Chapter 1
Loki wanted to leave.
He had to leave.
He was sure he couldn’t stay there, not after what he had seen.
He felt so confused, so tired and so… powerless.
That was the right word for it.
He was powerless.
He had no control over what was happening, no idea of where he was, he didn’t have his magic help him and the Tesseract…
Oh, the Tesseract.
That cube, the instrument on which he had relied and that was a source of infinite magic, was totally useless.
A paperweight.
Just like the Stones.
The Infinity Stones, held in a drawer like children’s knickknacks.
Loki shuddered thinking back about the creature who so desperately wanted.
And about what the Mad Titan had done to him in order to obtain the location of the Stones.
Now Loki had touched them.
Had held the Time Stone in his hand, and nothing had happened. He had been seen doing that, and there had been no reaction. That grey clerk hadn’t shuddered in fear of what Loki had just done, of the possible implications of his gesture. No, he had paid no mind to the Stone, as if Loki had just picked up a pen.
And that was what the Stones were to the TVA. Just like pens, something that could be kept in abundance in the drawer of a desk. Something of little value, something that held no importance.
Loki was lost.
He had spent centuries convinced of the power of the Stones, considering that just one single Infinity Stone would have multiplied his powers a thousandfold, and there the Stones were, treated like and old trinket.
And actually being just that.
If the Infinity Stones were trinkets, then what was of him?
If the Stones held no power, then what was of his own powers?
They were just a speck of dust when compared to the Stones, and if the Stones were nothing, then he was less than nothing.
Loki took a deep breath.
He needed to escape.
And yet he had been the one to return to the room in which he had been led before his aborted attempt at fleeing.
That had seemed like the safest option. At least those people wouldn’t have immediately come looking for him there, and he had a little time to refocus and gather his strengths. The encounter with the Hulk had weakened him, and the TVA had captured him before he was able to fully restore his health.
And that was without counting what the Other had done to him.
Loki shook his head.
He had no clue what was going on, no idea of what to do.
But there was something that had never failed Loki.
His curiosity.
There was a strange saying on Midgard about curiosity and cats, but he really couldn’t remember it in the moment.
He got up and went to sit on the chair that had been previously occupied by the Agent of the TVA. The man had used that small computer to show him his… memories? He didn’t know.
Those weren’t his memories, because he didn’t have them.
He couldn’t call them that.
He could say at best that he was being shown his history, or what it was supposed to be at least.
The path the Norns had weaved for him, hadn’t he decided to pull one of the threads.
That was definitely easier for his puzzled mind to understand, and he unconsciously decided to grasp on that. Something familiar in a swirl of confusion and madness.
He glanced in the direction of the screen, and realised that that was not what he cared about.
He didn’t want to see again those so-called heroes of Midgard. He didn’t care about their shining armours, fancy shields, and sharp arrows.
There was only one thing he cared about.
He pressed his fingers on the keyboard, and moved forward to the only thing he cared about.
Another version of him would have been interested into knowing what had happened before, but Frigga was the only thing on his mind.
His mother.
He looked at her, lifeless, on that screen.
That was his mother, and he had been responsible of her death.
He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t stop thinking about how stupid he had been, about how it was all his fault, and while there was a part of him that refused to admit that what he was seeing was real, another knew that there was no mistake.
That was Frigga.
Dead, her chest not moving, and yet still her.
Loki had been shown illusions, his mind twisted by the Mad Titan until he had managed to trick him and freed himself of the vices of that control, and he could say by now what was real and what was not.
What he was seeing belonged to the first category.
There was no way in the Nine Realms and beyond to mimic the aura Frigga had always had and kept in her death.
That was his mother, and he had been responsible of her death, after telling the worst and most unbelievable lie he had ever uttered.
Frigga was his mother.
No matter what blood dictated.
His breath started trembling as his eyes focused on the lifeless face of the woman who had raised him and taught him everything that defined him.
His fingers twitched, trying to reach that magic, that green colour that had been passed from Frigga to him, but to no avail.
He would have just wanted that little comfort, that memory of her, and he was denied even that.
He couldn’t keep seeing that image.
It was already seared in his brain, so he pressed the key that would have led him forward in his history.
His eyes lingered for a second on Frigga’s funeral, but he didn’t want to see any of that anymore.
He just kept pressing, until something made him stop.
Odin was there.
Older, more pained, dressed in clothes he had never seen him wear.
They were sitting on a cliff, Odin, Thor, and him.
“I love you, my sons. Remember this place,” he paused, looking in the distance, “Home,” the old god said, and Loki felt something in him break.
He saw it in the screen, in the way the Loki he had never been reacted.
And then Odin disappeared.
He died, just like the sagas said he would have.
He disappeared in a golden dust, and Loki knew by instinct that every speck of that dust would have found Frigga, wherever she was.
He took a deep breath, but he couldn’t hold back tears.
That had… that had been the only thing he had wanted. And Odin had said it. His father had said it. Just before dying.
Loki swallowed around tears, but he couldn’t.
They were just chocking him.
He pressed the key again, and his history unfolded some more.
He didn’t understand where he was.
He didn’t understand why Stark was there.
He had just seen him a few hours before – at least in his conception of time – and had thrown the man out of a window, but now…
Stark was hugging him?
The Loki on the screen seemed destroyed, as if he was crumbling on himself. As if there was nothing keeping him together any longer.
And Stark was there to catch him.
“I know, Lo, I know,” the man cradled him close, holding him, “I know it hurts, but you couldn’t know. It wasn’t your fault,” he pressed a kiss against Loki’s dark hair, and the god just curled a bit more in the embrace that was already enveloping him.
Before Loki had even the chance to understand what was happening, he saw a different episode.
There were people there, apparently the Avengers plus some other people, and there was yelling and shouting. It was because of him apparently, but Stark was by his side.
All the commotion ended when the human barked, “I don’t give a fuck! I love him and he stays.”
Loki didn’t know if he was pressing some of the keys making the device work, or if that thing had a will of its own, but the scene shifted again, and there he was, sitting on a modern sofa with Stark’s head in his lap, gently carding his fingers in the man’s brown hair.
“Do you have any idea of how happy you make me, my love?” he heard himself say, before the Loki on the screen got his hand snatched away and gently kissed by the human.
“If it’s half as happy as you make me, I think you may be quite elated.”
The god didn’t say anything, just flicked the man on the nose, but while doing so he was smiling.
The scene changed again, and Stark was bringing him tea while Loki was reading by the window.
He commented with a “Do you want your drink now?”, and Loki reacted by throwing him a pillow before accepting the cup with a smile.
The Loki that sat in the TVA had reacted very differently to the same offer just a few moments before.
After that a pretty uncommon scene presented in front of Loki’s eyes, and he had already seen rather uncommon stuff.
He was in the Stark tower, leaning against the bar from which Stark had taunted him just a few hours before in his perception, a drink in his hand and a rather inebriated look on his face. Loki could see it, that version of him was drunk.
“Men trærne danser og fossene stanser, Når hun synger, hun synger ‘kom hjem’, Men trærne danser og fossene stanser,” he was singing, and under Stark’s perplexed gaze he switched to English, “When she sings, she sings ‘come home’, when she sings, she sings ‘come home’”.
The drunk version of himself looked at Thor, and went back to the original version of the song, alternating between English and Old Norse, “Men trærne danser og fossene stanser, Når hun synger, hun synger ‘kom hjem’, Men trærne danser og fossene stanser, when she sings, she sings ‘come home’, when she sings, she sings ‘come home’, when she sings, she sings ‘come home’, when she sings, she sings ‘come home’”.
The unknown Loki waved a hand, drunkenly shushing the drunken Avengers who had joined him in his singing, and his voice turned deeper and softer, “I stormsvarte fjell, jeg vandrer alene, over isbreen tar jeg meg frem, I eplehagen står møyen den vene, og synger: ‘når kommer du hjem?’”, he sang, looking in Stark’s direction, and the man melted under his gaze.
There was so much love in the way in which the human was looking at him, moved by him singing in his native tongue, and probably even understanding what he was saying, that Loki didn’t even know what to think.
A small part of him recorder the fact that Stark must truly care about him if he had taken the time to learn Old Norse only for his sake.
In the next unknown memory Loki saw himself in a bedroom he didn’t know, but that sported a bedside table that was definitely his: he recognised the book on top of it as a novel he loved reading, and that he had many times seen in his chambers in Asgard. What he wasn’t familiar with was the fact that Stark was sleeping right next to him, spooning him, as the Loki in the memory woke up for a moment, sighed in contentment when he realised that he was exactly where he wanted to be, and went back to sleep with a quick kiss to Stark’s arm.
Loki was so confused he was beyond words.
He… he didn’t remember of having ever had that level of familiarity and intimacy with anyone. That was just so uncommon, so strange, that he didn’t know what was happening.
He took his eyes away from the screen, too overwhelmed by what he had seen to investigate some more about what his life would have been, hadn’t him be robbed of it.
He then heard his brother speaking to him in that way, telling him ow much he cared about his little brother, and then the scenery shifted again and…
No.
No, it couldn’t be.
Loki looked at himself facing the Mad Titan, placing himself between him and his brother, and then…
And then he couldn’t keep his eyes away from the screen.
When he felt his own neck snap, he felt sick.
He gasped.
No.
That was…
No.
That was wrong.
And yet it must be true.
Those were the memories he had never lived, but they had happened.
In another timeline, to a Loki that wasn’t him, but they had happened. They were a possibility, a possibility for him, a scenario he could have lived.
And died in.
Suddenly the collar around his throat became a burden he couldn’t stand anymore.
˜
Loki had lived too much during his crossing of timelines and apocalypses, and after what had happened, he didn’t know where to go.
It was too much, even for him.
He felt hollow, tired, alone.
Even the person he had considered a friend didn’t remember who he was anymore.
He needed someone.
He needed a grounding presence, someone who cared about him.
He didn’t know where to go, what to do, but there was just one consolation in all that: nobody knew that he was a prisoner of the TVA. He had access to all their rooms and devices, and rather than dwelling in his own misery he decided to slide in the archives.
With no idea of what to search, his instinct led him to the ‘S’ section; there was just one person who came to his mind in that moment of utter abandonment.
He went to Tony Stark’s file, and retrieved the recording of the man’s memories.
It was easy for him to find a Theatre in which to play him, and when he saw that most of the memories matched the ones he had previously seen from his own file, his eyes swelled with tears.
The significant moments of the man’s life regarded him.
Sure, there were some others, bus so many of them were about Loki that it was sure that his presence was something crucially important for the human.
He heard himself singing one more time, but this time from another point of view.
It was even more touching than from what he had seen from his own unlived memories.
He could perceive the love in there, could understand how important that moment had been for Stark.
And the way in which the man was looking at him… it was as if Loki was the centre of his own personal universe.
After that the memory moved to a different one, and Thor was there too.
He was telling Anthony that Loki had died, and that there wasn’t even a corpse to grieve.
Loki saw the man crumble in front of his eyes.
It was as if half of the human had just died there.
There was rage, despair, things thrown and smashed, but in the end the only feeling he could perceive was despair.
Loki had never seen that in no one else, and in the spur of a moment he took his decision.
He stormed out of the room, and stole one of the timepads.
He didn’t care about the implications of his gesture, he only wanted to go there.
He just set the time, and disappeared from that unknown TVA.