Chapter Text
The silence in the citadel at the end of time is deafening.
Sylvie doesn’t know how long she sits on the floor, everything inside her aching with emptiness and only a dead man to keep her company, his blood still dripping into puddles under his chair. She can smell his blood, the sharp copper tang of it, and the floor beneath her is hard and cold enough to hurt, and everything else is…
There’s nothing. Where she is supposed to be, or a purpose, or maybe a soul, there’s just a roaring, endless nothing, because the man who destroyed her life is finally dead and nothing has changed.
Except no, it’s worse than that, isn’t it? Something’s changed all right, because she changed it, and all she managed to do was throw away literally the only person who’s maybe loved her since she was a child, all because she couldn’t let him stand between her and revenge.
I just want you to be okay, he said, the tears in his eyes finally overflowing, and there was no more question about his sincerity or his motivations, not after he’d jumped in front of a fucking sword just to get her to listen and then dropped his own sword, putting his life and his heart in her hands—of course she believed him then. I just want you to be okay, he said, and she could no sooner disbelieve him than she could stop her own heart from beating.
But she couldn’t stop, not when she was so close, so she kissed him and sent him back to the TVA where he’d be out of her way and safe from her, and then she did what she had to do.
And, well, she is very much not okay, so it seems like Loki might have been onto something, and on some level she thinks maybe she wants to scream about that until her throat tears and destroy this entire stupid pretentious fancy office, except that would mean finding the will to drag herself up off this damned freezing floor, and she honestly thinks she might just sit here until she rots.
She had to kill He Who Remains. Had to. This couldn’t have ended any other way. Why couldn’t Loki see that?
Sylvie slumps back to lie flat on the floor, too drained to stay upright when there’s no point to it anyway and absolutely sick of looking at the man who destroyed her world. The dead man isn’t going to get up and attack her anyway, as much as she almost wishes he would because at least that would force her to do something. The stone is cold all down the line of her back, cold and hard against her skull. Like this she can still see a bit of the fragmenting timeline behind the dead man, all those branches still growing and twisting in fractals on fractals.
What if she was wrong? What if Loki was right, and she’s actually unleashed something worse on the multiverse?
She flinches back from that thought so hard she thinks for a second that she’s going to be physically ill. She can’t. She just…she can’t. If it’s true then she’ll deal with it or she’ll die, but she’s not going to think about it now because she fucking can’t.
(Loki did. He thought about it. He tried to be the responsible one this time, even when it hurt. Did you see his face when you told him to kill you? Did you? He would’ve rather died than hurt you. He wasn’t lying. You still didn’t listen.)
Sylvie presses both hands to her eyes so hard she sees sparks. That’s the thing, isn’t it? By the time she had her sword at his unprotected throat while he pleaded with her to stop and listen, she knew without a doubt that it wasn’t a con. He meant every word—he didn’t care about power, he didn’t care about a throne, he only cared about her, and he really thought He Who Remains was telling the truth. He had reasons to think He Who Remains was telling the truth.
And when he said, I’ve been where you are, I’ve felt what you feel—
If he’d said it a little earlier, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t have believed him—a lot earlier, and she would’ve laughed in his face. She raised herself in apocalypse after apocalypse by the skin of her teeth, barely surviving, barely having time to rest, never knowing what it was like to have someone actually know her or care—hell, until Loki, she didn’t even remember what it was like to have a conversation with someone who wasn’t about to die. And Loki actually got the royal upbringing that was violently stolen from her, the training, the education, the friends, the family—everything she’d tormented herself by imagining for a while when she was younger until it all hurt too much and she had to make herself forget it to survive. Loki had all that, over a millennium of it, and she knew enough about his role on the Sacred Timeline to know that he threw it all away for a chance at a throne.
Except. Except. His mother was dead, and he missed her, and he had to be drunk to think much about love, and the getting drunk happened almost immediately after he told her his mother was dead and while he reminisced about an Asgard that was lost to him as much as it was lost to her, and he’d grown up as surrounded by people as she’d been effectively alone but she knew he got it, the loneliness that follows a lack of real connections, whatever the reason. And he claimed their trek across Lamentis-1 was more walking than he’d ever done before but he easily paced her, then and in Shuroo while they ran for their lives, and every time they fought—back to back or against each other—she could see in every move that he’d built on the royal training with centuries of real, hard-won experience (one shitty drunken knife throw notwithstanding). He didn’t fall apart when they were about to die—he came after her, said he was sorry and meant it, told her she was amazing and meant that too, was so focused on comforting her in the face of their imminent death that he flinched when she touched his arm (and what did that mean, that he flinched from a gentle touch?) and seemed almost baffled for a second that she would want to offer a little comfort in return. He pulled his hands away from her shoulders when he was being pruned, because even in horrific pain when he thought he was dying, his brain moved that quick and he was worried about the reset charge hurting her too. When everyone else left, he didn’t hesitate to face Alioth with her, and then to risk his life by offering himself up as bait.
Loki of the Sacred Timeline was a spoiled prince, yes, and the Loki she knows can be utterly ridiculous at times, but he wasn’t and isn’t only that. She knew early on, even if she didn’t want to admit it to herself, that he wasn’t only that.
And then they enchanted Alioth together.
She was focused only on Alioth himself at the time, first on not getting killed and then on subduing him so the older Loki’s sacrifice would mean something, so all of this struggle and heartache and destruction would mean something. She wasn’t focusing on Loki, on the way he seemed to commit every time his hand gripped hers, on the way his mind intertwined with hers, reinforced her magic, amplified her strengths and canceled out most of her weaknesses (which isn’t to say she didn’t notice, because she did). She wasn’t even focusing on the strangeness of touching another mind so closely without trying to control it, thoughts and memories streaming by in the background, but she was…very very aware, all the same, that their minds were connecting on a deeper, more comprehensive level than all the times she’d enchanted people before. It had to be, for their minds to touch at all, because Loki’s hid behind layers of ugly scar tissue that she’d bounced off on Lamentis without realizing what she was seeing.
The scar tissue was…nauseating. The memories of how it got there were worse, just glimpses but they were already in her head, and Sylvie slammed the door shut on those for later or maybe never because right now was all that mattered and right now was Alioth, and she felt Loki doing the same (and what did he see in her memories?), and together they tamed the beast and slipped past it to visit the man behind the curtain.
Only, ignoring Loki’s memories didn’t make them go away. She used telekinesis there in the citadel, for the first time in what felt like forever, because being in Loki’s mind let her remember how it should feel to do it, and that was fine. But his memories—
He’d been a spoiled prince, yes. That part was true. He’d been a spoiled prince, overlooked in favor of his louder, shinier, more conventionally Asgardian brother, told to know his place, informed that his strengths and interests were deceitful and cowardly. The people he trusted most had lied to him all his life about his very identity, had allowed him to grow up hating his own race—and then he learned the truth and everything fell apart, nothing was real anymore but the rage and the pain, one bad decision after another when he couldn’t see another way forward, all the way up to killing Thor, fighting Thor, failing to destroy Jotunheim, hearing no, Loki and knowing after all this that it was pointless and he would never be good enough for Odin because of who he was, and so he gave up and opened his hand—
—and he fell for a long, long time, in an airless frozen void, unable to breathe or move or scream or die, as the endless nothing scoured him out—
—and he landed, somewhere else, and he believed he was empty, because he had already fallen so far and lost so much, had let go on Asgard because he had nothing left. But the Chitauri found him when he was already broken, and then he met the Other, and the Black Order, and at last the Mad Titan. First they taught him how much more he had yet to lose, and then they took what was left of him and they bent and broke and twisted until he took on a shape more to their liking, and then they filled him back up with pain and fear and rage until he knew nothing else and sent him to Earth.
(And then, of course, just as he began to regain a little clarity at the end, an opportunity to escape literally slid to a stop against his foot, and he seized it like any reasonable person would do because at least he’d recovered a little of his will to live—at which point the TVA, not giving a shit about reason if He Who Remains hadn’t personally put an exception for it in the Sacred Timeline, arrested him, informed him he’d already lost literally everything that mattered to him, and expected him to be grateful that they hadn’t killed him yet. On the Sacred Timeline he was still supposed to lose almost everything over a longer period of time before being painfully murdered, so this was better, right?)
In the time Sylvie’s known him, and even before that at the TVA, he’s been pretty aggressively Not Thinking About It, which Sylvie knows now because she caught that too—that and the overwhelming chaos and confusion of his time on Earth, with none of the singleminded drive for a throne that she’d expect from a normal conqueror (and she knows from conquerors, because she’s had to enchant a few). Oh, he was driven, sure, but it felt more like the desperation of a wounded feral dog, lashing out at everything that came close. Everything that swept through the back of her mind was a conflicted mess, only slightly less so as her subconscious sorted it out a bit on their hike to the citadel and she continued ignoring it all because this was absolutely not the time.
She couldn’t ignore it all, though. She couldn’t ignore that she knew Loki now, in a way she hadn’t before; that when he said I’ve been where you are, I’ve felt what you feel she didn’t just believe that he thought so, she knew it was true because a whole jumble of his memories was telling her so. Her lifetime in apocalypses had lasted much longer, but he’d been through awful things and done some awful things in response, and now he lived under the crushing weight of regret like she’d never experienced. How could she, when everything she ever did until very recently just got wiped away by the oncoming apocalypse?
She’s sure as shit experiencing some crushing regret now, and she still doesn’t know who was right, in the end. If she’s triggered devastating multiversal war—she doesn’t know how to begin dealing with that. But even if she hasn’t, even if she was right, even if she goes to Loki now, she still pushed him away and refused to listen, refused to even stop moving long enough to try to get him to understand. He might be furious with her now, or worse, he might just be heartbroken that he trusted her and she used that trust as a weapon against him.
The worst part is, that endlessly dividing timeline outside the window doesn’t look…healthy. Maybe she’s just paranoid now because she’s grief-stricken and so exhausted she could puke, but maybe that’s how a multiverse looks, when it’s headed for all-out catastrophic war, when it’s set on devouring itself. So maybe she hurt the one person who understands her and made life worse for trillions of people across all reality, and killing He Who Remains didn’t even make her feel better.
All she wants right now is Loki, and she can’t face him. She just…can’t.
But. She sits up slowly, staring out at the branching timelines as a new idea takes hold. But—whether it was right or not, she just freed the multiverse. She just gave an infinite number of Lokis, specifically, their choices back—not freedom from the consequences of their parents’ choices or Thanos’s choices or their own shitty choices, but—
She could…change something. Help a Loki, a Loki who could almost be her Loki even if he’s not quite the one she knows, and—what, exactly? Prove to herself that no matter what she’s done here, she can still change something for the better?
Fuck it. Sure. Beats sitting here until the multiverse explodes or the silence and emptiness eat her alive. She sheathes her sword, considers the tangle of Loki’s memories, and opens a time door onto the SHIELD Helicarrier, right in front of Loki’s clear cylindrical prison.