Chapter Text
The faint hum of the sacred timeline outside the Citadel had raised to a roar. Loki could hear the thunderous cracks vibrating through the window before them. The bated breath of their sole audience, HWR’s, everything was too loud. Still, the sound of blood rushing through his veins and the clang of his own sword against Sylvie’s wasn’t enough to drown out his own despair.
“Do it then, take your throne!” Sylvie sneered as she pulled his sword to her throat. Her eyes reflected the betrayal he’d never meant to inflict. An assumption she’d always had in the end. The venom in her tone pulled a single, broken word from his chapped lips- because he hadn’t meant for any of this to happen.
None of this was meant to happen.
“No.” Because gods damn her, that was not what he wanted, that wasn’t what either of them wanted. He had only wanted her to consider-
Punches were thrown, chairs were hurled, and Loki grunted when Sylvie used a bit of her raw, untamed magic to blast him away. Even through the pain, though, he couldn’t take his eyes off her as she charged toward her grinning aggressor.
She was about to make a huge mistake. If she wanted to kill HWR once they were calm, then so be it. But now? Loki knew that feeling so well. When her hands stung with the bite of ice, her eyes hot with hate, and her strength put forward before her mind? No, this was a path that only led to destruction.
Something that could lead to a complete loss of self. So he had heard, anyway.
There was only a matter of seconds for him as pushed aside the pain in his chest to concentrate on his spell. Loki folded the matter around him, bent space, and condensed his magic into the gap. The world perilously lurched, a sensation he was all too familiar with, before everything snapped into focus once more. His feet were on the ground, and the heat of exertion was replaced with the cold bite of the edge of her sword against his neck.
A superficial cut where his warm blood trickled down his neck, millimeters from his life vein. Despite how close he’d been to death, a remarkable calm came over him when Sylvie almost instantly withdrew her sword. Resting it on the clothed portion of his neck, the metal minutely shaking in her grip. He held up his hands in surrender and dropped his own sword, finally having her in a state where he could try and entreat her to listen to him.
“You stop this nonsense, and you come home.”
Loki took advantage of her breathless state and tried explaining it to her as if he were confessing to his own faults. No matter how moved she appeared, however, she never lost that critical eye. Even as he spoke, she appeared to try to glean any hint of disingenuity from him- and there was only one thing Loki could say that was his full truth.
So he said it.
“I… just want you to be okay,” Loki said, trying to impart as much authenticity to those words as he could. And for a moment, as ironic as it sounded, time seemed to still. The way Sylvie’s face broke as her arm fell away, the way she pressed her lips to his. Firm and desperate, apologetic- and it was very much a goodbye kiss.
Even as he dared to hope with the warmth of her lips on his own- he saw that mask fall back into place. That mask of cool, mischievous indifference, and he held his breath.
“But I’m not you.” All accompanied by a thin smirk.
“It’s too late.”
Loki saw a flash of green before he was hurled backward by Sylvie’s roughspun magic. The dusty smell of the Citadel was instantly replaced with the smell of acrid blood and smoke, and as ridiculous as it was- even here in the thick of whatever battle Sylvie had thrown him into- Loki took just a moment to catch his breath. To soothe his aching heart and to keep his throat from pathetically quivering.
“You’re alone, and you always will be.”
It hadn’t been a lie. He’d been genuine, every bit of him. Before he could linger in self-pity, however, Loki was startled from his thoughts when sharp toes connected with his side. Letting out a cry of surprise, Loki threw out a conjured dagger in the direction of his assailant. Instantly the Chitauri dropped, lifeless next to him.
Loki stared at his old tormentors, turned soldiers. As mundane as it sounded, he recognized the stonework in the ruined road he stood on. Snapping his head up to gain a proper look at his surroundings, he couldn’t help the strangled gasp that escaped him.
Sylvie had shoved him onto a dying Asgard. The magnificent buildings of the city had fallen, the palace reduced to nothing but a tin foil ball, and Asgardians all around him were roaring as they tried to fight back the pale Chitauri as they overran the city.
Images of the reel Mobius had shown him flashed across Loki’s mind as he tried to remember when this had happened. Words from the reports he’d read about his role in the timeline flitted across his eyes- but he couldn’t remember reading a single event like this.
You will unleash the multiverse. Infinite possibilities…
“Traitor!” He heard an all too familiar voice bellow behind him. Loki whirled around and narrowly dodged a cleaving swing from Heimdall’s claymore.
Seeing the old gatekeeper again stirred a heavy set of emotions that all stemmed from the same feeling. Betrayal. The gatekeeper who had betrayed him as King of Asgard. The one who had seen through his single greatest lie. The dark Asgardian glared at him with those golden eyes of his, face covered in blood and soot, and he yanked his sword from the ground.
“I’m not your Loki!” Loki shouted back as he dodged blow after blow. Really, did he look like a Prince of Asgard at the moment?
“You wouldn’t honorably face your sentence, and so you took the Tesseract and ran! Did you return the infinity stone to our doorstep just so Thanos would wreak havoc on our realm? All the while playing on Midgard? Those disgraceful clothes, is that how you were raised, prince?”
Loki couldn’t help the indignant, “really?” From escaping his lips as he twisted away from Heimdall’s angry hands, the gatekeeper’s sorrow-filled gaze, and Loki saw an opportunity. He slipped into Heimdall’s guard, slammed his hand into the Aesir’s throat, and channeled his magic into his palm. Enchantment didn’t come to him like it did to Sylvie, but Heimdall was miles easier to enchant than an interdimensional beast of destruction.
“Why have you brought me here, trickster?” Heimdall growled, his voice echoing in the relative emptiness of their meeting ground.
Loki rubbed his face in his hands and began to conjure his own memories to fill the place.
“A memory for a memory, and a tale that has occurred in a place you’ll never be able to see.” Loki intoned, waving his hand around where it all started. In a desert, with the Tesseract.
In return, he would see this timeline’s Loki from the perspective of a gatekeeper who claimed to be all-seeing.
By the end of it, three minutes had passed like an hour, Heimdall abruptly pulled away from his hands. Golden eyes cast wide as he darted them over his ex-prince’s form. The Chitauri around them were oblivious to the invisibility spell Loki had managed to cast around them.
It was a miracle they hadn’t been cleaved in two by a stray swing of a sword.
“You…” Heimdall said uncertainly, lowering his sword.
Loki shoved the man away. “There’s no time. Take the Asgardians through the cracks of Yggdrasil. The path I showed you will take you to Vahaheim. Once the last are through, you have to collapse the entrance to prevent being followed.”
As he spoke, Loki threw a refined bolt of his seidr into a group of incoming Chitauri and gestured for the wild-eyed Asgardians to follow Heimdall. Why was he doing this? Why was he risking life and limb for a timeline that may or may not be his own?
It was hard to tell, really.
“Round them up, gatekeeper,” Loki said when Heimdall stood there like a muppet.
Heimdall spun around and impaled an incoming Chitauri, going straight through their spear and into flesh.
“Your father and mother are engaging against-”
“ Odin wields the dark space magic far better than you think. Do your part, Heimdall.” Loki interrupted, feeling time slipping through their fingers as more Chitauri ships began to circle above them.
“...You think this deed re-”
Loki’s patience had reached the end of its tether and gave Heimdall a look that commanded silence from his subjects. “Think as you like, spare me this useless chatter.”
At that, the God of Mischief turned his heel and summoned a dagger in each hand. Since he was on Asgard, he could also summon his daggers from his room in the palace. Or whatever remained of them, anyway.
The Asgardians easily accepted him into their ranks despite his garb, accepting the orders he barked at them as he pointed them back to the escape ships hovering in the lower parts of the city. It was curious, had they always trusted him thus? He couldn’t remember ever commanding true respect from his citizens but now was as good as any.
Using his magic, Loki grabbed a piece of boulder four times his size, using his arm as a focal point, he made a sweeping gesture and cleaved the Chitauri in the alleyway. He ran through the narrow alleys of the city up to the grand entrance of what remained of the palace. He was chasing the feeling of spent magic, thickening as he got closer and closer to the source.
When he finally arrived at the Asgardian courtyard, he was greeted with a sight not seen for a couple millennia.
Frigga and Odin worked in synchrony, her magic to his spear, his magic to her dual blades. Illusions to blind their enemy- and Norns . As he surveyed what they fought against, hate and terror spewed in equal amounts from his chest. It was that damned wretched alien that had broken him in the Black Order.
The memories came forth like a floodgate. Dark cell walls, the bite of steel, the painful sting of needles aimed to inflict pain , and not maim.
Loki quickly cast an illusion about him, making him invisible as he wove between fallen bits of wall and upturned earth. Clenching his fists as he got closer, he saw a few needles sticking out of his mother. The few she had no time to extract, she fought on with gritted teeth and a furrowed brow of concentration.
“You can do whatever you set your mind to, Loki”
Loki hadn’t gotten twenty feet from Maw when a needle came his way, and he deflected it with one of his daggers. Well, so much for the element of surprise.
Upon his reveal, the three of them turned to look at him in disbelief. A hideous smile spread across the blue-white tint of Maw’s skin. “If it isn’t the little mouse who escaped the cage. Come back to grovel? It’s not too late to become a child of Thanos.”
Each word grated on Loki’s nerve like a piece of flint on a chalkboard. His mother, so like himself, took Ebony’s gloating as an opening to cast magic at his feet. It didn’t hold very long though, Ebony was a master of magic himself.
Loki cast his duplicates, each imperfect- but set a flawed glamor atop himself as well. He’d learned his lesson the last time he’d tried to use this little trick to escape, and the brief flicker of uncertainty on Maw’s face as he sent his little ice needles through each and every one was gratifying.
Daggers are a distraction. Our real mettle is in magic.
Loki touched the side of one of the needles Maw sent his way. He was intimately aware of the sharp tips, unable to stop the shudder that rippled through his body as they slid past him- and tugged at them with his own telekinesis.
Anywhere else, Loki wouldn’t have dreamed of beating a telekinetic in a game of telekinesis- but they were on Asgard. Where seidr ran deep in the city, where he had learned to channel the realm’s ambient magic for his own uses. He reached out with his magic, tugging at each needle that came his way. Like fishing at a stream, Loki could feel a nibble on the lines of his seidr he cast all around- and he yanked them.
All at once, half of Maw’s needles came to a halt in the air around him- and Loki felt a victorious, nasty smile adorn his face. “How does it feel? To face me in my home,” Loki said, unable to help his voice from cracking in the middle of his sentence.
He remembered making such threats to maw in the past, as he was bound and tortured. Tortured until every bit of sense had been wrung out of him, all while being taunted that he was unworthy of his title as a Master Asgardian Sorcerer.
Maw narrowed his eyes and spat with every word he spoke. “You rotten, ungrateful-”
Loki refused to let him utter another useless word. He plunged the needles into Maw, forcing them inch by inch, relishing in the pained hisses and gasps it elicited from his tormentor. The instruments cracked under the pressure as the telekinetic attempted to push back- but it was useless. It was already over.
Odin was upon him with his spear in hand, glowing hot with Frigga’s magic and the Odinforce, and he decapitated Maw in a single movement.
Maw’s head rolled off to the side, his body only suspended by the needles Loki used to hold him in place, and Loki couldn’t help but gloat in front of his former tormentor.
“I told you that I would make you kneel.” Loki withdrew the needles from the body, watching as it slumped to the ground before he vanished those very same needles into his pocket dimension.
They might come in handy sometime.
It was an acrid victory, Loki thought as he stood taller, amongst the rubble of what he considered to be home for his whole life. He looked down at his mother, helping Odin up from his kneeling position on the ground. The man looked worn to the bone, and Loki couldn’t help but think.
Where was Thor? Did Thor not claim that he would protect Asgard from monsters?
Anger surged in his very being at the ruinous state of Asgard. Once, perhaps, he had dreamt of its ruin. A realm of deceivers, a realm unworthy of its name as protector of the Nine. But that time had passed, and now he could only feel mournful for his homeland.
Loki walked towards his adoptive parents, noticing how Frigga’s eyes brimmed with tears as she shouldered his father- who once looked so grand, was now so small. “Where’s Thor?” Loki asked.
He was so tired, his magic- while bolstered when on a realm like Asgard, had been nearly depleted. At his question, Frigga shook her head.
“He’s defending Midgard against another attack from Tha-”
“Oh, well, if it isn’t the rat. Coming back to play.” Loki couldn’t help the full body shudder as soon as he heard His voice calling from the entrance of their former palace.
The whole ground shook with every step from the Mad Titan. The sacred flowers his mother had so carefully cultivated on these ruined grounds, even their corpses seemed to slink away from his very being. Loki’s jaw shut tight (The searing pain of a dagger, screaming his voiceless scream as a voice softly told him how unworthy he was) at the very sight of Him.
“Loki?” Frigga whispered, realization dawning on her as she saw how he took a fearful step backward. Loki couldn’t tear his gaze away from Him and how He smiled at him. So kindly- yet there was nothing truly kind behind those eyes.
Thanos was just a mad soul, bent on the destruction of half of all life.
“Go,” Loki said, his voice cracking and his breath shuddering as He approached.
Loki hadn’t forgotten what Thanos had promised should he fail to bring Midgard to its knees. It had been anything but pleasant. It had been a promise that he would wish for the mercy of death, but fuck him.
“Use the dark magic, and go,” Loki muttered, but when he looked to the side, he saw Odin falling into a half Odin sleep. Frigga held him up, her expression distraught- but also solidifying into an unwaverable dissolve as the Queen of the Protector of the Nine Realms.
The old bastard had used too much magic, damn him! Loki’s heart thundered in his chest, his ears hot as his limbs stiffened. If he couldn’t protect Asgard, he could at least protect his wife!
He heard the viscous sound of Chitauri approaching, their joints clicking as they encircled him- their slick skin sliding against each other as they neared.
Throughout this whole ordeal, Loki hadn’t heard the detonation in the mountains just behind the palace. He felt his own resolve steel as he assessed how much magic it would take to send them to the gap where Heimdall was making his way to this very moment.
There will be no moon you can hide.
“Where did you hide the Tesseract?” Thanos asked, his voice even paced and calm. Gauntlet soaked in blood, his helmet long since bronzed with the blood of his previous victims. “Now tell me, witch, where did you hide it?” Thanos growled, the Chitauri closing in on them bit by bit. Chattering, whispering, and discussing amongst themselves what kind of torture they would subject them to.
Loki looked behind him, and he found himself crying as he looked at his mother. Tears, hot and irrepressible even as his own face was expressionless. She had her dagger out, ready to kill Odin. To kill herself. Her blue eyes were steely with determination, teeth slightly bared in that mischievous sort of defiance he had always thought was a trait he’d inherited from her.
That was something people seldom saw from the Goddess of Motherhood. It was ironic, however, that he could see nothing more fitting.
No crevice where he can’t find you.
"You’re alone, and you always will be."
Loki primed the magic at his fingertips, pulling at the strings and flows of Yggdrasil- praying that he would be able to send them to the crack fast enough. That a boat would see them, and take their King and Queen with them.
He’d only be able to hold the portal open for three seconds at most, big enough for two people. Long enough for a single pair to fall through.
Loki couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand being the problem anymore. Always the villain. Always destined to lose against heroes. Being pushed away, forgotten, lied to, deceived. Deceiver, liar, betrayer, he was done with it.
Norns be damned- because if this was his fate, then so be it. If his final act of defiance to the Norns, to the sacred timeline, to his former tormentor would be to save Frigga from the same fate as he- then he would do it.
Even if Sylvie would think him a self-destructive fool, he knew what his actions were worth.
“I was beginning to miss you, Prince.” The titan’s voice was deep with the faux edge of civility to it. Loki thickly swallowed, forcing his leaden tongue to move.
“Can’t say I share your pleasure.”
Loki’s magic flared to the tips of his fingers, creating a portal right below his adoptive parents. Frigga’s eyes widened, hand reaching out to pull him through- but she slipped through before anything could be done. The wisps of her hair cut as the portal vanished and Loki collapsed onto all fours. His limbs felt heavy, his heart thundering in his chest as he saw those large boots approach.
“Look, I saw this. It reminded me of you.” Next to his face, stirring up a bit of dust, Thanos had dropped one of his old Asgardian garments. Reminiscent of what he’d worn in New York.
Thanos dropped down to his knee for him before he pulled Loki's head up by his hair, all with that perfectly civil smile on his face. “Let’s get you dressed, and shall we talk? From a Liberator to a Prince.”