I take you by the hand, promise you it will all be fine. The timeline takes care of all of us, if we trust in it, and they’ll just put you back where you need to be. It’s peaceful, safe. It doesn’t hurt at all. Will you come with me? I ask. Yes, you say. You’ll go with me. You’ll go quiet. Calm. Like you know what I mean. You understand right up until you bite the hand that saves you and I never knew until that moment: this is what a Loki does.
You’re variants, you say, you’ll all variants. We are all variants. And that’s how I knew you would be safe. You never trusted me, and you want them in your footsteps, but, Sylvie, we were never going to hurt you. We were never. You would have been here, and trained, and one day you would save other variants with me. I can save you from yourself if you just. Trust me. Trust Them. Trust in yourself.
I watch another hunter fall to your enchantment, and curse under my breath. Again. I got here too late, again. I call for backup, this time; if you’re not here, anyway, there’s no point trying to explain. Trying to talk you down, trying to – you set them all after us and don’t care who gets caught in the wake, but why should you? It was only ever about you alone, after all, wasn’t it? Send them after us, then. We won’t give up.
You disappear back into the ether, and Mobius swears. I feel for him, because I know you, and because I know you, I could tell him it’s a lost cause. But. But. But, then, you’re not my problem, anymore. I was promoted, Sylvie, have I told you that? Not that you’ll ever read any of these. You’re not my problem anymore, but you’re still you, and I still see your footprints in the disaster that should obscure anything but the threat to eternity.
When Loki follows, I know why. How many times have I wanted to walk those footsteps? To leap through the gateway after you, take you by the arms, beg you to listen to me? How many times have I closed my eyes, wondering if you could convince me of what you believed? Wondered what it would be like to dance to your tune, leave carnage behind me and fuck the timeline entire? So what hope did he have?
I watch the branch, and it’s so small no one else has seen it yet, and I wonder if it’s you. But it’s so small it merges with itself almost before it cleaves, and it’s then I picture your eyes, wide with fear or narrowed with hate, and you’re right between, deciding which way to go. They send me to investigate, just in case, and I slowprune it, just in case. And I think: hate me, Sylvie. Hate me. We always catch the Lokis who forget to hate.
You’re out the door before anyone can process, all of us used to reassurances of cooperation, and I’m the first to know, the first to, through some forgotten instinct, think to block the door, but you’re gone already. You’re gone and all I can see is the determination on your face and the utter certainty we’re not going to find you. I’ll look, they’ll send me to look, but it’s hardly my fault, is it? You’re a slippery one, Loki, Sylvie.
I don’t make it in time to stop you and by now I can never tell any longer what’s pure chance and what’s my own instincts begging me to let you fight. But both are up to higher powers than either of us, higher powers even than the ones I’ve seen, the ones I know. Someone out there has been talking to me through the Powers That Aren’t, and you can’t just cut off their heads, too, can you? It can’t always be violence, Sylvie – why can’t it be trust?
You’re learning to clean up after yourself. It’s beautiful, from a certain point of view; not a wound in time, but a surgical scar, neat and deft and far more expensive than it has any right to be. You don’t know what you’re doing. You do know what you’re doing, but you don’t know what it does to me. What it does to us. To everyone. All you know is how to end a trail, leave us stranded and desperate and silent in awe. You’re impressive, is all. But you know that already, don’t you?
I step into the office in trepidation. This has never happened before. To anyone, as far as I know. But you wouldn’t be the first, even if you’re the rare specimen that takes it upon yourself and the even rarer that succeeds. Of course you wouldn’t be the first. You’re special, but we’re none of us that special, and I know that now, I know that, when they show me picture after picture. Taller in their ice giant form, older in their regret. You’re not the youngest we’ve taken but you’re the youngest on the loose and, keepers, what will you be like at your full powers? This doesn’t leave this room, they say, and they tell me all about you.
It’s a game of catchup at this point. You can look like anyone you want and yet you still always look like you, and I – I may be the only one who recognizes you. But I’m not on the frontlines, and no one sees how often you linger in between my waking and sleeping, and no one asks. No one asks. And I can’t tell them, because if I – if you’re not you, then who am I? I need you out there for reasons I haven’t discerned yet, but I wouldn’t need them if we didn’t need you. You’re you, even when you’re not, and I’m me, even when you are. Are you ever me the way I’m you in the silence after hours wondering where you’ll leave an imprint next? Doing something, somewhere. I trace branches with my finger and hope.
You prune the first of the hunters and I wonder whether you consider it murder. You’ve killed before, we all know. I’ve killed before, we all have. Can I judge you for it, the way you would judge me? Pruning is supposed to be peaceful, like falling asleep to the sounds of the ocean. They tell us it doesn’t hurt. Do you think it hurts when you take an unknown weapon and use it on an unknown enemy? Do you mourn?
You kill another hunter and I wonder whether there’s ever a break from the fear for you to see the thousands of faces you’ve frozen in time. Yet another coworker I’ll never speak to again, yet another expression never made. Do they keep you awake? Do you see them march before you, full of accusation? How many show fear, how many hate, how many confusion, how many hope? How many show pity to cover their pleas, smug humor over the urge to fall to their knees? How many turned on you at the last moment? Did any escape?
I watch you prune yourself, and I want to know what you do that I don’t. You were a fighter first and always, and your eyes aren’t changed enough to give up. Tired, we all are, and, Sylvie, what I wouldn’t give to rest too, no more chasing, no more endless work of prune and prune and prune. But you would never lie down beside me and let it go. You’ve gone somewhere, and Sylvie, I can’t follow. How would I follow?
You did something to C-20, I know you did. She can’t remember you but she can remember and did it ever occur to you? Did it ever occur to you what you were doing, Sylvie? They can’t live like this anymore than you could. I can barely live like this, Sylvie. Why would you do that to her, knowing she had no defense? All she can remember is your eyes boring into hers, and herself. I can see your eyes in hers. Do you know yourself, Sylvie?
Another ice storm in another ice age and I shiver. I don’t like the field. There are rumors they might pull me out of it, but it’s not about talent, is it? It’s about you. They think I can’t hack it because I dropped your hand, because you took your hand from mine. I can’t see my hands in front of me, but I can see the bodies running, blurs through water turned glass. I know you’re one of them, but another watercolor impression does nothing for any of us. Do you feel sorry for them, Sylvie, when you take your gate away and leave them to die? Do I?
The branch grows and we’re on it like handcuffs, chafing at the too quick crossing and still, still, missing you. You’ve killed too many of us and no one remembers your face anymore. I don’t remember your face anymore, only the determination showing through your eyes, and the sensitivity turned up so high we have no hope but to miss you and to miss you and to miss you. And I do. Almost there and never soon enough for all that the whole timeline is ours. What kind of trick is that? Why do you know us better than we know you?
I watch it, sometimes. They’ve told me not to. They’ve issued an official reprimand. But I’ve looked and I’ve looked, I’ve trapped myself in a loop just to see where you turned, where you changed your mind. What I could have done to keep you with us. And that’s the thing I haven’t told them. You never changed your mind, did you, Sylvie? You were always, always going to make me take the bullet for you. And I don’t blame you. You didn’t know me; why would you care what rained down? But why should I want to?
You breach when I’m in my office, relaxing to a song that reminds me of you, and it’s not coincidence; nothing is. But you weren’t meant to be here. You weren’t meant to because I can feel my own fear in the midst of everyone else’s, and I have to stop you from getting all the way there, and all the teams have gone and no one there and how did you plan this? How long did you plan this? How many times have I read your file to never have dreamt that this was the route you would take? And yet when you’re stolen away only then do I reach out to stop you.
I won’t let you. I won’t let you. It’s the timeline on the line and you don’t understand. That’s okay, not one of us ever understood at first. I never understood until they promoted me. I didn’t need to understand until I was to take those like you under my wing, because how could we sentence to death those just like ourselves? And how do you, Sylvie? One day you’ll be here with me, on the side of order. You don’t have to be Chaos, you can just be yourself. You know that, don’t you, Sylvie? Take my hand again.
Did you want me after you, Sylvie? Did you want me to spend every waking hour with your smirk imprinted on my eyelids, every sleeping hour with the smear of your magic in my periphery? Did you want me to find the beginning and end of time for you, Sylvie? Did you want me to break down the walls between what we know and what they know and what They know? Tell me, Sylvie, just tell me what you want, just speak to me Sylvie, just tell me what you’re here for. There’s too much to be coincidence, Sylvie. What have you made me do? What have you made me?
I get a commendation, and then another. They think there’s never another slipup. They think I always catch them, now, and that’s because I never tell them when I see you. Well, never you, but I know the feel of you watching me through other eyes by now, of you waiting to see which of us will be sent, which variations and variants we’ll overlook. I can’t overlook you, but they might, and maybe then I’ll understand one day what it is about you. Why fight the inevitable, Sylvie? What does it get you?
You took our Loki, and I forgave you. You took so many of our hunters with you, too, and still, I never spoke a word against you, Sylvie. Why did you have to take my Mobius? Why turn him against the few people who loved him? Do you know what his life was like, before, Sylvie, do you even remember your own? It wasn’t rosy, Sylvie. You and Loki, you’re the same. Have you asked him about his childhood? Do you know how many things I saved you from, Sylvie? Why, of all people, am I first against the wall? Who are They to you?
I look at the file, and it isn’t yours, it’s mine. The memories, too, if I want them, and I’m not sure. Should I take them? Would you take them? Stupid question. I know you would. I know, and still, I hesitate. I wouldn’t know this, if not for you. It’s the careful handling, they say, and I don’t know if they mean catching you, or losing you, or letting you go so many times when I was supposed to just be looking. Is this a punishment or a reward? Do they know how many files exist only in my mind because I was too anxious to write them? Why, Sylvie?
You return one hunter unharmed, just to see what we’ll do, but I don’t want to see what we’ll do. You’ve covered your tracks well, and even the hunter doesn’t know the difference. If I couldn’t see your eyes in his – but you know how your gaze locked right on mine and never let go. You know, by now. You know we’ll hurt him. Why send him back to us? Just to make us live by our code, no matter how much it hurts us too?
Magic is common enough, but when I see it pervading the scene – we all know Lokis have magic, but this much? It’s your first real show of power, and it’s intoxicating the way power always is. I almost find myself asking: is there only one authority? What makes someone a god? How many powers are there in this world that might stand up to each other? How many Lokis is enough? Are you enough?
Your hand slips from mine over and over again in dreams, but it’s never you pulling away, never you pushing me, never you fighting to get free. It’s me, now, me dragging my hand out of yours, shoving you away from me, hitting you or kicking you as you drag me away from the timeline. It’s me, fighting off the soft caress of your magic, like a sunbeam and good scotch, smelling like scorched earth and freedom. How do you make burnt metal and ozone smell like perfume, Sylvie? Why won’t you take me with you?
I’m not the only one you try to drag to your side with a clever turn of phrase or a soft little twisting of thoughts. It’s the hollow sweetness of bile, and it fits with your acid tongue. Stop taking them, Sylvie, why must you take them from me? They aren’t yours, Sylvie, they aren’t yours to take. And I can’t stop you with the truth, because the truth was never sweet, and the truth was never dense enough to sink your teeth into. It’s a simple flavor, but it sustains us, Sylvie, unless you insist on poisoning it. But that’s what you’re the god of, isn’t it? Always. For all time.
You’ve taken them to your past, haven’t you, Sylvie? You’ve taken them back to Asgard, watched it burn beneath your feet. You’ve shown them your misery and hidden it behind misery that can never be changed. It’s not your life, Sylvie, it’s not even Loki’s, and it was never any of the rest of ours. Is that how you’re changing hearts and minds? Dragging them into a memory and never letting go? You have to let go, Sylvie. It isn’t safe.
You’ve taken them to my past, haven’t you, Sylvie? It’s not fair. That isn’t for you, and it isn’t for me, it’s for her, and she’s a different person who never had to worry about any of it. It’s not fair, Sylvie! It’s not your life to share! I’d share this, here, the TVA, that’s mine to give, but that – you can’t have that, Sylvie. You can’t go there. You can take as many of them as you want, but I will never, never give in if that’s the route you choose to go. Some things are sacred, Sylvie, even if you think the timeline isn’t.
I only meet you once, but you don’t get a chance to enchant me. I’m on guard for that, and if there’s one thing we have, it’s an abundance of esoteric equipment that can do any given thing if you aim it in the right direction. And me, I’m aimed in the right direction. Not on anyone’s authority, and that’s what catches up to me as you catch my eye, but the light of burning warships shines through your hair before I lose you in the debris. And you smile.
You really believe what you’re saying. Now, only now, you beg for your life – this is escape no longer, this is something more. And still, still, you don’t tell me. You don’t trust me as you never did, and yet mine is the information you ask for, and, Sylvie, how does that make sense? Let me tell you what I believe, Sylvie, let me speak to you with no weapon on my throat. Sylvie. We want the same thing. We can have the same thing. Sylvie. Sylvie. Sylvie.
It’s chaos, but it was always meant to be. So many branches at once is, fortunately, something we’ve always had a protocol for, and you can’t disrupt us that easily. Can’t distract us that easily. Can’t – but you can go anywhere you want to, can’t you, Sylvie? And we can’t stop you. I can’t stop you. And the question is, panicked hunters streaming past me to their designated exit points, how many branches can I stop? And how many do I want to? Is there a branch where you forgive me, Sylvie? One where I forgive you?
I almost thought I had a Loki with him, you know. I almost thought one of them understood. He was more like me than like you, Sylvie; he had remorse. He knew all of it had gone wrong, and he wanted to fix it. Glue the broken pieces together and sand it down until it was pristine. I made a mistake with you, Sylvie, but you’ll never give me the chance to glue you back together, will you? But he follows you like neither of you ever followed me. He trusts you like you never trusted me. Two broken pieces that fit together like you and I never did. Two broken pieces in the kintsukuroi at the end of the world.
You’re on my mind when Mobius kisses me, asks me to give him a chance. There’s someone else, I tell him, but I don’t tell him it’s my husband from the sacred timeline, someone I knew and loved and pledged forever to before I pledged forever to here. I don’t tell him it’s something I don’t feel and yet can’t stop feeling, and I don’t tell him it’s your fault. You put this information in my mind, Sylvie. How could we judge without it? But you don’t want to be judged, you want to be the judge, don’t you? How do you judge me, Sylvie?
There’s a man at the end of the world, and he knew both of our life stories before we did, Sylvie. He set me up to fail, and he set you up to…what are you doing, there, Sylvie? What does he want with you? How can I put it back the way it’s meant to be, Sylvie? My whole life wiped away in an instant, meaningless, like I never existed, and Sylvie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Sylvie, but I can’t do it any more than you could. Oh, Sylvie, I’m running away, too. Oh, Sylvie, I’m running. I can’t be here only to give up, can I? Sylvie? How do I not give up?
Every day I sit behind my desk, I miss being in the field, looking for signs of you I never yield to the people I’m supposed to trust. Every file I read I see reflections of you in: defiance, power, survival. Drawn to destruction, reveling in magic, offering me your hand even though you know I’ll never take it again. Every variant I sentence is you in microcosm. Cooperation where you had risk, but not the you I hoped to see before me once more. I’d sentence you to the library because you understand so much and once you were there, maybe you could finally explain it to me.
You hold out someone else’s hand as remnants of a naval battle writ large burn up at our sides, shrieks of blackened shrapnel turning to fireworks around us. Come with me you offer, and I want to, you know I want to, but Sylvie…. No one sees me here, with Ragnarök in twisted metal, your wolf in the hope of life amongst the stars, your serpent in the stripmines of asteroids whose titles pass from hand to hand at throat. And still I can’t. I stare at the calluses on your fingers long enough for you to become yourself and then something crashes and it’s time to find my way home.
There’s a dragon at the end of the world, and it’s meant to fight off evil. Are you evil, Sylvie? Is he? Good luck strung in hope and prayer and every step predestined and I can see you, Sylvie, she’s finally let me see you, and you’re the first one who’s ever had a choice. You take your choice and you give me one, and, fuck, Sylvie, what kind of choice is that?
There’s a baby at the beginning of the world, at the beginning of everyone’s. Yours is different from mine, but not yet different from his, from all of theirs, and is it strange to see who you could have been? Who you were never meant to be? But then, who’s to say, anymore – there was no one point where I could say you were different from him. Happy children, and perhaps you changed form left when he went right, and perhaps a parent whispered a different word in your ear, and then one day. One day the timeline branched. And it was no one thing, and you are no one thing, and I am no one thing. Where are you, Sylvie?
You can’t trust anyone, not even yourself. You push Loki away and only four of us see: you, me, him, and Them. And They’re ended soon enough, no argument, no debate. You see so clearly, Sylvie. How did you get that? When you aren’t told day in day out who you are, how can you possibly know? How can you make that decision, and nod to yourself, and never know a moment of regret? Let me do more than just watch you through the looking glass. Tell me what you know, Sylvie. Tell me how you know.
You enchant a merchant for food, and an innkeeper for somewhere to stay. You enchant the tailor to sew you something that fits better than your rags, too small and covered in so much more than just blood. And you stare at the other children, and you’re lonely, and you don’t enchant them to play with you? Why not? I don’t understand how someone would run away, endanger the universe, and still, and still. So selfish and too scared to take what you want. Come back, then. There are other children here. One will be your friend. There are so many friends at the TVA. Why won’t you trust us?
You’re giving lie to the Sole Survivor, Sylvie. How many worlds can you watch take every single person with them and leave you untouched? You watch one, two, three, escape, you watch a dozen run and the others burn. How can you watch it, Sylvie? Is this why you hate the timeline? Every world you have to take a torch to, every world you have to save from saved from burning? How many places can I find you just because I know you that no one else knows to look? Please, Sylvie. Come home.
You were always different, and yet, you’re right at home with the other Lokis. Running in a pack past the end of time, and still, still. Living when they look like they should die, betraying when they look like they should trust. What is the difference between you and any of them except time, except chance? Except some twist of circumstance that let them move where you couldn’t, trapped them in their own spells, freed them from imprisonment? Why, then, are your eyes the only ones that glow when you say things should not be so? Why are your eyes the only ones that can still see me?
You have nothing but a piece of candy, saved for when the desert steals the last of your spit, and you fight tooth and nail for it. My fingers play along the scar you gave me. We’re unchanging, here, except for small things. You, on the other hand…every time I see you, you’re taller, unless you’re shorter again. You gain weight and then you lose it, and then you claw your way back to health. You bite a stranger who tries to take your last hope and yet you give it away to the next sad face that comes along. Your hair grows, and lightens in the sun, bleaches in the radiation, burns in the poison atmosphere of yet another place you shouldn’t be. Your eyes are hurt and suspicious and vengeful and sometimes dull, and almost always sparking with magic. Your mouth is soaked in red because there’s always water in blood.
Your hand hits bone just so, breaking nose and driving skull into brain, and there’s a body in front of you and a branch almost unfixable the second we see it and my heart judders in my chest. You’re gone by the time I get there, but you’re gone, then, never making such an obvious mistake again. Sometimes when you kill the person who holds the big red button, everything changes. Sometimes when everything changes, we see it. Sometimes when we see it, I come running after you just to find out I’ve always been too late.
If you had given me more time, I would have taken your hand, Sylvie. But, then. If we had given you more time, you would have trusted Thor. If we had given him more time, he would have righted his wrongs. If we had given Mobius more time, he would have apologized, and that could have gone one of two ways. If we had given Casey more time they would have changed the research, saved the oceans too quickly. If we had given B-15 more time she would be in charge of the company, just in time to sue the Avengers. And if They had given me more time, I would have talked them down, and there would be three more variants on the timeline. If you had given me more time, there might not be a timeline at all.
What if I told you what you were looking for? What if I gave it to you right away? What if I made Miss Minutes listen to you and help you break your way in? What if I tunneled my way through to the end of the world? What if I opened the door there, held it for you so you could pass, let you in without taking a weapon to yourself? What if I followed you there, what if I fought with you, what if I saved the universe to your wish?
What if I never took your hand?