She chatters incessantly. From years of disuse his voice goes hoarse within the hour. His slower responses only hastens her grandiose pacing, frowning, and pinching at different timelines.
"Don't—don't do that."
She eyes him and crosses her arms. "So protective are we? After you were willing to let most of them go?"
His forearms tighten imperceptibly. The ropes shimmy with the movement.
Something akin to guilt flashes over her face. He can't confirm it, because her presence is an eruption of stimuli amidst the green, no single thing he can focus on. So he concentrates on the weight on his head, tugging at his arms and feet, his back, the precious lives unspooling in growing infinity. Time is all he knows, will know.
His reply is intended to be careful, but something bitter lingers, too. "You were okay with fighting until there was nothing."
"Are you okay?" she asks, voice low.
He bites the inside of his cheek. Yggdrasil swells all around them. Another branch, creating another fractal. It swings low behind Sylvie's knees and nudges her forward.
"Yes," he says after she's turned her face to look up and can't see the lie on his.
She's packed a rucksack. The simple motions of unpacking, reminds him, ridiculously, of the times his—well, Thor's—friends. Volstagg, Fandral, and Hogun would dump their belongings in his chambers and declare they were staying for the evening. And day after day they would beg their parents to let them stay another night.
He wonders how long Sylvie plans to stay. A woman content without a home would not create one for the sake of it.
She has few possessions. First is the rigged tempad, which she treats with care. Second is a cream-colored book that she treats with less care, nose wrinkling before she tosses it onto his lap.
"They wanted you to see the draft print."
The third edition of the TVA guidebook is twice as thick as the first. Loki wishes he could pinch his nose in contrite exasperation but is unable to suppress the small smile. Each of his index fingers straighten, but his hands can move only in his imagination. All this time, and some reflexes don't dull.
"Here." Noticing his obvious predicament—this is not the most vulnerable she has seen him, and the thought scares him, a little—she flips the book open to the inside cover, where O.B. and Casey's bright faces smile at him. They look older. They're aging. She quickly shuffles past the first couple chapters and lands on a large diagram of a tree that spans two pages. The pages are egg-white but the glow that is his life casts a watery green over it. His beloved tree, embedded in the pages for everyone to see.
"Yggdrasil," he breathes.
"They took it from Norse mythology."
"It's not mythology," he says on instinct. She's raising an eyebrow. She might not have had the centuries of Asguardian education he did, but she knows too.
"They added a couple children's stories. 'Loki, Balder, and the Mistletoe', and," another flip, "'Thor and His Hammer.' Incredibly banal, if you ask me."
"I didn't," he says, dreadfully dry.
And then: "Children?"
"Time passes in the TVA now. There's life. You can't see it?"
It must be another sacrifice fate asked him to make. A tendril he identifies as elation grows in his chest. The After is worth it. It must be.
Sylvie pulls out a notebook, pen, some hair adornments, and a greased-through brown paper bag of what smells suspiciously like nuggets. The blasted yellow M confirms it.
"Why are you here?" he asks again.
A long pause. She settles onto the ground, holding the handful of items in her lap. They're all she has. She pops a nugget into her mouth. Offers him one, but that would require her feeding into him, and—she's not here to stay.
She shrugs and eats another. Stares at his feet. "I'd forgotten how godly you are."
"Can I change your shoes?"
"They're comfortable," he grouses.
"They're ugly. I'm going to change your shoes," she declares.
"O.B. is incredibly irritating. Take him out of the basement once, and now he's everywhere. Him and that infernal clock. Those cartoonish blinking noises follow me everywhere. Almost worse than Renslayer. B-15 doesn't like to be called her name, although the TVA passed a policy years ago to encourage everyone to see who they are on the timelines and…" she rambles, and he is hungry for every nugget (hah!) of information she brings with her. That, he tells himself, is the only reason he doesn't tell her to leave, goading her with noncommittal hums and the occasional side-eye.
His smile remains fixed. He has tried to hold it back, but he can't, and it's been years. He is tired. But it is a half-smile, because he's not entirely sure what he's supposed to do. How long has it been since he last felt unmoored? In the same place, as he was and will be, and she's plucking him straight out of the soil.
Sylvie cannot sit still. She stands sometimes, walking in circles around the throne, dodging growing branches and disappearing into fractals. Others, she lays flat on her back or on her side, arms outstretched. They don't sleep, because outside time there is no time passing through their bodies, and she makes a macabre comment about having eaten nuggets outside time and therefore the nuggets are a part of her until she leaves.
He doesn't ask when that is.
"They have more options than Key Lime pie. It doesn't make sense that they ate for routine's sake yet didn't expand their nutritional selection. Pumpkin pie is the only suitable form of pie. That Brad Wolfe keeps crying for another go at McDonalds, and I can't say he's of poor taste."
"Sylvie," he starts hoarsely, "How long were you at the TVA?"
She continues babbling for another word or two. Her jaw snaps shut when she seems to register his words. From her position splayed on the floor, head towards his feet, she can't see him unless she vanishes her horned crown or rolls over.
She does neither.
"A few years," she confesses quietly.
A long exhale starts deep in his sinuses.
"Why?"
"I wanted to see what it was about it that made you so protective."
At that exact moment, wherever in time it may be, every universe feels the longing in his gold-studded veins.
"Did you?"
Sylvie's chest rises and falls twice. One leg bends to let a branch grow past her. It meets another in the air, tangling together in a short dance, then each shoots off in opposite directions, still tied together in that spot above her.
She swings an arm over her face. "Gods, no." Her lying abilities are better than his. "They remind me of my coworkers at McDonald's and Eric from the bar and Lyle from the vinyl shop." She chuckles softly. "I went back to make sure they were living well, and it made me—it made me—well, we Lokis think a lot."
I suppose we do.
He can't fault her, exactly. Because from her vantage point, their conversation in the bar never happened. Neither her hurtful digs and callous departure, or her cry that everything was falling apart. They reset the TVA, regained their magic, and he became a physics and mathematics and metallurgy genius, walking across the gangway in full view of the loom's radiation, alone, in a business suit.
All the words in her disappeared after his question. Or they slumber, deep inside, and he has never been good at approximating her. His knowledge of her is what makes him so acutely aware that there is no exacting measure to her unpredictability, how monopolizing her presence can be. His advice to the unwitting would be to simply not prepare for her at all. She is a fractal, only instead of branches she is composed of thorns.
Also, he is tethered, and she is not. So her concentric circles around his throne grow bigger. She disappears for minutes at a time, soon becoming hours. She always returns with reverence in her eyes and a faint grin. But before he can label it as pride for what he's done, her face takes on a color of guilt. Her eyes do and will sweep over him, she'll twitch as though she wants to reach—what can she reach for that isn't time?—and finally return to her spot near the stairs.
He wants to speak again. But what can he say?
I didn't want this throne.
I did it for you.
How did you get here?
How many HWRs are left?
How's Mobius?
The last question is redundant because he can see the aging man lumbering after chaotic sons in a timeline, so Loki starts with that one. Sylvie pauses in her latest perusal of Yggrasil. The branch closest to her is an old one. It carries a universe that is a billion light-years long in time, now. It was part of the Sacred Timeline and most of its branches live.
She scrutinizes him carefully. "He visits the TVA sometimes. But mostly sad, like you."
He inhales sharply. "I am okay, Sylvie. I am surrounded by a thousand Asgards and thousands of variants of my friends."
More lies. She wouldn't understand his sacrifice even if he told her the truth.
"Do you believe in the afterlife?"
"Did they not teach you of Valhalla?"
"Of course I know about Valhalla. Do you believe it's a physical realm? Accessible? Can you see those timelines?"
Dangerous hope skitters by. He leaves it adrift. "I can't see places of no time, and timelessness is the purpose of an afterlife." A purpose that is freeing, he hopes, not for his sake but his those he loves. He would not wish his type of eternality on anyone—and the more he is here, the more he understands He Who Remains and the loop the dangerous man set into place that would start anew with another variant each time.
The realization, that he empathizes with He Who Remain's disregard for immortality, is horrifying. So is the fact that one day, his friends will reach the end that he can't. They will die and be in places he cannot see. And then they will truly be out of his reach.
Grief threads cobwebs around his heart, and she is none the wiser.
"This place. The Void out there," she points in a random direction. "Where everything pruned goes. That's like the afterlife for the TVA, isn't it?"
It'll hurt if he thinks too long over it. Faraway memories of the tablecloth blanket they shared, those variants, and Classic Loki sacrificing himself to defeat Alioth.
Fifteen million timelines tug at his bones. She is still there, in her pristine uniform.
She reaches, and reflex sends him shifting backwards as much as possible. Which timeline will she touch? What is she looking for?
Her right hand folds his fingers under hers. Ropes shift to make room for the movement. He has not touched anything but fine thread for so long that flesh is a distant memory.
The feel of her skin startles him. The tree flares brighter, if just for an uncountable moment outside time.
"I tried to count the weight of your sacrifice. I am a god, too, and I think it will take me forever." Her grip tightens, seemingly hearing his unspoken plea. He wishes he could curl his fingers on his own, keep her here forever. "I'm sorry," she chokes. "You tried to tell me—I didn't know this was what it took— I didn't know —"
Their way their gazes connect reminds him of magnets snapping together.
"Don't be sorry. Even if you did know, you would have killed him. Some choices are always the same." He sounds harsher than he means too, but it's the truth. Under the force of his words she swallows. Because he cannot touch her throat, he traces it with his eyes. "It's what makes you, you."
She gestures to herself with her free hand. "A thousand Lokis and only you're here. Only you would've chosen this. Why? Why are you more godly than me?"
"You're here, aren't you?"
She lets go, and all of the possibilities with it.
She's gone for a few days this time, or a few weeks. Not through a fissure, but deep into the branches. Maybe she is trying to watch universes the way he does, but he's not sure how much her magic differs from his. She could also be hiding from him.
The hand she touched is weightless. All of the branches it holds have a cerulean undertow, almost, and less strained than he remembers.
When she turns, he is angled on his throne.
Her confession is thin. "I couldn't find my Asgard."
"You could have asked me."
At first, she looks dismayed at the prospect of him checking. It smooths over into incredulous curiosity.
"But there should've been a sacred timeline version of it, before whatever I did caused a nexus event. Another female Loki—"
"I checked. There aren't any." His unburdened hand flexes and her eyes flit to the motion. "All those years with the TemPad. Didn't you didn't check?"
"I did. But…" she looks embarrassed. "The branches are growing now. It could be growing back, or—"
A small shake of his head.
Wordlessly she departs again.
He considers asking her to touch him again. To lessen the burden just a bit, again.
Sylvie is Queen of many things, and somewhere among her titles is Queen of the Unaware. Loki realizes that even he knew the shape of love when leveled at him. He Who Remains and the TVA robbed her until there was no one alive left to love her; she has not learned to recognize its edges when she's in the middle of it.
"Loki," and it's the first time she's said his name, "I tried touching—" he jolts, "—some of the branches. My magic is different than yours because you're part Jötun, but it has the same source. I could help."
The offer melts the last of the acidity between them. Warmth floods the universes.
"This is my purpose," he declares throatily. "Why are you here?"
"We are gods. I came to share your burdened purpose."
"Please go home, Sylvie."
Her snap echoes through Yggdrasil. "I have no home. Growing my magic enough to come here took ages, and in all of those time slips you never considered explaining what was happening? How many conversations did you have with us that we aren't a part of? We didn't get to say…to say…" Misery turns her tone acidic. "Clearly I was wrong to come—"
Green orbs lock with green. Loki speaks more softly than he ever has. "This was all so you have the freedom to find your burden. Your choice of purpose."
"For me?" she asks calmly.
"For you."
"You complete," she takes a large breath, steps back, and kicks at the ground, " Idiot ! Ripping a hole in the space-time continuum to create a tree? Your worst fear is being alone! And here you are, alone! "
This Sylvie, he knows. When he smiles it's mostly teeth.
"You're here," he finds it apt to point out, and there should be a sort of old comfort in their bickering. All they did was bicker. He can't fight her anymore. He can't touch her or reach for her. His limbs know nothing but strings.
"But I'm not lonely, like you."
"Then why are you here?" He can't raise his voice any higher without risking his limbs jerking a fraying rope. "I heard you in the TVA. 'I need to get out there'. You almost started running after me. You're one of the most powerful creatures to exist. Why did you stop?" His vision teeters. The salt on his tongue is from tears. She has come to him for answers but he needs his. "Why did you come now? To torture me when you inevitably leave?"
She snarls. "Is my presence torture?"
"Your absence—"
The flinch rattles her entire body. She slumps over, pressing a thumb and forefinger into her eyelids.
Her croak is quiet. "I have replayed that day a thousand times in my mind. Hope was, is so hard." When her hand lowers, the green in her eyes dim. Flecks of honest gray shine boldly in spite of the fluorescence he's made a home in. "I wanted to. I froze. You were already so far away and unreachable when you came to me at McDonald's. You out-grew me in every possible way. I could never…I was scared." Her lip has been gnawed through. "I could never be a hero."
"Reach for my left pocket."
Eyebrows stitch in confusion. "Your what?"
"I assume you know what a pocket is?" He juts his chin towards his left leg. "Under the robes."
Uneasy, she does as requested and lowers. Her knuckles graze his left side, and she is calmer than he feels. His heart pirouettes wildly against his ribs.
Nestled in the layers, the small Valkyrie figurine he plucked from her pruned timeline had kept him company in its delicate weight. When she cradles it in her palm, her eyes oscillate from it to him. Realization makes her grasp the armrest to keep her balance.
"This is—where did you get this?"
He squeezes his eyes shut, working past through all of the timelines and lives and multiverses he nurtures. There, in his past, his attempt to find answers.
"Do you know what your nexus event was?"
Her knees sink to the floor. She's steadying herself, holding tightly to his throne, head falling into his lap. He wishes he could fall with her.
"Don't tell me. I don't want to know."
"I spent…" he grunts. The burden is lessening and its loss leaves him confused as he adjusts his hold. Yggdrasil sings. "Much of timeless time thinking. There's no variant that comes close to resembling you. No other Asgard like yours. What were you thinking when you played with the toys?"
"I was just playing," she whispers.
"Or," he adjusts his knee, and she wraps her arms around his torso. The syllables clatter from his lips faster and faster. "After your parents told you were adopted, you started to realize something. A Valkyrie is a hero and an option I nor any other Loki variant had. Lokis were supposed to be tricksters. Villains. Violent and angry. And you turned your anger into hope. You wanted to be a hero."
And Sylvie—Sylvie climbs onto his lap and begins to cry.