When Loki realizes the TVA has changed hands, that his timeline has turned far darker than the one he was in, he weaves a story for Mobius about a nightmare that was so real it was disorienting and then flees to his room, hoping it still is his. Blessedly, he still has this place as his own. He sits on the edge of his bed and tries to gather his thoughts. There is a TemPad on a dock in the wall and he picks it up, flipping through the screens and names he knew from before, those who would no longer remember him. He shoves down his emotions and the sinking feeling of loneliness, a feeling he thought he'd finally found people to help fill- friends. Now one of them has rejected him and the other has forgotten him. No matter how hard he tries to ignore them, they keep bubbling up against his defences, threatening to break through. He can't be left alone with his thoughts.
He takes a few deep breaths, tries to pretend he knows what he's doing, and leaves his room, letting his feet carry him to wherever they will. He isn't paying attention to where he is going anymore. He just has to move to keep from thinking about Sylvie and what he's lost.
And so he finds himself in front of the doors to the archives, but they are no longer propped open and the handles have a thin layer of dust over them. He closes his eyes and sighs, hoping that there is some slim chance that someone in the archive will remember him, or at least it will be less painful to start over with them than it will be with Mobius.
He opens the door and steps in, brushing the dust off his hands and scanning the room for a familiar face.
Jemmi sees him from where they are standing near the desk and drops the books in their hands, "Loki. You're back."
He drops back against the closed door, "Oh thank Hel, you know me."
Jemmi runs to another room and calls for the others. Tam, Iris, and Cyd hurry from where they are working on cutting together requested files.
Cyd gasps, "You came back."
"We saw they pruned you," Iris whispers, "How did you come back?"
Tam walks over to him and touches his arm, "You're still the same you?"
Loki gently removes their hand, "Yes. I am. I remember you." He looks to the others, "Should you call for Ayshi?"
Tam shakes their head, "We can't. Things have changed."
"Are they alright?" he asks.
Iris shakes their head, "We don't know. The archivists have been restricted."
"Even more than before?"
Cyd nods, "Yes. We work in shifts together in our own archives only. We can't live with people we don't work with- Tam had to move in with us and Ayshi had to leave. We aren't allowed out into the city. No one comes here anymore." They gesture to a series of pneumatic tubes against one wall, "And all our assignments come and go through there. We don't see anyone from the outside and only the other archivists on a shift change."
"Oh...I'm sorry."
Iris gestures for him to follow them, "Come on- we have work to still do. But you can come with us, if you don't think they'll kill you for it."
Loki follows them into the cutting room where images of lives are on a series of small screens, notepads covered in timestamps scattered across the workstation, "So...what happened?" he asks.
"They reset the TVA," Jemmi says, "Or at least that's what it seems like happened. We don't know. No one came and told us. But one day we came here and the rules were different, the room was different, and we couldn't leave. We come and go through tunnels and catwalks over the city so we don't even come into contact with anyone else."
"When did this happen?" he asks.
"Weeks ago," Jemmi answers, "Or at least we think it was weeks ago. Time...is fuzzy. How long ago was it for you?"
Loki sighs and Cyd offers him a chair, "You look exhausted."
"Thank you. I am. And it's been about an hour."
"How?" Iris asks, "How did this all happen?"
"I...we...Sylvie and I...we discovered what's past the Void at the end of time. That's where we go when we're pruned. Into a timeless place. And we got past the creature that devours timelines and found a man behind the TVA who promised us a timeline of our own, together. But it would have just been one more lie. And she wanted to end the lie. But when one lie ends, the world is set to draw another lie into existence to fill the space left behind. I told her to wait. To think. I just wanted her to be safe and maybe even with me. And then..." His voice trails off and he drops his head into his hands.
"And then what?" Tam gently prompts.
Loki's shoulders shudder and Iris comes to sit beside his chair, looking up at him from the floor, "What happened to her?"
"I don't know. But she pushed me back here. And then she did what she felt she had to do."
Iris sighs, "And that hurt you deeply, didn't it?"
"Yes."
Jemmi and Cyd sit beside Iris while Tam goes to an electric kettle on a counter and pours him a cup of tea, bringing the steaming mug before joining their friends sitting on the floor beside him.
"Here. It's nothing fancy. Not anything really suited to a prince, but..."
He shakes his head and takes the mug, "I'm not a prince anymore. And thank you." He lets it warm his hands, closing his eyes, breathing in the steam and the scent of bergamot mingled with the tea leaves.
"What can we do to help?" Cyd asks.
"I don't think you can," Loki answers.
"I'd offer music in the archives, like we did before, but...they told us we can't do that anymore. No looking at files we haven't been told to fetch. And they know, too. They caught us listening to Woodstock once," Tam says.
"Woodstock?" he asks.
"An earth concert from the 1960s," Tam replies, "There was a lot of good music that came from it. It was a favourite when we just wanted something fun to listen to. We'd pull the lives of some of the bands on stage and watch from their eyes."
"Why can't you do that anymore?"
"Because they caught us looking for ourselves in the files," Jemmi answers. We knew we were variants. So we decided to see if we could find ourselves."
"Did you?"
Cyd nods, "We found Jemmi, Iris, and Ayshi. We thought we'd found Tam when they caught us, but we couldn't be sure."
"We had names," Iris says, "And we had lives. But they didn't want us to know that."
"They also didn't want us to know where they pulled us from," Tam adds, "How we figured out the connection. Why our bodies are different than they should be."
"Oh?" Loki says as he sips his tea.
"We were victims of experiments," Cyd says, "Sterilized, our bodies cut and reshaped. It explains why we don't look like the people having sex on the screens."
"That's how we figured out where to trace ourselves to," Iris adds, "When you know you all have one thing in common..."
"It's easier to find each other," Jemmi continued, "And here's the uncomfortable part- there are at least three of me among the archivists. Now that I know what I looked like back then...I can see myself in other places."
Loki stares at Jemmi, "There are more of you, too?"
"I must've been a troublemaker, for a librarian," Jemmi says, smirking, "But they pulled me a few times. All of them after the surgeries. Apparently that awful thing is something that's supposed to happen to all of us."
"I met other Lokis. Not just Sylvie. But others, and of different ages and bodies, and even...an alligator. That one was a little jarring," he says.
Cyd giggles, "An alligator?"
"Yes."
"I think this is why we can't see anyone," Iris says, "We know too much. But resetting an archivist would risk losing too much of our knowledge and the speed at which we can cut together the film strips of lives. So instead of risking everyone knowing we're all Variants, knowing we had lives before, and that we can be pulled and reset time and time again so many of us exist at once...no wonder they don't want us seeing anyone else. Likely not even you."
"Oh I'm sure not even me," Loki says, "I'm sure they're going to figure out very quickly that something is wrong. It's only a matter of time."
"Well," Tam says, "I guess then we need to make a plan."
"And you need to get back to work," Loki adds, "You can't just not do your jobs on account of me."
Tam shrugs, "There's that, too. We'll get done what we need to. We can work faster than what we usually do. But since everyone was reset, we just...slowed down. Who really knows how fast we can pull and cut files? Nobody. So we decided to put in only the effort needed to actually get the job done."
Cyd stands and stretches, "But we do have a file we're supposed to have done today, so..."
Loki sighs and winces as he tries to drink the tea- it's just a little too hot, still, but he feels as though he should rush drinking it.
"Don't," Tam says, "You can stay while we work. But take the tea and rest. You're our only visitor since...this all happened."
He nods and slows, taking his time to sip the tea while the others work. After what seems like an hour, he returns the mug, says his goodbyes, and heads for the door.
Jemmi follows him out, "Hey- wait a minute."
"Hmm?" he says.
"There's things you're not saying. Things that happened in wherever you were. With Sylvie."
"Yes."
"Well...if you ever want to talk about them, or need someone to just sit with you in the quiet, call on us? Or just come here. We hardly know each other, but...at least we do still know who we are, right?"
Loki gives them a small smile, "Yes, at least there's that." He nods to Jemmi and leaves the archives.
Jemmi returns to their companions and settles back in at their work station, "He's a mess, isn't he?" Tam asks.
"Yeah," Jemmi says, "You saw it too?"
"Would have been hard not to," Tam replies.
Cyd tosses down the reel they're working with, "I hate this. I just want things fixed. Why do we have to be like this? We had hope before. Now...we're quarantined away from the others because we know too much."
Iris speaks while carefully lining up film strip and taping it together, "This can't be fixed. This isn't a timeline we can cut apart and tape back together, but..." they hold the strip they're working on up to a light, "But if it could be dismantled before, it can be dismantled again."
"You mean go back into the Void, past the guard or whatever it is, and meet whomever is behind all this again? But what if this time, it's Sylvie?" Jemmi asks, "You saw how he looked when he talked about her. If she ends up a part of how this is controlled, he won't be able to fight her."
"She can't be," Tam says, "Because every statue and celebration award is named after the man on the statues and she's not with him. Wherever she is...I just hope it's somewhere he can find."
Meanwhile, Loki makes his way back to his room. He strips off his clothes when he arrives and takes a shower, letting the grime flow down his skin, the wound on his arm stinging as the hot water hits it. While in the shower, staring down at his hands, wondering just who he is in this new life, the grief of losing Sylvie hits him harder than he thought it could. Shuddering, he can hardly stand as he sobs, bracing himself against the wall, but sinking to the shower floor not long after. He feels dizzy. It seems like a small eternity before the tears start to abate. He leans against the wall, breathing heavily, feeling stifled by the steam.
He hears a knock on his door and freezes, quickly gathering his composure, before turning off the shower and wrapping a towel around his waist.
"Hello? Loki?" Loki steps out of the bathroom to find Mobius standing in his room, a clean set of clothes folded in his hands. "Hey. I though you could use these."
"Mobius? Is it really you?" Loki asks in disbelief.
"Yeah. Sorry about that out there- we're being watched even more closely now. Hunter B-15's the same person we knew, too, but there are a lot of others who aren't and we have to be really, really careful."
Loki takes the clothes, his hands brushing against Mobius' as he does, "I understand. But...could you stay a little while?"
"Sure. I'm on break. But I have a feeling they're going to get suspicious if we're spending every waking moment together."
"Or if we just go back to how we were before?" Loki asks.
"That might even be too much. You're not my recruit anymore. This is a different TVA."
Loki nods, "Of course." He turns to the bathroom, "I'll be out after I'm dressed."
Mobius shrugs, "I don't mind if you just get dressed while we talk. That's up to you. It's not like I haven't been a naked man before."
"Understood. But I prefer to dress alone." Mobius waits until Loki returns. He sits in the chair beside Loki's bed while Loki stretches out on top of the blankets, "I need to tell someone what happened when we got past Alioth. I can't tell all of it right now. But in pieces. Can I do that? Can you keep these secrets?"
"Sure, but why are they secrets?"
"Because I need them to be."
"OK. Then they will be."
And so Loki starts talking, sharing a framework of what happened. The man they found. The disagreement on what to do about it. Fighting Sylvie. But most of his heartbreak he sets aside for another day. When he has finished speaking, he's struggling to stay awake.
Mobius pats his arm, "Get some rest, Loki. It's been a really long time since you slept."
"Or eaten, for that matter," Loki says, "But I think I'm too tired to eat."
"You're exhausted, friend. I can see it on your face. Come on, let's get you under the covers." Loki nods and struggles to sit up, so Mobius helps him and lifts the blankets back as Loki adjusts himself and slides his legs under them. Mobius tucks him in, "There. Now your job is to sleep. I'll come get you when we need you. And if anybody asks, I was talking to you about the nightmare, got it?"
"I do."
"Good. Sleep tight. We'll start figuring this out after you're up." He walks to the door and turns out the light.
Loki turns on his side, "Mobius?"
He looks back over his shoulder, "Yeah?"
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For still being my friend."
Mobius smiles, "Anytime, Loki. Anytime." He fixes a serious expression on his face takes a deep breath, and turns out the light as he leaves the room. Anyone who walked past him would see a serious analyst coming from serious business, not a man desperately worried about one of two people in the TVA he thinks he can trust. He knows from watching the Loki files over and over again- a broken Loki is a dangerous Loki. A Loki who loses something precious is a volatile person who tries to fill the hole in his heart with power. He only can hope that the fragile friendship he's managed to make with this man is enough to keep him steady.
He takes another deep breath and whispers as he walks down the hall, "He said he's not that person anymore. He just wanted her to be OK. No more thrones." Saying it out-loud, even if barely audibly, is just enough to reassure him that something in Loki has changed. He just hopes it's going to stick.