Chapter Text
* Present *
It always takes hours After for Loki to feel more like himself: Loki Odinson. The God of Mischief. Prince of Asgard. A mischievous, insubordinate, unpredictable scamp.
Though even as his chaotic, hedonistic urges re-emerged, he could not fool himself into thinking he was the same. Like a tiger declawed and collared—everything tempered by ‘Glorious Purpose.'
He could strangle his younger self for throwing around the words with such lack of care.
‘Most purpose is more burden than glory.’ Mobius may not remember uttering those words, but Loki would never be able to unhear them—no matter how many times he had time slipped, or how many timelines he whisked through.
If his pranks increased in frequency and scope in these hours Between, could anyone really blame him? It was one of the few times he felt truly himself.
“Loki!” B-15 (Verity, he reminded himself) hissed, holding up Mr. Peter Welles close to her chest. The (normally) grey tabby had his face tucked into the crook of Verity’s neck, unbothered by his now green and gold coat in lieu of receiving extra cuddles.
“What?” he asked, feigning ignorance to her concern. “I think he looks lovely. Don’t you, Doctor Welles?” Loki reached a single finger under the cat’s chin to scritch softly, Welles purring increasing in volume and sending a pleasant thrum through Loki’s fingertips.
Verity sighed, turning to bring the cat out of Loki’s reach. Rude.
“His name is Mr. Welles. He’s not a doctor. And we did not start allowing magic in the TVA so you can pull pranks, Loki. If you’re going to abuse it, we’ll just block it again. You’re the only one who consistently uses magic here, and even then you rarely use it for anything but just terrorizing the hunters.”
“I do not just terrorize the hunters,” Loki amended, tone dripping with fake offense. “Though I’ll admit to some bias due to the fact that it was the hunters that dragged me here and wanted to prune me in the first place.”
Verity winced, a barely there twitch of one eyelid that most wouldn’t have noticed. But Loki did, because she was his friend. He had those now, ones that weren’t his brother’s first. He felt a twinge of guilt that perhaps that had been a step too far. Loki’s smug grin wavered, avoiding Verity’s eyes.
“Though I suppose if you hadn’t dragged me in, I wouldn’t be here to do any pranks at all. I’d be dead due to chiropractic malpractice, my body floating endlessly in space until it gets sucked into a black hole or scorched to ashes by some exploding supernova.”
Verity did laugh at that, a brief huff of a thing that at the very least made her shoulders droop just a bit from her tense posture. Even though that had been a macabre joke even by his standards. You didn’t get far in the TVA without a healthy (or unhealthy depending on how you looked at it) dose of gallows humor.
“Be that as it may,” he continued, “It’s either I stop the pranks, stealing, or compulsive lying. You can’t take away all my unhealthy coping mechanisms all in one go, B. I mean, V.” He let his smile grow as his words gained momentum, donning his ‘Professor Loki’ mask as Mobius fondly (and irritably) called it whenever he went off on a tactical tangent.
“Why, after all the childhood trauma, the post-traumatic stress from being confined to a tree powered by my lifeforce for decades, let alone from literal torture and mind control by a madmen bent on killing half of his universe, and apparently I display certain characteristics of borderline personality disorder, so really I think choosing just one habit to work on at a time—”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You’re finally dealing with your shit.” Verity shifted the puddle of purring cat to her other arm where he melted his face onto her shoulder. Not-so-coincidentally further from Loki. “Breathe, Loki, You may be a god but you do have to inhale at some point.”
Loki snorted in a decidedly un-prince-like manner, to his own horror. This having friends thing can be so unseemly.
“Technically I don’t need to breathe quite so much as you mortals,” he paused, mouth growing into a feline grin, “Which comes in handy for—”
“Nope. Don’t want to hear it,” Verity interrupted. “Just… Please leave the few animals the TVA has out of it. It’s one thing to prank Casey, another to prank sweet little Mr. Welles.”
“I daresay Dr. Welles doesn’t seem particularly traumatized by the event.” Lokk forced himself to pause. Comedic timing was an artform thank you very much. “Unlike me, considering I spent my childhood being measured against an unattainable standard and-”
Verity held up the hand not clinging to the tabby to stop his aside, her expression oozing with impatience, though Loki would swear there was amusement in the creases at the corners of her eyes. “I would be more inclined to listen to you talk about all of this if I thought you were actually working through the emotions and not just reciting what your therapist said and secondly, if you weren’t doing it to distract me from you dyeing the office cat green and gold. ”
Loki scrunched his nose, the wrinkles still feeling odd on his face. Sometimes being present in his own body felt unpleasant and awkward after his time in the tree. “I thought you would be impressed, honestly. The green is one thing, but do you know how difficult it is to get a good, metallic gold with the correct sheen? I had to go through—”
“I do not care, Loki. Put him back how he was.” Welles meowed in a low rumble as irritation caused Verity to tighten her hold on him. I understand, Doctor , Loki thought. It can be trying when loved ones cling too tightly to the old you.
Dr Welles, not being telepathic or able to understand English, predictably didn’t respond in any perceptible way. Loki still appreciated the cat's slow love-blink aimed at him regardless. Love is so trying, isn’t it my doctoral feline companion?
“No imagination,” Loki bemoaned with no heat. “No sense of whimsy, the lot of you.”
Verity sighed, and not for the first time Loki was reminded that while he was quite good at the manipulating, wooing, and tricking parts of existence, when it came to the friendship parts of life he could never quite find solid footing. At times he would find himself responding like the old Loki, like it was some muscle memory that would take control of his body and new Loki would be stuck watching, proverbial mouth agape as old Loki proverbially ‘stepped in it.’
“Loki. I meant what I said,” she said. “I’m proud of you for seeing the TVA’s therapist. And it seemed to be helping at first. But now I think you’re falling back on the old habit of intellectualizing everything so you don’t have to deal with the emotionality of it.”
“Rude.” And too close to the truth, he didn’t say. Old Loki took control then— again —his internal mantra of retreat! pulling the conversation back to the safe. Turn the conversation back onto her . “I don’t call you out on your obvious crush and thus avoidance of Sylvie.”
She stared at Loki, face flat but her dark brown eyes a torrent he couldn’t begin to detangle. The silence drew Loki back towards her orbit even as old Loki tried to step away.
“I give up,” she said finally. “He can’t say I didn’t try.”
There was one emotion detangled, then. Disappointed. That, at least, is an emotion I am quite familiar with.
“Fix. The. Cat,” she grumbled, and plopped Dr. Welles into Loki’s dangling arms. Loki scrambled not to drop the poor Doctor, and by the time he’d regained his wits all that remained of Verity’s presence and disappointment was her retreating back.
Once that, too, was gone, he let himself slump back against the off-white hallway wall. It was quiet—the kind of quiet bred from disappointment, unworthiness, and the echoing murmurs of all time, always, on his lonely throne.
The cat meowed and sniffed at Loki’s chin, his whiskers pulling Loki back from the Möbius loop of endless universes and infinitely expanding realities.
“You’re my only true friend, Doctor Welles,” Loki whispered, carefully rubbing tiny circles under the cat's chin. “You understand me at least.”
The Doctor’s languid purr rumbled through Loki’s ribcage, and he found his mind wandering—not along the branches of the tree or his melancholy and rage tinged memories, but to the friend’s he had made when he had resigned himself to being incapable of making them. I might not be great at being a friend yet. But you have to become something before you can be it, right?
The memory of Verity’s parting words tripped his contented internal stroll.
“Wait, who did she mean by he ?” He asked Doctor Welles.
The Doctor didn’t even bother slow-blinking this time.
—
Timeline #66606
2018, Remains of the Andromeda Galaxy
<If I could only spin the world backwards
I would know the things that came after
That way, I could save the day faster, faster , f̸̡̨̼̒a̵̻͐̕s̷̢̛̙̩̪͓̔̄͝t̶̰̼̲̋̓ͅę̴̨͖͍͍̓͒̈́ȓ̴̖̋͘̚>
When he was young, Loki thought his weakness in capturing minds over long stretches of time was due to being unable to nurture another living being. An intrinsic, insurmountable character flaw. There was something dark and twisted in his soul. Everyone thought so.
Even later, Loki could admit his logic was sound. To capture a mind momentarily, as in battle or for a trick, was like plucking a flower's bloom. Beautiful. Useful. But fleeting. Cut off from its roots, it would eventually wilt.
To ensorcell a mind you needed to tend to it, he’d thought. Feed roots, prune away disease and overgrowth, ensure the proper light. To really take a mind, surely one must be able to nurture .
The Loki after The Other could forgive his youth's naivety.
The Loki ensnared by The Other just wanted everything to burn.
<If I could only make the world slow down
Weaponize the lives that I know now
I could fan the flame that won't blow out>
As it turned out, Loki had never been proficient in capturing minds not because he could not be nurturing. It was because to capture a mind, you had to break it of knowing it was one at all. The Loki of Before, for all the death, destruction, and chaos he caused, could never quite force himself to sever that final tether.
In some way, “Freedom from freedom” to Loki meant security in certainty, the breaking of the inner dialogue that picked, picked, picked at every decision. It did not mean the breaking of self. He only wanted for others what he wanted for himself. What he thought he wanted.
The Loki of After, in his infinite knowledge of all time, always, knew how close-minded this want was.
The Loki ensnared by The Other was too broken himself to care.
<I could run away now
I could try to hide and pretend>
These were the variants that The Loki of After struggled to watch. The ones not defeated by The Avengers, either due to the group not being formed, the invasion taking place elsewhere first for the variant to cut their teeth on commanding an army, or because the mighty Avengers succumbed to The God Who Fell from Asgard.
These were the variants that left him feeling a deep solidarity with He Who Remains Remained. As his own variants wreaked havoc among the many-verses, he began to understand what could have driven that Man at the End of Time to go to such extreme measures. The ones that opened old wounds of self-hatred and remorse.
The Variant no longer needed the Mind Stone to break his victims. A hand to the forehead, a strangehold, the clawing grip on the body reaching into their minds and then a violent grip and ripping as they tore the tether from the mind to the self in taloned fingers. The hands were removed, but the body never fell. Blank eyes tinged in a nauseating green light awaited orders, an ever-expanding hive-mind that tore through the universe.
“Very Good,” the Mad Titan murmured, tinged with praise underneath the quiet rumble. “He was the last obstacle against us. With his help, we can start on Phase 2. You have done well.”
Thor stared blankly forward, past his not-brother’s shoulder into the distance. Blood that had been trickling down from a gash on his forehead slowed and stopped as The Variant extended his healing to their newest soldier. Soot and blood stained once burnished silver and leather armor, the colors dull and near unrecognizable from the proud King of Asgard as he stood at the helm of Asgard’s now dead and decaying army.
<But this is not a story
Where the hero dies at the end
w̸͚̓h̴̲̏3̷͇͋r̸̗̓4̴̼͒ ̶͎̔t̸̙̔h̴̩̒3̸̹̄ ̶̯̔4̸̩͝ȅ̵̮r̸̻͗0̶͚̈ ̷̼̑d̴͒͜!̸͖̚ę̶̾$̴͍̽->
The Variant felt nothing.
The Mad Titan heaped no more praise but a gaze lingering on blood stained cheeks before turning to head back towards the ship. “Get him in gear and let’s get off this decrepit planet. The whole galaxy should be purged.”
“Of course,” The Variant purred, not exchanging a word with his not-brother-turned-soldier as they moved in unison to follow.
<I should just walk away
But I've got my price to pay.>
Phase 2 went sideways within a fortnight. Rumbles of uncertainty and unsatisfied bloodlust spread through the ranks of Thanos’ Children and unwilling-soldiers alike.
The Variant had made sure of it.
When the rumble became a roar, The Variant was ready. His not-brother and himself were the well-oiled machine Loki always knew they could be were they not tied to the whims and wants of an arrogant, spoiled God of Hammers. As Thanos’ ironclad grip on his army and the Infinity Gauntlet waned, The Variant already had all the power he needed broken as his own playthings.
Better yet, he knew how to wield them in ways they never could have themselves.
“I think it’s time for a change in leadership,” The Variant sing-songed, boot kicking the viscera of what was once Thanos’ head up the ship’s gangway as if it were gravel on a sidewalk. “Don’t you, Thor?”
“Of course, brother,” Thor said in an even tone, eyes looking at The Variant but seeing nothing. “You always know best.”
“I do, don’t I?” The Variant beamed, blood-stained teeth blinding through his manic grin. He chuckled before grabbing his not-brother’s hand, manipulating Thor’s own fingers to paw away at the flesh splattered on his clean-shaven chin.
“This is why you don’t get a beard anymore. You’re too messy with your kills.”
<They made a big mistake.>
—
* 72 years ago, Remains of The Citadel at the End of Time *
After decades of combing Timeline #66606, the Loki of After was certain there was no He Who Remains in Timeline #66606.
As his variant brought the universe under his thumb, an army of broken-minded loved ones and enemies wielded like marionettes, he could find no comfort in that fact.
—
* Present *
When Mobius found Loki several hours later, he was still shuddering through a cold sweat, staring off into the middle distance. He couldn’t feel the agent's arm around his shoulders or hear the quiet, gentle words caressing his ears.
His vision was overshadowed with eyes so much like his own assessing his domain of piled bodies and blank-faced, hollow-minded soldiers.
Of a Thor who no longer had the reason or means with which to smile.