In the beginning there was God. In the end there is a god, grasping greying threads, igniting them with star-lit magic. The frays begin to pull apart. He yanks. And then—
There is light, for all time, always.
Sometime, in the centuries more that he lives trying to find the answer, he finds one. It's a whim, really, until it becomes desire so painful that between seeing Timely turn into spaghetti enough to feed a village in Mesopotamia and Sylvie carve grotesque tattoos into He Who Remains' chest, he slips into Asgard.
His Asgard. So he stumbles, almost, forgetting that there is no variant of his here, no blonde-haired curmudgeon, and—thank Odin—no alligator.
Frigga is different from what he remembers. A child's mind remembers a mother as greater than she was. Now, she seems smaller. Softer, less frightening. Her dismay is playfully contrite in what he remembers to be nearly world-ending at the time, as she chastises the dark-haired one of two boys for teleporting his brother while he was naked in his personal chambers into the middle of Odin's meeting with the warriors.
It was because they thought less him less, he assumed. Defected, defunct, child to take pity on. But he sees now: the soft smile Frigga wears as both child Thor and Loki trudge away. The pride in her eyes breaks through the exasperation at his antics. The bitter self-fulfilling prophecy of a villain becoming villain because he thought so; for all pride in his tricks, his crowning glory was in tricking no one but himself.
He made himself so hard to love.
Later, in Heimdall's observatory, Valhalla be with that man, Thor asks him why, and the Loki of that time shouts, "I never wanted the throne, I only ever wanted to be your equal!"
Seeing it on a tape recorder in a TVA prison is a diluted version of the pain that burns through him now. But it cauterizes him, too, to revisit who he was to ensure what he must become.
He gasps and falls into another time, when he was a wrongful king watching the Destroyer kill Thor on Midgar. Thor, powerless and defenseless.
"Brother... for whatever I have done to wrong you, whatever I have done to lead you to do this, I am sorry," comes his brother's rasp. "Take my life, and know I will never return to Asgard."
Loki swallows and slips again, leaving behind the body that will continue to rage.
There is a brown-haired girl swinging Thor's axe at some aliens that resemble gobbled up remains spat out. Then comes the lighting, and the thunder it follows, and Thor is smiling. It's not quite whole, but his brother looks at peace. Loki wonders when Thor will return to New Asgard, if at all.
He slips to see his father. His psychopathic half-sister that makes his own crimes look like parlor tricks. Laughs when Hulk swings him back and forth like kneaded dough in Stark's penthouse. This Loki is the accumulation of ridiculous, savage, and warm memories, that he visits in no particular order.
But the end, always, must come.
He is a god who creates an ending from a fear that was over a thousand years in the making.
It is lonely, but it could be worse. Thousands of Asgards surround him. When his heart lurches and reminds him he is not dead, because he had forgotten what it was like to look forward to the future, he thinks of the branches he holds. Each vibrating with life he helps create over and over. When they become heavy, he tugs harder. His mother taught him magic came from Beyond, from an infinite reservoir as much as it did within. Magic splinters infinitely to pump free will into thread as fine as hair. Each one matters. Each one is precious. He tastes salt on his tongue; more evidence of his morality, one he will maintain for eternality.
I know what kind of god I want to be. For you. For all of us.
Before the end, he visits Ravonna. Her purpose and role in all of this is unclear, but her memory remains spotty because she holds no love for Timely or any Kang variant when Loki interrogates her. He is a god, not the human sort of good, not yet, and all self-restraint parts at her sneering mention of Sylvie.
"She's still a child. If she were mine, I would've understood why she had to be pruned."
He barely stops himself from grabbing her throat. Teeth grind against teeth. "What was her nexus event?"
Ravonna laughs. The boat teeters. Miss Minutes and Timely left her to drown, and Loki will too—at least, she will think so, until she reaches land and intervenes and time proceeds as it did and will.
"I told you: I don't remember."
He doesn't have Sylvie's powers but he will try. "Let's see if this jogs your memory—"
She rolls her eyes skyward. "She doesn't love you, Loki. Everyone heard you at the carnival. She left this world in chaos and you for dead. Her story is over. She's happy on her own."
I don't want to be alone.
He's tried everything. For everyone and for her. Shifting through TVA files, slipping in and out of time, bearing through his bones sliding over bone each time, looking for an answer. Sylvie had escaped before her hearing and judgment. None of the other hunters know her crime.
"She's going to spare you," he snaps. "In a few hours, she'll have the opportunity to kill you and think it above you."
"You haven't changed at all."
"You know, Renslayer," he thinks of Kang and evil and good, "a trickster's mercy is worse than a hero's. If we don't hurt you, it's because what is coming is far, far worse."
At this, she flinches. "Are you not a hero, chasing after your brother's ghost?"
He is a god. His magic helps her sleep, and her memory will be hazy when she wakes.
The only option left is her Asgard. This slip sends his jaw spinning and skin bubbling, as though the world is rejecting his presence.
What is worse than the possibility of Sylvie having lied is her telling the plain truth. A girl with glossy hair and slanted eyes bobs her Valkyrie figurines. Her chambers resemble his boyhood ones in luxury, but are slightly more girlish in style.
Then the hunters come. She screams, unblinking eyes watching her world vanquish at the hand of a woman on a routine shift for work.
He's left alone, outside time and space. He rewinds.
Again.
Again.
It is the same.
He tries again and lands far earlier to wander. It is like a dream, where everything has a familiar pull but is distorted just so. The dining hall is in the wrong wing, and the Asgardian mead carries a hint of plum instead of charred vanilla. He sneaks a bottle into the security chambers below, which Odin secures with the same sorts of measures, and confirms many of the artifacts are the same.
A dull twinge of regret sits at the base of his spine. The infinity stone he had not left behind—had the Fire Demom Surter destroyed it, would a different Loki be alive? Would Thanos have failed?
The Sacred Timeline, he reminds himself. The Sacred Timeline's collection of things that was supposed to happen, decided by a man eating green apples in a Citadel, far, far away.
Odin and Frigga tell her long before the pruning that she is adopted.
Sylvie—she is Loki now but will always be the name she chooses—turns inconsolable. Not a single person in the palace hears her voice for a month. Her jocularity disappears. Loki time slips again and finds her Thor leaving meals at the foot of her door, though they each have dozens of attendants and handservants.
Is this how Kang wanted them to be in this universe? This Asgard is softer around the edges, and he's cannot attribute it to her being woman alone. What did Kang desire in puppeteering his family's fissures in this world, this way?
His pupils swell just as a time door opens weeks later, as Sylvie lounges in her room on not a particularly interesting day. She and her Thor have begun to reconcile, and she joins the family for meals now. Things are beginning to set themselves in order. There is no life-altering moment he can see.
She plays with her toys. "The dragon swoops towards the palace and Saves Asgard…"
The figurines clatter to the floor. Hunters sweep her away, and Loki picks up the Valkyrie before another Asgard perishes.
What he hopes will be eternity is a long time for what-ifs. Some what-ifs he sees plays out in the boundless branches.
There's a concept in mathematics called fractals, O.B. had taught him, where no matter how close or far one looks, the shape is the same. An expanding symmetry or a self-symmetry, Loki remembers. A scaling pattern, not problem.
That his touch built a facsimile of the Yggdrasil tree, thinking of the closest fractal from his upbringing, or perhaps in a topsy-turvy mind-bending way his creation was the thing he grew up in the shade of, is less a surprise the more timeless time passes here. The tree is beautiful. At regular intervals the end of a branch blossoms into another evenly spread bunch, its nascence beating a slight purple Sometimes it sputters when he shifts or laughs to himself, and his mirth colors the entire multiverse.
Some branches give way to universes that are of utter foolishness. A pig snout-faced Thor in a zoo Asgard, or the Avengers, a music band that saves the universe with sick vocal tracks. But they are freedom and chances he was so close to unraveling. In the question of nothing and saving something, the result seemed so easy. So logical. Save at least something. The Sacred Timeline was better than nothing.
Sylvie is like how he was. Unpredictable and stubborn. Time had dulled his more negative instincts—but ironically, it was a Loki's obstinate belief that helped him create a choice.
He regrets nothing. He can't. He needs to give the TVA time.
Infinity is also a long time to count. The branches, of course, which he estimates roughly to hover around one million. If he divides it by the weight of the branches when he first spun them like a weaver around his hands and into his clothes, he can estimate the time passing in the TVA since he left.
One year.
Is one year enough for a mortal to count his regrets? Or are those the sorts of burdens Mobius hinted they simply carry? Loki has plenty, of course. Shaving Sif's head was the least of it.
There are the Asgardian warriors killed in Jötunheim because he spurred Thor to war against their father's orders; eighty innocents in Midgard before the Hulk smashed him; and ah, that old fellow he stole an eyeball from in Germany. Apart from spilling blood, he vanquished much good-will on his brother's part. Heimdall's. Odin, too, for dumping one of the greatest progenitor of Asgardian gods into an ugly retirement home. Calling that sorcerer a second rate magician (if the goatee-man could see him now). Fighting the Avengers, escaping them, faking his death, either he is very good at not dying or Kang's reach was omnipresent and moving him as a chess piece on a board until the end of time. The end of his time.
What will they call Loki now? He Who Left? He on the Throne?
He never wanted a throne. He wanted them—I want you—to be okay. And if to be okay, he needs to be here, then Here He Shall Remain.
He checks. There is no universe in which Tony Stark survives Thanos. There is only one where after Thanos completes the Snap and is defeated at all, and it is the one he came from. There are some things freedom cannot change, some sacrifices that must always be made.
Elsewhere, a branch emerges, and this child Loki kills Thor, but there are no hunters to prune him. So the child grows into man until regret takes his own life.
Some branches die. Not from lack of effort, but because violence in that universe tears it to pieces. There are Thanoses that win, and the universe slowly dies grieving the half it lost when heroes cannot restore them. There are worlds of purely man-made disasters, like nuclear war. Or uncontrollable apocalypses, like solar flares or moons falling out of orbit to leave their planets to implode. When those universes comes to an end, Loki plucks the thread and mourns every soul. It should be a happy mourning because they had a chance, but so much of free will, he sees, is just a little drop of water in an ocean of life. There is so much every soul cannot control. So many choices dictated and shaped by the uncontrollable. What is free will at all, then? Is it free will, still, if they cannot choose what they do not know?
In every apocalypse he finds himself resisting a search for a flash of blonde.
He became something more, and she could have, too, but she saw such universes every day, living in them out of desperation to survive. The most nondescript life is her happy ending, so he is careful not to breach it at all, or see if any branches come of her. But in other worlds, where the mythic of Yggdrasil and a great and lonely god emerge, there are hushed whispers of a second, selfish god who abandons.
It is hard to hate a selfish woman when he understands her.
His hands are looms. He remembers the harp players his mother was so fond of and recalls their graceful threading in his own hands.
Four million branches. Mystical magic lives in an unreachable void. The closest approximation would be a black hole, where there is no light nor density. It should be enough to sustain them all.
His eyelids droop. Someone invokes his time, again, and it is in Mobius' voice. He sounds out-of-breath, like he's been on those jet ski contraptions.
"This time, I won't fall off!" Mobius is assuring his sons. He does. The boys snicker at him.
Time passes strangely in the TVA, as he had left it. There is magic and time there now, but he cannot see into it because that orange conglomeration was built outside of the branches. But Loki puts together a picture through hunters stepping into branches, appraising them for any sign of a dangerous Kang-variant from reaching Yggdrasil. B-15, or Verity, hasn't chosen to live in her branch. She works the hardest, leading raids and snapping commands at a dutiful but calm pace. The TVA is good in her hands.
Casey and O.B., he hears, are co-authoring a third edition of the TVA guidebook. The second edition was a best-seller. Brad, the good for nothing fool, is in prison; Verity mentions to another hunter that his latest punishment is endless timeloops of a Zaniac screening. Renslayer is missing. Victor Timely elected to return to his time before HWR and Renslayer set him on a different course, so the Victor they knew is reborn. It's not perfect, but they are okay.
When the TVA eliminates every Kang variant, how many branches will he shoulder? Will he still need to sustain Yggdrasil? He tries not to cling to hope too much, because there is still so much that can happen.
But he worries anyway. What if there are more Victor Timelys that had never harmed, as far as non swindling behavior went, a fly and said he would never harm one? Can they risk the will before it migh? Even Sylvie could not kill Timely. Had their Victor Timely remained, could they have seen the one good Kang variant, like he is the one self-sacrificing Loki?
These thoughts keep him from collapsing under the weight.
In every universe, Odin starts as a war leader. In most he ends as that. In few he finds peace, in fewer he establishes it. In every universe, Odin's leadership comes at the cost of being a good father, and doesn't know it until it is too late.
Loki forgives him. It makes the weight lighter.
It's strange. There are no other universes with a woman Loki variant, and he had seen no lady in the Void after being pruned. They are both ones in infinities.
No love spared for Hela. Hela is as wretched as life can offer, for Odin eventually turns against her. But his father can never kill her, so in some she is successfully banished until she dies (and Asgardians do die, Odin often reminded them). In others she mocks Thor, what are you the god of again , and Loki of Yggdrasil smirks, and then beams when Thor blasts her out of the palace. The Loki that is actually there, the one he would have become had he not taken the infinity stone to escape, arrives in a ship and declares imperiously, "Your savior is here."
Later, before Thanos kills him, he says, ""I assure you, brother, the sun will shine on us again."
There is something in this universe, then, that it could create two good Lokis.
It's different, again, to watch like this. He cannot see or interact, exactly. Each fractal thread becomes infinitely large, and it's easier when he knows what he's looking for or his motif is called upon.
In no universe does a Thor know there is this Loki, watching over him. His Thor in particular thinks Thanos' murder was final, which it was, in a way. But his Thor's Loki split into two in New York, 2012, and so he is half alive to him. That must count for something.
He should have gone to see his brother. Another regret that he lives with, but regret is easier than the prospect of Thor's agony.
The barest of silver linings is that adopted kid of his is as mischievous as they come. "This time you'll never find it," she taunts. Thor's looking desperately for his helmet. She's been using it as a post-battle wash basin.
That mortal woman, Jane, should be with his brother. But in most universes, disease takes her before she sees him again. In a few, she's Lady Thor in a last battle, and dies either instantly or in Thor's arms.
Infinite universes doesn't mean infinite different choices or infinite different outcomes. Often, it's a showing of infinity ending at the same point. In mathematics, it's called an asymptote. That's what it means to be a variant, isn't it?
Except alligator Loki. That one has no purpose beyond unleashing teeth on irritating feline neighbors.
He wonders if there was a way he could have been softer. Or maybe Sylvie had reached her limits of benevolence on Lamentis, and like an asymptote, it was a line she could never transgess. She was going to kill Kang at every cost. That she displayed no apology at every point afterwards, even in witnessing the unraveling of the Loom and his friends in O.B's home, meant the murder of He Who Remains was a fixed point of sorts. A time loop could not exist without a point to return to.
Forcing her to use her powers to see his memories of the outcome would have changed nothing. Perhaps she would've killed HWR quicker, even, to force a decision to the loop problem. An apocalypse she created for others to live, for once.
The centuries spent learning and trying and seeing those he loves die be ripped apart, versus a second's worth of time to kill her. And she accused him of being selfish.
Was she not a god, too?
Was she not enough to create her own chances?
He told her over and over, in that bar, that people would die. For a woman who justified she did what she did on behalf of trillions claimed by pruning, she was so callous of his fierce protectiveness over the TVA. Jealousy? Collective punishment in retribution of what the TVA took from her? What, woman, what was it?
So she dug out his selfish motives, like hers weren't at all. Her egoism unleashed chaos. His trapped him in isolation, for all time.
A long breathe ripples through the universes. He shifts on his throne, thinking. Like regret, anger won't sustain him.
Between eight million and ten million, he breaks. He searches for green eyes among the trillions of souls because he doesn't know what else to look for. He doesn't know what happiness looks like on her face. No matter what she said, her life at McDonald's had not been happy. Temporary relief, maybe, but not joy.
There is no Sylvie at any McDonald's, McDougal's, or even McKebab's. He prods his way through other fast food franchises from the industrial era to a post-AI era and in the decades that these surprisingly endearing companies have hold on the public consciousness, he finds she's gone. She could be illusioned as someone else, but he is a master of seeing past them. All he finds are regular humans.
Her name crosses the tongues of some hunters, and on occasion Mobius', when he threatens his kids that Lady Mischief would arrive in the night to slaughter them if they didn't stop putting graffiti on his jetski. Still, he can't find her. The only answer is that she doesn't want him to find her, not since she last spoke to Mobius.
"It's weird that Loki's not here, isn't it?"
Callous. So callous to cover deep wounds.
Loki sighs and zooms out.
The throne is all that's left of the Citadel at the End of Time, made anew by Loki. It is the last thing he wanted and now it is the only thing he has.
He doesn't rebuild. Yggdrasil needs space to grow further into the soil and above into the nebula, and there's no need to guard it with an electric cloud guard dog. Thousands of variants and junk objects must wander in the Void, their fate unclear. The rigged TemPads can open time doors there, so he imagines some of the hunters have restored them to their timelines or given them the choice to join the TVA. Loki can't see into the Void, but he has no reason to. The barren land is his to protect.
Millions of precious branches feeding off his magic. A glorious kaleidoscope extends in clusters as far as his physical eyes can trace. He never tires of the green. He longs for more of it.
At ten million, ripples begin. It's not his magic, but his tendons. Magic is pulled from the mystical realms but it is called upon by the inside, and he's given the multiverse his all, nurturing it like a parent would a child. He worries they may not be anything of his life left to give.
The TVA must destroy all the Kangs before then, he pleads. He keeps his crown unchanged. That weight, he will carry. He is a god.
The fissure startles him from a lull in his thoughts.
A rip in the dimension ricochets as an unpracticed hand bluntly saws it through. The air shimmers and then gives. The hole cleaves wider, bits of dimension clinging on the edges. Through it, he sees the gangway, and beyond it, glimpses of familiar faces.
Before he can put names to the faces the hole sputters and zips shut.
Grunting, Sylvie stumbles from the force of it. Then her eyes widen as she extends an arm to touch a rope of waving universes, scanning it to follow it to its end.
There he sits, at the end of time. Something dislodges in his chest.
She ducks under and tiptoes over the universes, more careful than he remembers her to be. Her mouth contorts every which way, warring with itself on what to utter.
At the bottom of the stairs to his throne, she pauses. Her horns are shorter than his, but she wears the same outfit as when he first laid eyes on her. Except it is cleaner and polished. Less blunt and cool-girl, more poised.
Thick silence seeps into their gap. They bristle at each other.
"You don't suppose you have a detangling hair brush?" She waves a hand at it all. The wonder in her face is magnificent. Reverent, almost.
"Why are you here, Sylvie?"
There is a choked sob waiting between them. It is hard to say from who.
"You were right," she says. "It is harder to stay."