Nervously, I looked around the strange room I had been taken to after the man in the tweet suit had saved me from what would surely have been my end. It was large and despite the orange colour accents, the grey concrete walls and columns made the room seem cold and dark. The only pieces of furniture in the room were two simple plastic chairs and a round table with 4 thin metal legs that surely came from an outdated canteen. On the table was a projector that looked like it could play Super 8 films. However, I did not see a screen or anything comparable anywhere.
The round lamps were built into the ceiling in such a way that the concrete pillars partly swallowed their light and making it rather dark here, despite the many lights. All in all, this room didn't look like they wanted to save me, but to carry out what the judge had sentenced me to. I wondered what exactly this man had planned for both, Loki and me, because it didn't really look like he wanted to free us. In fact, I was still wearing this hideous collar, feeling like a dog of sorts.
I wondered what that projector was for. Was this supposed to be another one of those unbearable propaganda videos like outside the courtroom? This strange clock mascot, Miss Minutes or whatever it was called, was even scarier to me than Pennywise and Professor Umbridge combined. This forced friendly voice, which did not match what was actually said, inevitably made me cringe.
I started to think about the Video again. It had spoken of a sacred timeline that was created by the three timekeepers after a multiversal war. The timekeepers formed it in order to prevent such a war from breaking out again. Anything that deviated from this timeline could lead to another war. To prevent that, the TVA sent its soldiers to the beginning of such a deviation to eliminate it. However, I couldn't begin to understand what was so bad about the fact that I still existed. Of course, I was part of the Avengers, but surely they could have accomplished everything without me.
Before I could dwell on this thought, the man who had taken me out of court entered the room again. Finally, he introduced himself to me. His name was Mobius, an analyst for the TVA, whatever that might be. Thinking about it, he was probably something similar to an investigator.
"Why am I here?", I asked him after he had introduced himself. I wasn't interested in what else he might have wanted to tell me. I just wanted to know what was going on.
"I was going to ask you the same thing," he replied with an amused grin. I had no idea what was so funny about my question and I really didn't know what strange game this Mobius was playing with me.
"Why is it a crime to be alive?"
"Isn't it obvious? Someone with your powers?" I looked at him for a moment, aghast. He just asked if I really thought the TVA would have been unaware of my abilities. Yes, it probably wasn't far-fetched that an organisation that knew everything I had ever said would also know about my abilities. With a sweeping gesture, he asked me to sit down on one of the two chairs and I preferred to do as he asked. After all, I was still wearing this collar and I wasn't exactly eager to find out first-hand how it felt to be catapulted through time.
Mobius pressed a key on the ancient-looking keyboard that was attached to the projector and, to my amazement, an electronic screen materialised right in front of us. It showed scenes I knew only too well and the sound echoed through the room without any real origin.
I saw my brother working on his gamma ray experiment in his laboratory. I saw him turn into the Hulk and badly hurt his girlfriend Betty. I was waiting for him to bring her to me to the ER, but that didn't happen. He did take Betty to the hospital, but he left her outside the and then disappeared.
So in the sacred timeline I never received the injuries that would later give me my abilities and save my life during the battle of New York. And indeed, on the screen I could see myself running from the hospital towards Stark Tower during that battle, the battle in which the Avengers had fought together for the first time. Unfortunately, I was caught in the crossfire and the lifeless body of a Leviathan buried me and many others.
I remembered that had been the very spark that had allowed my abilities to surface, that I had unconsciously flung the Leviathan aside as it flew towards us. But that had not happened here. This was probably where my life ended in the sacred timeline, buried by a giant alien being that my brother had hunted down.
"You see, your abilities and their presence in the sacred timeline, were never intended, they are an unstable variable that could lead to a nexus event at any time," Mobius explained, as if it would help me accept the fact that a higher power actually wanted me to be crushed by an alien being.
"Then why didn't they come for me sooner?", I wanted to know and I thought that was a fairly valid question. Mobius on the other hand seemed unwilling to answer. He just entered something into the projector for a moment and it started to play scenes as I remembered them. I saw how I treated the Avengers' injuries after a fight. I saw the serum that I created with the help of my brother and Tony Stark to quickly calm the Hulk down after a battle and turn him into Bruce again.
"You seem to have a fable for monsters," he remarked with a knowing look and a smug grin, as if he knew one of my darkest secrets.
"He is my brother. Are you going to blame me for loving my brother now?" I couldn't help asking this question, even though I could tell that by 'monster' he didn't just mean my brother. Apparently he had drawn conclusions from my life, or at least from what the TVA had collected of it, that did not correspond with what I recalled. I suddenly felt anger rising within me as he continued to look at me as if I were someone to be pitied for my lack of foresight.
"We should return to your initial question," he then said in a calm, almost placating tone. "Why are you here?"
He seemed to think that I was capable of answering that question myself and looked at me expectantly like a psychiatrist who had just asked his patient a question essential to treatment. But I had no clue why I was here, or rather why he had saved me from the execution.
"What do you know about Loki?" he asked me rather directly when I did not answer his first question. I was beginning to suspect that the whole thing was actually less about me than about Loki. If I hadn't been with Loki when the TVA had found him, they probably wouldn't have picked me up.
"I don't know much about him," I said, and it wasn't a straight lie, though it certainly wasn't the whole truth either. But Mobius didn't look like he really needed my answer, nor did he believe it, so I added, "If you know more than I do, please feel free to enlighten me." I was no longer in the mood for this man's games. If he wanted something from me, he should say it straight away.
"I'm not talking about the Loki you accompanied here." I tried to look as unimpressed as possible. This man seemed to have done his homework, thoroughly. Again he pressed some buttons on the projector and scenes were shown, some of which I would have preferred to forget. The time on Sakaar, the destruction of Asgard, Thanos. I would have loved to erase all that from my CV. But most of the scenes had one thing in common: Loki was a part of them.
So Mobius knew that for me Loki wasn't just the villain who had almost destroyed all of New York in a crazy attempt to take over the Earth in 2012. The only question was how much did he know and what conclusions had he drawn from what he had seen.
"We have a volatile variant that ambushes our Minutemen at every opportunity, kills them and steals their reset charge." Apparently he was finally getting to the point. "We assume the variant is planning something. We don't know what and we need to stop it."
When I asked how I was supposed to help them do that, Mobius explained that the variant he was referring to was a Loki. A far more cunning and dangerous Loki than the pussycat that had been stranded here with me. I was sure Loki would be anything but pleased to be compared to a common earth pet, but I doubted that cuddly cat was the right term for Loki. The countless deaths on his chart would certainly beg to differ.
"Even if I wanted to help you. I don't know this Loki." He was a completely different Loki from the one I had known, and even then our journey had changed him further. "What he went through after New York changed him, made him the Loki I knew. The Loki here didn't go through all that. The same applies to the completely unknown variant you mentioned." I looked Mobius straight in the eye. I wanted him to understand that I was serious.
"Then I saved the wrong Variant from being reset. Maybe I should take you back and find another variant of you that might be able to help me." He stood up and I tried to gauge if Mobius was bluffing or if he was serious. But I couldn't. It was better to assume he was. So I relented and said that maybe there were still some similarities I could help with. Mobius looked at me triumphantly. He had hopes that I would manage to keep New York-Loki in check while he helped Mobius find out what the fugitive variant was up to. Mobius suddenly seemed very pleased with himself that he had achieved what he wanted.
Suddenly the large double door opened and the female soldier from the beginning rushed in. "We've found him" She looked quite out of breath and angry. I wondered who she was talking about, but I figured out pretty quickly that it was probably about the New York Loki. Apparently he had escaped, but hadn't got too far.
Now I wondered why Mobius had remained so calm when he had apparently known all along that Loki was moving freely around the TVA. Apparently he actually considered him a low risk and I wondered what made the other Loki so dangerous. Then Mobius slowly pushed me towards the exit.
As we left the time theatre, as they called the room I had been in, I was flanked by two soldiers, the Minutemen I assumed. Mobius briefly asked if that was really necessary, but the woman, whom he called B-15, only remarked that Loki had already escaped because Mobius had been too careless, she wouldn't have that with another variant.
"I can arrange thing for you, if you cooperate," he said as we walked through a circular corridor that apparently connected a group of time theatres. I wondered for a moment if all of them were staffed by some arrested variants who were just waiting to be approached. The more I saw of the TVA, the clearer it became that there was more to this organisation than met the eye, that they represented a higher power. So if I wanted to survive, I had no choice but to cooperate. Otherwise I would probably be back in front of the judge sooner than I would have liked.
Mobius stopped in front of a double door and looked at a small monitor in the wall. Apparently every time theatre was equipped with some kind of camera and you could monitor what was happening inside the room without being noticed.
We saw Loki on the monitor, sitting against a wall with his elbows resting on his knees and his head in his hands. The tesseract lay unnoticed beside him. Apparently he had stolen it and hoped to take it back to where we had come from. But he wasn't the only one who was surprised, that it didn't seem to have worked.
"You wait here, observe." He told me right before he entered the room. It was strange to see Loki almost in despair. He looked defeated and I wondered if he had looked like that when my brother had smashed him to the floor in Tony's flat. Yet somehow I assumed this defeat was bigger, that it went deeper than the one in New York.
I heard him mention to Mobius that he didn't really want to harm anyone and I was amazed to hear that realisation from the mouth of this younger Loki. The Loki I knew had also come to this realisation. However, it had taken the destruction of his home for him to realise that his actions were only to cover up his own imagined shortcomings.
What had Mobius shown him to make him react like that? Had he seen Frigga's death? The parting of Odin? From Asgard? Perhaps even his own death? Certainly it wasn't nice to witness all that, but it was only a film if you hadn't experienced it yourself. At least that's what I assumed. And yet, my supposed death at the hands of the Leviathan had upset me a little too, I couldn't deny that.
"I am a villain, a monster.", I heard Loki's voice say resignedly, and it was hard to hear him pronounce those words himself. Until now Loki had never seen the wrongs in his actions, had always convinced himself that others were responsible, that it was their own fault. Now he seemed to comprehend the fault in this thought and deprived of any reason for his actions he saw only the abysmal evil in him. But that was not who he was.
I knew this from conversations I had had with the Loki from my timeline before Thanos' attack. He too had thought of himself that way at some point, even if he didn't admit it to many people. But we had reached a level where we could at least talk openly without having to lie to one another. He too, like the New York Loki at that moment, had not been able to realise that his wrong decisions were mostly based on his experience that negative attention was better than none. Besides, standing in the incredibly large shadows of his brother Thor, it had been easier to get attention through shenanigans and misdeeds than through something good.
After this revelation Mobius made Loki the same offer that he had made me: To help him in his case to get into the Timekeepers' good graces. All he had to do in return was hunt down a volatile version of himself and work with an Avenger.
"It can't get much worse than this," he remarked rather half-heartedly, more or less agreeing to join Mobius' hunt. I was sure that the time ahead for us at the TVA would not be easy and I didn't even want to imagine where it all ended for us. All I knew was the fact that I was trapped here with a Loki who knew nothing about me and what we had been through together. I on the other hand, knew everything about him and I was sure he wouldn't like that.
Wow, a lot of stange stuff going on in this one, but how will Anni manage to work with Loki or give Mobius a better inside to this Aesir?