.”

Sylvie nods. “You go,” she says to Loki. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

“Remember what I said,” Verity admonishes them as she leaves the room. “Tomorrow is a vacation day for you two.”

Loki looks like this prospect intrigues him, but Sylvie starts to protest. “Really, I’m sure we can just stop—”

“No, you can’t, because I asked you about it last week and neither of you apparently heard me because of your googly-eyes for each other. Clearly you two have something you need to get out of your system, so go get it out of your system. I need your heads in the game.” 

But despite her no-nonsense tone, Sylvie catches Verity’s eye as she’s leaving, and there’s an amused little twinkle in it.

Casey chuckles as they get back to work. “Two Lokis,” he says. “How do you make it work?”

“We’re not really a couple,” she says, realizing how hollow it sounds even as she says it.

Casey sits back and observes her. “I could even tell you two were a couple twenty years ago, back when you were barely speaking to each other,” he says. 

Sylvie sighs. So it’s always been visible to others, even when they weren’t obvious to themselves.

Or… maybe just to her.

Loki has known for a long, long time.

Her heart strains in her chest, trying restlessly to break free from its confines. She wants to share it with Loki fully and completely. But even after all this time, there’s terror. Terror at making herself totally vulnerable to another.

Dammit.

Maybe she can work through it on their TVA-mandated date. She’ll have to think of a nice, romantic spot. Something that will inspire love and tenderness.

Or maybe we just need to stab some bad guys. That’s romantic, right?

Battle of Eltraghi, planet Wreyn’i

852 BCE

Sylvie whirls around and beheads a large winged creature, knowing from experience that it’s there without even checking. She’s experienced this exact battle many times, both as a pure healer and as a combatant, because… well, she’s Sylvie, and sometimes she just needs to fight. It’s easy to blend in, since the warriors on both sides comprise many different species, so no one questions her presence.

“They’re gonna come in on the left flank, Loki, so you help head them off, got it? Oh, hang on—”

She takes a break to stab several snarling mercenaries.

“Sylvie, I think those creatures were from the side we’re fighting on…”

“We’re not fighting on any side right now, remember? We’re taking out the most violent actors on both sides, leaving the ones who are willing to reach a peace deal.”

“O-kayyy…. Got it. I have to say, you didn’t fully explain that when you—”

“Run!” Sylvie grins and runs headlong into a mob of shrieking soldiers with cat ears on their helmets.

As the battle draws to a conclusion, Sylvie realizes she gets a rush of adrenaline every time she sees Loki slay one of her appointed targets. His fighting form is graceful, his body lithe; her style is far more gritty. 

Also, he looks damn good in battle armor. She wonders if she should have finally conjured or crafted herself some new armor. But she’s tried, and she can never quite improve upon the one she has, even though it’s old and beat-up and might not even offer much protection anymore. It’s her good luck charm at this point.

She catches him sneaking glances at her, as well, and at some point they force themselves to stop gawking at each other so they can concentrate on not getting killed.

“That’s it!” she says at last, snapping her fingers at him and drawing him away from the melee. “Come on, leave it now, we’ll go in here and watch.” 

She pulls him into a nearby cave that isn’t immediately visible to an outside observer. “We have to make sure your presence didn’t screw anything up. But in theory this is when the generals should approach each other… Yes, there they go…”

Loki watches with interest; space is limited and their arms graze each other. “Is this when we step in and heal people?” he asks, although she sees his eyes dart down to their arms and thinks that he doesn’t actually seem to be in a rush to get back to the battlefield.

“We need to let them conclude their meeting first,” she responds. “See, everyone else is kneeling? We can’t just rush in.”

“Ah. I see.” They turn their heads to each other at the same moment, and Loki looks away first. He peers around at the interior of the cave, noting the turquoise and green glimmer around him. “What’s causing that glow?”

“Glow worms and foxfire,” she says. “The caves on this planet are full of them. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

“Stunning,” he says, but he’s not looking at the glow. He’s looking at her again.

She clears her throat. “That was a nice move you did, disarming that Parfighian of his spear and blasting him away while throwing the spear at his backup man.”

“Oh. Thanks,” he says. “I liked it when you, ah, spun around and kicked that monster thingy in the face.”

“The Gernfellin? Yes, they have particularly kickable faces. Thanks. I thought my form was pretty good there.”

“Oh, yes, quite good.”

“And you, with your…” She imitates one of his bouncy-twisty moves. “I liked that.”

“And I liked your…” He mimics her crouch-and-spring attack.

“Thanks.”

They move nearer to each other, until they’re standing in the middle of the cave together, surrounded by the bioluminescent glow of thousands of tiny charming creatures. They’re breathing heavily, and it’s no longer from the exhilaration of the battle.

“See?” she says, jutting out her chin. “We didn’t need some stupid date. We can just fight and get everything out of our system that way. Right?”

They are now so close that she can feel his warmth. Everything falls away: the thrill of the battle, their bashful compliments, their worries for the future. All that remains is the heat that perpetually simmers between them, waiting to be acted upon. 

He catches her around the waist, allowing his burgeoning hardness to press against her. “Right.”

She closes her eyes. Let go, she breathes to herself, and when she opens her eyes, Loki’s are hungry for her. There’s a tug deep down in her core, and she suddenly can think of nothing but Loki, Loki, Loki.

She walks backwards, pulling him with her, so that he’s pinning her to the cave wall. He presses  his hands into her armor, which feels like her second skin at this point. 

Loki’s freshly conjured armor is nothing like a second skin, so she tests the waters by vanishing his mantle cape. Quirking an eyebrow at him, he nods, and she strips him down to his innermost layer: boxers and a black T-shirt. She smiles; she doubts that the T-shirt is approved Asgardian underwear, but she likes it. She runs a hand up inside his shirt, feeling the taut muscles underneath, then hooks a finger behind the waistband of his boxers and pulls his pelvis as close to hers as possible. 

Gently, she rocks her hips into his. He lets out a tiny sound between a grunt and a moan.

The turquoise lights wink in his eyes, perfectly matching his inscrutable shade between blue and green.

Loki glances down at her armor, but doesn’t make a move to remove it, and she’s grateful. She’s never removed her armor at this battle, and feels antsy to be ready to jump back into the fray in case it’s necessary. She knows it’s hypocritical to expect Loki to be defenseless and not herself, but he seems to understand that this is what she needs.

Gods. He understands her so well.

Still, though, she wants him inside her. So she pulls off one leg of her trousers — just one — and starts to hook her leg around his waist.

But Loki has other things in mind.

His lips find hers — only for a moment, as he tries to catch his breath — and then he’s moving downward. 

Kneeling. 

Grasping the flesh of her ass with his hands and planting a series of kisses at her sex, each one increasing in intensity. And then he remains there, nose nuzzling her clit while he buries his tongue in her cunt, exploring every niche of her. Her hips snap into him and she lets out an involuntary cry —

“Ah— mm…”

His tongue maps a path through her center that she never could have charted herself. He wends his way around her ridges and furrows, tending to each one with pressure and attention, sending shock waves all the way to her fingertips.

Fuck, he’s good.

Her hands fall to his head and she runs her fingers through his hair, getting a handful of it, guiding his motions ever so slightly. But she doesn’t need to do much; he has an intuitive sense of what she needs.

She could come in a few seconds, she really could, if she uses him as her plaything, fucking his face like a toy. She’s done it with plenty of people before, and none of those people had anything like his skill set. He’s so specific with his movements, like right now: there’s a ridge just inside her cunt that she had previously paid little attention to, but he’s running his tongue over it repeatedly and it makes Sylvie’s vision go white — all she can think of is the cascade of sensations.

His tongue is magical inside her, and indeed, she almost wonders if he is casting an unknown spell upon her, for she feels vibrations and tremors previously unknown, running throughout her body in ripples and quakes.

But no, he’s not doing anything supernatural; he’s just Loki and he is good at this. 

Oh, she could come right now… She would just have to move his head a little faster, oscillate her own hips against him…

But no, she won’t hasten it, for Loki is on a journey of discovery. In the dim but luminous lighting, she studies his face and sees a tear falling from one of his eyes. He drinks her in like she’s an antidote to all the poison in the world. He shudders and holds her closer to him, redoubling his efforts.

“Sylvie.”

He says her name against her hot, wet lips, and she spasms (just once for now); a trickle of liquid trails down her perineum, and his posture shifts as he tastes it, laps it up. One of his fingers finds her perineum and he strokes it, rubbing her own juices into her flesh, from the smooth skin below her slit up to the lower reaches of her lips, and then inside, next to his tongue, driving her mad.

She can’t help bucking into his face a few times; panting, she tries to stave off her peak, giving him time to discover every inch of her. But she can barely hold on.

His eyes meet hers, transfixed.

And then he shifts everything upwards, lips moving to her clit, sucking, prodding, flicking with his tongue. Another finger enters her slick passage, then a third, and he fucks her with abandon.

It’s too much, she can’t hold out any longer.

“Fuck… Loki…”

Magic…

Sylvie succumbs to the pumping of his fingers up inside her, jerking her repeatedly upward as she cries out in time with his movements. She leans into him, grinding herself on his face and his knuckles as her cunt clenches around him in billowing waves. 

She’s dripping again, coating him with her scent and her self. He licks it all up as his fingers fuck her through the ebbs and flows of the climax.

“Forever,” he murmurs, and while he probably means he could taste her forever, she suspects there’s more to the word. 

She lets herself enjoy it, relishing the promise. Responding in her own way, with another shuddering aftershock that makes him gasp and swirl his tongue around her clit in one final, devastating invitation to come again. Which she does, tightening up and pulsing against him in an orgasm that seems to pull her body every which way, electrical impulses running wild in every supple joint. Rewiring her, rewriting her code.

She almost collapses.

But no — before it subsides and before her knees buckle, she pulls him up, savoring the tang of herself on his mouth as she kisses him, and sliding his boxers down past his erection. She hooks her leg around Loki’s hip again, and this time, he wastes no time in hoisting her up a few inches off the ground and sheathing his cock inside her, renewing the pleasure and sending her into a new round of spasms and cries.

He holds her up, with the cave wall at her back, keeps her steady as he pulls back and slams himself inside her again, grunting erratically in a way that suggests this will not take long.

…three, four, five…

He’s hitting every spot that his tongue just massaged, but now it’s with his stiff, heavy cock. The thick ring of his cockhead stretches her to the limit and drives home every burst of sensation. Sylvie can only bite her lip to keep herself from screaming in ecstasy.

She clings to his shirt as he thrusts, her armor protecting her back from the craggy wall of the cave as he gets faster and more desperate.

Every surge of his cock increases his urgency, brings her back to the brink, sends her over the edge. She can’t tell when one crest ends and another begins. She thrashes her head, feels his cock twitch inside her, opens herself a little wider to take in the last fraction of an inch of him. At this, he makes a strangled sound and hammers out his last rapid-fire strokes.

“Hngh—”

His whole body goes stiff and he holds himself inside her, fucks his cum into her with shuddering pulses — she accepts it readily, milking it all out of him with the throes of her own unremitting orgasm.

She’s not sure how long they maintain this position; it’s not very sustainable, but it seems to last quite a while… until Loki speaks:

“One of these days,” he rasps, “I’ll be able to hold on a little longer for you.”

“Long fucks are overrated,” Sylvie says, and he laughs into her hair. “Besides, you did, that first time. When we have more time to do this regularly, I’m sure you’ll last longer.”

He pulls back and regards her, and she realizes that she’s been taking it for granted that, if this whole thing works, they’ll just sort of… be together. Fucking, living together, bickering, joking.

Loving?

“Yes,” he says, and his words grow heavy with significance. “Soon. When we have more time. Together.” His eyes invite her to elaborate.

But she doesn’t know how to talk about the future.

“We should get back out there,” she says, fumbling for her trouser leg. “They’ll be finishing the agreement now, and there are people we’ll need to heal.”

Loki nods as she returns his battle armor to him with a wave of her hand. There’s a look on his face that’s almost wounded. I’m not trying to hurt you, Loki, I’m not, I just can’t… can’t…

“All right,” is all he says, before she can finish her own thought.

“How many more of them are there?” Loki asks, after healing about thirty-odd injured soldiers. Sylvie has been teaching him how to enchant health into people on death’s door, ensuring that they’ll survive long enough to be taken to a hospital. “This is a lot of work.”

“A lot of work?” she asks. “Haven’t you been holding the multiverse together for quite a while now?”

“That’s all mental energy. This is physical energy. I haven’t exercised for a while, I’m rather out of shape.”

Sylvie throws him a glance as he transfers the soldier to a more stable location. “Beg to differ,” she says, and he gives her a knowing, sensuous look. “And come on, you were just in a battle. Healing is harder than fighting?”

“Well, I’m more trained for combat. Carrying around dead weight is not my forte. And frankly, the enchantment itself is quite draining.”

“You’ll get used to it. Here, try again.”

She places his palm on the soldier’s chest, adjusting his precise position. “Now summon the health. Up, up, from the heart, from the lungs, every organ you can feel, pull life from it and set it right at the forefront of his consciousness.”

A gust of air swoops around them. Loki reels back, and the soldier springs to her feet, bright-eyed. “Glim! Parlia, finglim.”

“You’re welcome!” Loki says, pleased with himself. “I assume she thanked me.”

“Something like that,” Sylvie says, crinkling her brow. “You’ve got to be careful, you healed her too much.”

“Too much? How’s that possible?”

“If you make everyone bounce back too quickly from their injuries, both sides get suspicious of each other again and the peace deal falls through. Trust me, I’ve made that mistake before.”

Loki appears suitably impressed that she’s done this enough times to have figured that out. “How many branched timelines do you think you’ve created, just from this moment?” he asks.

She shrugs, but puffs with pride as she thinks of all the branches she’s created. “Can’t count. I did it multiple times a day for a while, trying to get it right.” She looks down at the person underneath her healing hands now. “I have to say, I wish I preferred the saving, but I really prefer the fighting. Don’t get me wrong, this is very fulfilling, but I just can’t get around the fact that I bloody love a good battle.”

Loki chuckles. “You sound more like a Thor than a Loki. I always used to tease him when we were young; I would sit back and plot revenge against the kids who aggrieved us, but he just wanted to leap headlong into fighting, even if it meant he’d get pummeled. Didn’t change when we were grown, as well. I don’t know, Sylvie, maybe you’re a Thor after all.”

“I’m really not.” She doesn’t think of herself as a Loki anymore, of course, but the thought of being a Thor is laughable to her, even if she only barely remembers her brother. “Do you miss your Thor?” she asks him.

“In theory, yes. But it’s been so long, I’ve mostly made peace with the loss. Of course, I…” He goes quiet and steadies himself as he beckons the lost health from the depths of a soldier. “Sylvie, is this fellow supposed to have talons growing out of his cheeks?”

“Yes, that’s just dandy. You don’t need to fix that.”

“Thank goodness, I wasn’t sure how.”

Sylvie shakes her head; Loki has tried to change the subject, but she won’t have it. “Mobius is the brother you still miss,” she says, finishing his abandoned thought as they move on to the next injured creature.

“Yes,” he says, almost smiling. “I don’t know that I’d call him a brother. Or a father. ‘Friend’ doesn’t do it justice, either. He kept me honest, almost as much as you do. Knocked sense into me in a way that was vital. I’m glad he found his way out of the TVA, I’m sure it was what was best for him. But I do miss seeing him there.”

“Well, what’s stopping you from going to see him?” Her enchantment isn’t stanching the blood flow in the wound of her current charge; shaking her head, she conjures a bandage and wraps it around the leg. It won’t hold forever, but it will last long enough.

“We don’t have time, of course.”

“Sure we do. Clearly we’re not essential personnel in this operation, since we got kicked out for being annoying.”

“Temporarily kicked out. They’ll need us back. Nobody can rewire a device like you, Sylvie.”

She nods, acknowledging the truth of the statement. “And nobody can resurrect O.B. like you.”

“Why, thank you.”

“Anyway… go visit Mobius! He’d probably be really supportive of you leaving Tree-Land. He might even want to come and help.”

Loki shakes his head. “I don’t want to intrude on his life. I’m sure he’s busy.”

Sylvie rolls her eyes, then frowns at her next patient. “This one’s tricky. I sometimes can’t save her, but maybe with both of us…” Sylvie plucks a healing herb from a nearby bush and, while Loki performs an enchantment, Sylvie crushes the herb and applies it to the warrior’s flesh wounds. Then Sylvie finishes off the enchantment with a powerful burst of magic at the soldier’s temples. The soldier coughs and stirs, and Sylvie stands and moves on.

“That’s all of them,” she says. “We can probably get back to the TVA soon, to check on things. We still have a few minutes before the core is gone.”

The sun is beginning to set, and something in the Wreyn’ian atmosphere makes the sunset-glow mimic the twinkling creatures in the cave. Everything is bathed in a sparkle of aquamarine, and Loki’s eyes are transparently spellbound by her.

She still doesn’t know how to deal with a mesmerized gaze like that. “What’s that look for?” she asks.

“You’ve done so much. It’s incredible, the way you’ve been able to get this battle down to a science. This, and so many others, I have no doubt.” She expects him to congratulate himself, at least internally, for having done his noble sacrifice so she could live her life. But he doesn’t show any trace of it, and she decides he deserves a reminder.

“Thanks for that,” she says, reaching up and caressing his jawline, down to the back of his neck. His eyes flicker back to the cave, and Sylvie smirks at the implication, but he laughs and takes her hand instead.

“We should go,” he says. “Back to the TVA, just to make sure everything is ship-shape?”

“Sure.”

He looks stealthily around; no one is paying them any mind. He kisses her — nothing lengthy or groundbreaking, just a simple kiss — but it sends a warm shiver up her spine.

“Thank you,” he says, “for this highly unconventional date. Verity will certainly roll her eyes when she hears what we’ve been up to.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure she wanted us to screw, and we’ve done that, so that should keep her happy as long as we don’t mention it outright.” Sylvie thinks how much easier it would be if they allowed themselves to fuck at the end of time, but Loki’s whole attitude when he’s there precludes it. He treats it as a sacred space, and the timelines as his vulnerable wards who must not be corrupted by the sins of the flesh. Or something stupid like that. Sylvie would gladly jump his bones while he sits on that ridiculous throne of his, but he just can’t let it happen.

It’s okay. They’re working on it. He’ll be out of there soon, she has to believe this.

They move to a more private location in a cluster of trees and Sylvie opens a time door. The yellowish glow blends with the turquoise and turns his eyes greener. He puts a hand on her arm to pause her before she steps through.

“Hey,” he says. “How’s your lockbox-heart?” He conjures a cartoonish red heart in a translucent box, which flits around in between them, bobbing like a cork in water.

She laughs as it flies in the air in front of her, and counters with her own silly metaphor. “And you, Tree-man? How’s your infinitely-fragmented heart?” She conjures a heart and splinters it into tiny shards.

He locks eyes with her soberly. “You tell me,” he says. “How does it feel? To you?”

Sylvie contemplates him, assessing his face. She can’t deceive herself; he looks like a man deeply in love. Not urgently or desperately; he’s past all of that. His is a deep and abiding love, a love that has lasted and weathered a million storms, surviving even the atomization of love itself. It has endured.

She conjures a tiny broom and sweeps the shards back together. When she can’t get her conjured creation to stay in one piece, Loki almost laughs at her, putting a hand over his mouth to stifle it. Giving him a challenging look, she conjures some clear tape and binds it all together in an untidy mass.

“There,” she says. “That’s your heart. It feels mended to me, albeit imperfectly.”

Loki’s laughter fades and he raises an eyebrow. “That is… uncannily accurate, I must say,” he says, watching it hover in between them.

“And mine?” she asks. “What do you think about my heart?”

One of the shards of Loki’s faux heart has failed to make it into the taped-up reconstruction. He takes control of the tiny shard with his own seiðr , then holds his breath as he punctures the lockbox around the heart he conjured to represent Sylvie’s own. At first, nothing happens, but when he relaxes and taps a bit harder, a series of great fault lines emerges. The heart isn’t free yet, but it looks like one whack from inside would destroy the box. If only her heart would take a leap, it would be free of its prison.

They watch each other’s conjurings, which orbit around each other in midair for half a minute or so. Then Loki catches her eye.

“So… our hearts are… better?” Loki asks.

“Yours, yes. I’m not sure about mine. Better, I think.”

He nods hopefully. “Thriving, perhaps?”

“I don’t know about thriving, but… awake.”

Her hand reaches up instinctively to touch the little hearts, but they fade away as soon as her fingertips arrive at the spot.

But ultimately when you reach for it, it isn’t real.

Conjurings aren’t real hearts, no. So she brings her hand to rest on his true heart, and tracks its tempo. And she remembers something else she once promised to do to his heart:

Well then, I’ll cut it out.

And then she’d gone and done it. No wonder he had given up on her.

“It wasn’t a ploy,” she blurts out, before she knows what she’s saying. “The kiss in the Citadel. I really did want to show you that I cared for you.”

He gives her a skeptical look. “Not a ploy in the slightest?”

“Well. I mean, yeah, I needed to distract you. But there were plenty of other ways I could have distracted you.”

“Most of them violent, I presume.”

“Naturally.”

He leans in and kisses her slowly, taking his time. They’re both remembering that first kiss, writing over the memory with new record grooves, making it beautiful instead of bitter.

She knows they need to be leaving, but she luxuriates in the kiss for as long as she can, basking in the light of the sunset—

Snap. Something about Loki’s demeanor and stance is different, and he’s got a discontented expression on his face.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “We just got a message on my TemPad. I had to timeslip back a few minutes.”

“Oh,” Sylvie says, deflated. “O.B. died again?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

She nods. “What did I miss?”

Loki gives a sad, soulful smile. “More of the same. Nothing earth-shattering. Just a really, really good kiss. And some… touching.”

Sylvie makes a face. “Only a few minutes?”

“Yes.”

She purses her lips and expels air forcefully through the corners of her mouth. “Let’s go back, then, or we’ll miss it again.”

“Right.”

Sylvie opens a new time door that leads to the testing chambers, rather than the loom room, and they hurry through it. She’s woefully disappointed, even as she tries to tell herself she’s fine. She hates losing time, especially time with Loki. Kissing him, no less. It’s one of her favorite things she’s ever done. Maybe even better than fighting.

She’s just glad they didn’t have to go any further back in time. She wouldn’t have wanted to forget their encounter in the cave. Although… She imagines Loki describing it to her after the fact, if she’d forgotten it, and… she has to admit that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, hearing it described in exquisite detail in his silvery tones.

But it’s still better to remember it. Her inner walls pulse and her heartbeat quickens at the memory.

When they locate the correct chamber, O.B. is about to press a button that will lead to his doom. Loki quickly raps on the door of the chamber, and when O.B. whips his head to Loki and Sylvie, they both shake their heads at him.

“You’re about to die again,” they say in unison. O.B. sighs in dismay and exits the chamber, closing the door firmly and flicking an “off” switch on the wall.

Casey and Verity run in, out of breath, in response to Loki’s message that he has just turned back time and saved O.B. “Wait, wait… I think I was in the middle of a pun,” Casey says. “Before the time shenanigans. I don’t wanna lose it… Just let me…” He screws up his face, snaps his fingers, and says to Verity, “You need to take a krill pill!”

Verity rolls her eyes at him. “Thanks, the TVA would definitely have come to a grinding halt if you hadn’t called me a fish name at least once today.” She turns to O.B. “You okay?”

He gives one shake of his head, very slowly. “You guys,” he says. His voice is weary, his posture defeated. Loki puts a supportive hand on his shoulder. “I’m getting tired of dying so much.”

“I know the feeling,” Loki murmurs.

“But you don’t actually remember the dying, do you?” Sylvie asks.

O.B. shakes his head. “No. But I know it happens. How many times now, Loki?”

“Seventeen,” Loki whispers.

“It’s too much.” O.B. grimaces. “It takes a toll, knowing that.” He sinks down, sliding along the wall down to the floor, and somehow the vision of the eternally optimistic, pragmatic Ouroboros grown joyless and dejected on the floor gives Sylvie’s heart an unexpected tug.

Verity kneels down next to him; Casey’s eyes are welling up with sympathetic tears. “Hey, chin up,” Verity says. “Let’s think about this. What’s missing from the equation?”

O.B. shakes his head. “I’ve said it before,” he says gloomily. “I’m good at the science, not the fiction. I wanted to be good at it. But I never was.” His head drops to his knees. “And we need both.”

Sylvie looks around at these people who she has only really known for a week. But already she feels closer to them than to anyone she was acquainted with during the twenty years she was on her own. Loki really knows how to pick good friends, she thinks, as her heart rattles its cage and makes a significant dent in it.

And she knows the answer. “Mobius,” she says. “He was part of the equation before, and he should be part of it now.”

Loki’s countenance is troubled. “But he wanted to be done with the TVA. I don’t want to drag him back in…”

Verity stands up. “Sylvie’s right. Mobius would know.” She chuckles to herself at a distant memory. “He was always good at figuring out the story behind the madness we were dealing with. And if we tell him Loki’s freedom depends on him, you know he’ll be here in a heartbeat.”

Loki’s face finally breaks into a wide smile. “Okay,” he says. And Sylvie is happy for him, giddy at his happiness. She loves the feeling. She loves empathy, discovered at long-last after a lifetime of dismissing it.

She loves…

She loves…

Oh, Loki, soon. Soon.

Chapter Text

The time door is open; the energy core is fresh. Despite his minor apprehensions, Loki is anticipating the next two hours with a buoyant excitement. I’m going to see Mobius… my dear friend…

“Loki…” Sylvie’s voice breaks into his reverie. “You know that twenty years is longer for humans than for us, right? And Mobius is a mortal human now, who ages at a typical rate?”

Loki freezes at the precipice of the time door. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Well, take fifteen seconds to process it.”

“Hang on, Sylvie.” Sylvie turns to him expectantly, bouncing on her heels a bit and looking pointedly at the newly-made energy core, reminding him that they’ve only got two hours for this excursion.

“Yes?” she asks.

“Why are you just mentioning this now?”

“This all came together rather quickly, didn’t it? It only just occurred to me that Mobius looking older might affect you.”

Loki strokes his jaw. “I mean… it shouldn’t. We’re twenty years older, too.”

“But he’ll look it. You’re probably not used to being around people who age faster than you.”

Loki bites his lip. “We can’t go back to a previous point in his timeline, right?”

Sylvie gives him a look. “That’s far too complicated. You’d create a new branch, with a new Mobius who misses you and never gets to see you.” 

Loki winces; he realizes that he did something similar, back when he went to recruit Mobius’s variant, Don, twenty years ago — he had taken him back in time by a few minutes and created a new branch with a new Don and new kids, and he’d been so laser-focused on his mission that he hadn’t even considered the consequences. All those branches were gone now, lost to spaghettification. But Sylvie’s point is well taken. 

“And even if we could,” she continues, “you wouldn’t really want to, would you? Don’t you want him to be the Mobius who exists in the same time frame as we do?”

Loki knows he’s being selfish; he just wants Mobius to be the same. 

But, he reminds himself, he will be the same.

Loki nods. “Of course I do.” He considers what little he knows about Mobius’s new life, smiles faintly. “Now, I have a question for you: are you ready for the kid chaos?”

Sylvie frowns. “Kids? But Don’s kids would be grown up by now, they—”

“Oh. Did I forget to mention? …Well, you’ll find out soon enough. Let’s go.”

Cleveland, Ohio, Earth

2042

The house is both familiar and unfamiliar to Loki. He’s sensed Mobius’s presence all of these years, and in the beginning he used to hear him speaking a fair bit, but he’s never actually seen where Mobius lives. Sylvie has seen the house, albeit briefly, and Loki looks to her for guidance.

“You’re sure this is it?” he asks.

“Yes, and it looks exactly the same. Same toys and everything. I still don’t understand…”

Loki explains. “Kevin and Sean are grown up, yes, but now they both have kids. They live nearby, and Mobius and Don are the babysitters.”

As if on cue, an older-but-familiar figure emerges from the door, carrying a cranky toddler. “Now, Josie, you know we have to go to the grocery store, gotta let your little cousins sleep, huh? So just put your shoes on and we’ll get you in the car seat…”

“I WON’T EVER!”

“Aw, jeez… um… well, okay, we can probably get the shoes on you when we get to the store, yeah? Here, do you want Hissy the Snake?” He tries to offer her a snake Beanie Baby. “He was your dad’s favorite when he was little…”

“I HATE HISSY THE SNAKE!” She throws the toy on the ground.

“Oh, sweetie, that’s vintage ‘90s… Okay… um… yeah.” As he retrieves the snake and buckles the pouting girl into her car seat, he puts his cell phone to his ear and, apparently, leaves a message.

“Hey, Sean, where the heck is that Rowlf the Dog doll? Josie’s lost without him! Okay, um… gimme a call back if you have any ideas. Bye, kid.”

“Is that Don or Mobius?” Sylvie whispers.

Loki shakes his head. “I… I can’t tell. He’s acting exactly like Mobius…”

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

“Fair point. Should we say hi?”

Sylvie looks keenly at the scene; the man has just finished buckling in Josie and is now collecting himself outside the car, leaning on the open car door. “Well, we have a 50/50 chance of it being Mobius. Might as well give it a try,” she says. “Want me to start.

Despite his nerves, Loki’s excitement wins out; he shakes his head.

“Good morning!” Loki calls cheerily, stepping closer to the house. The mustachioed man squints his eyes and looks at them.

And immediately, Loki can tell it’s not Mobius. There’s no recognition whatsoever.

“Can I help you?” he asks, looking from one of them to the other.

“Ah. Right, yes. I don’t mean to disturb you, but…” His voice trails off and he snaps his head back to look into the car.

The wails from the car seat have died down; Josie is staring at Loki and Sylvie with bright-eyed interest. Don’s eyes grow wide and he looks back and forth from the toddler to the newcomers.

“Wait… how did you… she likes you guys!” Josie nods and hugs Hissy the Snake, who is now apparently an acceptable replacement for Rowlf the Dog.

“Oh!” Loki says, flattered. “Well, it’s probably the accent.”

“Yeah, you Brits are magical with those voices of yours!”

“Right,” Loki says. “Brits. That’s what we are.”

Sylvie nods sagely next to him. “From the United Kingdom.”

“Well, what can I do for you fine folks from across the pond?” Don asks. “Anything for folks who can make my granddaughter stop crying.”

“Well… we’re actually here to see Mobius.”

Sylvie’s head snaps to Loki, a look of alarm on her face. Loki gives her a hopefully-subtle “it’s cool” gesture with his hand; he knows that Mobius has used his own name with Don. However, he suddenly realizes he’s not sure of the exact story that Mobius has told Don about his identity. He knows that Mobius lives in Don’s house now, and that they both split their time between selling personal watercraft and taking care of Don’s grandkids, but he doesn’t know how Mobius explained his presence, showing up out of the blue and looking identical to Don. He must choose his words carefully.

Don gives them a jaunty smile. “Old friends?”

“Yes,” Loki says. “And colleagues; we used to work with him.” Loki bites his lip, hoping this maps onto the pre-existing narrative.

“Oh!” Don says. “From TVA?”

“TVA…” Sylvie says cautiously. “Um… yes.” And then she laughs in a way that’s supposed to be carefree. “What a silly acronym, isn’t it?”

“I’d say. Triceratops Visors and Ankle Socks? I mean, the name is wacky enough, but how did that company even get off the ground with such a narrow and unrelated range of merchandise?” He chuckles and shakes his head. “No wonder it went bankrupt all those years ago. My condolences, by the way.”

Loki’s mouth twitches. He hadn’t overheard this conversation, but he can imagine it clearly: Mobius letting “the TVA” slip from his mouth, Don thinking he’d said “ATV,” Mobius correcting him automatically and then Don asking what “TVA” is, Mobius scrambling to come up with a work history and an explanation for the acronym… 

He puts his hand over his mouth, smiling as he envisions the scene. Don seems to have accepted the lie, however.

“Thank you,” says Loki, “but we’re all right. It’s been a long time since the company closed.”

Don nods. “He told me there might be TVA visitors someday. I always wondered why he didn’t just contact you himself; he’s always seemed to miss you.”

Loki nods, feeling quite warm inside. “Well… we travel a lot. Hard to reach, you know.”

Don drums his hands on the top of the car. “Well, much as I’d like to linger and let little Josie here bask in your presence, I think I’d better skedaddle. If I don’t get diapers soon, we’re gonna be in deep doo-doo, literally. Mo’s just inside.” He jerks his thumb at the door.

Sylvie’s eyes sparkle with amusement. “Mo?” she asks.

“Mobius. I know” He shakes his head. “The thing about discovering you have a long-lost twin at age 45… well, it’s a lot to wrap your head around, and I needed a nice regular name to call him at first, you know? I’ve mostly broken the habit, but sometimes it still slips out.”

Long-lost twin, Loki repeats in his mind, relieved to have had the explanation handed to him. He’d wondered if Mobius might have tried this tactic.

“Well,” says Don, “I guess we’re off. Hope you enjoy your visit with my big bro! …He’s five minutes older than me, apparently.”

“Older,” says Loki. “Yes, I believe he is.”

They wave as Don and Josie drive off. When they get to the front door, Loki rings the doorbell with a shaking finger, nervous again. “Do you really think he’ll be happy to see us?”

“It sounds like he’s been expecting us to turn up someday. Loki, I think it’ll be fine.” She squeezes his hand.

Mobius opens the door very slowly, one inch at a time, making absolutely no noise. He’s not looking at them — in fact, he’s looking frantically up the nearby stairs. “Keep it down! I just got two babies to sleep, and we can’t have any—”

He glances in their direction and his jaw drops. “Loki?” he whispers. “Sylvie?”

“Hi, Mobius,” Loki says.

Mobius’s mouth splits into a broad grin and he holds out his arms. “Come here, you two.” 

After a firm (and silent) hug, he invites them in. “Come on in and we can chat. Quietly. Like seriously, as quietly as you’ve ever chatted in your life, that’s how you’ve gotta be right now.”

They take seats at the kitchen table. “All I’ve got to offer you is juice. Or baby formula. And for snacks, um… do you like rice rusks? Carrot mush? Animal crackers?”

“We’re fine, thanks, Mobius.”

“Okay.” He sits down and adjusts his laptop on the kitchen table so he can watch the camera monitor that’s trained on the babies, who are sleeping soundly upstairs. “This is just a very tenuous situation here, it’s like if one of them even breathes differently, the other one wakes up because he thinks it’s playtime, and then they’re both awake, and they’re making the same exact cooing sounds… They’re freaking psychic with each other.”

He looks dazed. “Right now, the only major difference between them is that one prefers Kermit and one prefers Fozzie  — we’re a Muppets family, y’see.” He holds up two teething toys, one with a frog and one with a bear; Loki can only assume that these are the aforementioned Kermit and Fozzie. Mobius’s eyes are still mostly glued to the screen. “I don’t know what’s more unnerving, twins or variants.”

Upon uttering this word, he tears his eyes from the screen and takes a proper look at Loki and Sylvie. He lets out a soft but relieved laugh. “Wow,” he says. “Haven’t said the word ‘variants’ in a while.” He shakes his head. 

Loki takes a moment to examine the changes to Mobius’s face; he’s noticeably older — despite being centuries old in actuality, in human terms, he must be in his sixties now. (Loki fondly remembers his sixties as the flower of his youth.) But besides a few wrinkles, his face is exactly the same.

“I know you probably don’t want to think about any of that,” Loki says. “You left the TVA, and it seems as though you’ve been quite happy without it.”

Mobius nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I have. But I’m happy to see you, too. I can’t believe…” He runs his hand through his hair. “Loki… I never got to thank you. It all happened so fast. And then you were just… gone.” 

Mobius looks to Sylvie. “I mean… right, Sylvie? We talked about Loki’s whereabouts a bit, that one time we hung out. You seemed to be taking it in stride, Sylvie, but I was still pretty messed up about it.”

Loki feels the unmistakable stab of an injured heart, and tries not to look at Sylvie, for she’ll see the pain in his face. His heart, he suspects, is now fully reassembled, and beats only for Sylvie. But its wounds are still raw and vulnerable to reopening. Hearing that Sylvie didn’t seem to give a fig about him when he left… well, he knows it’s more nuanced than that, but it’s definitely what it felt like twenty years ago. Getting a fresh reminder from Mobius doesn’t help.

Sylvie clears her throat and jumps in quickly. “I wouldn’t say I was ‘taking it in stride,’” she says. “I was just… um… coping. You know.” She sneaks a glance at Loki, which he sees with his peripheral vision.

Mobius nods slowly as he ponders the distinction between ‘taking it in stride’ and ‘coping.’ “Right,” he says. “Well… anyway. Thanks, Loki. You freaking saved the world. The worlds, rather. All of them. None of us would have a life without you.”

Loki shakes his head. “Really, Mobius, it was the least I could do, after all the destruction I caused on my timeline.”

“No, it’s definitely not the least you could have done! The least you could have done to help would be, like, becoming a motivational speaker! ‘Ex-genocidal maniac advises clients not to become genocidal maniacs!’ You went above and beyond, my friend.”

Loki senses Sylvie stiffen next to him, and any wound he might have felt from her past indifference melts away. He knows she’s conflicted about not joining him in his quest to save the multiverse, and she seems to be experiencing a pang of guilt right now. He puts his hand on her leg under the table, and he feels her relax a bit at his touch.

Mobius cranes his neck and peers over the table. “Hey!” he says. “I was right. Two Lokis in love. I called it, way back when. Wow. I’m impressed it survived you becoming a time tree, Loki. Did you guys stay in touch all this time?”

Sylvie bites her lip, and then looks up. “No,” she says. “I ignored him for twenty years. I don’t feel bad about it, but also, I do feel bad about it. Does that make sense?”

Mobius chuckles. “You’re talking to the Loki expert; it makes perfect sense to me. Hey!” 

Mobius switches tabs on his laptop. “Look at this! I’m part of this discussion group about you. Well, not you, the Loki who actually exists and attacked New York in some timelines (not this one, conveniently enough). But the mythological Norse Loki, the one people used to worship here on Earth. Yeah, people love my interpretations of those old stories. Well, maybe ‘love’ is a stretch — Let’s say I challenge some assumptions they have. Okay, fine, maybe they think I’m a nutcase, but hey, what do they know? Did they spend centuries studying you guys?”

“Why did you keep it up? The Loki research?” Sylvie asks, as Loki bites his lip in amusement. “After everything was over, I wanted to get as far away from thinking about the TVA as possible. You seemed like you were in the same boat, that day that we talked.”

“Well, I’d been at the TVA a long, long time. Can’t change interests and habits that easily.” He switches the tab back to the baby-cam. “Although, I have to say, I’ve got some great interests here, now.”

Loki smiles. “We met Josie outside. What are the babies’ names?”

“Yeah, Josie’s a handful, huh? She’s Sean’s kid. And these two here, Kevin’s twins, are Gabriel and Daniel. For two kids named after angels, they’re not doing too shabby at living up to their names. But they’re babies, so… who knows.” 

He shrugs. “Helping to bring up Kevin and Sean was no easy feat, but they turned out okay. Don says he’s never seen someone who so intuitively understands the brother dynamic, until he met me. Once again, I couldn’t really explain that I studied a pair of very powerful brother-gods for quite a few centuries… brother-gods who, coincidentally, have an uncanny similarity to Kevin and Sean.”

Loki grins; he had vaguely gleaned this about Kevin and Sean during his years at the end of time. “So… you did a long-lost twin story?”

“I did. Took him a while to believe it, but I may just have kept my TemPad and I may just have visited my birth year and planted a fake birth certificate and records and… yeah. I mean, maybe. I only did it once!” He looks a little unnerved at having admitted this to Loki. “TemPad’s locked away, probably long dead now. No more time shenanigans.”

“It’s okay, Mobius,” Loki laughs. “I’m not the time police.”

“Anymore,” mutters Sylvie under her breath, and Loki gives her an affectionate shoulder nudge, which she returns. Aloud, she says, “Yeah, and if he was the time police, he’d have arrested me long ago. I was all over the timelines, messing with shit.”

“Mobius…” Loki says, “did you ever consider telling Don the truth? I must say, when I recruited him for the loom mission…”

Mobius looks perplexed. “When you did what, now?”

“Oh. Right. You don’t remember. Long story, but I encountered him while I was timeslipping, before I learned to control it…”

“So you did learn to control it.” Mobius pumps his fist. “Verity and I were debating that for weeks before I lost steam with the argument. But I was right.”

“Yes. Anyway, Don was surprisingly amenable to believing my story about being a time-bending wizard. He went right along with me to the TVA after only a few minutes’ persuasion.” 

Loki wrinkles his nose a bit at this memory; he had been treating Don as though he actually were Mobius: as though he could access Mobius’s memories and priorities, when that simply wasn’t true. It hadn’t been fair to Don.

But Mobius doesn’t know any of that. “Yeah, well, some of us have the storytelling abilities of a Loki, and some of us don’t,” Mobius says. “The only times I attempted to broach anything close to the subject, he scoffed and got all folksy on me. I feel bad about it, but I couldn’t risk jeopardizing what we have — this family. It’s everything to me. And if that means being Don’s twin brother instead of his variant… well, it’s really not that different, is it?”

“Yes it is!!” Loki and Sylvie exclaim simultaneously, both looking down self-consciously at the way Loki’s hand has begun stroking her knee. He pulls it back quickly, but Sylvie grabs it firmly and returns it to her knee. Loki doesn’t complain.

“Shh!” Mobius says, looking in terror at the monitor. “Phew. Keep it down. Okay. Look, me and Don are timeline variants and you guys are universe variants, so we’re more like twins than you are. But yes, okay, point taken. Variants and siblings, different beasts.”

Sylvie gives a brusque nod. “Damn right.”

“But…” continues Mobius, “I just can’t tell him. You see why, right?” He looks fondly back at the monitor. “It’s my family. I can’t risk it.”

To Loki’s surprise, Sylvie is nodding even more fervently than he himself is. “I know,” she says. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Of course; even though Sylvie can barely remember her family, this makes her appreciate the idea of loss all the more.

Loki looks at his own name emblazoned on the other open tab on Mobius’s laptop. “Mobius,” he says. “Don said that you told him we might show up here someday. Why did you think that?”

“Oh,” Mobius says, softly. “Well, I wasn’t sure it would be you two. Frankly, I always assumed it’d be some fresh-faced intern that they’d send down with some essential paperwork I’d forgotten to sign, or some problem that only I could solve. But as it turns out, I was less irreplaceable than I thought,” he muses, staring off into the distance for a moment.

“Anyway,” he continues, “I didn't think it would be you. But I…” He looks at them sheepishly. “I hoped it would be.”

“Well,” Sylvie says. “You didn’t hope it would be both of us. Just Loki, right? He’s the one you were actually friends with.”

Mobius shakes his head. “No, I mean both of you. Loki was the one I spent more time with. But the two of you… you both fascinated me, separately and together. You were the most interesting Lokis I ever met, the only two who transcended your Loki-ness so that I thought of you as… more. Just as… people. People I liked.”

Loki’s heart is swelling, not just for himself, but even more for Sylvie. He knows what this must mean for her: knowing that anyone has cared deeply about her, just for who she is, must carry a lot of weight with her. And it does; he sees it on her face.

“Hm,” she says, a little pink in the cheeks. “Now that I think about it, you did tell me I was your favorite.”

“Hey, when did that happen?” Loki expostulates impulsively.

“Keep it down!” Sylvie and Mobius hiss together. Loki laughs at his foolishness. It doesn’t matter when it happened; it’s true, after all. Sylvie should indisputably be anyone’s favorite Loki.

“Okay, kids,” Mobius says. “Spill. Why are you here?”

Loki and Sylvie look at each other, then back to their host. Grinning, Sylvie says, “We’re the fresh-faced interns with the problem that only you can solve.”

“So, Mobius?” Loki asks. “If the energy core is the soil for Yggdrasil, and the TVA is the water, what’s the sunlight?”

Forty-five minutes later, they’ve explained everything to Mobius — or at least, they’ve reached a point at which Loki can’t think of anything else to add. Mobius has done his best to comprehend Loki’s distillation of O.B.’s lectures on quantum bounce and quantum entanglement and quantum everything else.

“Sunlight…” Mobius muses. “You think I’m the metaphor guy. Honestly, I dunno about that. I never was that good in English class in school, or so Don tells me.”

“It’s not really about metaphors. You can scratch the sunlight thing if it’s not helping you. Really, we all just thought that you understand people so well, you were the perfect person for this.”

“People, maybe. Time trees…” Mobius rubs his forehead. “Let me start with what I do understand. I understand where you’re coming from. As someone who opted for mortality over immortality, I get ya. I’m on board.” He squeezes his eyes shut for a few seconds, then opens them and resumes.

“But that might be the only thing I understand. Really, I’m flattered that you think I can solve your science vs. fiction problem, but I’m not sure I’m the miracle-worker everyone seems to think I am. When I imagined this TVA-related problem that would find me in Cleveland, I always thought it would be, like… what to do with a Loki who figured out how to universe-hop and started causing massive incursions or something. Figuring out their motivations, getting in their head. But this is… more than that.”

“No, it’s really not!” Loki says. “Because… you see, the configuration of the multiverse… well, it’s really just an extension of ourselves. The entirety of the Yggdrasil is our creation!” Sylvie gives him a little smile at his implication that Yggdrasil belongs to her as well, and Loki grips her hand firmly to confirm it. “The whole thing, Mobius, is just one big Loki for you to psychoanalyze. Have at it.”

“Sunlight,” Mobius says again, so quietly Loki can barely hear him. “What makes Lokis light up?”

Then he frowns and stands up, pacing. “I always thought I was maybe a psychologist on the timeline,” he says. “Turns out I was a salesman. Nothing wrong with being a salesman, but I’ve lost some psychoanalytical confidence.”

“No, no, you’ve still got it, Mobius!” Loki exclaims, “You always did!”

“Mobius?” says Sylvie. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from this visit, it’s that you do understand us. And that means so much to me.” It’s hard for her to open up like this, Loki knows, but it appears to be cathartic for her. “All my life, I’ve just been yearning for people to get me, to really know me. To pay attention to me, if I’m honest. I know that sounds childish, but, well, what can you expect from someone who was yanked away from her childhood?”

“Well, of course,” Mobius murmurs. “It’s why this guy tried to make an entire planet kneel for him.”

“Anyway,” Sylvie says, “I just… really believe in you.” Her face shines.

Mobius stops pacing and turns his head to look at the two of them. “I just had a… thought… right on the edge of my brain…”

Loki and Sylvie hold their breaths, waiting, not wanting to disrupt his thought process…

And they are interrupted by the simultaneous wailing of two infants.

“Gah!” Mobius cries. “Here, hold on, I’ve gotta…”

“Do you want help?” Loki asks.

“No, they’ll freak out… Hang on…”

He returns a few minutes later with two cranky six-month-olds, one in each arm, who are both babbling and reaching out their hands for something. They both give Loki and Sylvie mildly interested looks, then resume their chatter.

“Here… you want bottles? You want… Okay, not ready for bottles? You want your Muppets, don’t you? Here, Gabie, here’s Kermit… Danny, here’s Fozzie… there you go, you’ve got your teethers, you can be the happiest little buddies in the U.S. of A.!”

Loki is smiling at them as Mobius places the twins in their high chairs. The boys are looking up at Loki again, eyes bright with interest. “Mobius, they’re beautiful, they’re really…”

“WAIT A SECOND!” Mobius grabs the Kermit teether out of the mouth of Gabriel, who frowns in disapproval. “WAIT A DAMN SECOND! Sorry, kids, don’t learn that word, Uncle Mobius just said jam, that was ‘wait a jam second.’”

“What is it, Mobius?” Loki asks.

“Kermit! Kermit the Frog!”

Loki had been hoping that Mobius had had an epiphany about their problem, but clearly, he’s still in great-uncle mode. “Oh. That’s… the name of that character?”

“Hang on, hang on…” Mobius closes the browser on his laptop and opens a folder called “Movies.” “Muppets Take Manhattan… lemme just skip to the right part.... Aha! Here, watch, watch!”

Bewildered, Loki and Sylvie lean over to see the screen, where the puppet character called Kermit the Frog is beginning to sing a tender, palliative song.

Look at me

Here I am

Right where I belong

I see that face coming back to me

Like an old familiar song

Kermit stares around at the smiling faces of his little group of friends; Loki is amazed at how expressive the puppets can be.

They look like they love him.

What better place could anyone be?

'Cause you're here with me

It's all I've been looking for

And so much more

The song picks up the tempo a bit:

And now I'm here

Now you're here

Nothin' can go wrong

'Cause I am here right where I belong!

It’s just a little felt frog puppet, a children’s character he’s never seen before, singing a very simple song. But to his astonishment, Loki finds a lump growing in his throat.

How could I ever have thought I could be alone for eternity?

He looks over at Sylvie; she’s trying to hide it, but she’s affected, too. 

Mobius looks excited beyond belief. “This is it, this part right here…”

Kermit and his friends seem to be heading out onstage to perform in a theatrical production. When the bear called Fozzie asks if a larger group of friends can watch from backstage, Kermit has an epiphany:

“That's it! That's what's been missing from the show. That's what we need: More frogs and dogs and bears and chickens and whatever. You're not gonna watch the show. You're gonna be in the show!”

Mobius lets the scene continue as he scampers around to their side of the table; they stand up to meet him.

“Lokis yearn for attention,” Mobius says breathlessly. “And while some people think that’s a toxic trait… I think it’s kinda beautiful.”

Mobius grips their arms as the lively, joyful music continues to play.

Look at us

Here we are

Right where we belong

“You want to be loved… and so does your multiverse, the one you created together. You don’t just need the energy core plus some buttons and wires at the TVA, you need… more frogs and dogs and bears and chickens and whatever. You need other people powering the core!”

Loki wants to be as excited about this as Mobius, but he’s still cautious. “But Mobius, we told you we’ve already tried another Loki—”

Mobius claps his hands together.

“I have at least eighteen ideas about how to fix that, don’t worry about it. This is the answer, I swear. The timelines need the energy of living creatures who care about them. But it doesn’t only have to be Lokis, and it doesn’t only have to be you.”

Hearing this out loud, from the mouth of someone he trusts and respects more than almost anyone else, is like being released from a pillory. He puts an arm around Sylvie’s waist, gripping her tight.

“You were right,” Mobius says finally. “I can do this. My God. I can’t say I’ve missed the TVA in general, but I’ve missed… moments like this.”

He throws his arms around both of them, then turns back to the babies. “Hey, kiddos?” They look away from the screen at the sound of their great-uncle’s words. “This is your Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Loki. They’re pretty cool, huh?”

In unison, the twins pop out their teething rings. The musical laughter that ensues, with the background of the joyful Muppet song, makes Loki’s heart soar with bright, shining hope.

Sunlight.

Chapter Text

Two Weeks Later

“Okay, people, listen up.”

Verity’s voice is crisp and commanding, and it makes everyone in the loom room snap to attention. Which is an impressive feat, as there are more people in the TVA than there ever have been before, as far as Sylvie knows — all crowded together, and spilling out into the hallway beyond.

The core team is arranged in a shallow arc around Verity: Loki, Sylvie, Casey, Ourobouros, Mobius. The old gang, albeit more so for Loki than for Sylvie.

Loki… Sylvie’s eyes steal in his direction.

He’s scanning his eyes over the arc in wonderment; it must be surreal to him to see them all together again like this, Mobius included, after living with them all for hundreds of years. He’s told (and showed) her more memories of that time over the past two weeks. Just the day-to-day, humdrum nature of it. Over and over. Trying to save the loom, to save everything.

Loki’s knuckles brush against hers, running down the fabric of her old familiar gloves and then finding her fingertips. They can’t hold hands, not here in front of everyone. But she wants to. Instead, she straightens the bodice of her armor.

“I’ll keep this as brief as possible, to avoid confusion,” Verity says to the crowd. “You all know why you’re here, and we thank you for your willingness.”

Sylvie notes that the two faces at the front of the crowd who are nodding most fervently are annoying old acquaintances: President Loki and Steve Rogers, who have apparently put aside their differences and are here to help out. Grudgingly, Sylvie has to admit that she’s glad to see them. At least they have experience with this, however flawed it was. 

In fact, they’ve been selected as the first two volunteers. The fact that both of them have, however briefly in Rogers’s case, created energy for the timelines should theoretically ease the transition.

And they’re not the only ones she recognizes. There are Avengers from all over the timelines, with a wide variety of costumes and appearances. But it’s not just a crowd of superheroes. It’s mostly regular people. The TVA has pre-vetted them before contacting them, ensuring that they would be amenable to this mission. And they’ve all been recruited voluntarily. Not kidnapped, not the way the TVA used to do things. 

They’re here because they want to be. 

They care about saving the multiverse, and they’ve been selected not only for their generosity of spirit, but for their discretion. They won’t go back to their timelines and start blabbing about the multiverse. Not all creatures are ready for this truth, Verity said. It’s better to let scientists on the timelines discover it on their own, rather than having the truth foisted on people. The TVA is certainly not stopping anyone from discovering it, just as long the discoverer’s name doesn’t happen to be Nathaniel Richards.

Sylvie smiles approvingly at the crowd, and at the whole process. She was the chief recruitment consultant, and she’s still amazed that the TVA is listening to her now, acting upon her recommendations

“This,” Verity continues, “is what you have volunteered to protect.” At her nod, Casey presses the button that removes the enormous window covering, unveiling the temporal tree; the crowd gasps in awe.

“For two decades, the multiverse has been held in place and given sustenance by one person alone: Loki, who you see before you.” Verity gestures in Loki’s direction. “The timelines require energy from living creatures in order to remain viable. Until recently, only Loki and his variants had the appropriate temporal aura.

“However, thanks to Ouroboros,” (she nods at the man in question), “a device has been created that will make it possible for others to provide the necessary energy. O.B., would you explain how it works?”

“Oh. Um… yeah.” O.B. has been staring intently at the orb-shaped device, which is modeled after Loki and Sylvie’s energy core. He looks startled at the question, like he’s forgotten he’s standing in front of a crowd. “Well… you touch it. And it works. That’s pretty much it.”

Verity crinkles her brow; she had definitely been expecting a more thorough explanation, involving all of his quantum physics. But O.B.’s too nervous to give a long-winded commentary. “Okay,” Verity says. “Well, I’ll just explain that fortunately for all of you, you will not need to venture out to the end of time in order to make this happen, as Loki and his variant Sylvie have been doing.”

“And us!” calls out President Loki, pointing indignantly to himself and then to Captain America.

“Briefly,” Sylvie mutters.

“Anyway,” Verity continues, “with the Core Alteration and Reinforcement Processor—”

“Or… CARP!” Casey pipes up. “Come on, you’ve gotta do the acronym.” Sylvie gives him a smile and a wink. He worked hard to make sure the acronym was fish-related.

“— right, yes, with the CARP, you can remain here, in the safety of this chamber, as you observe and provide energy for the timelines. Captain America, I believe you have experience with this. Can you tell us what happened when you attempted to hold the timelines by yourself?”

Rogers nods. “There was a tiny spark, ma’am. But it didn’t last.”

“But the thing is,” Mobius chimes in, “It can last. The timelines have become dependent on the temporal aura of Lokis, but my theory, and I’m pretty sure I’m right, is that if we’re able to successfully make the transfer, the multiverse will be even healthier for having a greater variety of caretakers. So I want to thank you all for being part of it.”

“You must prepare yourselves,” Verity continues. “We don’t know how long each person’s temporal energy will last, even after the transfer is made. It might be a few minutes, might be up to two hours. But you must all be ready. Despite what O.B. said, it won’t be a simple matter of touching the processor. You must do so with intention: the intention of holding the multiverse together at all costs.”

“We’ll be monitoring your impact on the timelines over here,” adds Casey, making his way to his station. “When the monitors tell us your impact is waning, we’ll switch you out for someone else. Make sure not to relinquish your hold until you are relieved by the next person.”

“So this is probably a good time to go to the bathroom, if anyone needs to do that,” adds Mobius, to general murmurs of amusement.

“Loki? Sylvie? Anything to add?” Verity asks.

Sylvie’s mouth is dry. She knows what Loki has to do: timeslip forward thousands of years to the point where will be in his greatest danger, and return to the present in that altered state. Only thus, O.B. claims, will his connection with the timelines be vulnerable enough to be transferred to a wider array of temporal auras.

She shakes her head. “I’m good. Loki?”

Loki, who is wearing his TVA suit and looking quite ordinary for someone who’s about to undertake a catastrophic risk, opens his mouth. “Only to say… thank you all for being part of this. You are truly helping the multiverse… and myself.”

A civilian with a skeptical expression and crossed arms calls out from the back, “That’s not quite like the speech you made in Germany. I was there for that, you know. How do we know this isn’t some sort of a trick?”

Sylvie glances quickly up at Loki, whose face falls almost imperceptibly. But he rallies. “I am not proud of that moment from my past. But I am proud of this, and of what we are all trying to accomplish together. These fine people here will tell you that I have changed, and I want the best for the multiverse, just like all of you.”

“Hear, hear!” President Loki calls out, applauding enthusiastically amidst scattered claps and whispers, then conjuring himself a celebratory glass of wine. Sylvie glares at him and he vanishes it before imbibing.

“Okay, people,” calls Verity. “Five-minute break.”

Sylvie and Loki turn to stare out at Yggdrasil, which looks as beautiful as ever. The timelines undulate gently, bending and weaving, growing all the while.

“Are you going to miss them?” Sylvie asks.

Loki lets out a long breath. “In a way. But ultimately, the timelines themselves are quite abstract.” He turns to her. “It’s who’s on the timelines that truly matters.”

She plucks a piece of dust off his sleeve, which is pointless, as she knows he’s going to change back into his god-garb soon. “You’re sure about this? It’s not too late to back out, to try to find some other solution.”

Loki shakes his head. “You know it’s this or nothing. It can’t be helped.”

The knot of fear that Sylvie has been repressing is now manifesting in full force inside her chest. She wants to hold Loki close and never let him go.

Instead, she takes his hand and regards him. He gives her that look that she’s only ever seen directed at her, his eyes as gentle as feathers, lips slightly parted. She remembers the first time they kissed, how she tried to convince herself she could forget that expression of his. Impossible.

And then she allows her mind to slip back to the last time they were able to get away from the preparations for a bit. Three days ago. Just a Kree motel room, nothing fancy. Very few words were exchanged. It was quick, which neither of them wanted; they both wanted to make it last. But everything feels more urgent these days.

He told her, not for the first time: you’re amazing.

They couldn’t stop kissing, after it was over. Loki had tears in his eyes. Sylvie felt her own tears pressing against her cheekbones, blocked behind the last remaining wall keeping her heart in check.

She wants nothing more than to bash down that wall. But there’s still something strangling the connection between her throat and her heart, tossing her back, away from the oasis of love she seeks.

Loki is still staring into her eyes, caressing her hand with his thumb. “Sylvie,” he says, his voice breaking, “everything will be all right. All I’m doing is timeslipping. I’ve done it countless times before.”

“Not to a point where you’re supposed to be in the middle of imploding.”

“Or exploding.”

“Right, can’t forget that part, that’s much better.”

Loki almost laughs. “O.B. said he’s optimistic. If I get in and out within thirty seconds, nothing bad should happen to me.”

“And you can’t just use the end of time as your starting point? You have to do it this way, all dramatic, leaving the loom room and traveling there on foot, through all the radiation?”

“He says that the end of time will have shifted its location by then, and it’ll be closer to the TVA. I need to get there from here; the rend in the fabric of time only opens from the outside.”

“Of course it does,” Sylvie says acidly. “Just… don’t die. Okay? Can you do that, please?”

She puts her hand over his, and he lets out a little shudder, interlacing their fingers. “Sylvie, I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but my heart seems to be doing just fine these days. Not splintered, not fractured. Whole, and yours. And I love you. There’s no other way to put it. I simply… love you. For everything you are.”

Her heart stops, begs her to set it free so she can reciprocate.

Surely by now she must love him too, more than she has ever loved anything in this mottled-together life of hers. There’s something hitching in her throat — if she can just dislodge it, it’s the last piece —

“Ready to go, people,” Verity calls out. The crowd quiets down again. “Everyone in place.”

Sylvie shakes her head. “Loki, I—”

Loki brushes her forehead with his lips. “Tell me after,” he says. “When you’re ready. There will be plenty of time.”

Verity steps forward. “TVA employees, please ensure that all TemPads are off or in sleep mode. They will interfere with the procedure. Sylvie, you too.”

Sylvie looks down at the TemDisc on her wrist; she’s never switched it off. But instinctively, she knows how to do it. She traces a ridge along the back, and all golden remnants temporarily disappear.

Since the TemPads aren’t available, Loki will have to get out to the end of time the old-fashioned way: marching right up to it, through all of the temporal radiation, using his fancy Loki-God-of-Stories powers. In preparation, he shifts back into his usual attire, with the billowing cloak, giant horns, and impractical slippers. 

“First two volunteers, please take your places at the… CARP,” Verity says, with a sidelong glance at Casey, who beams. President Loki and Steve Rogers find their spots at the device, and O.B. stations himself next to them, ready to monitor the readings.

Mobius puts a hand on Loki’s shoulder. “You good?” Mobius whispers.

Loki nods. “Yes. Thank you, my friend. I must tell you again how much I appreciate—”

Then suddenly, there’s a fresh commotion; someone appears to be pushing through the crowd. Sylvie turns and searches for the newcomer, and to her astonishment, she sees none other than Mobius elbowing his way through the crowd.

But Mobius is right next to Loki! How…

No. Not Mobius. It’s Don.

Mobius runs to his brother/variant. “Don! What are you doing here? How did you—”

“Oh, come on, Mobius. Triceratops Visors and Ankle Socks? I never really bought that. I’ve been trying to figure out what your deal is for years, and I finally figured out how this thingy worked.” He waves Mobius’s old TemPad in the air, while Mobius’s jaw drops. “I’m here. I don’t know what’s going on, but it looks important, and I wanna help.”

Mobius shakes his head. “Don, this isn’t your speed… I don’t want anything to happen to you…”

“Hey, you two,” Don says, appealing to Loki and Sylvie, “this isn’t gonna be dangerous for me, is it? If I stay and volunteer? I haven’t heard a hundred percent of what’s going on, but I know that everyone’s volunteering for something, and none of them look like they have any significant kind of a death wish.”

Sylvie shakes her head. “We’ve been assured that there’s no danger. For you.” She refrains from mentioning the danger to Loki, and gives Mobius a reproachful frown. “Really, Mobius, this is quite impressive. You’ve got to hand it to him for figuring out a TemPad.”

Mobius raises an eyebrow at her. “Didn’t you do that in about five seconds when you were like nine years old?”

Sylvie shrugs and flicks her eyebrows up and down. “Yes, but I’m exceptional.”

Verity lets out an insistent “a- hem” next to them. Sylvie had almost forgotten that they are in the middle of the launch of this project, and that everyone is still staring at them. “Can we please make a decision soon?” Verity asks.

Don puts a hand on Mobius’s shoulder. “The kids are with their parents now. Everything’s fine back home. I want to help, and I’m staying.”

They embrace in brotherly affection. “Okay,” Mobius says. “But you’re going to the front of the line, so that you can get back home ASAP, just in case.”

“And… what exactly are we doing?” Don asks.

Verity jumps in to answer the question. “We’re ensuring the sustainability of the multiverse,” she announces proudly, loudly enough for all to hear.

Don’s jaw drops; he hadn’t quite realized the stakes. But he swallows and shrugs and takes his place at the front of the crowd.

“Okay then!” he says.

This is it, then.

Sylvie’s nerves begin to jangle harder.

“O.B., your volunteers are in place?” Verity asks.

“Check,” he affirms.

“Casey, Mobius, Sylvie, take your positions. All’s well?”

Right. She has a job to do. Numbly, trying not to shake with apprehension, Sylvie moves over to the monitoring station she’s been assigned to. “Check,” she mutters, a second or two after the others.

“Loki?” Verity says. “It’s all you now.”

Loki casts his eyes around, taking a moment for each friend in turn, saving his final look for Sylvie. His eyes pierce hers, and if he hadn’t already told her with his words that he loves her, his eyes would be enlightening her right now.

And then he’s gone, stepping out into the airlock and sliding the doors shut behind him.

He doesn’t look back this time.

Last time, he knew it was a goodbye. Now he must believe it will be different. No sorrowful, lingering gazes.

He still believes he’s the only one who can do this. He can’t let Sylvie do it, that’s for sure. The end of time is safe, protected from the radiation, but out here, it’s not. It’s fire and brimstone and thin strips of agonizing spaghetti for anyone who attempts it. Anyone but him. He is convinced of this.

It’s quiet this time, peaceful. He feels the radiation, but it slides off his back like mercury in a maze. When the loom was in the midst of its meltdown, it had felt and sounded like a raging tempest. But now, Yggdrasil simply rustles around him, just another ash tree in a spring breeze.

One step of his staircase, then another and another appear before him. He ascends.

Up ahead, he sees the fabric of reality begin to open for him, beckoning him. The vibrant green energy core, visible through the crack, is at about half-power now. But O.B. has assured him it will return to full size when his CARP device bounces the temporal energy from the volunteers out into the core, spreading them throughout the timelines. Making the timelines feel cared for.

They will be cared for.

Loki wondered at first, during the TVA’s recruitment process of the great mass of volunteers, why so many people were willing to do this, just to help him. But he’s comprehended gradually (as is difficult for a narcissist) that it’s not solely about helping him. They want to help everyone.

Except for Sylvie. He realizes, and his steps falter as he does so, that she’s gone from wanting to save everyone else, to wanting to save him. Specifically, him. It takes his breath away.

More steps… and there, he’s at the spot O.B. plotted out for him. He breathes in, and out, and in again.

His thick cloak swirls around him, despite the lack of anything that could truly be called a breeze, and he finally steals a glimpse back at the observation deck through the window. There are so many people watching. He can only barely see his friends; they’re all at their stations, monitoring the vital signs of the multiverse, the readings of the CARP device itself, the structural integrity of the TVA. 

It’s just as well. He doesn’t need one last look at them, he reminds himself, because he’ll be back with them soon enough.

There’s no need to prepare. He’s been practicing his forward timeslips; all he needs to do is go… further.

There is no need for further delay.

So he closes his eyes, crimps his body into position, and feels the unmistakable gutting, tugging sensation of the timeslip…

Forward, forward, further than he’s ever dared go…

He asked O.B. yesterday if this would even work, since he would be going forward into the future after he declared the intention to get himself out of the end of time. “So wouldn’t I… not be there?” he asked, his head aching with the various implications of time travel in a place where time theoretically doesn’t even exist. “Wouldn’t I have already done this?”

But O.B. explained to him that, unless he had already gone through this process, the future would remain unchanged. Loki tries to confirm this in his own mind, with all of his scientific knowledge, but this is beyond anything he ever studied.

Just trust it, Loki.

He advances through time, more, more…

It stretches, tears, squeezes…

There.

He feels somewhat older, but when he touches his face, he can tell that he looks the same. (Living at the end of time, as He Who Remains could have attested, will keep one’s outward appearance quite young.) The end of time has drifted to meet him where he is, and…

Oh, god…

It’s all crumbling; there’s little left of the floor. The timelines are feral, uncontrollable, slipping out of his hands. He tries to grasp them, but can’t get any sort of purchase on them.

Thirty seconds. O.B. said to stay here for thirty seconds and no more. He waits patiently for the pain to set in.

It’s not too terrible at first, and then… then… 

O.B. was wrong. He’s neither imploding nor exploding. No, it’s more subtle than that: it starts as a prickling on his skin… then a stabbing pain, it feels as though thousands of knives are piercing him from the inside. It would be a relief to be spaghettified. He’s being torn apart, but his body somehow remains intact — he drops to his knees, unable to remain upright.

There’s nothing quiet about this space now. Something akin to a cyclone is brewing around him. His throne is almost gone; Sylvie’s throne is gone already.

Sylvie… He wonders where she is. Maybe she has died. Maybe, by this time, she has tired of him and left him. He hasn’t let him think too much about what would happen if he saw her here at the end of time… or if he didn’t.

And then he spies her: high up on a timeline, clutching it, trying to hold the strands of a branch together. She looks older, older than himself, but not as old as she would be if she hadn’t spent much of her time tending to the timelines with him.

She stayed with me. This whole time, she stayed.

The cosmic winds blow in a gale force; the multiverse whips around him. He crouches low to avoid a timeline smashing against his face.

Sylvie looks down, locks eyes with him, and calls to him.

“Loki! Loki, I’m trying… I’m…”

But holding the branches together is too much for her; she slips and crashes down near him, shattering the floor even more. She crawls over to him and takes him in her arms.

It must be past thirty seconds now, Loki. Just go… go… But he doesn’t go.

“Loki…” Sylvie gasps, “I won’t let it kill you… Dammit, Loki, why didn’t we do that thing O.B. suggested, ages ago? Why? Why did we let this happen?”

Loki’s pain is diminishing at the sight of her; she’s only grown more beautiful with age. “Sylvie,” he says weakly. “we didn’t let it happen. We’re fixing it now.”

The older Sylvie’s mouth falls open. “So… you’re from the past. You’ve timeslipped here.”

“I have.”

Her eyes fly around, taking in the whirlwind that threatens to overcome them, and then she looks back at him, her expression set firmly. “Then go back, now. Right now. Fix it, fix this, and don’t you dare die.”

“But… Sylvie…” The pain is returning, but he grips her hand, his brain comprehending something he hadn’t let himself contemplate before this. “I can’t just leave you here. You’ve lived a whole life with me, I can’t just erase you… Norns, isn’t this just as bad as pruning timelines?

Sylvie rolls her eyes. “If you really had a problem with that, you would never have started intentionally timeslipping in the first place. The only difference now is that you don’t want to give up the version of me that…”

She pauses, her voice catching in her throat. Then she peers at him ruefully. “You see? Even after all this time, I can’t tell you I love you. Go back. Fix this… mess.” She gestures around at the floundering timelines. “There’s no guarantee that the multiverse will survive this. I’d give it a 50/50 shot right now. But you definitely won’t. Not without help. So go back and give us a real chance.”

“But you exist,” he says, stroking her cheek. He’s well past the timeframe O.B. allotted for him, and he feels like his body is about to break into bits. But he can’t leave yet. “All of this exists.”

“And might all be about to end,” she responds. “Loki… I’ve learned not to take that chance.” She laughs shortly. “Consider my existence hypothetical, like all the other Sylvies you created for hundreds of years while you were trying to fix the stupid loom.”

She bends down to kiss him on the forehead. “Now get out of here, before you die pointlessly, and give me my Loki back so we can say goodbye.”

Loki closes his eyes and thinks of the Sylvie who’s waiting for him back in the observation chamber thousands of years ago (minutes ago). With barely enough strength to move, he squeezes her hand.

Then he closes his eyes and journeys back.

Sylvie struggles to keep her eyes on her monitor — she remains frightfully conscious of the observation window in her peripheral vision.

It’s been too long… way more than a minute… Loki, where are you?

Finally, after what seems an interminable amount of time, Loki materializes, out in the middle of everything and nothing.

“He’s back!” shouts O.B. “President, Captain, keep your hands on the orb. Don’t look, don’t break contact.”

Sylvie puts her hand to her mouth: Loki has brought an apocalypse with him. He’s writhing in pain, and suddenly, so are the timelines.

Before Sylvie can process all of this, her monitor starts beeping. As does Mobius’s, and Casey’s.

“O.B… something’s wrong…” Casey says.

“Yeah, here too…” Mobius concurs.

O.B. shakes his head and adds his hands on the orb between Rogers and President Loki. “Too long… he stayed too long! I need one more set of hands on here…”

Immediately, Don is there, squeezing himself in and placing his palms on the orb, concentrating mightily. Yggdrasil grows somewhat calmer, but now there are sparks and flames and a great wind near Loki, and the trunk of the tree shakes ominously.

Sylvie abandons her station and runs to the massive window, pressing her hands against it and boring her gaze through the thick pane of glass. Loki senses her eyes upon him and connects with her. A storm surges around him, and it’s growing; the timelines once again thrash in distress.

With a sad look at her, a look she recognizes all too well from the last time they were in this position, he turns away and begins pulling himself up the steps that rise to meet him, struggling his way back to the end of time.

What the hell are you doing, Loki… shit, shit… 

Anger brews inside her. He’s going to leave me again.

Most of the crowd seem not to understand the magnitude of what’s happening; they whisper to each other, some in confusion, some still in excitement. They’ve been assured that all is well; for all they know, the timelines are supposed to be flailing like that, and the poor soul out in the emptiness of space-time is supposed to be on the brink of collapse. Only the small band of compatriots understand, and Sylvie hears her friends speaking in low, urgent voices to each other, trying to maintain composure and ensure order.

She thinks she hears Mobius call to her, but doesn’t budge.

Her nails begin to scratch against the glass. Maybe, maybe things will stabilize… maybe he’ll get stronger… maybe it will all click into place…

But an alarm begins blaring from the CARP device, startling O.B. and his volunteers. O.B.’s brow is furrowed, and he’s shaking his head, still muttering “he stayed too long… he stayed too long!”

Verity, Casey, and Mobius are poised around Mobius’s monitor, trying to work out a new set of coordinates to match Loki’s ever-changing location. “It’s too far!” she hears Casey say. “It’s not… no, he’s trying to… If he just stays in one place, we could try to fix it… we could try…”

“He’s trying to do it all himself,” Verity says. “It’ll never work.”

“And he’s gonna die trying,” Mobius says, his voice full of fear.

Sylvie suddenly feels as though she is at the eye of the storm she sees outside. The frustration she’s experiencing at Loki’s second attempt at martyrdom; her terror at his fate; the growing sense of concern from the crowd around her… it all falls to the perimeter, and Sylvie is a vessel of clarity.

“Not this time,” she says, mostly to herself.

She strides purposefully to the blast door, the one that Loki has now locked behind himself twice, leaving her to watch. Not anymore. He can’t do this alone, and I’m the only one who can do it with him.

Mobius is the first to notice what she’s doing. “Sylvie!” he cries. “Don’t go out there!” He runs down to her, putting his hand on her arm. “I know you’re a Loki, but you don’t know what the radiation will do to you… it might be only him who can withstand it! Please, just wait and think about it! We’ll try other things!”

Sylvie shoots him a wide grin. “Not bloody likely.” With a wink for Mobius and a tip of her hand to the rest, Sylvie turns again and raises her hands in the direction of the blast door. Green coils of magic swirl at her fingertips; she throws her hands apart, and the locked doors spring open. She hurries into the airlock, accompanied by gasps from the crowd.

Maybe Mobius is right. Maybe she’ll die trying, too. But there’s one thing she will not do: allow Loki to die alone.

Thrusting her hands back together, she closes and locks the door behind her.

Chapter Text

Loki knows she’ll be disappointed in him. That she will say he was consumed by a martyr complex and will be furious with him, even in death.

He doesn’t want to do this to her. These past two months with Sylvie have been a waking dream, and they’ve been wonderful. He knows she cares about him, and that’s worth everything.  

But it could never have lasted, he sees that now: it was always supposed to end like this.

He tries to pinpoint the moment he first knew he was going to end his life alone: was it when he first gave up his freedom to become one with Yggdrasil? When Sylvie kicked him through the time door? When a facsimile of Sif told him he would always be alone?

No, he must go further back: Odin cuffing Thor fondly on the shoulder after the success of his first hunt, while giving Loki a curt nod and no acknowledgement that he had tried his very best. The first moment, in point of fact, when he was able to see that Odin loved Thor more than him.

It doesn’t matter, ultimately, whether Sylvie wants him alive now or not. He can’t risk the entire multiverse for his own selfishness, and that’s exactly what he’s done. How, how could I have agreed to this? I should have just stayed at the end of time… Now I’ve put everything at risk…

No. He can’t think about his or anyone else’s concern for his life and safety. He spent far too long concerned only with himself, with his own greedy pleasures and hunger for power. This is his atonement. He alone can create the energetic link between the TVA and Yggdrasil; he is the conduit, and his life may be the price.

This is for the best, in many ways. The multiverse has grown too dependent on him. If anything happened to him, either the multiverse would crumble, or some other Loki would have to sit at the end of time forever in his stead. He shakes his head vehemently at either option.

With an effort beyond any he’s ever made, he rises to his feet, stretching out one hand to the Observation Chamber and another to the energy core, which is barely visible through a slim rift in the barrier around the end of time. He throws his head back and allows his seiðr to stretch out and coil around the energy exuding from O.B.’s device, locking into it, allowing it to flow through him all the way to the end of time.

He knows he can hold it, that it will permanently link the TVA to the core. That all will be well with the multiverse. And just as assuredly, he knows it will sap him of all his remaining life force. His sacrifice will be the sun… the water… the soil.

It’s taking longer than he expected, though. Grimacing, he falls to his knees again, his horned crown clattering off his head and disappearing into the darkness. 

In this moment of vulnerability, Loki dares to glance back at the observation window. Knowing he’ll see Sylvie there. Hoping there will be forgiveness in her eyes.

But… she’s not there.

Sylvie, no, don’t tell me you’re…

He senses her presence before anything stirs in the atmosphere, just a gentle prickle on his skin that can only signal the presence of Sylvie. And then the entire space around him begins to eddy like a hurricane, growing even more tumultuous. He turns and beholds her: emerging from the doors, just as he himself had done twenty years ago. Loki’s heart nearly stops: No, Sylvie, don’t do it!  

She gasps and shields herself against the blast of radiation. The multiverse recoils and writhes at the intrusion…

He wants to call out to her, to scream at her to go back, that it’s not worth it, that she might die… but he stops himself: this is her choice. And he doesn’t know what will come of it, but he loves her and must allow her to make it. He closes his eyes…

…and then everything around her becomes a haven of peace. He hears it, opens his eyes.

There is Sylvie, in all her glory, straightening and stalking up the steps that Loki created, which glow golden under her feet. Her face is set in a scowl as she nears him.

“Not this shit again,” she snarls.

Loki shakes his head. “Sylvie…

“If you dare tell me to go back, I’ll throttle you.”

He almost laughs. “I don’t plan to.”

“Great,” she says. “So let’s fix this together before you turn into a pumpkin or whatever the fuck. You know that if we do it together, it won’t destroy you. Right?”

Together…

He’s been telling himself that his heart is full and healed and filled with love for Sylvie. The last part is true, certainly. But that very same heart is now murmuring to him that something is still missing, that whatever they feel for each other still isn’t quite enough to save reality.

But we have to try. He nods unsteadily.

Sylvie grabs hold of his hand (to his weakened form, it’s like the grip of a vise), trying to pull him up to a standing position, but he can’t quite manage it. Brushing this off, she reaches out in the direction of the TVA as he reaches for the energy core. He gets an immediate sense memory of how it felt when they were enchanting Alioth, that sensation of being linked together beautifully and inexorably. Their joined palms radiate light and truth, their entwined fingers feel like an unbreakable bond.

But nothing happens, not for one second or five or thirty. They’re so connected to each other that Loki can perceive the fearful dropping of her heart — 

“It’s not working,” she whispers. “Why isn’t it working?”

So it’s me. It’s only me after all.

“Sylvie, it’s no use. If I give my life, the multiverse will have enough energy to survive this.” His lip trembles but he presses on. “That’s how these stories always end, isn’t it? With a sacrifice.”

Sylvie looks like she wants to hit him with a timeline. “No, you idiot. It’s like I’ve told you. You needed me back then, and you need me now. That’s how this was supposed to work. With collaboration. Stop being self-indulgent.”

He still can’t believe it’s true. “But how can you say that, when we’re standing here trying, and it’s not working?”

She lifts her chin. “Because we haven’t tried everything yet, have we?”

“What do you mean?”

She surveys the situation; between them and the energy core, the storm rages still. The timelines are weakening along with Loki. She closes her eyes.

Finally, her eyes pop open again.

“Hey,” she says, looking clear-eyed. “I know what it was. On Lamentis. We…” She chokes up, but shakes her head and continues. “It wasn’t just that we fell in love with each other. We did, of course, before we fucked it all up. But in that moment, we Lokis, we stubborn, prickly Lokis, allowed ourselves to be loved in return. And it took certain doom for us to allow it to happen — what absolute clods we are!” She kneels next to him urgently. “We’ve got to do it again. Loki…” She catches her breath and tears form in her eyes. “Goddammit, I want to be loved. Love me?”

As she says it, a dam breaks within him and he suddenly feels it: her love. It’s miraculous: he’d thought his heart was perfectly restored, but now he understands what was missing: the knowledge that there is more to love than selflessness. Because his unchecked selflessness has apparently led him right back to selfishness. 

Everything steadies and balances, evening out and forming a peaceful equilibrium.

Loving, and being loved. Both in harmony. Giving, and receiving.

“Of course,” he says hoarsely. “And…” The words stick in his throat. “Love me?”

Sylvie’s face looks as though an actual apocalypse passes over it. She nods, open-mouthed, for a moment, before she’s able to reply.

“I… I…”

He doesn’t respond, merely leans forward with the little strength he has and holds her shoulders. “Whatever you need, my love. All will be well.”

She throws her arms around him and Loki can feel the love resonating from her, from both of them, offering him a protective bulwark. Her lips brush his. 

He’s stronger now.

But not quite strong enough; he slips down in her arms. There’s pure fear in her face now, and she lays him in her lap.

“Okay, now that we’ve done that,” she says, “don’t go doing something stupid like dying.”

He nods. “Not yet… not before the multiverse is fixed...”

“Loki?” She snaps her fingers in his face. “We just had this nice realization together that we both need to accept love, right? Part of that is not giving up on ourselves, right?”

“Right. Sorry.”

“I need you to be strong.”

As he lies across her lap, she reaches out towards the TVA again, and he in the direction of the Citadel. It’s working now, for certain: a forceful jet of energy shoots out of both of their hands, connecting the two seats of temporal power. But it fades away when Loki doubles over with pain.

“It’s okay… it’s okay! Just try again…”

Loki becomes cognizant of a balm of cool, calm brightness throughout his body, and he knows that Sylvie must have performed a healing enchantment on him. It helps: he straightens, and tries again. The enchantment energy has made the connection even stronger.

Just like with Alioth. Use it, use her enchantment energy.

“Again, Sylvie,” he says. The healing enchantment has faded from him with distressing rapidity, but it has given their connection a wild surge of life. He pushes through, grabbing the strands of her enchantment, using his intimate connection with the multiverse to thread and weave and solidify the connection.

Again… again…

He looks at Sylvie and sees his love, and the one who loves him. He sees the permission they have given themselves to be… not good, not bad, but decent.

He stands, bringing her with him, and nods. “Now,” he breathes.

They close their eyes and everything connects in a fiery cataclysm: the TVA and the energy core are communicating, bonding in an animated rapport. As it all locks into place, Loki feels a shock throughout his body; he holds his position just long enough for him to be sure that it has taken root.

It’s done.

We’re safe, we’re all safe.

“Let go,” he hears her whisper, and he does.

They are both thrown away from each other with the ricochet of the pressure release, he towards the TVA and she in the opposite direction. He skids down the steps and lands painfully, but without major damage. The storm has subsided, and although he’s still in poor condition, there is a distinct sense of relief in his body.

He dares to glance over at the end of time: all of its supposedly protective barriers have fallen away, and he can see the whole space. Their energy core has grown to mountainous proportions: it covers the entire area that once held the ruins of the Citadel. 

Sylvie’s throne is gone. And his own… he peers around through the translucent core, just to make sure… but no. It has vanished, too. His home of twenty years is no more. He feels a gentle pang of loss, but there’s beauty in the loss. The timelines and I… we no longer depend on each other. We are free.

I don’t want a throne.

He just wants…

Sylvie… she’s walking down the steps towards him.

I just want you to be okay.

His heart swells: she is. She’s okay. They both are.

As she walks, her old armor melts away, transforming into a new permutation of itself. It’s almost exactly the same design as before, but it’s clearly stronger and more durable, with golden shoulder pauldrons and forearm vambraces. The trousers are patterned with a column of glinting circles, equally gold, and Loki can tell they’re more defensive than decorative. Atop her head sits a shimmering horned crown. And everything else is a mesmerizing emerald green, including the sturdy cape that whips around behind her; he has no doubt that it’s a weapon in its own right. Her hair is long and quite straight, in a deep black-brown hue.

He notes, with a sweet stab of affection, that the new crown is identical to her old one, the one she lost valiantly on Lamentis. Just one horn. Even in her moment of greatest triumph, Goddess Sylvie remembers that life is imperfect.

His own horns, the massive ones, are lost. He waits, wondering if they will rematerialize. But they don’t. Instead…

Oh. His outfit is changing, just as Sylvie’s is. Green and black battle armor, but the armor is… soft, if that’s possible. Athletic, not combative. The thin belts crossed at his waist are as whimsical as they are functional, as are his knee-high boots. His mid-length jacket, slightly flared at the bottom, is embellished with a line of gold circles similar to the ones on Sylvie’s trousers.

And horns? He has none.

He doesn’t miss them.

Sylvie reaches him and bends down to help him stand up. “Are you okay?” she says shakily. 

Loki nods. “I think so.”

“You didn’t implode,” she says, brushing the hair out of his eyes.

He shakes his head and traces a line around the circumference of her broken horn. “Nor explode.”

“That’s… good.” She pats her hands all over his body, scouring him for unseen wounds. She’ll find none; everything was internal.

“I’m okay,” he says raspily. “I wouldn’t say no to a few more doses of your healing enchantment when we get back. But… I’m okay.”

She nods and takes in his new ensemble, which is refreshingly comfortable and less cumbersome than his previous garb. “Well. I like that.”

“I like yours.”

She glances back at the observation window. Loki’s not quite ready to do that yet.

“Are they all watching?” he asks.

“Definitely.” She juts out her chin. “Ready to make an impression?”

Loki laughs and feels a burst of her enchantment run up his arm as she takes his hand. “Ready.” They stride back down the steps, forging a path underneath the indestructible cord of matter that connects a place out of time to the end of time.

He hasn’t absorbed every detail of his new attire yet. But one component is unmistakable: there is a book in his hand. A hefty old volume, with no author listed.

On its cover, it reads simply: Stories.

Holding his book in one hand and Sylvie’s hand in the other, he finally understands what destiny feels like. Not sacrifice. This.

The next few hours are a whirlwind of recovery and congratulations. Accepting the thanks of a grateful crowd has been a new experience for Sylvie. And the individual thanks are even more meaningful to her, after getting to know these people. These friends. From O.B.:

“You did it! I can’t believe it! My quantum bounce… you survived it! You are scientific miracles… may I study you? No… no, you’re right, this isn’t the time… but maybe… someday… Miracles, both of you!”

From Captain America, flanked by a preening President Loki (who’s waving to the crowd as though he were the one who just risked his life):

“Candidate Loki and I want to wish you our sincerest good wishes for the continued success of your mission. It is a righteous and worthy one. I hope I can ultimately say the same for that man’s Presidential aspirations.”

From Casey, who’s near tears:

“Sylvie, Loki, I have no more fish puns today. You’ve earned my purest and truest sincerity. This place… the TVA… we’re better for having you out of that tree. You saved us all, you never stopped, you never floundered… Okay, look, that pun was accidental, I swear!”

Verity and Mobius hang back, checking to make sure the CARP and all the other systems are fully functional. Finally visit Loki in the medical bay to express their bewildered appreciation.

“That was reckless and foolish of both of you,” Verity says. “And I thank you for it, as does the TVA. As does the multiverse.”

Mobius is still shaking his head. “Reckless? Bird-brained, more like! Nonsensical! Thank hell you two dummies are gods, my lord, that was stressful. Come here. Hugs. Jeez. I need to go back to my boring suburban life.”

Sylvie pulls back from the hug with a rascally grin. “But you’ll visit, right?”

“Hell yeah. As long as I don’t have to pledge my eternal soul to this place again, Don and I are on board.”

“Oh, we’re not staying either,” Sylvie clarifies quickly. “We’ll return here to help out sometimes. But otherwise, I imagine we’ll be just like you. Living our lives.” It is profoundly strange for Sylvie to feel the word “we” slipping from her lips along with the future tense, indicating long-term planning with another sentient being. But she finds that she’s getting used to it more quickly than she could have expected.

“Then… I’ll visit you wherever you end up.” Mobius grins and flashes his TemPad. “Now that I know this thing still works, I can be there in a heartbeat.” His face is soft and misty-eyed. “I’m honored to be a part of this… thank you. And I’m glad to have you back. Both of you.”

Verity nods. “We all are.” She shakes her head, looking from Loki to Sylvie. “To think of how this all started…”

Sylvie hasn’t forgotten. At times, she thinks she has forgiven; at other times, she knows she could never apply that word to the TVA. But she can certainly apply it to her friend Verity, whose hand she shakes before they depart.

Sylvie has been insisting that Loki have regular doses of her healing enchantment, in addition to the TVA’s treatments, and after several hours she deems him ready to leave the medical bay. Back in the Loom Room, the crowd has thinned out; O.B. has determined that the turnover won’t be as rapid as he had feared, so most of the volunteers have been sent home for the time being. 

Finally, they have a quiet moment to themselves, and Sylvie hooks her arm through Loki’s as they watch the new round of volunteers at work at the CARP. Through the window, they bear witness to the energy core dancing with something akin to joy.

She studies Loki’s new outfit out of the corner of her eye and suppresses a smile at the circular designs that now grace both of their outfits. She may always prefer his simple, stodgy TVA suit, but this new look is quite nice on him. She has no complaints.

She’s now able to ask him a question that has come to the forefront of her mind.

“Did you see me?” she asks Loki. “When you timeslipped into the future, at the end of time… was I still there with you?”

Loki tightens his grip on her arm. “Yes, you were.”

Sylvie lets out a sigh of relief; a pocket of nerves had grown within her as she prepared herself for the fact that she might have left Loki. “So that’s why you took such a long time,” she says. “You were having an existential crisis about whether or not to delete Future Me.”

Loki stiffens. “What do you think about the fact that I did?”

Sylvie sniffs dismissively. “If you really had a problem with that, you’d never have started intentionally timeslipping in the first place.”

Loki chuckles. “That’s what Future You said, too.”

She turns her gaze downward. “We can’t save everyone and everything,” she says. “I think we’ve both had to accept that, in our own ways.”

He nods. “We do what we can.”

She peers up at him. “Did I look older? In the future?”

“Yes, somewhat.”

“Still hot?”

He grins. “Incredibly.”

She takes his hand and shudders pleasantly, slowly beginning to comprehend their new understanding, at long last, of what love really entails.

“During the apocalypses,” she says quietly, “I only ever let myself feel anything when I truly thought I was going to die. That’s when I allowed myself to miss my family and mourn for what I would never have, and to remember their love for me. And when we were out there earlier, in dire straits,” she gestures out the window, “I remembered how that felt. Believing in the love of my family, even though I had lost them. It helped me understand how you and I could truly love each other.”

Loki brings her hand to his lips and kisses it. “I thought I had fully repaired my heart, that my love for you was ideal and unmatched. Now I know… there was so much more…”

She leans against him, their entwined hands against Loki’s heart. “I’m starting to suspect that a heart can never be fully repaired,” she says, feeling surprisingly serene about this prospect. “And that the process of learning to love is… eternal.”

He puts an arm around her, his new book resting at her side as it dangles from his hand. “I wouldn’t mind that, actually. More love every day.”

“Except when we hate each other?”

“Oh, especially when we hate each other.”

She wonders if she could ever have convinced the Sylvie of twenty years ago that she would one day be here: back in the TVA, planning a real future, catastrophically in love with Loki. But she doesn’t need to convince her past self. She’s right here, right now, and she has never felt more sanguine about the future. 

She turns up her chin and looks at him; his eyes are sparkling. “What do we do now, then?”

Loki’s face betrays weariness, to be sure, but there’s also a new sense of hope and luminosity that she hasn’t seen since they curled up together under the blanket in the void. “I think I’d like to watch the sun rise,” he says, after a pause.

Sylvie smiles. “Which sun, and when?”

“Any, as long as it’s with you.”

She winks at him, detaches herself from his arms, and opens a time door, with a particularly dazzling sunrise in mind. But Loki lingers. Sylvie turns back to see him watching the energy flowing into the thriving core, where his throne once sat. The timelines shift and grow, steadily and heartily. His book rests in his hand for a moment (my God of Stories, she thinks, I wonder what he’s got planned for it) before he tucks it safely in his pocket dimension.

“Sylvie… I’ve been thinking of it all wrong,” he says, indicating his former home at the center of Yggdrasil. “It was never the end of time.”

“No?”

He shakes his head. “It was the beginning.”

It’s true. Everything that has happened to Sylvie since meeting Loki has only been the beginning. These past decades have felt like a restless half-awake mirage, and she had wondered if there was anything more to the concept of freedom than simply drifting along. But she’ll never drift again. She will live.

Hand in hand, they step through the time door together, into the lustrous orange light of the morning sun.

Chapter Text

Six Months Later

From his mid-sized cottage upon the New Asgard harbor that overlooks the North Sea, Loki reflects that he is exactly where he needs to be. And that has not been an easy admission for him to make.

“New Asgard is absolutely the right place to go,” Sylvie told him, after their ordeal at the end of time was over.

“New Asgard? Sacred Timeline? I just don’t know if I belong there.”

“Where else would you belong? Trust me, Loki, I’ve tried living here and there and everywhere, and nothing quite feels like home. New Asgard is the closest thing you have to a home on the timeline.”

“But…” he said, trying to convince himself that his objections extended beyond the dread of explaining himself to Thor, “I confirmed it with Mobius. I can never go back to my timeline. I’ve resigned myself to that, Sylvie.”

“Well, maybe you should stop ‘resigning yourself’ to things.”

In the end, he had relented.

Loki had a devil of a time explaining his presence in the land of the living to Thor. Thor and his grown daughter Love nearly blasted him into outer space with their combined powers of thunder and lightning and terrifying eye beams. But when he finally explained that he wasn’t actually Thor’s brother who had died at the hands of Thanos several decades ago, Thor wept and received him with open arms into New Asgard.

After arriving in New Asgard, they occupied the first few weeks with Loki bestowing upon Sylvie as many memories of her as he could muster, from the centuries he spent timeslipping. At first, there was a lot to cover, but at a certain point it became rather repetitive. Eventually Sylvie told him it was enough; she had been given a sufficient amount to consider Loki’s history a shared history between them.

But there was more to accomplish, of course: establishing a relationship with Thor… getting to know all the New Asgardians… proving their loyalty and trustworthiness to King Valkyrie… and, for Loki, becoming acquainted with being on the timeline again without having to rush back to his throne.

The throne…

His relief at the loss of that throne is palpable.

There are other things he’s lost, too, and he doesn’t miss them.

As far as he can tell, Loki can no longer timeslip. He hasn’t tried very hard to do so, but when he thinks about it and tests the waters experimentally, the relevant mental channel seems to be blocked. He suspects he could still pause time if he tried very hard and expended quite a bit of brain power, but he simply hasn’t felt the need to try.

He’s also fairly certain he’s fully shaken off the bonds of immortality at this point. It’s a great relief, for there is no permutation of reality in which he would want to live on for eternity after Sylvie eventually dies.

And…

His most important task, perhaps, has been the process of learning to share a bed with Sylvie. Every night, entwined and warm together. Learning that she still has trouble sleeping through the night, but that when he places a steadying hand on her back, she can sometimes shudder through her wakings and return peacefully to sleep.

Other times, when she wakes… things take a turn. She kisses him, strokes him, sits atop him. He’s always ready for her.

Oh, it’s wonderful to share a life with her. Even when she infuriates him. Especially so, perhaps.

Now, as the gulls squawk overhead, Loki sips his roseroot tea and waits for Sylvie to return. She had been compelled to interrupt their breakfast to go off on a mission of her own: she’s embraced her new role as the Enchantress, using her enchantment powers to heal people far and wide around the multiverse. 

She’s done it before, of course, but always in the shadows and without drawing any attention to herself. Now she’s finally allowed herself to accept the credit and the notoriety that come along with being an identifiable superhero. People revere her; they fear her. They concoct wild conspiracy theories about who she is and where she came from. Sylvie smirks and shrugs it all off.

Finally, he hears the clunk-clunk of her boots (her walk is heavy and graceless and he loves it) and he catches sight of her striding up the path to their cottage. He suppresses a full-on grin and heads to the door to meet her.

“Hullo,” he says, leaning down for a kiss.

“Ugh. Not now, I’m covered in entrails.”

Belatedly, he notices that she is, in fact, covered with a substance that he can only assume is what she says it is. “Oh. Sorry. Bad time of it?”

“No, it was bloody fantastic. I saved so many people, and my magic felt stronger than ever. I loved it. I just ended up covered in entrails.” She heads to the couch that separates the living room from the kitchen. Before Loki can stop her, she plops down, covering their nice ivory loveseat in guts. Loki bites his lip, but she’s still talking; she’s so proud of herself, and he can’t bring himself to interrupt her yet.

“That’s wonderful,” Loki says, moving to stand behind her. She reaches back, and he takes her hand. It’s sticky.

“They still had to call in the Indigarrian doctors to help,” she admits. “I can’t heal everyone, and it’s not perfect. But it feels so good to do what I can.”

“Yes, I know the feeling. We do what we can.”

After letting her bask in her glory for a few long moments, Loki clears his throat.

“Sylvie… might you not want to wash up before sitting on our new loveseat?”

She makes a pshh sound. “Whatever. We can just magick it all away, can’t we?”

Loki sighs and speaks, as patiently as possible for someone who has, in fact, explained this before. “The vanishing spell removes most cursory, surface-level matter, but it doesn’t work very well for underlying grime. That takes a lot more work, and magic can’t quite do the trick.”

“Fine,” she says, getting up and coming around the couch, wrapping her grimy arms around him when she meets him. “But if I’m going to have to shower, then you are, too.”

After a refreshing shower together (which lasts quite a bit longer than is strictly necessary), Loki receives a summons of his own.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get dinner started on your own,” he says. “I’ve got to go do my thing.”

“His thing” is, to his great enjoyment, telling stories to children around the multiverse when their parents are too overwhelmed to do so. When he first became aware of his new vocation, he hesitated: mightn’t it be a potentially endless job, given the sheer number of children in the multiverse? Would this turn into yet another circumstance of perpetual servitude?

But his powers have been kind to him: he’s called on only when it is vital. It hasn’t overwhelmed him. For both of them, in fact, their new lots in life have proved to keep them exactly the right amount of busy: not too much, not too little, leaving plenty of time to see each other while also giving them enough time apart that they continually yearn for each other.

Sylvie inspects the necklace that lies around his neck. It is, indeed, glowing. They’ve manifested tangible bits of their shared magic and enshrined them in twin necklaces, which become suffused with their green energy when the services of the Enchantress or the God of Stories is required. Midgardian scientists have begged them to allow the substance to be studied, as it doesn’t seem to be composed of any known elements of the periodic table. But the owners of the necklaces have politely declined. They need them, after all.

“All right, then,” Sylvie says, sighing. “Maybe I’ll just go over to Thor’s for dinner.”

“I should be back soon, though! It’s only a story.”

“Loki, sometimes your stories go on forever.”

“Fair. That’s fair. Well, do what you need to do.”

Loki readies himself to go, when he hears Sylvie let out an “oh!” of surprise behind him.

“What is it?”

She shows him her necklace: it is aglow.

“You, too?”

She nods and closes her eyes. “It’s the same job as yours. I can feel it.”

A shadow passes over her face. Whenever they’re called to the same post, it means that a child is sick or injured: in need of both entertainment and healing. It’s always difficult with children, as Sylvie is still refining her healing abilities with the little ones, and sometimes can’t achieve the same results as she can with adults.

But they can do it together, which makes it all worthwhile.

Together, they press their luminous pendants to the TemDisc; it opens a time door to the requisite location.

And, as it turns out, this location is very familiar to them: brick-and-white house, red door, basketball hoop in the driveway, a fair amount of chaos in the yard...

“Hey!” Mobius says, appearing worn out but giving them a good-natured smile nonetheless. “What are you guys doing here?” They’re outside in the yard, and he’s got both twins playing happily (and boisterously) on a picnic blanket.

Sylvie glances around, concerned. “Where’s Josie?” she asks. “We were both called here to help… Is she okay?”

Mobius looks perplexed. “She just scraped her knee, it’s not serious at all, and…” Then he bursts out laughing. “Wow,” she says. “How does she do it? She really knows how to exploit my friendship with you two. I imagine you don’t usually get called out for scraped knees, Sylvie.”

Sylvie chuckles, but is relieved. “Frankly, it’s a nice change. I wonder how she does it.”

“She’s got a magic of her own, I suspect,” Loki says. “Come on. Where’s the little one? We’ll take care of her.”

Mobius directs them to the bathroom on the main floor, where Don is patching up Josie’s knee. When they find her, she’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her lip stuck out in a classic, almost comical “I’m pouting!” face. But as soon as she sees them, her eyes light up.

“It worked!” she squeaks. “My wish was perfect.” She rips off the bandage that Don has painstakingly applied, and holds out her leg. “Heal me, Sylvie!” she says, beaming brightly.

Don sighs and picks up the discarded bandage from the floor. “Go ahead!”

So Sylvie grins, kneels down, and uses her enchantment powers to draw Josie’s health up to the red patch on her knee. It looks like an easy job for Sylvie, and she relishes the success. “There,” she says. “It’s not yet good as new, but it’s not nearly so painful now, is it?”

“It’s perfect!” Josie says.

“I’m still glad I used the Neosporin,” Don mutters.

“Now for my story!” Josie says, clapping her hands.

“Come along outside, then,” Loki says. “We wouldn’t want your cousins to miss the story.”

Out on the lawn, Loki tells a story of an errant June bug who can’t ever seem to do the right thing, and who goes off on a wild adventure across the backyard to fulfill his purpose in life, encountering three obstacles along the way: the Wasps of the Wind, the Ponderous Puddle of Peril, and the Stinky Skunk Surprise. After successfully navigating all of these hurdles, the June bug finds himself in a different part of the yard than he expected, and learns that his purpose in life is not the one he initially dreamed of. But he is happy and fulfilled.

By the time Loki has finished, the children’s parents have arrived to pick them up, and a few neighborhood children have joined the gathering. Loki loves it when his stories draw a crowd.

While Josie and the adults are applauding, and the twins are giggling with glee at Loki’s extravagant antics, Sylvie elbows Loki in the side. “The message was a little on the nose for you, don’t you think?” she asks out of the corner of her mouth.

Loki sniffs. “Certainly not. I am in no way insect-like.”

She takes his arm and pitches her voice so that everyone can hear. “Well. I hope all is well here now. Josie, love, your knee’s all better?”

Josie thinks for a second, and a glint appears in her eye. She stands up, then slumps down in a carefully controlled fall. “Look, I bumped my other knee,” she says.

Sylvie laughs and ruffles her hair. “I think your grandpa and Uncle Mobius have got that under control,” she says.

Mobius gives them a shared hug before they leave. “I haven’t checked in on the multiverse in a while,” he says. “Everything’s smooth sailing?”

Loki nods. “As far as I know. Sylvie, we haven’t been up there in a week or so. Think we should check in?”

She peers at him carefully; there’s often a look in her eyes that suggests she is watching him carefully to make sure he doesn’t get drawn back into an obsession with “being a tree,” as she would call it. But there’s no danger of that. He loves the real world: the corporeal, the dynamic, the reciprocal.

“All right,” she says.

They bid adieu to the family, and make their way to the TVA.

They’ve made their way to the Temporal Tree Observation Chamber, gazing out at Yggdrasil after having taken a turn providing their temporal energy at the CARP and then passing it off to two fresh volunteers. The multiverse is even more beautiful now that Loki’s not burdened by it — and yes, even with all the love and genuine affection he put into caring for the timelines, he can now admit that it would have been an unbearable burden over the long term.

“Hey,” Verity says, coming up behind them. They greet her, and after a few minutes of routine updates, the three of them stand in silence for some minutes, observing.

“You know, we’ve noticed one other thing,” Verity says cautiously. “We can’t be certain it’s connected to the change in operations. But we are noticing more Loki variants on the timelines who are able to… make wiser choices with their lives. Not all, by a long shot. But… some. Far more than we’re used to.”

“So you mean… they’re not predestined to end up either evil or martyred?” Sylvie asks.

Verity looks from one to the other of them. “No,” she says, with an expression of profound respect and appreciation that Loki had almost never encountered before this whole ordeal. “No, they don’t seem to be predestined for anything except quite a good deal of mischief.”

She leaves them after that, and when Loki closes his eyes, he fancies that he can discern the temporal energy of millions or billions of Lokis making their own decisions. Some of them will meet with disaster, for sure, ending up alone and immersed in tragedies of their own making. But some will not. Some will rise and do great things; some will exist and do perfectly pleasant things without causing a stir for good or evil.

He smiles as he watches the branches flourish and grow.

“It’s thriving, wouldn’t you say?” he asks Sylvie, and as he turns to her in expectant joy, he feels like a youth again.

Sylvie places a hand on his heart and taps it gently.

“Thriving.”