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“It’s crazy,” Miss Minutes says, which is quite possibly the most honest thing Loki’s ever heard her say, “but he could make it work. All of it. Everything. Exactly the way you’ve always wanted. And you can have it all, together.”
You have no idea what we want, Loki almost says—a reflex, and not an entirely accurate one. Of course she knows enough to get close, because the TVA does too, even if they don’t fully understand.
“It’s fiction,” Sylvie says firmly. She doesn’t seem very tempted, and Loki can’t blame her. Miss Minutes has no truly attractive offer for her, after all—she would have to make the conscious choice to overwrite all her memories with false ones, even assuming they could do it well enough and seamlessly enough that she wouldn’t doubt her new memories later. She would still know, in the moment she agreed, that she was choosing a pretty lie.
The offer to Loki, on the other hand…
He thinks about it. He can’t not. His mind has always been like this, flicking through possibilities, playing out scenarios, weighing his options even when he knows some of them are unacceptable (although his definition of “unacceptable” has gone back and forth quite a bit, lately). And in this case of course he is tempted, because—
The words thrum over and over again in his mind: You can kill Thanos, so simply and easily, as if the suggestion alone doesn’t feel like a punch to the gut. Forget the Avengers; self-righteous as they are, they were never his true enemies, which Miss Minutes would recognize if she took two seconds to look past some of the assumptions in his TVA files. If he could actually end Thanos, somehow, with or without the Infinity Gauntlet—take a little bit of revenge, yes, but more importantly stop the Titan from hurting or killing anyone ever again—
He could save everyone. He could return to Asgard a hero—even Midgard might forgive him, if he could prove Thanos had sent him. With the Gauntlet he could fix most of the problems ravaging their planet, and then they might well call him a hero too. He could protect Asgard from the Dark Elves—from everything, probably. Save his mother. Save his father, maybe, if that part isn’t an inevitable consequence of Odin’s age, and even then Loki would have those years, to do what he could to…have a family again. He could prevent Ragnarok, even, if the TVA allowed it—and why wouldn’t they, if they were really willing to change the Sacred Timeline for him in the first place? He couldn’t prove what Thanos meant to do with the Infinity Stones, maybe, so the universe’s inhabitants might not know that he’d saved fully half their number—but he would know, he would be responsible for preventing death on a truly cosmic scale, and that would matter.
And Sylvie, even if she couldn’t bring herself to accept a lifetime of happy memories while knowing they were fake—she could live, if he convinced her to agree to the rest of it. Stop running, stop hiding, go back to Asgard, have the next best thing to her own family back again.
He could save everyone.
…except, of course, that isn’t the bargain, not really. The reward is an illusion, even if the TVA’s ruler somehow keeps every single promise, even if that promise involves allowing them to forget the TVA’s existence. Loki would have to make his decision, fully knowing in that moment that he was making himself complicit in the continued existence of the organization that strips free will from everyone in the universe and regularly destroys numberless lives to do it. He could tell himself it was better than the alternative and he might even be right, if their claims about devastating multiversal war are true. He is a prince, after all (and, very briefly, a king), one who grew up understanding the value of pragmatism. He is still practical enough, he thinks, to choose the lesser evil, if better options really do not exist.
But he doesn’t know. He has nothing except propaganda and a temptation from the same (deeply unsettling) source—and giving in to the temptation would make him little better than Thanos, with all his lies to himself that the destruction of half the universe was necessary to save the half left behind.
Well. Maybe more than a little. Even in his relatively short time on Sanctuary, Loki came to know Thanos well enough to be confident that the Titan’s motivations were no more than self-serving lies to hide even from himself the truth that he wanted the universe to suffer, that it made him feel powerful to cause pain.
(For just a second he imagines Mobius interrogating Thanos and wants to laugh, even though it isn’t really funny. It’s been that kind of day. Or week, or year, or…whatever.)
If the threat of multiversal war is real, if the constant sacrifice of variants and everyone unlucky enough to be in their vicinity truly prevents more suffering than it causes—even then, it is still an evil thing to choose. And if he chooses it now without that certain knowledge, knowing that he is sacrificing countless variants of, quite possibly, everyone who has ever existed and choosing to do so purely for the sake of his own happiness and that of the people he loves—
Better than Thanos, yes. But not by much. Not by enough to live with it.
He exhales. “We write our own destiny now.”
“Oh, sure you do,” Miss Minutes says. “Good luck with that.”
Norns, he hopes he’s right this time.