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Finding a moment’s peace amongst the mayhem and chaos of not only a pit at the end of time designed to kill you, but a pit filled with apparently limitless Lokis was hard to find, but Loki managed it in the deep breath before the plunge.
Sylvie was with Mobius discussing something with quiet voices, which either meant it was about the current sorry state of affairs they found themselves in or about him - Loki hopes it’s the former as he didn’t really have the energy to try to eavesdrop.
He has other, more pressing things on his mind at the moment at any rate.
The old man stood a little removed from the rundown, shack-like building they’d been recuperating in, his back to him, with eyes on the horizon. Loki took a moment to regard him, trying to place himself in his stead. He’d never considered himself as an old man before, perhaps there had always been a part of himself that had known he’d never become one. The old man’s shoulders were a little stooped, perhaps with age, perhaps just a visual illusion of the frankly ridiculous get up he was wearing, or perhaps it was the weariness of a lifetime of loneliness, of glorious purpose unfulfilled.
“Sometimes it reminds me of it, all this wreck and ruin.”
“I’m sorry?” Loki asks on reflex. He looks around to see if the old man was speaking to the child, who he seemed to have a strong, slightly baffling affinity with, but saw that he was back in the shack, tempting the alligator with some treat he’d procured.
“This place.” The old man glances over his shoulder back at him and Loki takes it as an invitation to move closer. “It reminds me of Ragnarok, the destruction of Asgard. You saw it in your timeline, yes?”
“No, not first hand.” Loki looks down, feeling a shame and loss that he had no right to. “But I’d heard it happened, that it was set to happen.”
The old man hums in acknowledgement. “Then I envy you. It was the single worse thing I’ve ever witnessed; you cannot imagine it, I barely can now, after so long. Our home burning, an entire realm lost, and being the ones who caused it.”
“What?!” Loki cuts in, startled. “We caused Ragnarok? But I thought we made peace with Thor, that we’d reunited with our people by the end!”
“Oh, my dear boy, we had.” The old man grins at him with an air that he was greatly enjoying an in-joke that Loki was squarely at the butt of. Loki was gaining more sympathy to Thor for dealing with this for as long as he had by the hour. “Why, it was Thor’s idea! You see back in the day Odin- well, it’s rather a long story and I don’t think there’s enough time to truly unpack the nuance of it all, so let’s just say it was the only way out we could think of for an even worse situation.”
Loki’s throat clicks as he swallows thickly, trying to envisage an adversary more terrible than Ragnarok. “I have to admit when I saw the case file of it in the TVA, part of me did wonder…”
“Whether you’d done it yourself in a fit of bitterness and spite towards our beloved father and brother?” The old man’s smile turns a little softer round the edges. “I’m afraid we’d need a little more conviction than any of us possesses to follow through on that particular tantrum.” He glances back at the child still trying to feed the reptile. “Well, maybe not all of us.”
Loki stares out at the wasteland. In this grave of all things misplaced, there might be a Loki out there who had crossed that line, who had watched the flames and smiled.
“You know, you might be the closest to me I’ve seen come through here.” Loki looks back at the old man to find him watching him, considering. “The journey you’re on right now, the questions you’re asking, I’ve stumbled down that path, trodden those steps. Though mine took far longer, and I’d wager, was a lot less exciting.”
“How did you do it?” Loki asks, a hint of desperation in his voice. “Was it just the boredom?”
The old man chuckles. “I suppose that didn’t help. But you know what mother never tired of saying; only boring people get bored. You find things to do, ways to distract yourself, convince yourself you’re doing what you want, what’s in your best interest. But once you’ve had your fill of that, you realise that survival isn’t the be-all end-all. Is power truly powerful if no one is there to bear witness to it? If all it does is preserve a life not worth living?” He heaves a deep sigh, folding his arms with his cape gathered around him in a manner that might have looked impressive once, but now looks like an attempt at comfort.
“The loneliness was my undoing, I’m afraid, or perhaps the making of me,” he says, sounding terribly tired. “The acceptance that the universe is simply too large to inhabit alone, to bear alone. Though, having only yourself for company doesn’t quite mean what it used to, does it?”
Loki huffs a quiet laugh. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.” He licks his lips, hesitant to even ask but eventually his curiosity wins out. “Do you think he would have welcomed you back, after all that time?”
The old man doesn’t say anything for a moment. It was foolish to think he didn’t know who Loki was referring to. “Yes,” he says eventually. “I- I like to think that he would.”
Loki thinks back to the Thor - his Thor - that he’d left behind in 2012. Of the last look he had given him; the pain, betrayal and anger he had seen there. Forgiveness had seemed like such a foreign, impossible concept, one that Loki had stubbornly not even wanted until he’d seen a glimpse of it projected to him like a work of fiction come to life.
“What was it like?” he asks before he can stop himself, hating the way his voice breaks with it. He clears his throat. “With Thor, I mean. Before it all went to hel.”
It was the old man’s turn to laugh. His smile lines were as deep as the furrow in his brow, Loki was pleasantly surprised to note. “Arguably one of the only good things about getting old is that all the slights and arguments and pettiness fade away, while the good times are buffed and polished with revisitation until they shine even brighter. We could have only been reunited for a few weeks, a month at a push, and in the wake of our home’s destruction, with our people’s number dwindled to near extinction at that. And yet all I remember is the laughter, the camaraderie of it all. Thor wouldn’t let whatever had come between us in the past get in the way of us being together then. Thick-headedness, I might have called it once, in an uncharitable mood. He had an ease about him, a confidence, even in the bleakest of times that I always envied. A genuine, incorruptible optimism that blinded whatever darkness the norns could concoct to throw at him.
“We stopped off at the first inhabited planet we came across on the way to Midgard, filling our stocks with supplies that Thor acquired Heavens knows how when we had no funds to speak of, and he insisted on throwing a banquet - you know how fond of those he was. Madness, I told him, madness to waste what little we had on one night. Trust me, Loki, he said, the people need this. And damn him, he was right. After all that death, we needed to remember what it meant to be alive.” The old man traces his smile with gloved fingers, staring out into the distance but seeing a long-faded past and a future Loki will never see. “He wouldn’t let me leave his side all night, wouldn’t let my glass run dry, wouldn’t let the smile fall from my face. We’ve got catching up to do, brother, he kept saying, as though I’d been off on a pilgrimage instead of- instead of the truth.”
The old man laughs at the memory and Loki joins him, only his sounds like it was punched out of him - a wretched, ruined little thing.
“Thor, I think, was just as aware as I was that we were all that was left. Of our family, of our home. What did we have but each other? I did wonder… many times over the years, what became of him. Alone out there. The last king of Asgard.”
The old man falls silent then, lost in the wealth of regrets that ran just as deep as Loki’s own. Loki draws in a deep breath, hoping it’ll fill the hollowed-out cavern in his chest. The knife edge he’d been balancing on ever since he’d been ripped out of his timeline had never felt so precarious, so brittle, like he might shatter if someone touched him. If it wouldn’t give away their position, he’d fall to his knees and scream until his throat was raw at a universe that would make such a life with Thor a possibility but for only a flash of a moment in an excruciating long existence.
“Do you think it possible?” he asks, and there’s no helping the waver in his voice now. It was folly to try to fool himself at this point anyway. “For us to ever, truly be happy?”
The tumultuous sky rumbles and roars above them, breaking in two before spitting out another displaced object to be dumped in its wreckage. Another lost thing in a sea of outcasts.
“From my experience, seeing all those many variants who’ve found their way here, no, I've never seen it happen.” The old man turns to Loki and places a hand on his neck in a sign of affection they both knew all too well.
“But who’s to say you can’t be the first?”