Chapter Text
It took far longer than Loki was comfortable admitting, but he had managed to get everything he wanted. Well, for a certain definition of everything. He took a sip of fine Elven wine and then leaned back in the bath, letting the past weeks... Months? Decades? It didn't matter. It was over now, all properly behind him. Time worked differently in the TVA, and his body hadn't aged a day since he was first picked up by Hunter B-15. The preservative effects would wear off in a year or so, which would be right on time.
It took time to explain the Sacred Timeline to the Mobius he met after Sylvie's betrayal. Well, betrayal was harsh. One had to have trust in the first place in order to be betrayed, and there had never been a moment in their acquaintance where the non-Loki Loki variant had trusted him with anything. She let him do a few things when they were functionally identical to what she had already planned to do and mocked him while he did them. That wasn't trust, he deserved better.
Sorting out the inside of his head had been a high priority after the confrontation with He Who Remains, and Loki had managed a great deal, but he still found himself in need of it from time to time. Perhaps he always would. Centuries of trying to gain attention and approval from Odin specifically and Asgard in general had primed him for what Thanos put him through, and that shaped who he was in many ways. Perhaps he always had needed help keeping his mind in order and part of why he went mad was a lack of it.
Part of why it took so long to get his head straight was that he couldn't use the magical meditation techniques he was more familiar with all that often. Magic didn't work in the TVA as a general rule, but he made the mistake of thinking it deactivated all spells when it actually consumed the magical energy outright. The protections in his mind that he had built over years, responses to the likes of Loralei and The Other, had been in tatters after the whole Mind Stone Scepter situation. The TVA had not been kind to him while hunting Sylvie by any stretch of the imagination, but he couldn't fault their basic hospitality. Physically, he had enjoyed plenty of rest and good food while he was useful to them. Loki had mistakenly thought that this would allow his mental protections to heal along with his body even if he could not access them at the moment.
This was true for the mundane aspects of his health but not the magical ones. He was under a lot of stress in a hostile environment, but it was better than living under Thanos' rule and Mobius encouraged him to think about the things that had driven him to attempted suicide in a way that was... Not helpful, necessarily, but at least accidentally healthier while still manipulative for his own ends. Somewhat more objective, perhaps. It wasn't something he would have done if anyone had bothered to give him specifics about where this variant came from and how she differed from him before he met her. Still, the TVA that abducted him offered him something that had been an unobtainable luxury for some time: quiet hours to reflect with no physical discomfort or distractions. He couldn't even use his illusions to amuse himself in the evenings. It was just the four blank walls in a drab suite that looked nothing like the prison he knew it to be, and the contents of his own mind. He certainly wasn't lacking in traumatic memories to process.
The second Mobius he met was more deliberately helpful, and he would miss his friend now that they parted ways. He could see now that his relationship with that first Mobius, who had likely ceased to exist when the version of the TVA tied to the life of He Who Remained was consumed by Alioth, had started in a rather problematic way. The second attempt was free of that terrible start, and he would cherish the memory of both times that easy friendship grew between them despite their circumstances. It reminded him that he did have good qualities. Thor's friends didn't appreciate his charm, but that didn't mean that nobody did. He'd even gotten on good terms with a few of the other agents after a while. Perhaps Thor was right, in a broken clock sort of way, and he did spend too much time "alone in his rooms" or at least trying to socialize with the same small circle of people who dislike him. Surely there were some others out of all the people in Asgard who could be his friends.
After, and he was fairly certain his life would forever be divided into before he knew of the Time Variance Authority and after the death of He Who Remains, he had even more time to process. Loki's information about He Who Remains and his fate was considered highly valuable. The "Sector" of the TVA he landed in treated him well and was glad for his presence. He met that sector's Kang briefly. A ruthless man far too serious, or perhaps simply too sane, to be recognizable if he hadn't had the same face and voice. Kang spoke of small closed systems, groups of very few timelines kept carefully trimmed that were cut off from the larger and more complicated webs and how he'd never thought of binding one of them into a loop. It wasn't something that particular Kang thought possible for his domain for a number of reasons, most of which he didn't speak directly about, but it was information he thought he could use against other variants of himself. What more effective trap was there, than the one you built for yourself?
It was possible Kang used that same tactic on Loki to a certain extent, but it seemed that no matter how often he said it or how much he meant it no one would ever believe that Loki didn't want a throne. His goals were, by his measure, quite humble. He simply preferred to go about getting what he wanted in the most extravagant ways possible.
In any case, it was only once he'd gotten some downtime outside the TVA (at a beach just before a meteor strike where Mobius could ride a jet ski and Loki could enjoy the sand and all the beautiful people in skimpy clothing for a few hours) that he was able to notice the state of his seidr. He was a wreck of tattered and torn magic. Loki cashed in the owed favor from explaining how TVA agents could safely take a vacation day without altering the timelines immediately, and Mobius helped him set up the chance to have all the detritus removed from his person properly. He did it in isolation on an uninhabited planet as the older version of himself had done, ensuring he didn't make a new branch of reality as he purged and recovered. It left him blue for the week it took his magical core to recover, but even that horror had some value in the sense that he had to confront his natural biology and learned something about his inborn abilities. Not that he ever planned on living in that form for an extended time again, but at least he could put on the skin he was born with without wanting to peel it off with a knife.
Progress, Mobius called it. Loki preferred the phrase “unnecessary ordeal.” He might appreciate that the Jotun people were not divided into separate male and female forms for the simplicity of not having to deal with strict gender roles in social situations, but as a changeling he had no need of becoming intersex full time to express himself accurately. If he felt feminine or masculine, then he'd be feminine or masculine in a skin that felt like his own and would not change his body in ways he didn't want to.
When Loki thought of himself there were certain physical features that were his own, just as those who couldn't shift their form knew their own limbs and shape. His gray-blue eyes that changed with the light in the room, the long legs and general body proportions, his hands, his dark hair... not that the physical was what made him who he was, but who he was wasn't Jotun. Not culturally, as he had only a vague idea of what life on that planet was like. The blue skin on his hands was distracting because of the novelty, the tribal lines meant nothing to him, he never got used to the glow from his eyes casting shadows at night. Like clothes in a strange style that cling in odd places, he disliked wearing that skin. He was glad that his dark hair and the general shape of himself remained while he was forced into the skin he was born in; he could still recognize his own face in a black and white photograph. He didn't know why he kept that photograph, Mobius had babbled a bunch of nonsense at him when he gave it to Loki, and the man had his own copy he kept in his wallet. Loki didn't keep much from his time working with the TVA, and he happily burned one of his TVA uniforms when he was finally able to replace his lost leather armor, but he had a few things. He was reasonably certain nobody knew that one of those things was a fully charged tempad. He hoped he would never need it, but best to be over prepared than caught off guard.
He found Sylvie mostly to see if she made it out alright, but she didn't want anything more to do with him that wasn't a tumble in the sheets or unkind words meant to make her feel stronger. Perhaps it was the recent reminder of his tryst with Sif, but a purely physical relationship with someone who didn't value him much if at all wasn't palatable. Neither of them had valued him much by any metric, really, he was just convenient.
Loki left her in the company of Renslayer and rather uncharitably thought they deserved the highly dysfunctional relationship they had. Sylvie was right: she wasn't him. She'd managed to become more like Thor than any other Loki variant he had ever met (and he'd met quite a few while looking for her) despite the lack of sibling rivalry to push her into a contest with the oaf. Thor was quite adept at getting people to do things for him while not paying any attention at all to their needs, and she had that down perfectly. Perhaps that was the real reason why her timeline was pruned, it had a Thor and Loki who had swapped personalities and they wouldn't be able to fulfill their destiny properly.
Loki took a deep breath, savoring the perfumed air of his private bathing room and lazily running his hands through the warm water to disturb the floating herbs. He'd managed to get what he really wanted, and none of these things mattered anymore beyond idle thoughts and theoretical argument. The Sacred Timeline was a world tree made sick through over-pruning, but it was only a cutting from a much larger tree. Yggdrasil - the TVA could call this part of the multiverse by whatever alphanumeric code they wanted, his world tree was named Yggdrasil - was an enormous and unfathomably complex garden of thriving worlds based on a very strong foundation. This branch was slated for pruning after an 'essential element' was lost, meaning a chain of events that was necessary to maintain the health of the branch would never occur. In particular, Thanos would assemble all of the infinity stones and make his snap with ease. Since it was so simple, he would stick around to watch his glorious vision unfold instead of going into retirement on some backwater world.
It is a null condition: Whenever Thanos becomes aware that the people of the universe suffer greater strife and resent his actions instead of being deliriously happy about the death of half of all life like he expects them to be while he is still in possession of the infinity stones, he then destroys that branch of reality using the stones instead of attempting to destroy the stones. Pruning those branches of the world tree was far better than letting them rot and breed horrors as a madman with ultimate power reshapes creation on the fly with no consideration for cause and effect to attempt to achieve a goal that is too unstable and illogical to last.
In more practical terms: The essential element missing was Loki himself, as well as whatever weak pawn Thanos would send in Loki’s place in those universes where Loki did not fall into his clutches. In this branch his idiotic counterpart was dead. He had gone in person to Jotunheim without disguising himself instead of using the black market smugglers who ignored the trade embargo of Jotunheim to deliver a letter to make contact. He was killed on sight by the group of Jotun bandits he’d intended to use. They presented the corpse, which had reverted to its natural form, to Laufey. Then they died, executed for killing their King's kin. Apparently, Laufey cared enough for vengeance even if he only claimed him as kin and not as his son. Who could have guessed? Loki simply stepped into this timeline to fill the vacant space. Let the Jontar be confused about the body double, it shouldn’t affect much. He'd cheated death plenty of times in more honest ways.
Was it the ideal time and place to rejoin his timeline? Certainly not. The reason the timeline was available to him was that he was needed to botch the invasion of Midgard. Without him a more competent or willing scout would be chosen, or else Thanos would keep the Mind Stone and come to Midgard directly instead of gambling one stone to get another. Midgard would not be underestimated in this timeline the way it was in others because of a complicated web of cause and effect related to a Midgardian named Carol Danvers, who also deviated a bit from the set path of the Sacred Timeline Loki came from.
Loki had to fall into the void in the appointed manner. It was a high price to pay to get his life back, but if it meant retirement from his job as a TVA analyst, he would take it. A long soak in a bath as part of an extensive self-care routine was, at least in Loki’s opinion, completely necessary for his first day back. He didn’t leave his chambers once in the day before Thor’s coronation. Tomorrow he would have to play his part in proving that this Thor in this world was a hot-headed warmonger unfit to host a formal dinner, let alone run a kingdom.