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Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement
“Burnt Norton,” T. S. Eliot
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
“East Coker,” T. S. Eliot
There is no reliable way to mark the passage of time, out beyond the end of it in the branches of the multiverse. Loki can say with some certainty how long it’s been for Sylvie, out on her own timeline (a few months), so he can guess he’s been sitting here at least that long, but he certainly hasn’t spent every moment watching her. That would be creepy and pathetic, probably, if he did, when he has the entirety of the multiverse to consider.
It’s only, his role here is not a very active one, more of a passive conduit to keep energy flowing through all the timelines, and he is not at all sure that there’s much he can do from here if he sees something going badly wrong. His job is just to…keep the timelines alive, keep the feedback loop flowing that sustains them and him at the same time. He has cut himself off from the timelines he protects, and even if something goes catastrophically wrong, he is not sure now that he can do anything to intervene.
But he can watch Sylvie live her life and remind himself that the sacrifice was worth something, so he does, even as it increasingly feels like a physical pain. He really doesn’t watch her all the time. Just…yes, a significant amount of the time. He watches her with her friends in Broxton, aching to share this ordinary life with her. He watches with a little more concern when she starts taking TVA calls and hunting down variants of He Who Remains. Having to watch her stride into danger when he’s stuck being useless is a special kind of agony, and he constantly reminds himself that she’s a survivor. She doesn’t need him. He just really, really wishes he could be there to watch her back. That’s how this was supposed to work. It was his choice, and he would make it again to save her, but none of that makes it hurt any less.
So he doesn’t know how long he’s been trapped waiting here at the end of time when he begins to be troubled by a persistent cough, but he knows at least that it’s been a few months in Sylvie’s timeline since she saw him last. It’s an infrequent cough at first, enough that he doesn’t think much of it, until a coughing fit rattles his concentration to the point that he loses focus on her and has to catch his breath. Only then does it strike him how odd it is to be coughing at all, out beyond the end of time with nothing to irritate his lungs or throat, theoretically no illnesses to plague his body when he and the timelines are sustaining each other.
He supposes it’s possible for him to be stick, in theory—his ascension didn’t exactly come with an instruction manual—but it feels contrary to everything he understands about the situation, the rest of which has thus far proven to be true. His body doesn’t require the ordinary necessities of life anymore to sustain itself, because he has apparently transcended them—become one with the multiverse to the extent that as his power sustains this great tree of temporality, so the multiverse sustains him in return. If his body no longer has physical needs, it seems unlikely to have physical vulnerabilities either—or, for that matter, vectors by which illness could be transmitted, here at the end of time.
And yet—he is seized with another coughing fit, one that leaves him doubled over and gasping for breath. The end of time is still a physical place, of course, and in its previous life as a citadel there was a great deal of rock, so he supposes there could be dust of some kind still floating around. He doesn’t especially like the idea that he might have inhaled any part of the old citadel—or worse, he realizes, the corpse of He Who Remains that Sylvie must have left there—but it’s at least a plausible reason to be coughing.
With no immediate ways to solve the mystery, he lets his mind return to wandering through the timelines for a while, first checking on Thor from the former Sacred Timeline, Mobius, and a handful of Loki variants before drifting as always back to Sylvie. She’s hiking some planet’s back country, maybe for a reason, maybe just enjoying the scenery, and for a little while Loki can almost imagine he’s there with her, walking in companionable silence and listening to the birds.
She pauses to take a picture of a vibrant red flower, and that’s when Loki feels it again, a scratching in his throat that heralds another cough. He swallows, trying to ease it away with no success, and then he is coughing with such violence that he lurches from his stupid throne and slams to his hands and knees on the floor, the timelines obligingly sliding up to wrap around his arms. He can’t breathe for coughing, his back bowed under the force of it, blackness crowding his vision, and when it finally leaves him dizzy and gasping, he blinks down to see blood flecked across his hands braced beneath him.
“Oh,” Loki says faintly. His voice sounds hoarse. “Oh, that’s not good.”
There is something caught on the roof of his mouth. He peels it out and stares down at the bloody pink flower petal in his hand, mind blank with incomprehension.
And it is, distinctly, a flower petal—Loki is no expert on botany, so he hasn’t a prayer of identifying it (not a much higher chance if he had the whole flower, if he’s being honest), but it’s bright and delicate, pointed at one end, roughly the size of his thumb, and a little crushed from having been coughed up.
Something seizes in his chest, the wrenching cough taking hold again, and Loki has to slap his hand down on the ground for balance. There is something in his throat, something he can’t breathe past, and then it comes unstuck with another explosive series of coughs that sprays the rock beneath him with more blood and more…petals.
He stares, panting. The petals are all a bit crushed, all roughly the same size and shape. They’re not all pink—some are darker, leaning into purple or even blue. At a guess he’d say they’re probably all from the same type of flower.
They certainly don’t belong inside him.
Loki forces himself back up onto his stupid little throne, his head spinning, and opens his senses in a quick diagnostic spell. What he finds makes his breath stop short in his chest because there is something growing in his lungs. He flicks his fingers and projects the image into the air in front of him, and…there it is. It shouldn’t be possible for a root system to have buried itself all through his lungs, with flowering stems twisting up through his trachea, but that is what he sees, and what’s more he recognizes it, because the great tree he made of the timelines looked a lot like this.
Loki sinks back in his throne, his prison, breathing out slow and deliberate, telling himself this should not be such a shock. He’s wondered, after all, if the multiverse would take over eventually, leaving him hollowed out to nothing but a vessel, a conduit, a body in a chair, Yggdrasil endlessly observing itself through the eyes of the being that used to be Loki, because no finite mind could forever bear the strain of infinity. He just didn’t expect the metaphor of the great timeline tree to take over his body so literally too.
But it’s…it’s all right. It has to be. He knew this was a one-way trip when he set off, and he cannot change anything now that it appears he’ll have less time to live with his decision than he thought. And if the timelines are taking over, then…maybe, if he’s very lucky, whatever happens will untether his essence entirely, leaving his body behind to complete the circuit and his soul free to seek Valhalla, if he’s finally earned that in the end.
It’s…not what he wanted, what he hoped for. He wanted a life, a little bit of peace—it was only a dream at this point but he wanted to go to New Asgard on Earth, where the Thor of the old Sacred Timeline lived, the one who’d lost his Loki, and see if he could make a home there. For Sylvie too, while he was dreaming, because no place was home without her—she’d fallen out of love with him but they could be friends, he would make it be enough, it would be enough to be able to talk to her and know she was happy there. He would visit his friends in the TVA sometimes and he wouldn’t ask for anything else.
Clearly, that dream is gone now.
Air snags painfully in his throat and he bends over, choking and coughing. Blood drips down his chin, and he spits up another clump of petals.
How long can this possibly take? The plant growing in his lungs can’t be completely physical or he’d already be dead, but the results are physical enough, and the timelines could have implanted themselves at any point since he took up this post. He doesn’t know how long he’s been here, for that matter, not in any objective way, but it could have been unfurling inside him all this time, only now spread far enough for him to feel it.
He could try, now, to strip all of this out of his lungs, but without knowing what he’s doing, he’d probably just kill himself quicker, and he might damage the timelines in the process—and that was the whole point of this, wasn’t it, to save all the timelines no matter what it cost him? So he’s not going to do anything. He’s just going to sit here and wait.
He banishes his stupid horns, which are just giving him a headache at this point, and coughs until his ribs hurt.
Time continues to slip by, punctuated by his ever-worsening cough. His chest aches all the time now, maybe just from the strain of overused muscles, maybe from the thing growing inside him. He expels more blood and petals with every coughing fit, and he quickly gives up as pointless any attempt to remove the mess from his clothes. There is no one to see him, after all, and no sense in wasting energy on something so trivial.
The timelines shift restlessly where they’ve twined around his arms. Loki tilts his head back, trying to find a position that will ease his breathing, but every inhale takes a tiny bit of effort now no matter what. He has surrendered all pretense of monitoring the timelines, now that his body is failing, and spends nearly all his time watching Sylvie and Thor. He does wish he could check on his friends at the TVA, but he can’t see into it because it’s outside of time, and anyway they can look out for each other.
Thor, too, at least has friends. He fell into years of despair that were painful to see, even at such a distance, and encountered yet more loss when Jane Foster came back into his life. But between the remaining Asgardians and Gorr’s daughter, he has a purpose. He is not alone. (He has not forgotten Loki, either—his tattoos, ridiculous and overwrought as they may be, are testament to that, and Loki was truly touched to see them.)
Sylvie, once again, has no one.
She was friendly with people in Broxton, he knows. He saw a little of that in person, and more from here when he indulged himself in catching up on the highlights of her life there. But after he’d exiled himself, she went back to Broxton just long enough to pick up a few things she cared about and say goodbye to the people she knew, and she hasn’t returned.
Instead she’s been wandering again, not on the run but never settling either, and it hurts to see because Loki wanted her to be happy, to not be alone anymore, and he thought she’d found that. Instead she seems to be searching for something she can never find, driven by something that keeps her awake at night, and Loki wishes more than anything that he could tell her to live, however that looks for her. He just doesn’t think it looks like restless nights and long days spent in hundreds of libraries across the multiverse.
Whatever she’s looking for, he knows now he’ll never see her find it.
I hope you find peace, he thinks at her as she pages through a giant text on magic. He focuses on the dust motes falling through a column of light from a window in the roof high above her, and not the way his lungs rattle with every breath. I wish I’d said a better goodbye. I wish I could see you one last time. I wish I could be the reason you’re not alone anymore. He coughs, groaning, and wipes more blood away from his mouth. His ribs ache. I wish you weren’t alone.
He supposes he could project an illusion of himself down to the timeline to talk to her, to say goodbye, but—that would be abysmally selfish, wouldn’t it? He had his chance for that at the TVA, when he could have stopped time to tell her everything he wanted, and he didn’t do it because he knew he’d never be able to make himself leave after. Now, well, she’s moved on and that’s good. He can’t undo that just because he’s dying.
Sylvie closes the book she was reading, sets it aside, and opens the next one in the stack on the table in front of her. After a moment she kicks her feet up on the table and slouches back in her chair. Her boots aren’t actually touching any ancient manuscripts, although Loki has a feeling that won’t be enough to mollify any librarian who happens to see her. She frowns at the page, wrinkling her nose, and jots some notes down on the tablet at her elbow. The book is a very dry one about magical energy transfers, and Loki has no idea why she’s reading it, but he’s content to watch her while he can.
Another series of coughs shakes his body, making it hard to hold the image of the library. Something catches in his throat and he chokes on it, bending forward as he tries to dislodge the blockage, but he can’t cough if he can’t breathe. Finally he sends a wild burst of magic at his own throat, an absolutely stupid thing to do in a panic, but it works and he’s coughing up something like a gooey paste made of blood and petals and even entire flowers, way too much of it. His throat burns and he spits out more blood, wheezing.
“Is all this really necessary?” Loki mutters aloud, slumping back in exhaustion. “I wasn’t going to leave.” The timelines actually tighten a little around his arms at that, he thinks, which is probably an answer of some kind, and Loki sighs. The sigh hurts, air scraping through his abused throat. The wheeze lingers even after he mostly catches his breath, and it’s a little harder to breathe all the time now, whether he’s coughing or not. It’s…probably not going to be terribly much longer, then. The great tree ripples around him, the timelines moving in sync with his strained breathing.
Finally he stretches out his senses for the timeline where he left Sylvie in the library, and…she’s not there. He pulls back, sweeping the library for her presence, the planet, that entire universe, and further back, combing through the whole of the multiverse for her, but the Sylvie of the present is nowhere to be found.
His inability to see her probably means she’s at the TVA. He still doesn’t like it. If he can do nothing else for her, he at least likes to think he can watch her back—which is silly, because he can’t do anything except cut himself on the sharpness of his own longing for her, and that’s useless to her.
Another cough seizes him. His throat burns, and he wraps one arm around his ribs like it’ll help hold himself together. The timelines let him do it, shifting restlessly. More blood spatters against his clothes. A clump of flowers lodges in his throat and he has to dig it out with his fingers, letting the bloody mess fall to his lap as he sags back.
A time door pops into existence inside the whirl of timelines. Loki stares, blinking hard. Now he’s hallucinating?
Sylvie steps through the time door, vanishing it behind her, and Loki lets his eyes slide shut and his head fall back against the throne with a faint thunk. Definitely hallucinating, then.
“Shit,” Sylvie says under her breath, and then she’s shaking his shoulder, and Loki’s eyes fly open because hallucinations, he is pretty sure, don’t involve physical touch. She straightens, her hand falling away, and instantly Loki is doubled over again with that horrible cough. Blood drips down his chin. His throat feels shredded. Sylvie starts rubbing his back, and that feels nice, but it takes a long time before he has the breath to speak.
“You’re here,” he says finally, his voice hoarse, and then he has to pause to cough up another bloody clump of flowers and petals, which he tries to spit into his hand somewhat discreetly, probably without success. It doesn’t help that his hands won’t stop shaking. “I…I don’t understand.”
Sylvie crouches to one knee by the throne, her face drawn at she looks at the mess of blood and flowers on the ground and stuck to his clothes. After a moment she takes his hand and tugs on it to reveal what he just coughed up, stark against his palm, and he barely resists because there seems to be very little point. “That looks like a lot of blood, Loki.”
His throat is full of thorns. He offers, “Maybe it looks worse than it is?”
“Well, you look like shit,” Sylvie says.
He huffs. She can say whatever she wants as long as she keeps cradling his hand like this. He curls his fingers inward, though, trying to keep the blood from dripping onto her, and makes himself say, “But you shouldn’t be here. It’s…I don’t think it’s safe.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re not contagious, if that’s what you mean,” Sylvie says.
“No, I—” Loki grimaces. “It isn’t catching. But it is…progressing. And I don’t know what’s going to happen with the timelines or this place when, ah…”
“Nothing is going to happen,” Sylvie says fiercely, “because I love you, you idiot.”
“What?” Loki says blankly, or starts to say, but the word chokes off as his throat closes and blood fills his mouth. He coughs so hard he ends up on his knees again, all but collapsing if not for Sylvie’s arms holding him up as he gags on the bloody mess spilling from his mouth—cascades of flowers, and then leaves too, thin vines even, only then the plant matter thins out to something that looks like it’s dissolving. And then, finally, he spits out a little more blood and…his throat and lungs feel clear again, battered but healing. He lets himself slump against Sylvie, shaking.
Nothing makes sense.
Sylvie is rubbing his back again. “Your breathing sounds better,” she says, a little tentatively.
It feels better. He nods. “I…don’t understand what just happened.” He very carefully doesn’t ask her to repeat what she actually said that seemed to cause this, because—well, he’ll leave it at “nothing makes sense” for now.
“Are you okay?” Sylvie asks.
Loki decides he has the energy for the same diagnostic spell he used earlier, and casts it. As he guessed, the flowers and vines are all gone from his lungs, and what’s left behind doesn’t look quite healthy (the inside of his throat in particular still feels raw), but— “I think I’m getting there,” he says.
“I should’ve come here earlier,” Sylvie says, looking away.
Loki shakes his head. “I don’t understand how you’re here at all.”
She pulls her sleeve back, revealing the Tempad she took from He Who Remains. “I used it before to send Renslayer to the Citadel, so it seemed pretty likely that it could still reach you, wherever you’d gone. I could have tried a long time ago, and…I didn’t.”
“Oh,” Loki says. He’s too tired to do anything but blank his expression, and he’s probably not even doing a good job.
“Because I was scared it wouldn’t work,” Sylvie says.
“…oh.”
“But OB rang me, said there was something wrong with the timelines in a way that made him think there was something wrong with you. And I just knew…I’ve been doing a lot of research, like a lot of research, all over the multiverse, trying to find literally anything that could help free you and I’ve got…let’s say the beginning of some ideas. But I also…kept coming across stories, myths really, about this magic-based disease that had to do with…” She clears her throat. “Flowers growing in the lungs because of—this sounds so mad, but unrequited love, eventually resulting in death by suffocation. Like the multiverse was trying to tell me something was wrong, but it sounded impossible, and I didn’t put it together until I heard from OB…and here you were, actually coughing up fucking flowers, so…”
Loki stares at her, struck dumb. “I thought…”
She sighs. “Yeah, all things considered, it’s pretty obvious at this point what you thought.”
“Well—yes, but I mean—I’ve never heard of a disease like this. And I don’t know if anyone can see it from the TVA, but I turned the multiverse into Yggdrasil. With—flowers, or the suggestion of them anyway. I thought the timelines were absorbing me, the metaphor taking over.”
“And you were just going to let that happen? Fucking hell, Loki.”
“As opposed to what? Step out and let the multiverse collapse? I already made my decision.”
“That seems like it’s worked out great for you. God, you’re so fucking lucky OB was paying attention.”
Loki has no argument for that. “I confess I’m a little confused on one point,” he says quietly. “At McDonalds you said you were happy.”
She sighs. “Yeah, Loki, I was mad at you so I lied. I mean, I was happy, in some ways, but even when I blamed you for everything, I missed you, and I couldn’t stop no matter how angry I was. And then suddenly you were back, and I was still angry, in fact I had new reasons to be angry, and it didn’t change the fact that I really was glad to see you at the same time and I would’ve about died before I let you know it. Only I thought we’d have time to talk properly and hash things out and we just never did, and then you were gone, and…and I finally realized something I should have figured out a long time ago. That I loved you. Like really, really loved you. Because otherwise watching you walk away to the end of time wouldn’t have felt like somebody was ripping my guts out.”
Loki bows his head. “I’m sorry. I swear I never meant to hurt you. I thought…I thought I was fixing everything.”
“Yeah, you know, I believe you,” Sylvie says, “but has anyone ever mentioned you might have a little bit of a self-worth issue?”
Loki almost smiles. “Usually people say the opposite.”
“I mean the ones who actually know you.”
“Mobius might have hinted in that direction once or twice.”
“Well, if he did, he wasn’t wrong.”
“I did try to find another way,” Loki says. “But—this was the other way. He Who Remains made the Loom as a failsafe. He wanted me to kill you so you couldn’t kill him and free the multiverse. And that wasn’t an option, so…I found another way. You actually gave me the idea. I was ready to give up and you made me do better.”
“Wait,” Sylvie says, “all this was because of me? When you said for you, you were being literal?”
“It happened because of He Who Remains and his ego,” Loki says. “He’s the only one to blame. But I made my choice for you, before everything else.”
“When—just to be clear—you thought I barely cared about you anymore.”
“Well,” Loki says, and then doesn’t finish the sentence because he doesn’t know what he was going to say.
“I can’t decide if that’s really sweet or really stupid.”
“Bit of both?”
“Listen,” Sylvie says, “you might have resigned yourself to this, but I didn’t. I’ll find a way to bring you home. I don’t care how long it takes.”
Something twists in Loki’s chest. “What if there is no answer? You can’t waste your life looking for a solution that doesn’t exist.”
“Well, that would be my choice too, wouldn’t it?” Sylvie says. “But I don’t think it’s impossible. You already did something pretty close to impossible, so I don’t see why it has to stop there.”
He shakes his head slowly. “I’m out of ideas. And hope, to be honest.”
“That’s okay.” Sylvie leans her head against his. “This time I can have enough hope for both of us. All you have to believe in is me.”
“That’s easy,” Loki says. “I already do. I always have.”