Chapter Text
Oklahoma, 1987
Branched Timeline
Sylvie hopped out of the cab of her battered old truck, swinging her McDonald’s bag at her side with a jaunty skip in her step. Six big macs, four regular cheese burgers, one Filet-O-Fish (Sylvie was curious enough to give it a try, even if it didn't look especially appetizing), eight servings of the Mcnuggets and ten packs of fries. Plus ten of their apple pies.
It was a splurge, but she could afford it. You could get a lot in Oklahoma with not a lot of money.
Things got awkward when all her money was loose gold coins from various planets from across time and space, yes, but enchantment bridged the gap enough that she could set up a nice little bank account. Enough to get a crappy truck to drive anywhere she wanted and a modest two bedroom home in a cute suburb.
There were still times that she still couldn’t wrap her head around it. A few months ago, she opened a random time door on a new timeline, ended up in bumfuck nowhere on Midgard, and now she had this.
Of course, she could have gotten a hell of a lot more with enchantment, no money needed. But she didn’t want to. That felt like the old days, cheating and stealing with no care about who got hurt in the process (they were already dead, after all). And Sylvie was starting over.
Sylvie disengaged the locks on the front door (five of them – old habits died hard) and nudged it open with her hip. The light in the dining room was still on, she noticed with a hint of annoyance. Waste of power, she was going to have to rework their entire budget around it.
Then she laughed, easily and full bellied. Because who would have ever thought that she would be worried about something so…mundane. She loved it.
She kicked her shoes off and peeled off her jacket, nearly floating from the living room to the dining room.
“I got the job,” she called, dropping the bag onto the dining table.
They still didn’t have much furniture, just enough to keep the house from feeling totally empty. A table, a few bare mattresses, one ratty brown couch that wasn’t completely back-breaking to sit on, and a pair of truly hideous curtains. But it was getting there.
She sucked a cleansing breath through her nose and felt the tension of the day slide from her shoulders.
“It turns out eating there regularly for three months isn’t a guarantee,” she went on, “but I managed to seal the deal. Almost four bucks an hour. So I brought a feast for us to celebrate.”
A grumpy hissed floated from beneath the table. Slitted reptilian eyes gazed up at the take-out bag with open contempt. One wouldn’t think an alligator’s face was capable of conveying that complex of an emotion, or really any emotion. One would be wrong about that.
“Oh shut up,” she chided. “You know you love it.”
She tossed a single nugget, and the Alligator snatched it up. Despite his complaints, he happily munched on the morsel and instantly opened his mouth for more.
“Better get out here before he eats it all,” she shouted down the hallway, fishing out another nugget.
“I need to find the right calibration for the Gjallarhorn, ” a disembodied voice called from the second bedroom. “I know I’ve almost got it, I know I’m almost there. I’ve been chasing the answer all day long and I’m so close I can taste it. If we could just get some more parts from the Void–”
“Sounds like you need a break then,” she interrupted. “Get out here before it gets cold.”
A beat of mulled silence answered her. “It’s already cold.”
“Before it gets colder,” she allowed. “Get out here. And didn’t I tell you not to leave the lights on all day.”
Sylvie didn’t hear the resulting put-upon sigh, but she also didn’t need to in order to know it was there. The bedroom door dutifully swung open and the sullen clump of feet echoed down the hall. The child Loki-Variant slid into the seat across from her with an annoyed scowl.
“It hasn’t been on all day,” he grumbled. “Just the last few hours. It was getting dark.”
“You were in your bedroom, where you very rarely leave,” she pointed out.
“I came out for a snack a little while ago. You were running late.” The child rummaged through the bag and wrinkled his nose. “Does you getting this job mean that we’ll be eating this crap even more?”
“It’s not crap.”
“Yes, it is. Everyone knows that.”
“It doesn’t stop anyone from eating it. Including you.”
Proving her point, the boy fished out a burger and took a hearty bite. He crossed his legs under him and settled back in his seat, quickly devouring the whole thing. Sylvie snorted and shook her head. She didn’t know why he complained so much. As a healthy boy – a healthy Asgardian boy – with a raging appetite, one would think he was always being starved half to death. He’d eat just about anything, and do it with gusto.
The boy chased the burger down with a noisy slurp of Ecto-cooler – she still had no idea where he kept getting those damn things, but every day she found a carton tucked away in every innocuous corner – then nosed through the contents again. It was very possible she hadn’t brought enough food to satisfy him.
His face suddenly lit up with pure delight.
“You got the pies!”
The expression sent an unexpected surge of fond pleasure through her chest. A gentle, content smile tugged at her lips. It felt foreign to muscles on her face.
“Yes, I did.” She smacked his hand as he snatched one of the pies up. Confounded, he dropped the treat and gaped at her. “Finish your supper first, then desert.”
Even as she heard the words she realized how ridiculous it sounded. How…maternal. Heat burned at her cheeks, which she tried to hide by digging in to her own food. The silence between the stretched, then swelled. Determined to wave it off, Sylvie finished off her own burger and reached for a handful of fries.
“I love their fries,” she declared, a little too loudly. “Something about the salt to potato ratio. Plus the crisp factor. Perfect.” She popped another into her mouth with a flourish.
“Whatever,” the kid said. Munching on his own fry, he studied her face. The Alligator whined at his feet and the boy tossed it another nugget without breaking eye contact.
He had a disconcerting way about him when he wore that look. The kid was a truly angelic looking child, with a cherub face that looked much younger than he actually was – although he’d yet to tell her his real age – and fluffy curls that couldn’t be tamed, especially since he’d abandoned his helm.
But his eyes told a different story. The delighted light of a child excited for a promised treat died away, leaving something shrewd and cold in its place. They were the eyes of someone much older. Eyes that had seen an incomprehensible amount of time in the Void at the End of Time. It was an uncanny expression. Sylvie repressed a shiver.]
“I need more motherboards,” he finally declared. “Gjallarhorn can’t keep up with all the new branches, and it keeps overloading trying to monitor them. Midgard is still decades away from making anything anywhere near the level I need.” He sighed, shaking his head in disgust. “I want to go back to the Void. The place was littered with tech that’s centuries ahead of what we’ve got here. There’s bound to be something I can use.”
Sylvie’s heart did a sickening roll down to her stomach. She blurted out the protest before she’d even consciously thought it.
“We’re not going back there.”
The boy looked at her like she was an idiot.
Sylvie found she didn’t like being on the receiving end of that look.
“Why not? It’s not dangerous; practically everything there is dead after our little showdown. The man behind the curtain is gone, and Alioth has scampered off somewhere into the Multiverse. Where’s the threat?”
“We can’t go back,” Sylvie corrected. She plucked another fire and popped it into her mouth. It tasted like ash. “There’s nothing for a TemPad to lock onto. It’s outside of the timestream. We’re cut off from the Void, there’s no going back.”
“Doubt it,” the boy said breezily. “You still have His master Key. If it could drop us onto a branching timeline, it can get us back to the Void. Honestly, I’d like to hook it up to Gjallarhorn. Probably a great place to start when it comes to monitoring the branches. It could serve as a blueprint, at least.”
Even though the device wasn’t in sight, Sylvie’s fingers nervously twitched with the urge to grab it.
“We’re not going back there,” she said again.
The boy threw his hands in the air with an exasperated huff.
“The monitor can’t function like this! The alarm goes off ten, twenty times a day. So unless the multiverse has collapsed half a dozen times by now, Gjallarhorn is not working properly. The new branches are overwhelming; there are hundreds more every day. It needs more computing capability to keep up.”
“It won’t collapse. There’s no ‘multiversal war’ on the horizon coming to gobble us all up. That’s nothing but a campfire story meant to keep us all in line,” Sylvie spat. There might have been too much vehemence in her voice, but her stomach was roiling at the reminder of the pathetic propaganda. Even though it had been years since she saw it, the images remained seared in her mind.
The boy remained unimpressed.
“This is the only warning system we have for if the TVA starts pruning again.”
“They won’t. The TVA is gone.”
“We don’t know that for sure!”
“I killed the man behind it. Without the head, the body dies. The TVA is gone . It’s over.”
The boy was quiet for a long while after that. He plucked out another handful of nuggets and tossed them down to his reptile companion, but otherwise just stared at her with a thoughtful twist of his lips.
“Why are you so afraid?” he murmured. Sylvie’s spine stiffened with insult, but he was already throwing out the next barb before she could cut him down.
“Is this really what it looks like to achieve your glorious purpose ?” Now his voice was mocking, dripping with venom. “Is this what Lokis strive for all our lives? The chance to sling greasy shit patties and bury our heads in our asses? Is that really what he died to help you do?”
The boy’s tone was drenched in frigid anger and arrogance. But even that couldn’t cover the hint of bone deep pain that choked the end of his blistering accusation. His shoulder hiked up to his ears and for a fraction of a second, rage and gut wrenching pain flashed over his face. Mentions of the elder variant never failed to provoke that reaction.
Sylvie flinched back and tried to cover it with a glare.
“You don’t have to stay, if you don’t like what I’m doing. I can drop you wherever you want if this isn’t good enough.”
“I want to go to the Void,” the boy said, utterly unintimidated by the threat.
Sylvie gnashed her teeth. “So eager to get back to your kingdom of ashes, your majesty ?”
A part of her knew that falling into slinging petty insults with a child was a sign that she’d lost the argument. She was too insulted to pay it any mind.
The boy met her gaze levelly with those cold, cold eyes. “At least I’d be doing something.”
“I’ve done enough,” she hissed.
They glared at each other over the table in chilly silence. Even the Alligator at their feet didn’t break it.
An ear splitting shriek suddenly filled the air, jarring and horrible. Neither one of them jumped, unwilling to be the first to break the silent conflict between them. They were Lokis, after all.
Finally, the boy pushed back from the table and rose to his full height. It wasn’t an impressive stature, but he held himself like a king.
“Gjallarhorn is overloading again. Probably,” he added with a cynical smile. Sniffing haughtily, he snatched a handful of pies from the bag in a display of petty defiance. Then he marched down the hall without another word. The door to his bedroom slammed shut, muffling the horrid cries of his machine.
Sylvie dropped her face into her hands, massaging her temples. At her feet, the Alligator hissed again, its tone reproachful.
“Shut up,” she muttered half-heartedly. Leaving the food abandoned on the table – the damn lizard would probably scarf down everything she left unattended, paper and cardboard and all, but she couldn’t bring herself to care – and made her way to the living room. She folded herself onto the solitary sofa and rubbed her arms. The room suddenly felt lifeless and too empty.
Feeling exhausted, Sylvie drew her knees up to her chest. She couldn’t quite muster the will to make her way to her own bedroom. It was even more depressing than the living room.
She sighed. This wasn’t the first time they’d had this disagreement, but the boy had been growing more frustrated with her arguments as time went on. Not only refusing to try to revisit the Void, but also to leave this branch in particular. It didn’t help that she couldn’t really put her reservations into words. To answer for him, the most crucial, damning question: what now?
With another heaving sigh, Sylvie’s mind turned, as it often did, to The Citadel. To the yawning window that overlooked the newly branching timeline. Her stomach curdled, her guts tying themselves into aching knots. The time stream was humbling to look upon, brilliant strands of pure white light, like the fractals of lightning. Ever growing, expanding. Endless possibilities. It was beautiful, breathtaking.
And there were already branches colliding with thunderous crashes, in just the few short moments Sylvie had watched it. Unbridled chaos as the branches battled for equilibrium. Destructive as it was awe inspiring.
But that was the natural order of things. Life was struggle, after all.
The universe needed to break free; Sylvie still believed that with every fiber of her being. The damage that resulted as things settled, as balance was achieved, was hardly her fault.
Your years-in-the-making plan was to tear the place down, create the ultimate power vacuum, and then, what? Just walk away?
Sylvie scowled at the phantom voice. What the hell did he even know about it? She’d give free will to the universe, to countless universes. Wasn’t that enough?! Now, all she wanted was to live her life, a normal life. For the first time since she’d been a child. Didn’t she deserve that? To have a home after all these years?
She’d earned it. She’d done enough.
But as Sylvie sat on her solitary couch in a near empty house, with the boy’s machine continuing to blare hauntingly from behind his door, the assurance rang hollow.