Meeting Sylvie

Here is something you can know about Loki. He had been alive for a very long time, and he had met a great many people. Asgardians. Frost Giants. Avengers. The Chitauri. The Grandmaster. Thanos. Hunters and Variants and bureaucrats and analysts and Hulks. He had been to nine realms and a junkyard planet and a beige time-cop headquarters that existed outside of time.

But he had never, in all his centuries, met himself.

That was about to change.

Loki and his new strange friend Mobius were chasing a dangerous Variant. She had been wreaking havoc up and down the sacred timeline for years, attacking TVA Hunters and disappearing before anyone could catch her. She had a trick. The TVA monitored the timeline for ripples — for moments where something different from the usual story happened. So this Variant would only act inside DISASTERS. Inside a sinking ship. Inside a castle about to be struck by lightning. Inside a Roxxcart superstore on a planet about to be hit by a Category Eight hurricane.

Because if she did something strange inside a disaster, all the strangeness would be wiped out by the catastrophe itself, and nobody would notice. Clever. Very clever.

It was, in fact, exactly the kind of trick Loki himself would have come up with.

Loki and Mobius and a squad of TVA Hunters finally caught up to her in the year 2050, in the cereal aisle of a Roxxcart on the planet Haven-Hills, with Hurricane Roxxcart Beta tearing the sky apart outside.

She had been standing very still, looking at a box of Frosted Flakes, when they came around the corner.

She looked up. Loki saw her face for the first time.

She had blond hair pulled back. Sharp green eyes. Two curved horns rising from her head like a small crown. She was small but quick, the way a cat is small but quick. She did not look surprised to see them. She had felt them coming, somehow.

The Hunters drew their weapons. She drew hers.

Her name, although nobody knew it yet, was Sylvie.

She was a Loki.

But not the Loki we have been following. A different Loki. From a different timeline. A version of Loki the universe had been growing somewhere else, in another branch, with another family, another childhood, another life — until the TVA had reached in and snatched her up when she was just a small girl. They had accused her of being a Variant. The little girl had run for her life. And she had been running ever since.

Sylvie was tough. Sylvie was angry. Sylvie did not trust anybody, and especially not some smug other-version-of-herself wearing a TVA jumpsuit.

The fight in Roxxcart did not go well for the TVA. Sylvie was MUCH better at this than they were. She enchanted Hunters with a touch of her hand, taking over their minds. She zapped away with a stolen TemPad — ZWOOOP — and Loki, in a moment of panic and curiosity, grabbed the device with her.

They both vanished.

And they reappeared on a moon called Lamentis-1.

Lamentis-1 was a beautiful, doomed place. It was a small moon that orbited a much larger planet, and the larger planet had begun to break apart and was about to crash into the moon in less than a day. Twelve hours, maybe. The people of Lamentis-1 were scrambling for any ship they could find to escape. The sky was already raining fire. Pieces of the broken planet above hurled down through the clouds, smashing into the ground in flashes of orange.

Loki and Sylvie were stuck on this moon with each other. No TemPad — Sylvie's had run out of energy. No way off.

They were going to have to talk.

It started badly. Sylvie tried to leave Loki behind. Loki insisted on coming. They argued in a hot crowded refugee camp. They walked through ruined streets, dodging falling debris.

Slowly, carefully, on the long walk to find a ship that could carry them to safety, they started to actually talk to each other.

Sylvie told Loki about her childhood. How she had been a small girl playing with her toy Norn Stones when the TVA had appeared in her bedroom. How they had taken her. How she had escaped and run, and run, and run, ever since.

Loki told Sylvie about Asgard. About Frigga's library. About being a Frost Giant, secretly. About the time Hulk smashed him into a marble floor.

They laughed about that one. Sylvie laughed in a small surprised way, like she did not laugh much.

Eventually they ended up hiding in a train car on a track that was supposed to take them to the last ship leaving Lamentis-1. The train rocked. Outside, the night sky was orange and roaring. KRRRRACK. CRASH. The whole moon was groaning.

Inside the train car, with everything else going wrong, the two Lokis just sat across from each other and looked. Really looked. For the first time.

Sylvie said, "I don't understand. Why do you care about me?"

Loki opened his mouth.

And then closed it.

Because that was a question, again, that he had never been asked, and that he had certainly never thought to ask himself.

He thought about it. The train shook. He looked at her — at this odd, brave, lonely, clever person who was, in some real and surprising way, HIM — and he said, quietly:

"Because you're me. Or — you're a version of me. And nobody has ever really seen me before. And I think I'd like to be the first person who really sees you."

Sylvie blinked. She did not have an answer for that.

The lights in the train car flickered.

What neither of them realized in that moment — what Mobius would tell them angrily later — was that this small, private, surprising feeling was doing something the sacred timeline had never seen before. Two Lokis, caring about each other. As friends. As something more than friends. The universe did not know what to do with that. It was unprecedented. The branches of the timeline started to grow new, strange shoots. A nexus event was forming.

And back at the TVA, alarms began to wail. BWEEEEEP. BWEEEEEP. BWEEEEEEEP. Lights flashed red. Maps of the timeline filled with new branches. Hunter B-15 looked at the readout and her face went pale. Mobius, in his cluttered office, looked at his screen and whispered, "What have you done, Loki?"

The TVA came for them.

They came for them on the cliffs of Lamentis-1, with the sky breaking apart above and pieces of fallen planet exploding all around. Loki and Sylvie tried to fight back. They were good. They were both good. But there were too many Hunters, and Hunter B-15 herself led the charge, and in the end, both Lokis were pinned and taken.

Here is the thing, dear listener. This was the moment in Loki's whole life where something changed. Not the moment he died on the Statesman. Not the moment he became king of Asgard. Not the moment he turned blue in the vault.

THIS moment. On a cliff on Lamentis-1. With the sky falling. Being grabbed by Hunters.

For the very first time in his three-thousand-year life, Loki was not afraid for himself. He was afraid for someone ELSE.

He was afraid for Sylvie.

He fought back not because he was scared of being pruned. He fought back because if they pruned HER, he could not bear it.

That is the moment Loki became who he was going to be.

The trickster, the schemer, the boy who measured himself with the wrong ruler — that boy was gone. In his place was someone who cared about another person more than he cared about himself.

A real, actual hero.

He just did not know it yet.

The hunters dragged Loki and Sylvie back to the TVA. The cells were waiting. The questions were waiting. And, at the top of the long beige hallway, in a place neither of them yet knew existed — the answer to the biggest question of all was also waiting.

Who, exactly, was running the TVA?

That, dear listener, is a story for tomorrow.

Tonight, we end on the cliff. Two Lokis. One sky. Falling.

And caring, finally, about somebody other than themselves.