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He never seems to have the right words, not when it really matters, not until it’s too late, and he can’t find the right words now. Loki hesitates, rests his hands on Sylvie’s shoulders—she’s real and alive and grounding, somehow, so sharp and sure even now when she’s lost her purpose too, and it’s with a stab of something like grief that he wonders: who could she have been if the TVA had just let her be, if she hadn’t spent her whole life fighting to survive?
Who might he have been, for that matter, if he’d known from the beginning that he wasn’t an Odinson by blood but they’d chosen him anyway, if that revelation hadn’t shattered his identity at its foundations? Who might he have been, if he hadn’t fallen from the Bifrost and into the Mad Titan’s clutches?
He might have variants who could answer those questions—or might have had, once, until the TVA pruned them because they wouldn’t allow him to be anything else. And he isn’t sure, in all honesty, if he’s relieved he’ll never know what sort of life he never got the chance to have, or if it’s just more grief on the pile for himself and all those other variants alike.
But those variants and those possibilities are all gone, and nothing matters except this moment and what they do with it—because he thinks, if he can find the words, they can do something with it.
He never gets the chance. A horrific blazing pain erupts from a point between his shoulder blades, first ripping away his breath and then blasting outward to devour his lungs entirely. The horrified shock on Sylvie’s face and the sparks bursting from his chest tell the same story.
It burns and he can’t breathe without lungs and he has fractions of a second before the rest of his body disintegrates—and if he is still touching Sylvie when the reset charge eats away his hands, then—
You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That’s how it is, that’s how it was, that’s how it will be
No, not this time, not this time—
He never had the right words for Odin or Frigga or Thor, for all of Asgard, never knew it until it was too late, and he can’t speak now with his lungs gone and the sparks chewing their way toward his throat, but in the last instant that any part of his body remains under his control, he drags his hands away from Sylvie’s shoulders so at least he won’t take her down with him, and it hurts—
And then there is nothing.
He wakes up. That’s…unexpected. He wakes up gasping, flat on his back on something hard, which is at least a solid indication that his body is intact in one form or another. The gray sky stretching endlessly overhead means it can’t be Sanctuary, so if this is Hel, it’s…at least potentially better than the last place he woke up after dying.
It isn’t Hel. It’s somewhere much stranger. Loki stares at what he can only assume are three (four?) more variants of himself and finds their existence far easier to believe than the impossible idea that the Norns, or the universe, or something, is offering him another chance.
Then again, he’s seen a great many impossible things recently, even if most of them have been objectively terrible. Maybe, if he is very clever or very lucky, or a bit of both, he can make something of this one.