When burden is shared, it becomes magnificent. Glory is for kings and winners. Magnificence is for the lady not resigned to watching his self-made captivity, but sharing it for herself. He kisses her long and slow, even when mourning the loss of hands that could have carded through soft locks or cradled flustered cheeks. He misses the way she felt; the hesitant touches that he stole, the thousands of times he pressed a hand to her chest, I don't want the throne, I just want you to be okay , only for her to fling him away.
There is plenty of hand-holding here, too, but it's always her sliding hers over the back of his. The gaps between his fingers tether ropes that carry branches that carry threads. Their hands can't intertwine.
She tries to touch him where she can, but it's not nearly enough. It will never be enough. More punishments to add to his list of penance.
They talk philosophy. The, well, nature of where they sit lends itself well to the topic, but they are also gods, and he wonders why he's never traipsed through these questions before. Sylvie is a Loki, but she's also a variant, and he's mulled over the crux of the Creator and Creation enough to conclude that God—capital G—doesn't create redundancies. So Sylvie could not be exactly like him, hence, her perusal through things he could not conceptualize on his own.
"Since I'm a Loki variant, is my purpose a variant of yours? Or does every Loki get their own purpose?"
"Well, is variance characterized by their choices or characteristics?"
"Not physical ones, obviously." She makes an exaggerated motion between them.
"I would hope not or this would be terribly awkward." This being the connection they have; affection, love, endless bickering. They have yet to put a term to it.
Sylvie rolls her eyes. She's playing with the McDonald's brown bag, as if crumpling it enough times could make it produce chicken nuggets spontaneously. "The variants of He Who Remains all want to take over the multiverse, so choices, then."
"Except Victor Timely," Loki is keen to point out. Simultaneously he searches Victor's branch, which is growing quite nicely, and at the tip of it, he finds the man still swindling away, but his inventions are less dangerous and more of the prankster sort. Victor's enjoying life, and with no sociopathic clock chasing him for affections, he's also enjoying a burgeoning romance with a Chello player.
"Except Timely," Sylvie repeats. No doubt she's remembering how he begged for mercy and she let him go. A variant condemned by the things they hadn't done yet, or a variant condemned by the man at the end of time—there is no difference to her.
Occasionally, he wonders what would have happened if they took He Who Remain's offer to rule in his stead as benevolent overlords. He imagines himself and Sylvie, in the cathedral that used to be at the end of time, two halves of one whole.
When he confesses this out loud, her laughs ring like wind chimes.
"Ridiculous," she says. "Either us or another Kang variant. That was always his plan. A loop that would never end and force the existence of one timeline and one timeline only, knowing how it begins and ends." She shakes her end. "You can't see the ends, can you?"
"Not until it happens."
"Free will, then."
"Free will," he affirms.
"What about before the first He Who Remains? How did the multiverse exist then?" She traces the ropes in his eternal vice-grip. Though their skin don't touch, he swears he feels her strokes.
"Perhaps it was stable and the birth of He Who Remains is what set this all into motion." He smiles, forlorn. "I have though about this too, Sylvie. However the multiverse existed before He Who Remains, it can't that way anymore. Not as long Kang variants exist."
"And these branches will grow until they are infinite."
He nods.
"There could be infinite Kangs."
He nods again.
She swallows. Her voice goes hoarse. "Infinite Kangs cannot be stopped in the finite amount of time the TVA has."
"They will. They have to."
"And if they don't?"
"Then nothing changes."
Her eyes are glassy. Rims redden and she turns away, whispering. "I'm so sorry, Loki."
There's nothing to be sorry for. He did as Mobius advised; Loki chose his burden, and losing Sylvie would have been a burden he couldn't live with. Carrying infinity was infinitely better and a choice he would have made every single time.
She does, of course, grow bored. What else to expect of a woman who made homes out of apocalypses? The novelty of boredom made her seek the answers she finally could, and when she grew bored with that, she went to the TVA. So, too, she will grow tired of this.
Not tired of him, she insists. She hangs around him like the twenty million branches. Rather, she's bored with what little options they have for time together. There's braiding his hair or massaging his shoulders (alternatively, punching them).
They're not always the soft, sensitive sort. He wants to be as her touches make the weight all the lighter. She recoils sometimes, scared of what love she's capable of. Everyone she loved is gone.
When that happens, he assures her, "There's no where for me to go. I'm here with you." The threat and pruning and worlds being destroyed are gone.
"That's what I hate," she says quietly. Her arms loop around his neck as he inhales the notes of celestial lavender and citric spice. "Why can't we be anywhere else? An apocalypse or the TVA or a tree? Why are those our only memories?"
Because I was fine with a Sacred Timeline and you were not.
Because I chose one over zero, and you encouraged me to create infinity.
"There was the McDonalds," he corrects, managing to add a bit of cheek. "And the bar."
"What bar?"
He realizes his mistake.
She scowls. "Time-slipping. Any other things you want to share?"
"Sylvie—"
"Don't mind me and my scarce memories," she seethes and clambers away.
He can't walk to follow her either.
She's gone for a long time. He hears the cut of a dimension ripping open and zipping shut moments later. The energy in the tree shifts, like Yggdrasil herself is sorry to bid farewell.
Without her, the strain of twenty million branches tug at every nerve. He's on the verge of unspooling.
He suspects that she's returned to the TVA because she's absent from every timeline. He combs through each one twice. He detours while studying the branch Mobius is in and guilt stabs him when he sees the man's hair has gone fully white. His sons are in high school and college.
Mobius, or Don as he's known here, is talking to a customer in that nonchalant laissez faire manner of his. The sports store is his now. His commercials have gone viral on something called TikTok.
"I'm gonna leave early today," Mobius tells his employees. "Got dinner plans."
"A date?" A mousey employee with shaggy hair asks.
Mobius wheezes in laughter. His cheeks are gaunt. "Even better."
Loki is curious to know and watches, impatiently, the time unfold. And it is better, he learns after an hour following this branch's growth. Mobius hosts a holiday potluck. His parents, siblings, and even ex-wife, come. It's terribly awkward, but his sons are happy and as they make fun of the burnt turkey, Loki realizes he's watching a family.
Family, his own he helped destroy, family he never apologized to or told how he loved them so deeply and desperately, family he might never get to have of his own.
Panic turns to acid in his gut. Before he can register it, he's zooming across countries and worlds to find—
The God of Thunder rubs circles into the back of a woman's hand. They're ambling down a busy marketplace in New Asgard. Springtime calls everyone outside to celebrate. Children and adults alike grin at Thor but absolutely fall into step when recognizing the woman, whom Loki now places as Sif. Even bereft an arm, she's responsible for this new generation of warriors.
"You don't want to marry for love?" Sif asks him.
Thor shrugs and intertwines their hands entirely. "Human lives are so short. Even from the beginning I knew I would probably be the one to witness her die, and it was the subject of many arguments. But I realize now, I got to experience a love many don't find in their life even once." They stop in the street. He turns to her. "I've lost everyone and everything I knew for thousands of years."
"Except me." Sif lets out a long sigh. "Your father kept trying to arrange a marriage between us, you know."
"I heard you nearly joining the Valkyrie ranks because of it."
"Quite." Her cloak falls unevenly on both sides, and Loki is reminded suddenly of her hair that he half sheared off.
A high-pitched yell preludes Thor's adopted daughter running amuck. The crowd parts as she, a young woman with mischievous brown eyes, wrestles with another woman who had tried to take a picture with her axe.
Thor chuckles. "The added benefit of course is that she listens to no one except you."
The domesticity sends Loki fleeing again. It is like he's unwittingly filtered the worlds he holds for it, because everywhere he looks, all he sees are families. Families in the making or families breaking apart, but even when they break they create new ones. It becomes darkly obsessive, in the way one cannot help but watch an accident unfold. Every person he's ever known, he follows until their thread stops. Then he starts over. It creates another knot in his stomach and kink in his spine.
He wants his mom. He wants to cry in her lap and become a child again when the world was still so simple.
He shakes his head and the views of the branches from him.
Mourn. He will mourn what could have been and keep moving forward. Burdened purpose, glorious purpose, he whispers.
Another rip. More familiar faces far beyond in the window at the gangway, smiling and waving as the dimensional rip shuts.
Relief turns to alarm as Sylvie trudges to his throne. Her eyes are hallowed out; moving in and out of the end of time under the thick radiation of Yggdrasil is almost too much for her magic.
She flips opens a new tempad.
"Fast food can handle the radiation. A tempad couldn't, apparently, but Casey managed to integrate my magic into it." She taps a button.
"Hey there!" A rudimentary Miss Minutes shrills. "You've got mail!"
A video flickers onto the screen. Videos. Dozens of them; messages from B-15 telling him she's explored her life as a doctor on the timelines; Casey saying he's left a life of crime but returns to his timeline whenever he wants a break from his desk job to feel the adrenaline rush again; O.B. recollecting how he reconciled with his wife and holding up a small infant. Spliced in are some haphazard clips of the TVA's pie room, now carrying dozens of options, and the community garden that's begun to sprout at the base of where the gargantuan statue of He Who Remains used to be.
Timelines quiver as his tears flow freely.
"Mobius?" he asks.
Frowning, Sylvie looks at her feet. "He's sick."
"What?"
"He's old, Loki. Humans…humans are so frail."
He flips through the threads and branches, looking for the curmudgeon jetski enthusiast.
Sylvie places a staying hand over his. "He's in the TVA. The slower time flow is giving B-15 and O.B. more time to help him."
He cries for Mobius.
But most of all, he cries for all the times he demeaned the weakness of mortals. Look at him now.
"Loki." Sylvie's arms hang at her sides. Her hands curl into loose fists as the tempad on his lap replays the loop of videos for the third time. "I can help. Maybe my magic can hold on while you—"
The tears burn. He shakes his head. "This is not your purpose."
"That's not fair! Who decides my purpose? Not He Who Remains, and certainly not you !" The echo of her shouts are swallowed deep past the knotting branches.
"I know that it's not fair. I got my throne when I finally found somewhere else I want to be." His voice is soft and pleasing. "My only regret is my choice of burdened you too."
"You don't want to see Mobius?"
"Of course I want to!" he shouts.
They heave. Pain shoots through his chest.
She lowers her voice to a whisper. "They're all going to die sooner than you think, Loki. Alone, forever, with no one but Lokis for company."
Maybe that'll be enough one day. As soon as the silence returns between them, a curious look twists her face. He doesn't know what to make of it. It's a new expression and he burns it into his memory instantly. What is she thinking?
He waits.
Slowly, stubborn fire rises in her eyes. "These finite branches will grow infinitely?"
"So long as I sustain them," he answers.
"There will be an infinite amount of Lokis now, paths that haven't been set yet."
"Like He Who Remains or anyone else, yes."
Sylvie kicks at the ground. A plume of dust erupts and Yggdrasil makes a sound akin to a groan.
"Oh, come off it, you big tree." She smiles. "I'm sick of nuggets. I'll bring you back a chocolate milkshake."
Now that he knows she will return, he cocks his head goodbye. She pauses, steals a quick kiss, and is gone.
The tempad is a small facsimile of company but he indulges as it replays and replays.
It takes him an admittedly long time to realize what journey she's chosen for herself. And when he does, he struggles to suppress the lump in his throat, the hope rising to his chest. Hope could be poisonous with the potential it has to destroy. Hope is hard, he had told her. Staying is hard. He chose both.
The equation was simple. A god met a goddess, and his plans had changed. She changed him enough to bring about cosmic chaos in that nexus event on Lamentis. Inside her lived an urge to be heroic that him and other Lokis could only grow overtime; and that would be enough to set others on a different path.
Dozens of Lokis, in varying horned crowns and colors of flesh, ages and weights, magics and gimmicks, descend over him in macabre flight. He recognizes them all because they are of the same core. They come from above. Some dodge the growing branches, poking curiously at them. But they are all exhausted from insisting that all they are, are gods of mischief.
"We're here for our glorious purpose," says a Loki. It's the obnoxious President Loki, nursing a stump of an arm because of that damn alligator Loki, but he looks at ease, like he could laugh at himself for decades.
"You can't be the only god of stories the timelines sing about," says another Loki, reaching out a hand. This Loki is one whose embraced his Frost Giant heritage completely. As if recognizing him, a branch leaps to his wrist and curls around it. "Stories are supposed to be multiple, you know? We can take over a few."
Sylvie is the last to arrive, waving a casual hand through the crowd, as if she has not become a purpose maker herself, chasing hundreds and thousands of Lokis to inspire the dozens who are ready for the hard choice.
"If you sustain stories, then I am an author." She sips on a milkshake. "Is this enough magic?"
Loki takes a deep breath, and lets go.
Sylvie holds his hand for his first steps. Then he's running, running down the gangway, running into the Core Room, driven by instinct and the hundreds of years of memory he couldn't forget if he tried. He runs into the corridor and hears voices, real voices, wafting from the Pie Room and O.B's trinket-drowned lab.
"Where's O.B.?" he cries.
The man standing in O.B.'s spot blinks. "He retired years ago. Man, the TVA still ignoring what happens with the nerd team?"
Loki runs to the elevator and skids out onto the first floor it stops at. The hot cocoa machine is a hot cocoa restaurant. Motifs are overwhelmingly more yellow than orange and the garden theme dominates the conglomerate. The hanging lights are sun-shaped and pulsate like it too.
The TVA is nourishing.
He spins, the lights and colors and the blood in his legs rushing to keep him afloat.
A soft hand grabs his forearm. "Loki?" an incredulous voice asks. Her next words are muffled in his embrace.
"B-15—I—is Mobius alive?"
"Loki!" Sylvie catches up to him, panting. She grips his other arm, and the women keeping him upright stare at him, disbelieving for different reasons.
B-15 blinks rapidly at his horns and the green cloak. She's older and tired, but happy. There is a relaxed way in the set of her shoulders that wasn't there when she was a hunter.
"Is this a trick?"
"He hugged you," Sylvie says.
"That's true." B-15 hugs him again. Passersby pause at the ruckus, but most of the faces are new and confused. The sun-lights spin like tops. "H-How?"
"Mobius, I need to—"
"Mobius is fine," says B-15. "He's in the medic center—" her words disappear behind him.
The medic center? Is it new, or the first aid center he remembers but repurposed? He doesn't even realize he hadn't explored all of the TVA, its nooks and secrets. Where do people here sleep and enjoy life?
Sylvie is at his side the entire way. He startles when he feels nimble fingers weave through his. Flesh, he delights, not threads hardening into ropes of the multiverse. He's holding the hand of a loved one, the hand that will remain even after thousands of years and everyone else he loves is gone to happier places.
"Are you okay?" Sylvie's wide eyes sweep over him. His knees are threatening to give out. "Loki?"
He places a palm on the door and pushes.
An exasperated voice filters past. "All that racket out there, what's going—on…"
A nondescript hairstyle, crooked nose, graying mustache, and unkempt beard. There's a lava lamp at his bedside table. A young man, the son who was once promised a pet snake, adjusts the tubes connected to his father's forearms.
Loki swallows, watching the medical machinery make those infernal beeping noises. They both have had so much to carry in their hands.
Mobius half-lidded eyes are deathly still.
Loki tells him what he couldn't all those years ago, rewinding through memories of a handshake that this Mobius didn't have. You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That's how it is, that's how it was, that's how it will be. All so that others can achieve the best versions of themselves.
"You were right," Loki says thickly. "I was born so others could experience suffering and happiness on their own terms."
Though his sigh is immediate, light flares behind Mobius' irises. "Why…" a hacking cough, "Why is it always you two?"
The collision their hug causes, Loki is sure—though his hands have no hold on the universes—is felt in Yggdrasil's core.
Mobius' frail hand pats his back. "I thanked the world every day for their cosmic mistake of making you. Hate the horns, by the way."
An otherworldly seaside oasis is shadowed with human endeavor. The scent of blooming flowers is cast over with the smell of rotting fish. Crisp air meets the vaguest undertone of ale and merrymaking. Cobblestone streets and ornate fountains pay odes to the Avengers that lost and then saved half of existence. Frosty clouds hide the midday sun. Grassy hills are tinged with gray. Tired, cold faces scurry around quickly to avoid catching a frostbite. Winter is not kind in New Asgard.
It is here that from a translucent orange door emerges the God of Stories and the Goddess of Story-makers. They hike the dirt road, mud sloshing on their boots, cloaks whipping behind them, past the rickety welcome sign. They nod at fishermen too tired to spare them a glance—tourists in garbs coming to catch a glimpse of famous residents is nothing new—and pause to nab some drinks from a bar with a leaky roof.
When they reach their destination, the goddess turns to the god. "Are you okay, truly?"
His reply is slow to formulate but quick to vocalize. "You should know the answer to the question has always been yes, as long as you are."
Her easy smiles are the only infinity he may never tire of. "You don't suppose he'll understand it?"
It, being their joined hands, or the TVA, or the worlds and universes he has carried?
"We'll find out."
This weight is so heavy he feels numb. He's been reborn. He doesn't know how to be a different Loki out here. Will they think him the same? Will they see the sacrifice in the burns in his hands, the set of his shoulders? It is a new thing to not simply watch time unfold. The multiple deaths he's lived, some false and some not, and still it is a new thing to be a pulsing part of life. He wishes he could be gripping the branches and holding Yggdrasil together until it grew into infinity. He'll need to go back soon, but first—
The door swings open. "I told you irritating salesfolk, I'm going to rehab and I will not be drinking any lo...Loki? Brother?"
—he clings to his brother, the first to know he could be something more.
Thank you for reading and all the lovely comments! Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it.