Work Text:
“Do you see?” Frigga asked.
Loki pushed himself onto his tiptoes and eyed her loom. “I think so.”
Frigga smiled softly down at him for a moment, then picked him up to place in her lap. “Would you like to try?”
“Can I?” Loki glanced up at her dubiously. “I thought boys didn’t weave…”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Frigga released the wisp of cloud from her loom and reset it. “There’s more to life than what others think of you. Besides, I taught Thor how to weave, you know.”
“You did?” Loki glanced at the loom once more.
“Of course.” She leaned in, as if about to share a secret with her younger son, “He was not very good at it.”
Loki giggled,
“Here, watch closely,” Frigga leaned in, her arms around Loki and the warm, safe scent of her surrounding him. She began to re-thread the loom.
–
Loki touched one of the threads.
It lit under his fingertips, responding to who he was and what he knew.
He could hear Frigga’s instructions, from so long ago, echoing in his head. He could see her threading the loom. He could see her weaving clouds, fog, and fine cloths. What was a timeline if not a tapestry of moments? Frigga could have woven from these threads, surely. And Frigga was a good teacher.
Loki pulled a thread in, then another. He needed a loom of his own, at some point – very unlike He Who Remains’s loom – because surely the cloth of a thousand realities was better woven on a loom than through a person’s will.
For now, though, he was the loom.
He took a handful of threads into his hand. Threads began to cling to him, connecting and running off his very being and the ethereal cape he’d willed for himself, when manmade clothes failed.
Another thread. Another.
A handful of braided ropes of thread.
Realities on realities.
He could see Sylvie’s chosen timeline – the fast food store, her coworkers, the record shop, the life she’d built for herself – and he could see Mobius’s timeline – he sons, his store, his jetskis, and his coworkers – and he could see B-15’s timeline, OB’s timeline, the timeline his brother lived one—
Who was she?
The girl?
Jane had died? The Iron Man had died? The Avengers were fragmented, familiar faces gone. Thor’s timeline had gone through hell. What was free will even worth when stuff like that was allowed to happen?
Who was the girl?
Loki allowed himself a moment – a single moment entirely outside moments – to look.
Love?
A child. So small. So strong. Powerful beyond what such a small body might suggest.
Loki turned away, once more, but held the threads in that tapestry all the harder – he would not allow his brother’s reality to unravel, he would not allow his unknown niece’s reality to unravel. But he couldn’t look at her, he couldn’t look at just another thing he didn’t have and never would have. Here, outside of time and space, at the end of time and space, on a throne of the past and holding the threads of the future… he had nothing and no one.
An Atlas of time, all worlds on his shoulders as he sat between the roots of the past and the branches of the future.
What a lonely role to play.
Loki closed his eyes.
–
“Ey, wake up.”
Loki straightened, eyes wide, as Sylvie kicked his boot.
“What’s wrong with your shoes? They’re awful. You need socks,” Sylvie said.
“Sylvie?”
“The one and only,” Sylvie shrugged. “I mean, sorta. In as much as a Variant can be a ‘one and only.’”
“What are you doing here?”
“I talked to Mother,” Sylvie said, stiffly. “Not my Mother. The All-Mother was neither a weaver nor a witch. My father, rather, was the weaver, on my timeline…” Sylvie cleared her throat. That was probably more about her original timeline than she’d ever wanted to tell. “I spoke to Mother. She gifted me a solution. Well. Less a solution than an alternative.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s a loom!” Mobius said, lugging a bundle of sticks and ropes. “A really heavy loom.”
“A loom.” Loki eyed the wood and rope with suspicion.
“He Who Remains had something of the right idea, but done very wrong,” Sylvie said. She took a piece of the loom from Mobius. “The gods wove reality, once. Not that ‘once’ is the right way of putting it, is it? It’s not about time. It’s about the creation and maintenance of time, as a concept, for those that are not gods.”
“Mother gave you a loom?”
Sylvie looked somewhat chastised. “Your Mother. She knew she was to die…”
Loki blinked back surprised tears as some part of him remembered a future that he hadn’t even experienced. Versions of him experienced it, but he’d been plucked from his timeline a while, yet, before Frigga would die.
“This is her loom,” Sylvie said gently.
“Ragnarok is a story of rebirth,” Loki muttered. “Her death isn’t forever.”
“It’s okay to be sad, anyway,” Sylvie said. Then she turned to Mobius and the two of them started to put the frame of the loom together. A loom that had woven fog and clouds and mist, Aesir garments; and destiny itself.
Loki had never expected to see the loom again. That or any of his mother’s looms.
“I’m so proud of you, my son,” a voice whispered across the imploding void at the end of time. “So proud.”
Sylvie looked up and Mobius looked at Loki.
“You didn’t… bring just the loom, did you?” Loki murmured.
Frigga stepped forward, “I was plucked from my story at the last page, moments before an end that would have lasted until time was renewed,” she told him.
“And the Timeline is okay with that?” Loki glanced at Mobius.
“Yeah. So far, anyway,” Mobius said.
Frigga stepped forward and took a bundle of threads from Loki’s hand, into her own. “You have shown your selflessness, and a mastry of that which I taught you, my son. But, now, it is time that you go home. I will be fine, here. At the end of all. I’ve always wanted more time for my weaving,” she smiled, so kindly. “Besides, there are those who love you that would see you returned to them.”
“Mother,” Loki murmured. His obsidian crown disintegrated into the collapsing void around him, leaving him feeling bare and unprotected. Emotional. Breakable. “I won’t let this be your end.”
“No, Loki. This is my choice. It is you who will not be allowed to give in and embrace an end like this. Not when the world is not done with your generation of gods,” Frigga said. She took the threads from his other hand. “Stand, my son.”
Loki obeyed her. How could he not?
She smiled and took his place, the threads turning from emerald and obsidian to gold and airy white around her. She was far purer and had much better intentions.
Yes, Loki had been selfless, at the end of it all, but he’d been selfless because it was the only way to ensure that those he loved were not lost to him, including Sylvie. Including Mobius.
“You’re in the way, Loki,” Sylvie said.
He backed out of the way as Sylvie and Mobius moved the loom in, closer to Frigga.
She smiled at them. “My daughter,” she said to Sylvie. “My son’s protector,” she said to Mobius. “And my son,” she said to Loki. Then she set to putting the threads that built all of reality into her loom, where she could weave an endless fabric of realities, branching and coexisting.