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“There has to be something we can do,” Mobius said.
“Did you want to hear the options again, or—”
“I am very aware of the options you gave us after letting two people in there! Unless you have something new, I don’t want to hear anything else from you. God, Sylvie was right about this place, wasn’t she?”
B-15 gave him a deeply unimpressed look. “You’re only now figuring that out?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, and Loki was right that she shouldn’t have rushed in here without a plan, without backup,” B-15 said, but there was no judgment in her voice. “You ever thought about what a mindfuck it must have been, growing up that alone, always seeing places destroyed and reset like none of it was even real?”
“Yeah,” Mobius said heavily. “Hell, we treated everybody else like that too, didn’t we? Only we were worse because we were doing it to other people, like every variant or anybody doomed in an apocalypse just stopped being a person, and it was fine because…” He shrugged. “Because we weren’t NPCs, I guess. Kinda makes you sick, doesn’t it?”
“Believe me, I’ve had plenty of sleepless nights about all of this. Which I guess is better than the alternative, morally speaking. It’s just, it would be weird, you know? Spending your whole life not having consequences for your actions on anyone but yourself, because you live in apocalypses and you literally can’t change anything, and then suddenly you can and everybody expects you to rewire your whole brain overnight?”
Okay, maybe Mobius hadn’t thought about it quite as thoroughly as B-15 apparently had. “But you’d just…have to. Because the consequences are real now.”
“Sure. Like Loki putting himself in danger to go after her. He’s a big boy and he can make his own decisions and that was a very predictable thing for him to do, so it would’ve been good if she’d thought of it too before she went in.” B-15 shrugged. “It sucks.”
As if on cue, the alarms on Loki’s station started to shriek. The Nightmare Department director pulled up a screen, frowned at it, and transferred the frown to Mobius. “Who did you say these people were?”
“My friends. Why does it suddenly matter now?”
“Your friends are doing something statistically improbable,” she said. “Very improbable. If not for the fact that I know our equipment is good, I would call it statistically impossible. His nightmare increased to a similar level as hers, and then they synchronized and began to cancel each other out. That doesn’t happen.”
“They’re variants of each other,” Mobius suggested.
She shook her head. “Having the same essential temporal aura wouldn’t be enough to produce this result, not on its own.”
B-15 smiled. “They did create a nexus event inside an apocalypse one time, though.”
The director gaped at her. “…they did not.”
“Do you get out of your department?” Mobius asked. “Like, ever?”
“No,” the director sniffed. “Why would I?”
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” B-15 said. “The point is, Loki and Sylvie are doing something unprecedented in there, right? Because they match. They’ve led wildly different lives and they still match. That’s how they find each other, beat the nightmares, and make it out.”
“Maybe more than that,” Mobius said. “Sylvie wanted to…change things. Like, really change things, beyond just waking up everybody else. Could they do that, from inside the dream?”
The director hesitated. “Nobody’s done it before. That’s—that’s not how it works. People don’t change the Nightmare Department. They go in, and they come back out changed or they die. Even if these two figured out how to affect the entire ND, the whole system would be fighting them.”
Mobius exchanged a glance with B-15, who was still smiling, having apparently gone full-bore optimist at this point. Mobius wasn’t quite there yet now despite his earlier optimism, but if pressed, he would have to admit to feeling a little more relaxed than he’d been a few minutes ago. “If anyone’s capable of that,” B-15 said, “it’s Loki and Sylvie.”
Loki fell.
He fell so long and so far that he forgot he had ever done anything else, forgot anything else existed except this endless airless plunge through the frigid dark—but his body refused to forget that it needed light and air and warmth, refused to stop tormenting him for the lack of things he didn’t understand as he fell suffocating, freezing, burning, his mind unraveling—
This is a nightmare.
—no, Loki—
A monster seized his arm and his flesh did not burn but turned blue, and his existence turned inside out with a horror he could not comprehend. He saw an asteroid field spread out before him. He saw asteroids piercing a violent, violet sky above him. He saw a city, with a hole ripped in the sky.
He fell.
He couldn’t breathe.
He was missing something, something big, and he choked on his laughter as the thought came to him because he was missing everything, he didn’t know who he was or where he came from beyond the fall but he knew he was missing something—no, someone—someone important—
Sylvie, what does she want with Sylvie—
IS SHE ALIVE?
He landed, plowing through a maze of cubicles. Fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered around him, one dangling from its wires where his descent had smashed it out of the ceiling. The carpet was some nondescript color between brown and yellow, with an enormous blotch by his face that he identified after a moment’s confusion as a coffee stain.
Coffee. There was…there was coffee in the office he shared with Sylvie. Hot cocoa. This office? No, this…this wasn’t right. The office building he shared with Sylvie didn’t look like this. Did it? He couldn’t remember, but he was suddenly sure that building was wrong too.
Loki shoved aside a piece of cubicle partition and rolled over, groaning. The building groaned back and he froze, his heart pounding his throat, and then the floor shattered underneath him and he was falling again.
This time his body broke when he landed, and he lay stunned and gasping, blood running into his eyes, unable to believe that he still lived when it was impossible, with a vague horror that he knew what came next and it was worse—
It was a confusion of pain and blue light and dark rock and other presences in his mind, and he didn’t know what was real, and he was right that it was worse. There was a hand with too many fingers and that hand meant pain. There was a Titan with skin the color of a bruise, the Titan, and he promised to train Loki, to make him stronger, but there was no part of it that felt like anything except being broken. (He saw the Titan’s Luphomoid daughter, occasionally, and what he did to her to make her stronger, even as he kept her pathetically vying for his attention and affection.) There was a scepter, and it hurt him too at first, and he was so, so angry…
The city, spread out below him. Thor, hopeful, before his face twisted in anguish, ugly with grief and rage.
No, not again.
Another monster seized him but it was green this time and it smashed him into the floor until he stopped moving, and his head very slowly began to clear but he still didn’t understand, and then—
Falling again—no, something was dragging him up, Thor’s little mortal the last thing in his vision, probably more than he deserved, but Thor saved him at the last—so he saved Thor, took an enormous sword through his chest for his trouble, thought finally as he died in Thor’s arms knowing at least that Thor still loved him and he wouldn’t go back to suffocate in that cell and feel his mind splinter to fragments—
Except he didn’t die, somehow, so he had to improvise, and he sat on a clifftop five years later watching his father dissolve, the same man who hadn’t bothered to tell Loki in person that his mother had been murdered or let him attend her funeral, and yet the grief now was…
…was not unlike the grief he felt aboard the Grandmaster’s little ship, watching Asgard explode into dust. Thor’s idea, but Loki’s hands and his voice that raised Surtur and doomed the only home he ever knew. Loki’s choice, for so many reasons, to take the Tesseract and use it to escape Surtur, and thereby doom what was left of Asgard, and himself.
Because he thought he could keep the Tesseract from Thanos, knowing the stakes, only to find that the stakes meant nothing in the face of Thor screaming in the Titan’s grip. And it was very simple after that, because Thor had to live, anything else was unbearable, and Thanos was so obsessed with balance and he had promised Loki great suffering in return for failure, and so to give Thor a chance to survive, Loki had to die—
Panicked, struggling, his body screaming in pain as Thanos crushed his throat, the snap of his neck blasting through him like lightning—Thor sobbing into his motionless chest as he finally fell into the dark—
As he saw it all on a screen, forced to contend with the loss of everyone and everything he’d ever loved inside of maybe 20 minutes, only realizing how desperately he still loved his family (who, despite everything, seemed to love him in return) now that it was too late. Watched himself die, and that damned time collar felt very tight.
But then, but then…
Mobius gave him a chance and it led him to Sylvie, and Lamentis, and…meteors hissing down from a violent sky, the knowledge that he was going to die here and nobody would know or care but it was okay because they were together—
Only they didn’t die, instead they made it through agents and false Timekeepers and a different kind of barren void, all the way to a citadel at the end of time, where he couldn’t find the right words and Sylvie looked at him without a sliver of the trust and affection they’d shared and it made him want to die, that she thought he could bring himself to fight her for anything less than his fear of what killing He Who Remains could do to the universe and to Sylvie herself. So he flung himself in front of her sword, trusting her not to kill him
(only there was too much power behind her blow and she cut deep into his throat, and he collapsed into her arms as he choked on his own blood, her horror-stricken face the last thing he saw)
and he was right, she was so good she pulled her stroke just in time, barely nicking him, and he put his life and his heart in her hands and convinced her of his sincerity, but it wasn’t enough, and she kissed him and pushed him through a time door.
And there the timeline split again. In one life, he fought his way back to the TVA he knew, and Sylvie eventually returned to him there, having seen the beginnings of incursions and multiversal war and realized she had to help fight what she’d unleashed, and Loki thought they would be okay—but they weren’t, because she was only there physically, barely willing to look at him, and he didn’t know what to do, only that it hurt to see her every day and feel more separated from her than ever. So it had been an easy decision, really, going in here after her.
In another life—
See, I've read your file. It’s you! You’re the problem. Every time we've ever found a you. Problem is, you think you're special but you’re not. At the end of the day, you just make everything worse. For Mobius, for B-15... For your mother. ’Cause that's what you do. You lose.
I know I’m the last person you want to see.
Correct.
I haven’t come here to make trouble.
Then why are you here?
The TVA is in danger.
You have some nerve coming here.
I know you just want to be left alone to live a life on your branch. I understand that.
This is all very familiar, isn’t it?
You don’t care? I guess not. I guess this all worked out the way you wanted it to and you’re fine just walking away. It’s so selfish.
See? We’re both selfish. I know this is hard. But your friends are back where they belong.
But without them...where do I belong?
We’re all writing our own stories now. Go write yours.
There’s nowhere left to go.
Don’t worry, lover boy. She’s okay.
If you want to stop me, you’ll have to kill me.
Make the hard choice. Break the Loom and you cause a war that kills us all. Game over. Or, kill her, and we protect what we can.
What do I do?
It’s not enough to protect the Sacred Timeline, Loki. Even down there, it’s full of death and destruction and injustice. Do you really want to be the god who takes away everyone’s free will so you can protect that?
I know what I want. I know what kind of god I need to be. For you. For all of us.
Oh, he’d fucked it all up, hadn’t he? Hurt her, over and over again, for all that he really just wanted her to be okay, and let He Who Remains manipulate him from beyond the grave until even in finding a better solution that kept everyone alive, Loki still lost, alone at the end of time, sacrificing himself to give Sylvie the chance to be okay but never able to do anything else for her or with her, and he thought He Who Remains would probably laugh at the outcome if he could see it.
Loki looked up, slowly, and was entirely unsurprised to find that all the nightmare-chaos of memories that were and were not his had finally deposited him at the base of a long black stairway, streaked with gold. Dying timelines hung in the air around him.
There was no Loom crisis, in the life he’d actually lived. But it seemed some things were inevitable.
Loki gathered up all the timelines, flooding them with life, and turned to the stairs. He dragged the timelines up, up, knowing what he had to do—knowing with even more certainty when they vanished from his hands and he realized the misshapen little throne was already filled.
Sylvie looked so, so sad and tired.
Loki knelt in front of her and covered her hand with his own, feeling the strain in her fingers, the pulsing life of the timelines. He touched his free hand to her jawline and smiled when her eyes opened.
“Oh,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Loki said. “I think we both know that’s my job.”
She frowned at him, squinting like he wasn’t making sense—or like it was hard to focus on him past the entire multiverse roaring through the back of her mind. “What?”
“You saw it too, didn’t you? The other path? Everything goes wrong and I end up here and it’s okay, Sylvie, really. I think this is how it works. I take your spot here, and then you get to wake up and have the life you deserve. It’s okay. I’ve fucked things up enough.”
Sylvie blinked at him. “Wait. Wait. Are you saying one of us has to stay in here? Did they say that?”
“I don’t…think so? But it makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s…balance. And it’s what I’m meant for, in more than one timeline.”
Sylvie stared at him for a moment before her expression cleared, then hardened. “Fuck that shit,” she said. “I’m more than a cosmic mistake, you’re more than a cosmic sacrifice, and dreams don’t have rules.” She sat up, dislodging his hands, and flung away both handfuls of timeline. Loki made one panicked grab for them out of sheer reflex but it was too late anyway, all the timelines slipping up out of reach.
“Believe me,” he said, his mouth very dry, “dreams can have rules when someone else is running the show.” They could when your captor/host employed telepaths, at any rate. He still didn’t know how much he remembered from Sanctuary was real and how much had only happened inside his head.
“We know who’s running this show,” Sylvie said. “We already broke their rules, remember? Huge ones like ‘it’s not possible to cause a nexus event in an apocalypse.’ And half of them are supposed to be the good guys now anyway, right? Your friends? For how well that’s worked out—”
“I know that!” Loki said, frustrated. “You’re right, okay? When I said I fucked up, I was referring to a lot of things, on multiple timelines. There’s still evil at the heart of the TVA and it needs to be excised or we’ll never have a chance against what’s coming and that’s why I think this is a trap. Why would this place let both of us go, now that it has us? So—it has to be you. You deserve the chance.”
“Loki, for fuck’s sake,” Sylvie snapped, “I never wanted you to sacrifice yourself for me, I just wanted you to talk to me,” and then she turned bright red up to her ears.
Loki gaped at her. “What did you think I was trying to do? You wouldn’t talk to me!”
“Yeah, no, I kind of recognized it was a stupid thing to say as the words came out of my mouth,” Sylvie muttered. “Look, I’m…sort of shit at talking to people, you know? About things that matter? So I kept avoiding it because I didn’t know what to say and I was sure I would fuck it up. I did, in one life.”
Loki shook his head and offered her words back: “I just want you to talk to me. I don’t need you to find the exact right words or whatever. And I think it’s safe to say we both fucked up.”
“We’ll talk,” Sylvie said. “Okay? But not here. Later, when we both get out of here. Because I don’t care what they want to do, and I don’t care what we did in another life, neither of us is staying here. We’re stronger together. So we’re staying together.”
“There is a certain logic to that plan,” Loki admitted, mostly to hide the frankly embarrassing rush of relief at the simple fact that he wasn’t going to be left alone again.
“Well, I’m glad you agree, because you know I’m not above tricking you to keep you safe,” Sylvie said briskly. She took his hand and twined their fingers together, and Loki actually wanted to cry at how good it felt. “So. I don’t know about you, but I think my nightmare got more than terrifying enough that I should be able to wake up—”
“Same,” Loki said, grimacing.
“Okay. So we can probably wake up. But I didn’t come in here to sightsee, I wanted to wake up everybody else and tear this place apart, and I think we can, now that we know who we are and why we’re here.” She met his eyes—fierce, determined, with just a hint of uncertainty, and it hurt to understand why. “I just need to know if you’re with me.”
“I only came here to wake you up,” Loki said. “But you’re right. The Nightmare Department has to go. It’s not enough just to wake up everyone who’s here—we have to make sure this place can’t be used again.”
Sylvie grinned, almost feral and so beautiful it took Loki’s breath away. “Let’s break something.”