Home's the first place you try, once you figure out how to go there. It takes almost no time at all to work out how to enter a new time and place into the TemPad, considerably longer to learn how to calculate the right time and place. It's years' worth of trial and error, with no tutor to hint about the wrong paths you're taking or tell you the answer after you've grown too frustrated to try again. There's no one but yourself, no end to the wrong paths unless you manage to end them. It helps least of all that you're hungry all the time, exhausted, a beast run to ground--but no beast ever had a blade as sharp as yours, and no matter how low to the ground you go, you can always make a door.
It takes time, it takes too much of everything else, but one day, you step across the threshold, and find Asgard on the other side. The gold city, the Realm Eternal, just as you remember it, just as you left it what seems like centuries ago.
"Take me to Mother," you say the moment you're inside the palace walls, where every surface is spelled to bring you aid if you only voice the need. Every surface does, golden light flashing the way you should go, every other surface growing duller in those moments to make your way that much clearer. It's so much easier to follow than it is to figure it out on your own, and it doesn't occur to you until later that it must have been too easy.
The path of lights leads you to your mother's garden. Later, you'll think that it must not have been quite as you recalled it, after all; that there must have been different plants, arranged in different ways, alternate blooms given pride of place. You must notice something, because where you should be filled with relief, it's nothing but dread that comes to you at the first notes of her voice. She's speaking to someone, in the same way you recall her speaking to you, patient and amused, the way no one has spoken to you since you were a princess and had a mother.
You creep through the flowers, noticing even then that the smell is different, has changed from how you remember it, and even if memory is a faulty thing you know sense memory shouldn't be, and something about this is wrong. You're sure of this even before you hear the other note, so much more discordant, because there's another voice speaking, there's someone else there with her, and that someone is--
Not you as you are, but you as you were. Princess Loki. Laughing and smiling, yet still looking up at your mother as if it's nothing special to be with her. As if it's something that happens every day. Her dress isn't torn or stained, her hair isn't gnarled or matted, her hands have never been covered with drying blood, and for reasons you'll never understand later, somehow none of it makes you hate her. It's something else that makes your chest ache and burn, that makes you stand there and stand there, unable to step forward or say something or even turn away.
In the end, it's your mother who turns away, after murmuring something to the other Loki. It doesn't happen very quickly--there's little enough reason for a Queen of Asgard to hurry, and indeed she doesn't--but you're still so stunned that you don't manage to call her back. Instead, when you step from out of the shadows of those blooms, there's only one person who sees you.
"Wait--" you say, helplessly, hopelessly, holding out your hands for someone who's already slipped out of the far gate.
"Who are you?" Loki asks, and how you should know she's startled rather than alarmed when you've never seen yourself look that way, isn't something that ever quite makes sense. But you do know it, just as you know the exasperated scowl that comes right after, the one that says this would be a fine scheme indeed if it were her idea, but certainly not if it's anyone else's. "Did Thor put you up to this?"
A trick, that's all she thinks it is. It's all you would think it is, if you were the unruffled one sitting there, staring at some lookalike urchin who's just come from nowhere.
It would be so easy to let her think it, to slip away again. She's not what you need, she's not who you came for, not anyone who's been meant to be missing you, to be tearing the Nine Realms apart looking for you.
"Help me," you say instead, and you explain, as well as you can, words tripping over each other because as much as you've rehearsed what you want to say, it's different saying it than it is thinking it, and even more it's different than what it was supposed to be. You were supposed to say it to someone who'd wept for you, and instead you're saying it to someone who never imagined you existed until now.
It couldn't be more obvious that Loki doesn't get it. It's the way her eyes start shining, the way the corners of her mouth quirk up. There's nothing more serious than mischief there, no matter how much you try to stress the danger.
"I'll hide you," she decides, with nary a trace of questioning on her face, no sign she's wondering if this is the right course or another wrong path, or if the sound of bootsteps from behind you might be something worth worrying about. "You'll be safe enough in the palace. And then, once you're cleaned up, we can--are you listening? What's the matter?"
"We have to go," you say, because you're sure of it now: there are at least four sets of boots, and only moments until they're here. "Come on."
You hold out your hand. She doesn't take it, face twisting into a new suspicion that isn't nearly as much as it needs to be.
From the far gate, a figure comes, and even though Frigga begins to hurry when she spots you, mouth opening to ask or to command, it's too little, and it's too late, the Minutemen are here, and it only occurs to you later that you could have grabbed Loki and dragged her with you, that you should have--
"I'm sorry," you cry, and you're through the door as they crash onto the cobblestone. It closes behind you somewhere else, but for a minute all you can see is what's happening behind you, what must be happening, the thing that happened to you (or something even worse) now happening to another you. It's your fault right up until it becomes hers instead, for not listening, for being stupid, for thinking about the kind of mischief she could cause instead of saving her own useless skin--
You haven't been that stupid for a long time. You never will be again.
*
You return to Asgard more often than you should, after that. It's like poking at a loose tooth with your tongue when you don't wish to lose it yet, or picking at a person about something they're sensitive about when you don't want to fight. It hurts and you always end up in more trouble after than you were before--but it's your home, too, the only home you've ever known or ever will know. There are times you simply can't help it, even after you know for sure that your Asgard is gone, that there's no Asgard anywhere with a you-shaped gap in it. There are times when the familiar and more dangerous is too tempting to try for the unfamiliar and less dangerous instead.
They'd call you a ghost, maybe, if it weren't all erased behind you, each time. As it is, you learn to move like one through the quietest moments. Not nights, not ever--some thread of memory tells you the eyes that watch over Asgard cast their sight within it at nights--but during tournaments and feast days, when there's guaranteed to be nearly no one in the palace libraries.
Once you realized you couldn't go home, you realized something else, too: it's not allies but knowledge that will save you. Where better to get it than in these stacks, where all the knowledge of the Nine Realms resides? Surely there's something here that will help you escape the TVA. Something that will tell you more about it, for it's when you know about things that you can find the cracks in them, find your way inside. You're sure of it, so very certain, but half a dozen attempts later, you've still managed to learn nothing at all. The only thing that's changed is that the Minutemen seem to expect you here, or at least to come for you more quickly each time.
You don't even expect better by now, really, but like a moth to a lamp you go again anyway, and like a fool you must decide that if there's never been anyone around that corner before, there won't be now, either, because you don't even look and that's how you come within an inch of stumbling into Loki.
He doesn't notice you, and so you have a moment to watch what he's doing. You don't need a moment for being surprised he's a boy; by now you've met other Lokis, and plenty of them have been. What you are surprised by is what he's doing. He's gotten a puppy from somewhere, a gangly half-grown hound, and he's crouched down next to it, his hands to either side of its head. There's a glow between his fingers, green like emerald, like magic, flotsam of memory floating back to a shore that had nearly forgotten them.
This time, you don't stare for any longer than it takes to understand.
"Show me how to do that," you say.
Loki startles, and so does the pup, nipping at his hands before sidling away. It picks up something on the ground and begins to wave it around, growling and bowing as pups do at play; it's no threat, and you only notice what it's doing because you've gotten in the habit of noticing everything. As for Loki, he must not clock it at all, too busy staring at you, surprised, and, for that first moment, affronted.
"Who do you think--" he begins, and then understanding dawns, the way it always does; somehow, you always know you, whether you were expecting yourself or not. "Are you really--what's happening?"
By now you have it down, the barest few facts any other Loki needs to know. That you're another them, and you're in trouble; that whatever you're standing here talking to them about, what you need from them is something very specific. The prattle happens without you even having to think about it, because what you're still thinking about is what you just saw, and how you could use it.
"That magic," you say, when you're done. "What you were doing before. Show me how you did it."
For a second, Loki looks startled again. Then he looks accommodating, but in-between his eyes are just smug enough that you're sure of exactly what's going to happen before it does.
"I can show you," he says, and in the moment before he moves, you decide to let it happen, because out of all the Lokis you've met you haven't known a single one who's seen you coming.
He reached for you, and then you're somewhere else, a flash of noise and light maybe you're in a different Asgard or maybe you're in the TVA or maybe you're in one of a thousand of the other places you've run to; but while you're seeing what he wants you to see, you know why and how you're seeing it, you know he's there with you. Now that he's opened the door, it's easy as anything to turn it back around.
"Tell me about yourself," he says, and you're not anywhere from your past but from his, crouched by the entrance to the dining hall as it erupts into the kind of bellowing and movement that's less about the banquet and more about whatever Loki's done to the food or set loose beneath the table.
"Maybe later," you say, though you already know you'll tell him nothing worth knowing, nothing that can hurt you. "What were you going to do with the dog?"
He grins at you, clearly proud of himself, happy for the attention. "Well, my attempts at training it to attack Thor haven't come to much..."
It's been a while since you've spoken to a Loki, and so you've forgotten that their plans tend to be this trivial, nothing that can actually help you.
Even here, he must see the disbelief on your face, because he quickly adds, "If it bit down hard enough, he wouldn't be able to sit down for weeks, maybe even a month. It would be hilarious, don't you think?"
"Very funny," you agree, though you don't have anything more than impatience for this. "Tell me more about enchantment. How to do it."
For a second, he looks conflicted. It's a second more than you have, because even as his face smooths over, he opens his mouth and you know you don't have time.
You wrench yourself out just as they converge on you. A twist, a shove, and a desperate dash to the side and you're free. And what they have to deal with, the thing that lets you put enough distance between them and you to pull out your TemPad to make a door, is Loki. You hear something of the struggle, and you don't care, you don't care, he's gullible the way all other Lokis are, easy to manipulate in a way you're not anymore, and besides that he tried to take control of your mind. Even if it weren't for the rest of it, that's not something you can forgive from anyone, nevermind a Loki.
You don't care. It doesn't matter. You don't care.
It takes you years to figure out how to reverse-engineer what you felt, what you saw when he enchanted you. If a Loki can do it then you can do it better, and so you keep going until you get it to work, and then until it's as natural to you as any of the other things that shouldn't be.
*
You're not even on Asgard when you meet your last Loki. You finally stopped going there after you got what you needed, and so you're on Alfheim when he appears out of nowhere, right in front of you. You're paying attention this time, but you thud into him anyway, and the both of you fall to the ground.
"Ow," he says, making a face like having the wind knocked out of him is the worst that's ever happened to him. "What was that for? Who are you? Why are you out here?"
"I could ask the same of you," you snap, but you don't. Instead, you get up and walk away, in the opposite direction of the city walls just visible beyond the next hill, which is surely where Loki was heading, before.
You probably shouldn't be surprised when the footsteps that follow yours are his, this time.
"Are you," he says, "a," and then he falters, the way you've found Lokis always do. "What are you?"
"I'm not you," you say. "You're not involved in this."
"It would appear not--but I'm very interested in it," he says, as close to sincerity as Lokis get, just oozing with a sort of charm that wouldn't have impressed you coming from anyone else, either. "Whatever it is. You'll find that my involvement tends to follow my interest."
"No wonder Thor thinks you're so annoying," you snap, not because it's true--you barely remember Thor, have never sought him out; some part of you knows that seeing what happens to Lokis is only a fraction as bad as if you saw the same thing happen to your brother--but because it will hurt him.
"Ah, you wound me, madam," Loki says, in a way that makes it clear that you actually did even as he's trying to pretend otherwise.
You round on him, your blade in your hand. "Go. Away."
"All right, all right" he says, hands up as if in supplication, but from the way he's smiling it couldn't be more obvious that he's not taking you seriously. "Away I go."
"Don't follow me," you say, a warning, and you turn away, gripping the hilt of your sword hard enough to hurt, tensing your arm enough that he'll lose his head if he follows as closely as he did before.
When you turn around to see where he went, you don't see anyone at all. That seems to be the end of it until an hour later, when you duck into your door. You're at least several hundred feet ahead of the Minutemen, and so there shouldn't be anyone close enough to jostle you as you step onto the other side. There shouldn't be, but there is, and you twist around, hoping against hope that you're twisting the right way, that you're not turning into the business end of one of their batons. You bring your hands up, and grab him by the wrists, and a moment later you're in his mind, just familiar and alien enough for you to know whose it is before he even turns to look at you.
You break away from him then, draw your sword again, use it to back him up against the wall (which is dark and weeping and covered in moss; you're somewhere damp, and cold, somewhere no one's been in a while).
"I told you not to follow me," you say, and in that moment you could kill him, for being inconvenient, for not being planned, for making things more complicated than they are.
"Did you?" he said, grinning again, like he thinks you won't hurt him.
You stand there together for a minute longer. Until you figure out what he must have known from the second he saw you: you really won't harm him, because even if it's not quite true that you've never killed anyone who hasn't tried to kill you first, it matters that you get some kind of advantage out of it. Not having to hear a Loki talk does not count as an advantage.
You put away the sword, and say, "Either help me, or start running."
"Would I be running from you?" he asks. "Or from the creatures in the helmets?"
"What makes you think I'd have any interest in chasing you?"
"Oh, of course, I forgot. I'm very irritating," he says, grinning a bit more. "If I'm going to be on the retreat either way, I suppose I'd rather have the company."
"I wouldn't," you say, because this is already unbearable.
*
It gets more bearable a few hours later. No Minutemen, no other sign of life: you find the tallest hill in the region, on which stands another wall, this one just as damp and overgrown as the other, but with fallen-down parts that make for good seating as long as you have a blanket to put down. You don't, but Loki does, flashing it into existence. You'd ask how he did it, but you don't expect to have the time to learn, and so you leave it alone. Instead, you eat together, nuts and raisins and little cakes, and a haunch of...something big. All of it stolen on his way to the trick he'd been planning, which had something to do with humiliating Thor in front of people whose opinions mattered to Odin.
You don't pay much attention to the story. You're watching the horizon, everything between you and it, turning your head every few seconds to make sure you haven't missed something. The part of you just above the watchfulness pays attention to the food, how it tastes and smells, how it reminds you of home just as much when you're holding it as it does when it's on your tongue, sliding down to your belly.
The rest of you waits for the pause at the end of the story, the part where you're supposed to react.
"This isn't a story," you say, and ignore the annoyance that passes over his face because you jumped right to what you need to say instead of telling him how clever he is, how amazing. "You'd have been better off with your other thing."
He looks at you, really looks, and it's not the first time a Loki has ever seemed to peer at you like that--but it's the first time you've had one long enough for him to grow sober and say, "Why? Do tell me."
So you tell your story again. Not the prattle, but the long, confused one that you stumble over because you haven't practiced telling it, aren't even sure anymore which things are the most important, if someone else needs to know them.
And, wonders of wonders, this Loki doesn't interrupt, except to ask questions at more or less appropriate moments. He's gone a little pale, too, by the time he says, "So, you're saying I can't go home?"
"Yeah."
"Because my timeline has been erased."
"Uh-huh."
"And even if I were to attempt to go back, they'll be another me in my place. And I can't simply stab him in the back and take his place--"
"I wouldn't try it."
"--Because if I do, your...time wardens will be upon me immediately," he finishes. "You see, some of us know how to listen when our companion is speaking."
"It wouldn't really be your Asgard anyway," you say, though it's clear that Loki doesn't really understand this part, that he won't comprehend unless he goes back the way you went back, again and again and again, never closer to returning home than you were in a garden that smelled subtly wrong. "You wouldn't like it."
"Or perhaps I'd like it even more."
"I'm you ," you remind him, the ultimate authority on Lokis. "You wouldn't like it at all."
"Well, what if instead of being my brother, Thor were one of my servants? What's not to like about that?"
"Will you please shut up," you say, but you don't mean it the way you would have meant it even an hour ago.
"If you insist." And then, surprisingly, he doesn't say anything more for a good long while, even though he does stare at you quite a lot.
This is something you've forgotten, if you ever knew it in the first place: what it's like to sit with someone, and eat with them, and talk to them about things that are important, things you haven't been able to talk about to anyone else. You're tired now, but it's a different, more satisfied kind of tired than you've known for a long time. The silence is satisfying, too. You're with yourself, still alone, but also not alone for the first time in ages.
Finally, the silence breaks: Loki yawns.
"What do you do," he asks, "when you wish to sleep?"
"I don't," you say. You haven't done more than snatch a few minutes here or a few minutes there since the beginning; but now there's what seems to be a new path, opening up in front of you. "If you're tired, I can keep watch."
"What, sleep here? There isn't even a bed."
"Finding a bed could get us killed," you say.
*
In the end, what almost gets you killed isn't trying to find a bed. It isn't the Minutemen. It doesn't even have anything to do with how you go to sleep after Loki wakes up (complaining about the crick in his neck and the slime on his robes), trusting him to watch over you because he trusted you to watch over him, and if one of you can be trusted then surely the other one can be, too.
It starts mere minutes after you wake up, groggy from sleep for the first time in you don't know how long. You see the morning sun in the sky, you consult the TemPad, and you know you've been here much longer than you've ever managed to be anywhere before--even alone, even anywhere as deserted as this place appears to be, where you couldn't change anything if you meant to.
"What's wrong?" Loki asks.
"I don't understand why," you begin, and that's when you hear the sound.
It's not the sound of the Minutemen's boots, not the sizzle of their batons as they turn on, not any of the other little hints of noise you haven't gotten around to quantifying, but that are things anyway. This is something different. Deeper, louder, primal. A roar that begins in a tremble in the ground beneath you, before rising up to your ears. When you look for the source of the sound, you see the horizon itself is changing. Something's taking up more and more of it, blotting out more and more of the sky as it comes for you. It's the frothing toward the top of it that tells you what it is: water, a tidal wave bigger and faster than any you've ever seen, or imagined.
"--I think we should, perhaps," Loki starts, but you've already opened the door.
You grab him, and pull him through it just as the wave begins to come down.
*
There are a few more times, a few more worlds, a few more close calls. Closer than usual, because this Loki hasn't learned yet, he doesn't have your instincts; and the instincts you've developed aren't helpful when it comes to keeping someone else from getting killed. By the end of the week, you're tired enough that you may as well not have gotten any sleep at all before the tsunami. What you don't realize until later is that you're also--not happier, exactly, than you were. Less lonely, maybe, not because he's anyone you've spent all this time missing, but because there was a hole, somewhere inside you, hidden among the rest of the devastation and thus unrecognized as what it was. You didn't know about it, and now it's been filled in a way you never would have guessed before.
It's good to have someone to talk to. To have someone whose back needs watching, and who can watch yours if you're truly desperate. To be with someone who knows you and likes you, and seems to like you a bit more every day.
You know better than to trust it, but it's not long before you do anyway, not long before it feels like you've always traveled together, two halves of a person, of some greater whole.
And so of course he gets cocky. You both do, in the same way and for the same reasons. You're faster and stronger then your pursuers, and there are two of you now. Instead of taking the first opportunity to get away, you both stay a little longer when the Minutemen come, get in a few more strikes, and when you do run you're both laughing, soaring on the adrenaline of how well you fight together, unstoppable.
For the first time, you strike out of a motive other than survival, and it's good, it's beautiful, it's bringing terror back to where terror began, where it's deserved. You lie in wait for them once, twice, three times, and when you go through the door ahead of their reinforcements, you leave bodies scattered behind you.
The fourth time's different. There are more of them, triangulating on you, but it's fine, because you see it, and so does Loki, and both of you know what you're doing. You don't even need to discuss it before he's striking out in one direction and you in the other, knowing where the other will be as if you've trained together for a thousand days instead of knowing each other for barely a week. Coming together and slashing apart, a force the Minutemen can't be prepared for, try as they might.
In the end, what happens is he looks at you, in a moment where he shouldn't have. And because you're looking for him, too, you see him stumble, and you see what happens next, the baton not raised but swiping toward him, from behind and to the side.
"Loki, watch out!" you say, but it's too late, and by the time you finish saying it he's going, and by the time he could have said something back he's gone, and you'll be gone with him if you don't--
They converge on you now, all of them, at least twenty, and you twist and you duck and you sprint and you dodge, and you don't let yourself think about him until you're through the next door, until you're back in that dark, damp place, just a day ahead of the tsunami. Maybe you go there because it's the first setting that comes up on the TemPad, or maybe you go there because he was there with you, or maybe you go there because the Minutemen never did come while you were there together. You go there, and you find a hill that might or might not be the one you found before, and sit on a fallen-down wall that might or might not be the one you sat on as two. You sit there, and you think about Lokis, and how stupid they are, and impulsive, and how it's all his fault, anyway, and how you're lucky he got himself killed before he could get you killed, too. You sit there hating him, and you've never wanted to be a Loki less than you do now, because being a Loki means everything in him is also in you and being a Loki means what happened to him could happen to you and being a Loki means what happened to him was probably caused by you being you, and you're cleverer than that and you're stronger than that and you won't --
The sun sets. The night passes. The sun rises again. At no point is there a single sign of the Minutemen. After a while, you start wondering if this is some kind of dead zone, a place the TVA can't monitor. If there is such a place, you've never heard of it, never found another before now.
Reckless, you jump to your feet atop the wall, and you scream. Nothing happens, and so you scream again and again, until you're empty. You could never have done that on another world, no matter how deserted it seemed, without bringing the Minutemen down on you. But here, nothing persists in happening, until the water comes. It rises again, blots out the sky again, coming for you with a speed and intensity you've already forgotten, already papered over by memory to make it seem less than it is.
The water comes for you. You open a door, and stand just in front of it, watching. The water comes closer and closer, rising higher and higher, and there's something happening, some electric realization, and you're not sure what it is, and you can't quite grasp it, and so you stand there until the very last moment.
When you come through the other side, you're dripping with salt water. Worse, the roar of the water's left your ears ringing, and there are tall hedges to either side of you, meaning you won't hear or see anyone who comes. You spend the next few minutes getting out of that strange maze, the next hour after that finding somewhere with a good line of sight to hole up in until you can hear properly.
The whole time, you keep thinking, They never came.
The water--
The water--
You realize, and everything changes.
*
You hide in apocalypses for a long, long time. Longer than you spent running before then, longer by far than you lived as Princess Loki of Asgard. After a few centuries, everything that came before seems like a dream; all that seems real is the plan, laying down the path to your freedom cobble by cobble. You're in no rush, in no hurry; ironically, hiding in places where time is limited offers you all the time you need to get it right.
You don't take chances. After all, you're not a Loki anymore. You're Sylvie now, the first thing you decided after that other realization--though after a century or two you have to strain to recall precisely what events led up to the decision or the realization in the first place. But it hardly matters. What does matter is that hiding in apocalypses works. What does matter is that you're safe when you want or need to be.
You set your plan in motion, and when the time comes, when you're ready, you make your move.
The last thing you're expecting is for Loki to come along and muck it all up. Probably should have seen that one coming.