Work Text:
Lamentis-1 is not the end.
Loki has always been bone-sure that he will know the place of his dying—that he will set foot on the Bifröst against his brother, as he once did, and feel it break beneath him before it truly breaks. That he will expect whatever blow makes him shatter and bleed. That before his cold heart fails last, he will accept it, even, as he never accepted justice in life.
(Lamentis-1 is a place of death, of course—only not for him. His story was not meant to take him here, and so it will not be the end.)
Loki’s mind has no end. It is as infinite as the universe that spat him out time and again, more or less chewed but never irrecoverable.
What this means, in point of fact, is that his head is like a bag of angry, clever skogkatts, eternally preparing to wreak vengeance. When he is crossing the barren tundra of a planet—even a planet about to crumble into dust—he has a great deal of time to think. In one chamber of his mind, he can consider the plan to repower the TemPad, which will mean life for one companion (him) and death for the other (not quite him). In other spaces of his consciousness, he turns over the problem of the Timekeepers. And because he has been presented with the irrefutable and uncomfortable knowledge of other selves, he is also deciding what it means to be Loki.
Yes, he is the one who is chewing now, for the universe is unfolding somewhere else.
He has nothing better to do than to chew, spit, and survive.
He does not trust himself. Any of his selves. Nevertheless, he trusts his ability to plot and scheme and magick his way out of nearly anything. One could say the same for skogkatts.
There was but a moment to self-congratulate after his escape. Then there were a good many unmeasured hours in which to feel lonely. For it is lonely, to live forever—to live beyond one’s own death. Loki has seen footage of the life he should have lived. The death he should have died. He has seen it in endless rotation since that first glimpse, a weaving and unweaving that continues despite the chaos defining this journey outside his own world.
You are gone, is what it presently means to be Loki. You are not Loki anymore.
The Loki who returns to Asgard is still too proud to save his mother. The Loki who dies under Thanos’ hands, may be remembered, by Thor, as an almost-hero.
It is possible to hate both of those selves, and yet to long for their certainty.
It is possible to be very close in time to Thor, whom he baited and stabbed and betrayed, and yet to miss him.
The Thor he knew is now in a world without his brother. That Thor may search high and low, but he will find nothing.
The God of Mischief, the would-be ruler of Midgard, has vanished without a trace.
Loki has not yet asked Sylvie about Thor. Her Thor. It is too dangerous a question. One could ask a thousand of his kind, across a thousand timelines, how they first felt used and cast aside—but the Loki that he is now (wearier than he expected, more sorrowful for past brutality than he expected) does not believe he could bear to learn of a brother-love gone right.
Much less could he bear to know that there had been no love at all, from the beginning—
—or no Thor.
The Loki he was, and still is, has only just escaped the Titan’s visitations. He is fortunate that Thanos cannot reach him here. He never admitted, in his righteous fit of bloodlust, that the cunning and cruelty of those probing thoughts twisting in his frightened him.
He would not have escaped Thanos, in that timeline. He was, in his own world, doomed to let the Titan rule his fate the moment he fell from Asgard.
He feels as if he is a dog suddenly cured of madness, though he has not said as much. Certainly not to Mobius, the man with his wilted salads and his plain neckties and his searching gaze.
Doomed to repeat the mistakes of your past?
He certainly has said nothing on such a subject to Sylvie, who has always known who she was, but hasn’t told him yet what that means.
Is she wiser at the work of being you?
Loki will never say, I lost my way, even when the whole world has changed and he no longer has a place in it. He will never say, Love is knowing what you have lost, but he takes a strange sort of comfort in Sylvie weeping for an Asgardian song.
He will not soon forget that.
He will not ask her about Thor.
Lamentis-1 is not the end. But nor is anything he has a beginning. Some things are already gone forever. Loki knows what he has lost:
Everything.
And yet, he is still here.