Work Text:
He leaves Sylvie on the dissolving timeline in the future that might be, running back through their conversation in his head. He feels dizzy with it, the implications of so many choices and too few options, Mobius’ sometimes you have to make the hard choices and Sylvie’s we deserve the chance to go down fighting.
It isn't even really a conscious choice. His control of the time-slipping is still tenuous, less under his conscious control and more guided by the churning contradictions of his subconscious mind. He needs advice, needs guidance, wants someone to tell him how to make his way through an impossible choice, even though he knows, deep in his bones, that there will not be a simple answer. No good answer, nothing that wouldn't require him to carve out his own heart only to lose yet again.
And he is tired. Norns, is he tired. He can endure—if this has taught him anything, it's that there's nothing he does better—but the part of him that wants to curl up, to rest, to be held like a child and told that everything is okay, grows stronger every time another failure punches the breath out of him.
So it's not as surprising as it should be that his vague hope for advice would bring him here, though he still hesitates, nearly quails at the too-familiar sight. He's long since stopped believing in his father's invincibility and even his wisdom, saw the flawed man underneath far sooner than Thor had realized the same, but on some level, he still longs for what was and what could have been. A father, someone to fight the monsters and fix the world and make everything alright.
He can't even say, from the wooden door he's staring down or the antechamber that surrounds it, what time this latest Slip has brought him to. Asgard was always like that, unchanging until it wasn't.
Another time, he may have been afraid, but so much has happened that once he makes up his mind it seems almost small, trivial, to knock on the door.
“Come in.”
Something rises in his throat at the familiar voice, and he gives himself one instant, two, to wrangle himself back under control before he pushes his way into Odin’s study.
The King of Asgard startles, pushing up from his chair as a mixture of fear and anger and something else he can't quite place flashes across his face. Not a time when they were on good terms, then. The next instant he is face to face with a weapon, and the magic that's gathered in the room would've nearly swept him off his feet, once upon a time.
“You escaped your cell,” Odin says, levelly. Loki doesn't move, nothing sudden or threatening.
“Not exactly,” he says, and the weariness in his own voice surprises him. He moves, but only to gesture to the chair across from the desk, familiar from an entire childhood’s worth of stern parental lectures. “Can I sit?”
Odin looks suspicious, still, but in a way that has turned calculating. “Why did you not flee?”
Loki sits without waiting for permission, and he knows his answering smile must look grim. “There are some problems you can't run from,” he says, and recent experience gives the words weight.
Odin thinks a second more before slowly lowering his spear, though the gathered magic remains. “Something has changed,” he says, slowly. “It isn't so long since I last saw you, yet there is a magic here I do not recognize.”
He meets Odin’s one eye. “Time can be a funny thing,” he says.
“Why are you here?”
Loki studies the man he once called father. Odin looks old. His skin is creased, his one eye is weary, and his shoulders seem to push back against an invisible weight. There's an uncomfortable moment where he's seeing the scene as though he's stepped outside of it, looking at a part of his childhood from a perspective so different that he may as well be a stranger. He nearly is. He's changed. Grown. The world has grown so much bigger, and shrunken down into something so much smaller, than he ever could have imagined.
“You know,” he says at last, “I think I might finally understand you.”
Odin doesn't relax, but he does sit, looking equal parts wary and intent, as though he's trying to puzzle Loki out. Loki mentally wishes him luck. He doesn't quite understand himself, and while he thinks the pieces may be drawing together, what shape they're taking is a mystery even to him.
“What’s to be done, when the cost of peace is hurting the ones we love?” he says, soft, careful not to let the emotion choke him. It would be so, so easy to collapse here, to fall apart, and he doesn't think he could pull himself back together if he does. “What does it matter, when they’re the reason you care enough to fight for peace in the first place? It's an unsolvable contradiction, an endless cycle, the snake biting its own tail. There's no way to win. You can't love someone by putting them in a cage, but if the alternative is destruction?” He laughs, and it tastes bitter. “The choice is an illusion. Freedom is a lie, just as much as it always was.”
He's been speaking almost to himself, but he's surprised to find that when he looks up, Odin is watching him, transfixed.
When the words come, they're little more than a hoarse whisper. “What would you do, if saving the world meant doing something terrible?”
It isn't fair. It's not a fair choice, not a thing the Universe or He Who Remains or whatever guiding power that brought him here has any right to ask of him.
“Something has happened,” Odin says slowly, and he's momentarily disappointed, because of course his father is caught up in the details, trying to put this conversation into context. “This isn't about recent events, or at least those which I know.”
Loki swallows. It's almost terribly funny, in a way, to be nostalgic for the simple problems of treason and interplanetary war. “No.”
“This is not something I or any other can help you face,” he says, and it's a question as much as it is a statement.
“I’m afraid not.”
Odin nods, the easy acceptance almost as surprising as the fact he'd intuited as much in the first place. He supposes the magic that clings to him now must truly be foreign, near-unrecognizable in the aftermath of all that has happened.
“A difficult road lies ahead,” Odin continues, tenuously feeling out the shape of the problem. “Something terrible must be done, and you feel you don't have a choice.”
“I know I do,” he says. “I think I may be the only one who does.”
Odin thinks on that, a moment.
“You said you understand me,” he says at last. “You know what I would do.”
Something inside him twists, a sick disappointment that leaves him nauseated. “Duty before love,” he says. “Always. The burden of a king.”
“Yes.”
He swallows. Tries to picture it—Sylvie bleeding out in his arms under the watchful eyes of He Who Remains. A timeline forever enslaved, the people on it safe from the promised annihilation but never free, never truly. The Sacred Timeline marching on, oblivious to the sacrifices made, to the blood on which it is sustained. All else outside that one hallowed place reduced to ruin.
“But Loki,” he says at last, and Loki looks up. Everything is watery, seen through a film of unshed tears. “You are not me. Nor, I think, should you strive to be.”
“What?”
“If it is as you say,” he says, “if there is a choice that only you can make, you must make it as yourself.”
“But I don't know what to do,” he says, and the fault lines quiver.
“We never do.”
There is another silence, this time almost polite, as he regathers his composure.
“I have wondered, often, what other choices I could have made,” Odin says at last. “Where we would be now, if I had. I know I will have to live with every decision I've chosen for the rest of my life.”
It occurs to him, suddenly, that the Odin he had known was no more free from fate than any of them. To think that someone he'd always seen as so powerful, so in control, had always been subject to the preordained story written out for them all makes him feel sick all over again.
It's unfair, how he's not even allowed to keep his rightful anger, but with this newfound distance, holding onto it feels so small and pointless.
“I’ve always wanted better for you,” he says. “For you, and for Thor. And…”
“Hela,” he finishes when Odin can't. The old man only nods. If he's surprised that Loki knows his greatest secret, it doesn't show.
“You’re more than mischief, Loki. More than destruction. I think I'd forgotten that. Don't make the same mistake.”
His throat closes, and he shuts his eyes. The hand that falls on his shoulder is strong, and warm, like it had been when he was a child and the world and its problems had been simple.
“You’ve never been good at doing what you're supposed to do.” The words come from behind him now, strong and confident and tinged with what almost could have been amusement. “But you can do what's right. Usually in a way none of us could have expected.” He could hear the wry smile behind the words. “Do what you must,” his father says, “but don't lose who you are.”
He can't take it, not for one more second, he needs to be somewhere else, so he shouldn't be surprised when the next Slip pulls him away. He thinks he's sitting on the floor, probably somewhere in the TVA, and he's alone. His chest is a hollow ache, and the place where Odin’s hand had been feels strangely bereft of warmth, but he knows what he needs to do.
He takes a moment to gather himself before facing what is to come. Because if he is to make a choice as himself, he must first decide what that means. Who he is, at his core; what makes Loki, Loki.
The pieces are coming together, and he thinks he can see the shape emerging from them. He can't tell whether he wants to laugh or cry.
There's a third way. There's always a third way. Nothing is simple, or stagnant, or constrained as people like to imagine. The binary of choice is just a way to escape the chaos of limitless possibility.
He's done following rules. He's chafed and struggled against fate for too long to be corralled into one of the boxes set before him.
He's been so focused, his whole life, on the things he can't do. He can't be Thor, can't win his father's approval, can't lift a hammer he didn't even truly want, can't stop He Who Remains, can't protect his friends, can't make an impossible choice while the universe hangs in the balance.
But he can create chaos, and he knows well that chaos is not indiscriminate destruction. It is the destruction of boundaries, of rules, of expectations and walls and limits.
And today, that just might be enough to save them all.