Work Text:
Partway through their first winter in New Asgard, Sylvie looks across at Loki where they’re loosely curled up on the couch, legs twined together under a blanket, and says abruptly, “Hey, do you wanna make a gingerbread house?”
Loki blinks at her. “A what?”
“A gingerbread house. You know—” She sets her half-empty mug of hot cocoa on the floor to gesture. “A little one. For fun. Maybe—this big? Out of gingerbread and icing?” When Loki continues to look uncomprehending, she says, “It’s an Earth thing, for the holiday season we’re in right now.”
“Ah,” Loki says. He carefully closes his book, an ancient Vanir text he’s been trying to translate. “I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about Midgardian holiday traditions. This is the first time I’ve actually lived here.”
“You spent a lot of time visiting Earth though, didn’t you?” Sylvie says. “Here and there? I read up on your D.B. Cooper stunt—” Loki drops his head back, groaning— “well, that took incredibly detailed knowledge of about a million different, really specific things—”
“I was extremely motivated,” Loki says, “and in retrospect probably in a state of intense, sustained, almost manic hyperfocus that would have killed a mortal. I may have stopped eating and sleeping for quite some time there.”
That might explain some things about a few of his more recent decisions associated with the Loom, and judging by the sudden grimace on Loki’s face, he’s thinking the same thing. Sylvie makes a mental note to bring it up later and presses, “And between all of that—I dunno, research, and all the other random times you hung around, the pop-culture stuff I know you’ve seen, and everything in stores right now, you just kinda glazed over all the Christmas stuff?”
“Not all of it,” he says. “I remember—” And then his expression goes completely blank.
Sylvie’s breath catches. She grabs Loki’s knee through the blanket and jostles his leg, a little more roughly than she probably needs to, but it still freaks her out when he slips away like this. “Hey. Hey. Real memories only. The multiverse isn’t your business anymore. You’re here now.”
He exhales and focuses on her, smiling wanly. “I know. It’s okay.”
It isn’t really, because the simple act of trying to remember something shouldn’t untether him that badly, but this is still incredible progress compared to those first few weeks after he finally emerged from that damned tree. He was spacey but still present, mostly, enough to understand that yes, really, the combined efforts of Sylvie, Thor, and the TVA crew had solved the problem and the multiverse no longer needed him as a living battery, but it was immediately clear that there would be lingering effects.
“I could see everything,” Loki told them, his eyes burning, his hands shaking where he gripped Sylvie’s arm on one side and Thor’s on the other. He laughed and that was worse. “All time always, you know? All of time, multiplied infinitely, all those branches, always, always…”
“Yeah, but you’re a god, right?” Mobius said, a faintly hysterical edge to his voice. “You guys can deal with a little infinity, right?”
We are gods, he’d said to her in that weird pie room, resigned but certain. Now he giggled, nearly swaying out of her hold, and whispered “god of self-sabotage” before he collapsed.
He was unconscious for hours after that, awake but nearly catatonic for hours more, and frankly Sylvie thought she deserved a medal for not tearing the place apart while she waited. (Thor, she was pretty sure, would have helped.) Even after he fully returned to consciousness, for a while Loki didn’t try to speak, just lay in the hospital bed looking exhausted and occasionally flexing his hands like they hurt him. Sylvie finally offered her hand to hold, not sure how he’d react, but he seized it like a lifeline.
He wanted to know everything then, because he couldn’t see into the TVA and following individual timelines got increasingly difficult as the branches multiplied. It was okay when they told him about the Council of Kangs and their efforts to free him, and Thor showed him lousy cell-phone pictures of New Asgard and cried over having any version of his brother back, but Loki could only tell them the barest outlines of his own experiences without getting…lost.
Even a god wasn’t meant to be a conduit for the entire multiverse. Loki’s mind had barely survived the strain of infinity, but he still had the unfathomably deep memory of it, and any slip from the present moment could send him spiraling into unreality.
It helped when they went to New Asgard, away from the TVA and his real but very destabilizing memories of timeslipping, of the Loom. It helped when she was there, he admitted, because he knew she was real, and it was grounding to live like a real person again without the multiverse rushing through his mind. She still found him staring at the wall more than once, eyes wide and teary, and had to pull him back to reality by inches.
Sometimes, now, he can pull himself back, remember where and when he is without her help, but it’s slow going. The lapses are happening less and less often, though. He’s functional in a way he wasn’t at first—he could move out of her little house and into one of his own at this point, if he wanted to, but she wants him there. It’s…comfortable, having him around, in a way she didn’t know living with another person could be, and if she tethers him to reality and calms his nightmares, he’s been able to calm her nightmares too, even early on when he couldn’t reliably remember that he was in New Asgard instead of trapped at the end of time.
“We had winter holidays on Asgard,” Loki says slowly, as if feeling his way through his own memories, wary for traps—which is one of the ways he’s described it to her, trying to explain what’s wrong inside his head. “We brought some of our traditions down to the Norsemen, ages ago. Before I was ever born. But I didn’t particularly pay attention, otherwise. Time always passed so quickly on Midgard.” He sets his book down carefully and rubs at his eyes. “Being up there rewired my brain, Sylvie. It was all constantly on the verge of burning out my mind but I had access to everything, even if I couldn’t actually comprehend it all. Now those pathways lead back on themselves and everything’s corrupted and my instincts are all wrong.”
“You tried to remember—what, all the Christmasses that could have ever existed across all time and space?”
“I didn’t try to, my mind just did that, because the connection’s gone but the memory is still there, like a…like a black hole inside my head.”
Where her hand still rests on his leg, Sylvie can feel him faintly trembling. “Is it getting any better?”
“It’s…yes. Truly, it is. It’s just…unsettling. And I know you have better things to do than babysit me, so—”
She kicks his thigh, not very gently. Honestly she’s surprised this didn’t come up a long time ago. “Actually, I’m doing exactly what I want, because maybe you managed not to learn anything from this whole mess but I learned something, thank you very much, so I really hope you’re not about to try something self-sacrificial because you think it’s what I want.”
Loki ducks his head, looking chastened. “Old habits. I really was getting better about that sort of thing when I met you. I don’t know what happened.”
Sylvie sighs. “Yes you do. You put your heart and your life in my hands and I as good as threw them away.”
“To keep me safe!” Loki protests. “I understand that part now. You had to kill him, and you couldn’t let me stop you, but you couldn’t really hurt me either.”
“You didn’t know that then, though.”
“…no. But it wasn’t only that. The timeslipping didn’t help, and…X-5, you remember him, he said some things that…got to me, more than I realized. And I…as I said. Old habits. Old patterns. Bad ones. Stupid really, they never helped before, but…” He shrugs.
“Okay then,” Sylvie says. “Time to get more practice breaking old habits. What do you really want?”
Loki winces, for some reason, but his gaze on her is steady when he says, “You. However you’ll have me. But I…I meant it, when I said I just wanted you to be okay. Whatever that means for you.”
“Well, that’s good,” Sylvie says, “because my life is better with you in it, and I’m sorry I made you think I didn’t want you around.”
“I’m sorry for everything,” Loki says. “I can’t believe we didn’t…talk.”
“We’re talking now,” Sylvie says. “We got here eventually. That’s the important thing, right?”
Loki gives her one of those smiles, so overflowing with tenderness it almost hurts to look at. “Thanks to you.”
“Nah. I don’t get all the credit and you don’t get all the blame. It works when we share. Okay?”
“Okay,” Loki says, and rubs at his eyes. “Um. Tell me about gingerbread houses.”
“Yeah, so it’s mostly a European and American thing, starting from…I think a few centuries ago? Sometimes people do really fancy elaborate ones, but in more modern times people didn’t have time for that, so—you remember the Roxxcart Mall, right, where we met?”
“Of course, yes.”
“Places like that would sell them premade in kits with everything you needed, so you’d just get cookies already baked in the right shapes and you’d knock them together into a cute little house with icing as mortar. Actually, Roxxcart sold versions that looked like little Roxxcart stores, which was a bit much.”
“How do you know all this? You didn’t grow up with it.”
“Yes I did actually. When I was still pretty young I spent a lot of time in this awful Minnesota blizzard in 2043—it was a lot like the hurricane in 2050, with a bunch of people sheltering in a Roxxcart Mall, only it was the middle of December so all the Christmas decorations were up. Some of the little Christmas lights stayed on, even when the store was running on emergency power. It was…almost cozy, if you didn’t know how it was all going to end.” She sighs. “Early on, I liked it because there were all kinds of holiday snacks and the decorations were pretty, and I could play with any of the toys, or read, or—whatever. That’s when I found gingerbread house kits—the normal kind, and the weird corporate Roxxcart version. Made a whole village of ‘em once just so I could stomp through like Godzilla, only that just made me think about how the whole building was going to come down soon.” Loki’s smile fades, his expression turning somber as he listens. “There was this one family I hung out with a lot—they were always so sweet to me as soon as they realized I was by myself. Showed me how to make a gingerbread house the first time. Every single time I sheltered with them, they’d tell me I could spend Christmas with them when we all got through this, and I was the only one who knew we wouldn’t.”
“Well, we’re quite a pair,” Loki says. “I have a black hole in my memories, and all of yours are sad.”
“Not all of them. Not anymore. Our nexus event was my first really good memory, you know.”
“Oh,” Loki says. His eyes look suspiciously shiny. He clears his throat. “Well, I still don’t know how to do it, but if you think it would be fun, I’d be very happy to build a gingerbread house with you.”
“I kind of figured you would be,” Sylvie says, grinning, “so I picked up a kit last time I was in town, plus an extra in case we really fuck up. Someday I might try making one from scratch, but uh, I’m not that confident in my baking abilities just yet.” She retrieves her hot cocoa and swaps out another Christmas album in the record player (there are way more convenient ways to play music at this point, but she’s not ashamed to admit that hanging out at Lyle’s record store turned her into a bit of a vinyl snob) before joining Loki in the kitchen, where he’s already found both kits and a box of chocolate cookies in the cupboard.
“What about gingerbread cookies?” Loki asks. “Could we make those?”
“Bearing in mind that 90% of my cooking experience at McDonald’s was totally irrelevant, I can follow a recipe, sure.”
“My cooking experience before this was almost entirely based on campfires, so I suspect you’re doing better than I am.”
“Well, I had some of that too.” Sylvie pulls up a recipe on her phone and starts setting out ingredients on the kitchen island. “Grab the milk and a couple eggs from the fridge. Okay, so it says all the dry ingredients get mixed first…” They take turns stirring the resulting dough, mostly because Sylvie eventually pushes Loki out of the way.
When she finishes, Loki puts down the phone and says, “Don’t put it in the fridge. We’re Frost Giants.”
“The goal is actually to chill the dough, not freeze it solid.”
Loki gives her a faintly reproachful look. “I may have a complicated relationship with my heritage, but I also briefly wielded the Casket of Ancient Winters, and I heard its song, as much as I was trying not to at the time. My ice powers aren’t completely uncontrolled.”
Sylvie shrugs. “Go on then, just don’t shatter it if you do freeze it.”
The skin of Loki’s right hand turns blue and he holds it over the dough, just barely touching. “There’s a timeline where I grew up on Jotunheim, and I was happy,” he says, his voice a little far away. “I was…much less of a runt, and it was a kinder universe, really, but in other ways it was very like this timeline. It was a little easier to focus in on my variants when I was up there, you see, than on anyone else. And that variant spent a lot of time chilling Thor’s ale. So from one influence or another…” Loki concentrates and the dough visibly hardens under his hand, venting puffs of heat into the air as steam.
Sylvie pokes at it. “Okay, I’m mildly impressed.”
“You probably shouldn’t be.” Loki pulls his hand back and flexes his fingers, letting the rich blue color fade. “I still have no idea what they do with their food, among other things. There was…so much I wanted to learn and couldn’t, because there was just…too much, all the time.”
Sylvie breaks the dough in half, passes a lump to Loki, and sprinkles some flour on the countertop so it won’t stick when she starts rolling it out. “Wouldn’t the TVA have records? Of that timeline, or just of Jotunheim in general?”
“They would. I just don’t think I’m quite ready to go back there yet without getting—you know, overwhelmed. I will though, eventually.”
“I’d like to know more about Jotunheim too. I don’t know what my parents would’ve told me if they’d had the chance, but they didn’t, so—” Sylvie shrugs. “And I didn’t visit Jotunheim much. Not a lot of usable apocalypses in their history.”
“Not even the time I tried to destroy the whole realm?” Loki asks, focusing very hard on rolling out his dough into a perfectly even slab.
“The Bifrost struck away from populated areas. There were casualties, but not many.”
“Oh,” Loki says. His shoulders slump a little. “That’s good. I’m glad.”
“You never checked?”
“There was never a good time,” he says, cutting out two person-shaped cookies and arranging them on the baking sheet. Very carefully, he pinches the dough at the tops of their heads into little horns, and then breaks one horn off near the base. Matching Loki and Sylvie gingerbread people, that’s too cute. “…and I was a coward.”
“Don’t be daft,” Sylvie says. She grabs the set of Avengers cookie cutters just for Loki’s exaggerated look of disgust. “Being afraid of facing something like that doesn’t make you a coward. It’s just…normal.”
“I should have looked, though.” Loki takes a knife and starts carving shapes freehand from the dough: a snake, two ravens, something vaguely triangular. “I should have done…so many things differently. I definitely should have talked to you properly, when I found you again. And I didn’t, because I was afraid, and I let the fear rule me. I’m trying not to do that anymore.”
“Maybe we could visit Jotunheim,” Sylvie says. “Just to see what it’s like, and start there. In this timeline, or—hell, we could even visit your variant, if he’d be friendlier.” She stamps out some gingerbread snowflakes. “Maybe we don’t have to have some grand plan, for that or anything else.”
Loki smiles down at—oh, okay, he’s scored lines into the triangular thing and now she recognizes Asgard’s palace. “Maybe we could figure it out together?”
“Yeah, see, you were onto something there.”
“I meant it. I mean it.”
“Me too,” Sylvie says and dusts his nose with some flour, just to be obnoxious. Loki laughs and leaves it there.
Together they fill the cookie sheet and Sylvie slides it into the oven to bake. Almost immediately, the sweet, spicy scent of gingerbread fills the room, making the place even cozier.
Sylvie breaks open the gingerbread house kit and dumps the contents out on the counter. “Okay, we’re not eating this one, it’s just for fun. Probably tastes like cardboard anyway.”
“…so what’s the point of it being edible at all?”
“Tradition, I guess? Come to think, I bet the ones from Roxxcart actually had sawdust or some shit like that in them. I always did feel a little sick when I’d try more than a few bites.”
Loki picks up the box in mild alarm. “This isn’t from Roxxcart though.”
“Are you kidding? Corporations can only pull shit like that in America.”
“Right,” Loki says, looking appalled, “remind me why the Americans were so eager to fight me off when I attacked New York? I could’ve done a better job than allowing sawdust in food products!”
“Because you were off your rocker at the time thanks to being basically the catspaw of the guy who at one point wanted to destroy the entire universe, and also you never really wanted to rule anything in the first place?”
“…I mean, sure. I’m not naïve enough to think Thanos had any intention of letting me win, not really, even if I’d done what he wanted. But I’d almost think people would be desperate enough for change that they’d listen.”
“If you’d actually tried that angle, maybe.” Sylvie presses two pieces together, sealing them with icing, and Loki reaches in to help keep it stable. “You know, instead of crashing in guns blazing?”
“That does sound more like me, doesn’t it?” he says, pensive. “I wonder…I never thought to look for that, whether some variants took a different approach. It’s an interesting idea.” He pauses, but only for a second, and gets his bearings on his own, then spreads icing on another gingerbread wall and presses it in place. “Maybe it’s silly, but I like to think down deep I wanted the invasion to fail. Maybe that’s why I didn’t choose a more effective strategy."
“Well, I don’t think it’s silly,” Sylvie says, squeezing another glob of icing into the join of two walls to keep them together. “Your head was a fucking mess, but you had to know even then that Thanos was using you, right? I’d wanna fuck up his plan too.”
Loki huffs and carefully holds half the roof in place so Sylvie can line up the other half. “I’m not sure at this point what I knew, really, just that everything was awful.”
“Cheers to that—ah, shit.” Sylvie’s quick reflexes save the roof from completely collapsing. “Can you get a finger—yeah, right there.”
“This would also be easier with magic.”
“That’s cheating. There we go. So then the candy and the rest of the icing is for decoration.”
“Oh, we have to use the green ones.”
“There’s not enough green candy.”
“Can I please supplement the candy decorations with magic?”
“I suppose a little magic is okay for decorating,” Sylvie relents.
Loki grins and snaps his fingers. The little house begins to glow from inside with a gentle green candle-like light; on the outside, delicate green lines trace the outline of each roof tile and form intricate frost-like patterns on the walls. Finally he lines up the green gumdrops along the peak of the roof and makes those glow too.
Sylvie wrinkles her nose at him. “Showoff.”
“Next year I’m making a gingerbread Valaskjalf from scratch. Thor will love it.”
“You’re such a softie, you dork.” Sylvie leans into him, into the warmth and safety she always feels in his presence.
Loki wraps one arm around her and brushes his chin across the top of her head. “Yes, but that’s a secret.” He nods down at the glowing green gingerbread house. “What do you think, will this be another happy memory?”
“Little bit, yeah.” Sylvie smiles up at him. “Does it feel real?”
“You’re here. Of course.”
“You’re here, and that’s why it’s happy. Weird, right?”
Loki lowers his head and presses his lips to her cheek, and that’s the brightest spot of warmth of them all.