Journey into...

May I introduce a What If?angsty plot twist in the Baby Thor au: Old Thor wants to come back, but there's only one body👀 Who will Loki choose to save? Or will he not and they both just... dissolve into stardust?

- Anon

You’re evil, nonny, I like it. 

But honestly I think Loki would be singularly incapable of making that choice. He’s not put together that way. 

Adult Thor in the comics with JiM kid Loki? Would absolutely decide in favor of the restart, the innocent one, the hope of betterment, although he would mourn old Loki deeply and would probably always blame himself for making that choice. But he would make it.

Adult Loki with kid Thor? I don’t think he could. And I also don’t think he would simply shut down and fail to choose in such a way that the answer would become a default of “then you get neither.” I think Loki’s trickster brain would go into overdrive to come up with another way. Any other way, no matter how outlandish. Come up with another body somehow (a sorcerer who is unhindered by little things like morality and you don’t think he can think of a few ways to fill that need suitably? Clone one, steal one from somewhere else or some other time, make one entire from raw material?). Or somehow devise a body time-share, or a way to merge them again. Or, alternatively, split the universe (and his own consciousness) into two different timelines, one for each choice, and live in both of them. 

See, what trickster gods are best at is taking an impossible situation and coming up with unexpected solutions, because they’re unwilling to be forced into a bad choice and refuse to see it as inevitable. They end up looking at it from an angle no one else does. Like…

If the “old” Thor is knocking at the door wanting to be let back in… which one of them is real? Can there be more than one instance of his spirit in the realms? Did his soul somehow get split? Is the child somehow a copy? Or is there something more underhanded going on and someone’s trying to get the better of Loki using his known weakness for his brother? If so, which one is the fake? If it’s not something malicious, if it’s an error, what does it mean? 

So I think Loki would entertain a lot of suspicions. He would have to get to the bottom of what was going on and how it had happened. And if it turned out that they were both, in fact, the real Thor, he would get to work on how to keep them both alive, and he would be willing to do pretty much any crazy shit to make that happen (whatever it is, he’s probably done crazier things for less important reasons!). But either way, he’s not going to make a choice between them based on his own feelings. He wouldn’t be able to. If he’s Thor, Loki loves him and won’t give him up. Even if, somehow, there are two of him.

(And that’s the other thing tricksters are good at! Having their clever solutions get them in waaaaay over their head (when they don’t actually blow up in their face), and ending up being the one who mostly suffers for it! If he does succeed in saving them both, then… he’s gonna be living the rest of his life, forever getting ganged up on by two Thors. Two Thors who are well aware that Loki loves the heck outta them and reordered the universe to protect them. Oof, poor Loki. You showed your hand, dude. Don’t blame me when they no longer believe your protests about how evil and cold and calculating you are. You brought this on yourself.)