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The light on OB’s stopwatch flicks to green, and Loki’s breath stutters to a halt, a ragged “no” tearing from his throat. He is out of time.
He doesn’t actually know what happens now. You will be lost to time, OB said, which didn’t sound so bad by itself, but he didn’t think to ask for details because he didn’t expect to drop the fucking timestick. OB mentioned spaghettification earlier, but that was if the pruning didn’t work, not if he never made it happen at all.
So when the dial sweeps through the rest of the green and he’s officially too late, then what? Does he fade into nothingness? Start timeslipping and never stop? Scatter across the timestream, disintegrated but somehow still conscious, like he’s back in the void between worlds after the Bifrost’s explosion, but this time truly forever?
Probably something like that last one, considering how often his life seems to turn into a cruel cosmic joke.
Maybe, even in the worst-case scenario, he’ll dissipate eventually, enough to die for good, and then…well, the TVA can erase entire timelines, but surely Valhalla is a little more metaphysical than that, isn’t it? Then again, the Sacred Timeline’s Valhalla already has a Loki who died more or less heroically; they certainly wouldn’t want an extra one (assuming he’s even done anything that would warrant entrance to Valhalla, at this point).
At least Mobius will be fine if he gets back inside before the blast doors close, right? Loki’s not a total idiot, he realizes losing every bit of skin almost certainly means death too, but that doesn’t just happen automatically if Loki fails to prune himself in time, does it? So—he’ll be fine. Probably. And Loki didn’t get a chance to say what he wanted, Thank you for everything, for saving me, and if I don’t make it back, find Sylvie and make sure she’s okay, but he’s pretty sure he can trust Mobius and B-15 to do that anyway.
He just—he wishes—
There’s never enough time.
A jangling alarm pierces the numbness, coming just up the hallway—a new alarm, not the meltdown klaxons wailing all over the TVA. Loki movies toward it like he’s in a trance, the timer in his hand steadily eating away at the green. He turns the corner to see a ringing telephone on a little table in front of an elevator and he steps toward it, staring, suspended in a haze of unreality. Hands wrap around the elevator doors from the inside, straining, pulling them open, and he can’t breathe, because—
“There you are!” Sylvie says breathlessly. Her fond, relieved grin is so beautiful he could weep, because it doesn’t make sense but she’s alive and safe and here, and all the air leaves his lungs in a rush of disbelief and something like peace. He’s going to die but it hardly matters because she’s okay, and at least…at least he got to see her, one last time. At least he can tell her—
Again, again, he doesn’t get the chance. Fire explodes between his shoulder blades, racing through his chest, somehow worse the second time. If he could breathe, if his lungs weren’t already burned away, he thinks he would be screaming. He knows what being pruned feels like and it doesn’t matter that this is necessary, that it only feels like dying and this time it’s his one chance to survive, all he can think is not now not in front of her don’t make her watch this again—but the fire is relentless, it doesn’t matter how much he fights it.
He can barely see her anymore even before the unbearable pain squeezes his eyes shut, and then the fire burns him away into nothing.
—and then he slams back into his body, dragged through a howling burning vortex of sound and fire, crashes into Mobius in a giant ridiculous radiation suit and sends them both tumbling through the blast door, and still there is only one thing on his mind:
“We need to find Sylvie.”