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Loki doesn’t know anything is wrong until he feels the timelines—all the timelines—start to die.
It’s not like it was at the beginning, when he could only feel the timelines on the edges of his awareness—before he’d made himself part of them, before he’d taken them all in his hands and poured his life essence into them to keep them alive. This is sudden agony, like someone reaching into his chest and ripping out his heart except, somehow, it leaves him bleeding to death instead of killing him outright. It feels like bleeding to death, so much so that Loki is briefly confused to glance down at himself and see nothing wrong with his body at all, before his brain catches up and he realizes someone, somehow, is killing the timelines.
Reality shudders and writhes around him. He makes a panicked, instinctive grab toward whatever is doing this and finds it on Midgard, of course, in an otherwise fairly ordinary timeline: a young bald woman in the bowels of a subway station, hooked up to a hulking machine and grinning ecstatically, a machine that is TVA tech in a bizarre little TVA base on a timeline. Bewildered, Loki widens his awareness and lets information flood him from the individual timelines of the woman, the machine, the TVA agent who looks like he thinks he’s in charge, the two men bursting in dressed in outlandish superhero costumes (one red and one yellow) —
—and reels back, overwhelmed and dizzy. Norns what a mess, what a fucking mess. Rogue TVA agents, again? Killing timelines because they couldn’t be bothered to do their jobs and use all their extra new time to fix the anchor being nonsense instead? Sending heroes to the Void and making deals with the madwoman who apparently controls most of it? (He doesn’t want to think about how it must feel to have Cassandra Nova’s fingers in your head, and he remembers the pain of the Other’s mental touch and wonders anyway.)
And now, mostly thanks to a handful of TVA agents who think they know better than everyone else, Cassandra is killing all the timelines to leave nothing behind but the Void that she will rule, a never-ending apocalypse, and she might very well be killing Loki too. His life force is entwined with the timelines now to create the endless feedback loop that keeps them thriving and keeps him alive without most of the usual necessities of life, and to rip that way all at once—
Oh. Lovely. Deadpool is making a game of sacrificing himself instead of Logan to stop Cassandra. It’s so good to know the multiverse’s only hope is taking this seriously.
The sense of being ripped apart intensifies, and for an instant Loki is tempted to release the timelines. It might be too late anyway, he might be too bound up in them, but he could try to separate himself enough to survive. Instead he holds on tighter and pours everything he has left into them, willing the timelines to survive, to fight Cassandra with the strength of their trillions and trillions of souls.
Deadpool on his own is not enough. But Logan reaches him in time and together they are enough to begin to overload the Time Ripper. For his part, Loki can’t quite breathe anymore and he’s seeing everything in shades of gray as his life force drains out, but he feels the shift—
—then the massive backlash. Cassandra is gone. The multiverse is safe. Loki sags back into his stupid little throne, shoulders heaving as he gasps for breath. Eventually he realizes there’s something wet running down over his mouth and chin, dripping onto his clothes, and then that his nose is bleeding.
Oh. His ears seem to be bleeding too. That’s a little concerning.
On Earth-10005, Hunter B-15—no, not a hunter anymore? She’s dressed differently—arrives, and as much as he’s glad to see her looking well, Loki gets another ugly shock to hear her excoriate Paradox for his use of an unauthorized Time Ripper. That would seem to imply the existence of situations in which the current, theoretically reformed TVA would sanction using one.
Loki groans and releases his focus on the timeline. He’s exhausted from nearly dying and he can’t fix it anyway. Unlike He Who Remains, he has quite thoroughly exiled himself past the point of being able to influence the TVA, or anything else. All he can do, at this point, is let his energy slowly, slowly rebuild and hope nothing is permanently damaged.
The timelines drift around him, healthy again, with no awareness that they came so close to dying. Loki lets his head fall back against the throne and closes his eyes. He can feel it sometimes, all that life—and him at the center of it all, neatly and wholly excised. He can see it and hear it, he knows it exists because of him, but he can’t touch it; he has cut himself off.
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” he says aloud, because there’s no one to hear him and he realized quite some time ago that he’d only go mad faster if he didn’t talk to himself, “Deadpool and Wolverine were stronger together, at the end. They couldn’t stop Cassandra alone. They couldn’t survive doing it alone. Kind of like…” He sighs. “Me and Sylvie and Alioth. But when I came out here, I decided I had to go alone, because…I didn’t want anyone else to pay the price.”
The timelines make no response, but there’s a soft pop, and Loki opens his eyes to stare at the time door standing a few feet away. He says, “How—”
Sylvie steps through the time door, and Loki forgets how to speak.
“You’re okay!” she says, letting out a huge breath of relief before looking closer. “Are you okay?”
“You’re here,” Loki says stupidly.
Sylvie drops her gaze. “B-15 rang me, told me someone almost killed the multiverse and she didn’t know what it might have done to you, so she wondered if maybe I still had a way to check on you, and…” She turns her arm, uncovering He Who Remains’ Tempad. “I should have tried it before now. I just…didn’t know if it would work.”
Loki blinks hard, his eyes stinging. “Are you really here? Am I just imagining you?”
“Oh, hell.” Sylvie makes the time door disappear and walks forward until their knees touch. She lays her hand against his cheek. “Yeah, I’m here. I’m real.”
He tilts his head into her hand, shivering. “Are you okay?”
“Dummy, I’m fine as long as you’re okay. I wasn’t the one holding the multiverse together when some psycho tried to kill it. Are you okay?”
Loki has no idea how to answer that. “I’m alive?” he offers.
“That’s a low bar.”
“Sylvie, you were right, you were right again. There are good people in the TVA, I know there are, but maybe there will always be people who will use that power to destroy—and I can’t do anything from here—”
“Yeah, you can’t,” Sylvie says. She brushes a strand of hair back behind his ear. “Let me take care of that. You’re already doing too much.”
“Oh,” he says, and then, “I’m sorry, I’m just—I’m so tired—”
“Yeah,” Sylvie says, “okay, look, can you…do you still sleep?”
“I don’t think I need to anymore,” he says, but he’s too drained to hide the rest of the truth, so he adds, “what she did, it feels like I almost bled to death, so maybe I need to rest. But I don’t know what it would do to the timelines.”
Sylvie’s expression goes impossibly soft. “Sleep,” she says. “Just for a little while. I promise I’ll wake you if anything goes wrong. And maybe once you’ve slept, we can talk.”
“Okay,” Loki says, unable to think of a single reason to argue. “Okay. Thank you.” He lets his eyes fall shut, lets oblivion pull him away, because with Sylvie here, for the first time in a long while, he truly feels safe again.