Mobius almost couldn't believe what he was looking at. Almost.

Six stood before him, clutching her drawstring bag in front of her like she meant to choke it to death, covered from head to toe in dust. Even her hair had turned nearly as gray as his. Her expression, other than relieved, had a tinge of crazy underneath it, like she'd been awake for days on end. He scratched his head, unable to keep the smirk off his face.

Hal coughed, stepping out of the shadows, embarrassed, and greeted Mobius with a nod.

"Hey."

"Hey, yourself."

Mobius wasn't completely surprised to see him. He didn't need to put two and two together to figure out what Hal and Evette were doing down there. What he did need a calculator for was Six. He knew Evette and Hal had the same question for him, too, from their imploring, vaguely panicked looks.

"Well, since the door just happened to be open," he explained, after an uncomfortably long pause, "Evette, I was going to ask you where I might find someone, but…" he trailed off as he noticed Six clutching her hand, with a smear of bright red at her fingers. He pulled her hand away. Her pinky was covered in blood.

Evette gasped as she fumbled around in her pocket, then brought out a bit of rag to staunch the blood. "I didn't see that! Why didn't you say something?"

"What happened?" Mobius asked, forgetting about Zeit. She squeezed her hand again and spoke so softly he could barely understand her.

"I was… um… in the vents, and there was this little animal, with a long tail, and it-"

"How big was it?"

She held her thumb and index finger only a few inches apart. "About that big."

He grunted in disgust. "A mouse. Or even worse, a rat."

"What's that?"

"A pest," he said, helping her tie the rag tightly around her fingers. "Little carbon based life forms from Earth that multiply like crazy, spread disease."

"They're animals that know how to multiply?"

"I…" Mobius paused for a second. He couldn't stop the weary sigh that came out of his mouth. "Wait. Did you say you were in the vents?"

"Yes," she mumbled.

Mobius looked to Hal and Evette for an explanation, but they seemed just as befuddled as he was. He felt a headache coming on. Six needed help more than he needed answers, just then.

"I suppose I'll have to find Zeit another time," he said, trying his best to dust Six off. She looked like she'd been put on a shelf for a hundred years. She coughed and choked on all the dust bunnies flying around.

"Since you're here," said Evette, "I may as well give you something of yours."

"Something of mine? What?"

As Hal and Mobius helped Six clean herself off, Evette went to the corner of the room, where she opened a small closet hidden within the wall. The door popped open with a clang, and she reached inside, rummaging around in a box on the bottom.

After a minute, she brought out the rosary that he'd gambled on the fight, and Jet's chunk of gold, and Libby's Eye of Agamotto.

"You won back your necklace. This stuff belongs to your friends, right?" she asked, handing him everything. He struggled to fit it all in his jacket pockets.

"You're good, Evette," he told her. "Can't believe you remembered. I'd forgotten, myself."

"Well, someone had to clean everything up," she responded, giving Six a pointed stare. That wasn't completely fair: the chaos had been more Sarge's fault, though it was inevitable that she would get lumped in with it, too.

"How could you forget? You said that was your most prized possession, Mobius," said Six, punctuating her sentence with a sneeze.

"Ah, yeah, I did. Well…"

"You mean, you have something even more incredible than the last rosary of the last… what was it called? A Pope?"

"Actually, Six… I found it on the side of the road during a mission. Nineteen eighty two, Tijuana, Mexico. It's not made of yttrium or black diamonds. More like pewter and plastic."

Her eyebrows shot up. Mobius felt awful for lying to someone who trusted every word he said. Why wouldn't she? He was a senior employee, one who'd wanted to be her friend. If he'd known someone like that when he was a hatchling, he would have clung to them, too.

She looked understandably betrayed. "Why would you tell Lucky it was treasure, then?"

"Because, he needed the motivation." His real greatest treasure was the jet-ski magazine sitting in the top drawer of his work desk. He wouldn't bet on his own life with it.

"So, you didn't really believe in him," she said, the hurt seeping into her voice and hitting him harder than he expected. "If you did, you would have bet a real treasure on him."

"Six, I…" Mobius trailed off, not finding the right words to say. Evette looked vaguely amused, and Hal fidgeted around, staring at the opening like he wanted nothing more than to go back to his room. "It was just a psychological thing, you know?" he said, weakly. "A trick of the mind, to get him to really put his all into it."

Sure… Lucky put everything he had into it. Meanwhile, Mobius wasn't sacrificing anything of real importance to him.

His meager explanation didn't seem to satisfy either of them, but Six muttered an affirmative, with a tiny, disappointed shrug. Just as Mobius and Six were about to leave Hal and Evette behind in the Viscera, Hal leaned in close to Mobius so Six couldn't hear him whisper.

"I can get you down here again, next time Evette-"

He stopped himself short, though the implication was obvious. Mobius gave him a knowing grin, his hand protectively on Six's shoulder, keeping her from rushing out the door and down the hallway topside and being seen by someone who would care that she looked a shade grayer than normal.

"Sounds good, let me know. Let's take care of that bite, huh?" he said quietly to Six. They left the Viscera, down some less used hallways until they came to the first exam room he could find. He opened the door and pressed the com button on his tempad.

"Can I get a medic, non-emergency, Division Nine, floor NP2, exam room twelve, please?"

"Copy," replied an anonymous voice, "Sending medic."

Six made herself comfortable on the beige exam table, while Mobius took a seat in the chair in the corner. The stillness of the room bothered him, like a tickle in the back of his brain… like deja vu. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, even though he knew nothing bad was going to happen. That is, if Six didn't tell the medic something she shouldn't.

Poor Six. She looked absolutely miserable, still holding on to her drawstring bag for dear life. She'd sniffle on occasion, from the dust or something else, he wasn't sure.
"So," he said gently, to break the silence as much to soothe Six, "do you want to tell me what's going on?"

"No," she croaked. Her sniffles weren't from the dust.

"You're obviously upset. You can tell me, Six. You can trust me."

"Can I?" she said, giving him the slightest glower before looking away guiltily. "You lied about your treasure. You said you wish you'd never seen us."

Mobius let out a long sigh and paused before answering. "I was angry. You have to admit, you guys did make a huge mess out of fight night."

"I don't care." Six's voice came out in a growl, surprising Mobius. "I don't care about anything."

"That's not true. You care about Lucky, don't you?"

She scowled. "We're not on speaking terms right now."

"Well, that's a shame," said Mobius, trying not to smirk and make everything worse. So much drama between those two. He couldn't remember if he'd been so… volatile, as a hatchling. Well, he'd been perfectly good at quietly breaking some of the rules, once he'd been assigned as an analyst. The key word, there, being quietly.

The door opened and he was relieved to see a familiar face.

"Hello, there, I'm Dr. Alltid-" the medic began her usual spiel to Six, then her expression perked up as she recognized Mobius. "Well, what are you doing here again?"

Mobius wordlessly poked his thumb towards an embarrassed Six.

"What's your number, honey?" she asked, taking out a chart from her pocket.

"L-63."

"And what brings you in?"

Six unraveled the rag from her finger, which had soaked up a considerable amount of blood. The wound was starting to scab, looking red and angry.

"Oh dear." Dr. Alltid crossed the room to start rummaging around in her cabinet of medical supplies. "How did that happen? Did you cut yourself?"

"No. You see, I was in the ve-"

"Cafeteria!" blurted Mobius. He gave Six the smallest, silent shake of the head while Dr. Alltid's back was turned. "She was in the cafeteria."

"Okay," said Dr. Alltid as she pulled out a spray bottle of antibiotics and used it on Six's finger. "Then…?"

"I was in the cafeteria-" she gave Mobius a hurried glance. He could see the cogs turning wildly in her head as she lied, "-and… I saw this little thing, this little animal-"

"A mouse," Mobius helped.

"Right, a mouse. It darted across the floor, so I followed it… and it went behind these boxes, but as I was squeezing behind the boxes, I got stuck, and the mouse bit my hand."

"And then I found her stuck there, which is why she's covered in dust," Mobius finished.

Dr. Alltid nodded placatingly as she put some quick healing gel on Six's finger, the same kind she'd used on Mobius's face a few days before.

"Good thing you came to me right away," she said. "Animal bites are no joke, even little ones. You can get a nasty infection. Maintenance will have to do something about the mice. If you can see one, that means there's going to be more hiding around."

Six nodded absentmindedly, her green-eyed gaze faraway, her expression just a little bit feral. Mobius couldn't believe she'd nearly told the doctor the truth, right off the bat. She knew it would get her in trouble. What was going through her head?

Dr. Alltid finished Six up with a clean bandage, wrote something into her chart with her touch pen, then looked at Mobius and tilted her head towards the door slightly, too slight for Six to notice. Mobius stood quickly.

"I'm… gonna use the bathroom real quick," he told Six, then left the room, waiting patiently outside for the doctor. She came through a moment later, chart still in hand.

Dr. Alltid passed him down the fairly deserted hallway, her face expressionless. He followed, trying to look as nonchalant as possible.

She swiped her badge into a random room, which just so happened to be an unused courtroom. The second the door had closed, Dr. Alltid turned to Mobius and opened her chart.

"Look what I found, Mobius," she whispered, swiping down with her fingertip until she reached what she wanted Mobius to see. It made very little sense to him. All he recognized was an employee number and a date from about a Null-week ago.

"What are we looking at, doc?"

"I found someone else who received that 'vaccine', as well, and on the same day, too."

"B-15," he said. "She's a hunter. We work together on cases all the time."

Dr. Alltid closed her chart, looking pale, her eyes darting around the room, as if the walls had ears.

"Sorry I couldn't find anything else. Whatever happened that day, they're keeping a tight lid on it. It's all really starting to give me the creeps."

Mobius put a hand on her shoulder. "It's all right, Dr. Alltid. You've done more than enough. I would never ask you to put yourself on the line for my sake. Thank you."

She seemed to relax a bit, letting out a deep breath she'd been holding tightly.

"Now," he continued, "I should get back to Six, before she disappears again."

As they left the courtroom, they took different directions down the hallway. The revelation Dr. Alltid had just given him was about to change everything about this personal case of his, he could feel it. B-15 wouldn't lie to him.

When Mobius returned to the exam room, Six was laying down on the table in the fetal position, facing away from the door.

"Everything all right, Six?" he asked her gently.

"My stomach hurts," she groaned, squeezing her eyes tight. A tear oozed from her eye, made its way down her nose. "And my brain hurts. And my heart hurts, and all my insides hurt. I just hurt."

He sat on the edge of the table and laid a hand on her arm. She didn't resist, but it felt like every muscle in her body was ready to snap.

"Do you want me to call the doctor back in here?"

"No. I want… I want…"

"You'll feel better if you talk about it, I promise."

"No, I won't feel better. I'm only going to feel worse, forever. It's like my brain is going down a black hole…" she trailed off, then started to cry, covering her face and sobbing into her elbow.

Mobius was stunned, at a loss for words. He'd dealt with terribly emotional cases, ones that started to tear away at his insides once they were over and done with. He'd been trained on how to keep his composure, knew what to say and do to deescalate nearly any situation. This was different. She wasn't a variant he was trying to coax intel from. It wasn't just drama between her and Lucky plaguing her, either. Six really was in pain.

"I hate everything, Mobius," she continued, voice muffled by her elbow. "I hate Miss Minutes. I hate this place. I hate everything. I don't want to be here."

Mobius took a deep breath, then dragged the chair from the corner of the room next to the table, to be at eye level with her. He had, unfortunately, had to deal with variant children in the past, ones that were too terrified to respond to anything he asked of them. He couldn't blame them in the slightest. That's probably what she felt like, just then: a helpless kid, being shoved around by forces she couldn't control. Mobius silently laid his hand back on Six's arm, feeling her shudder with every sob.

Once she'd calmed down a little, Mobius finally spoke. "Everyone needs a breather, sometimes, Six. You saw how many people were willing to break the rules just to let off some steam. I didn't think you'd feel that way before you'd even been placed in a career, though."

"I don't want a career."

"What?" said Mobius, stunned. "You have to have a career, Six. Everyone does. You know, I put in a recommendation for you, too, to become an agent just like Lucky. I think you'll-"

"I don't want a career," she responded firmly. She wasn't crying anymore. She turned around to face him, her expression as hard as stone.

"I know you probably feel constrained, as a trainee, having Miss Minutes tell you every little rule you have to follow. I get that."

Six sat up suddenly, glowering at him. "You're not listening to me!"

"Well, then, what do you want?" he asked, keeping his voice at an even keel.

"You'll tell her," she grumbled.

"Six, you should know better than that by now. I'm not a snitch. I won't tell Miss Minutes anything you don't want me to."

Six took a very long pause before answering, holding her breath so long Mobius was afraid she might pass out.

"I want out, Mobius. I want to leave."

Mobius nodded sympathetically, which seemed to surprise her.

"Okay. So you want to leave, go live somewhere on the timeline. Do you know what would happen if you did that?"

"I'd become a variant."

"That's right. You'd be treated like one, too. They wouldn't take you back. If you did that, you'd be treated like you never existed here."

Six remained silent, her hands balled into fists, face still flushed red.

He continued. "That doesn't explain why you were crawling around in the vents, though."

"I was trying to hide. Trying to figure out how to get out without anyone noticing."

Mobius shifted in his chair. She had all this intelligence and ingenuity at her fingertips, but nowhere productive to funnel it.

"So, you made a little pack to take with you, and you were going to… what… live in the vents with the mice?"

"You're just as bad as everyone else," she growled. "You don't understand, and you don't care."

She got up suddenly, then pushed past him to reach the sliding door. Mobius grabbed her filthy shirt just before she could rush out.

"Six, Six, wait," he said, already exhausted. She jerked away from his grasp, but stood still, giving him a dirty look over her shoulder. "I do care. Say, why don't we go talk somewhere else?"

"Like where?"

"I'll show you."

Mobius rose and led her out the door, guiding her through the unending maze of hallways until they reached time theater number 49.

It looked identical to every other time theater in the TVA: a large, barren concrete room, with only a small table and a computer in the middle, and a projection screen on the wall where the most important scenes of variants' lives would play out before them. The number '49' was painted on the wall in big, orange, block numbers. Six warily followed Mobius into the middle of the room as he took out his tempad, then pressed buttons until he got to the setting he wanted: the time cell.

He initiated the sequence, and a little blur of light popped into existence in midair, then stretched out and formed a timedoor, glowing red instead of golden.

Six's eyes went wide with fear as she realized what it was. She turned to him suddenly, begging, "Please, Mobius, I won't run away again! I'll be good!"

Mobius couldn't help but burst into laughter.

"You're not in trouble, Six. I'll go in with you. Ready?"

Six took another uncertain glance at the red timedoor, then swallowed and nodded. He stepped out in front of her, letting her follow. As the crimson light engulfed him, he passed from the stale, mildewy air of the TVA into a warm, fresh ocean breeze. His shoes sank a little into wet sand. The simulated sea stretched before him for what seemed like a thousand miles, the waves gently lapping just in front of his toes, the sound and smells of the beach a welcome reprieve. As a beautiful finishing touch, there was a perpetual sunset on the horizon, glowing orange across the water. He'd been there many times, but the sight of it, the feel of it, never ceased to amaze him with its authenticity.

Six gasped as she walked through the timedoor, which blinked closed behind her. He watched her face fill with delight.

"This is-" he began, but Six interrupted her with an excited squeal.

"It's the ocean!" she said, bending down to take a handful of sand. It left no trace of itself on her hand, unlike real sand, disappearing as soon as it fell from her grasp. She seemed to have sprung to life again in an instant. "We're on a beach!" she laughed.

"How do you know what an ocean is, Six?" Mobius asked. "Have you talked about it in class?"

"No," she answered, gazing out into the distance. "It's just something I know."

It had been a long time since he was a trainee, but he was almost certain he didn't know what a beach was until he learned about the different planet environments in his agent training.

"Mobius," she piped up again, interrupting herself from examining a realistic piece of driftwood, "this is a time cell, right? For bad variants?"

"Well… yes and no." He put his hands in his pockets, forgetting they were stuffed full of treasures, and wandered over to a couple of beach chairs folded up on the ground. He brushed them off and unfolded them as he spoke. "This is a time cell, but it's kind of an experimental one. You see, Hal is an innovator, they're the people who make the new technology for the TVA. He'd been working on creating more realistic textures and tactile sensations for time cells; grains of sand, water, wind, certain kinds of scents, things like that. He was doing it all in this cell: a literal sandbox, if you will."

Six took a seat on one of the fabric chairs that Mobius had set up. "So… why do you have access to it?"

"He gave it to me, as a present, I guess. I haven't been here in a while. It's a nice place to get away when you-"

"Ooh, what's that?" Six sprang up again and ran towards a machine laying on the beach, painted in bright streaks of teal and purple and pink.

Mobius chuckled and followed her. "That is a nineteen ninety six Yamaha Waverunner." He patted the handle a few times, like it was an old, faithful horse, then sat on the foam seat, settling himself in. "Unfortunately, it doesn't actually, you know, waverun. Hal couldn't get that aspect to work. Something about the interaction of the water physics and the engine… I don't know."

He was still a little bummed about it, if he was being honest, but it was still just nice to sit on. As silly as it seemed, it calmed some part of him, when he was feeling frazzled or frustrated with TVA life. It was nice to pretend, sometimes, that he could be somewhere else, without actually being somewhere else.

Six's eyes darted around to take in all the new things she'd never seen before, face filled with wonder. She picked up small shells, pieces of slimy seaweed, whatever lifelike detritus Hal had decided to plop into his weird little experiment. It was wonderful to see her really, truly happy, for once. Suddenly, she turned around and dashed to the edge of the water as it rushed to shore, laughing as she went. She yelped when the water engulfed her shoes, but the simulation broke into little pixels and pieces, leaving her bone dry.

"Mobius, look," she said, pulling up the hem of her pants to show her dry, white socks. "It felt wet when it hit, but it didn't stick! How does it do that?"

"Well, the water's not real… that's all I know about the technical aspect, honestly. I don't know how he can simulate things like that. Man's a genius."

Mobius got off of his beloved fake Yamaha and took a deep stretch. His back and shoulder popped: he'd been sitting too long at a desk. Sitting at a beach felt like a much healthier option.

As he settled down on one of the beach chairs, Six followed suit, gazing up at the perfect, cloudless blue sky.

"Have you ever shown this place to anyone else?"

He paused before answering, mulling over how personal he felt like getting with an excitable hatchling.

"There was one person," he began slowly. "She and I were agents together for a while, before she moved up the ladder to become a judge. I took her here a couple times, before it was quite finished." He chuckled at the memories coming back to him. "Sometimes you'd see fish swimming through the sand, or the sunset would glitch and flicker off, like a lightbulb. Fun times. Anyway, we would just come here to… I dunno, hang out. Talk. Chill."

"So," Six asked in a wry tone. "You talked to her a lot, didn't you? I can tell."

Mobius grunted. He thought he'd been keeping a poker face, but apparently she was damned good at reading expressions… or he was bad at hiding his feelings for her.

"Yes. She was… still is… a good friend of mine."

He left it at that, and she didn't pry any further for a good few minutes. They both laid there in their chairs, watching the lifeless sky and the rushing waves. He realized the place was missing the high squeal of seagull cries, like in the recorded noise of Ravonna's suite.

Mobius knew, without her ever telling him, that the time cell was the reason she'd picked that background for herself. For some reason, it gave him a fleeting pang of sorrow, one he couldn't ignore. Heat flushed in his cheeks.

Six spoke again, quietly, sheepishly. "Hey, Mobius? Have you ever… do you know what it feels like when you… have you ever felt like…" she trailed off and grunted in anger, crossing her arms in front of her. "Oh, never mind."

Mobius grinned at her frustration. He couldn't help it.

"Do you want to try that again?"

"No." Her leg jittered, like she was getting antsy and anxious all over again, then the words fell out of her all at once. "I can't say what I want because there's no words for it. It's this feeling you get when… when you want to kiss someone, or you see other people kissing, or when you think about somebody that you want to be with. Do you know what that's called? Is there a name for it? Does everyone feel it, or just me? Am I crazy, Mobius?"

She turned in her chair to give him a pathetic, imploring look, made worse by still being covered in a fine layer of dust.

"No, Six, you're not crazy. I know what that feeling is."

"You do? Really?"

"Yeah." He propped himself up on one elbow. It was his turn to fumble his words, while trying not to betray anything on his face. "You see, that feeling is… well, most cultures have a concept of it. The ones that reproduce sexually, anyway. It's called love."
"Love." It wasn't a question. She seemed as if she was mulling over the word itself, committing it to memory. "Love. Are we supposed to feel… love? Even though we don't reproduce like that?"

Mobius took a deep breath. He wanted, more than anything, to answer with a complete, uncensored opinion… but he also had to keep her safe from people-and certain AI clocks-that were much stricter than he was.

"A lot of us feel love, I think, though I haven't really asked around. Whether we're supposed to or not is another story."

"Oh." She gave a disappointed groan and turned back around to face the sky. "So it's like when the sun glitched out. It means you're broken."

"No! Absolutely not."
"But if we're not supposed to feel it-"

"There's plenty we're not supposed to do around here. People do those things, and they get right back on with their lives. Nothing's wrong with us, just because we want to have a little fun, or some intimacy."

"Then why do we have to-" she paused, then gave Mobius a surprised glance. "We? Do you mean you've felt love, too?"

Mobius froze. He'd gotten too personal. He knew he would, the moment the subject came up… and Six saw it written all over his face already.

"You're blushing," she sang, a big smile blooming on her lips. "I bet you do love someone. Is it that other agent?"

"Six…"

"Ooh, have you kissed her?"

"Six!"

His reply was so terse and blunt that it startled them both. The smile fell abruptly from her face.

"I'm sorry," she murmured. "I won't ever tell anyone, I promise."

Mobius closed his eyes and calmed himself down. "I don't think you understand how harsh the punishment is for being caught in an intimate relationship. People can lose everything."

"I know," she said, deeply serious. "Don't ask me how, please, but I do."

"Miss Minutes might be lenient on a trainee, but once you've graduated into a career-"

"I get it."

The conversation died again for a good long while. If the beach had been real, the sun would have fallen by then, but the simulated sunset stayed frozen in place.

"I guess I don't really hate Lucky," Six ventured, letting out a loud yawn. "He's just obnoxious sometimes. I kind of miss him."
"How long has it been since you've talked to him?"

"Days. Since fight night. We got into an argument." Six closed her eyes, breathing deep and steady, soaking up the fake sunlight.

"Do you think maybe you should go make up with him? I'll go with you. I should apologize, too."
"Okay," she whispered, keeping her eyes closed. Before he knew it, she had settled into a catnap, her mouth open ever so slightly. The poor thing looked like she'd needed it desperately.

Mobius chuckled to himself. There was no need to wake her. There seemed to always be time, when he was on that eternal beach; time to think, time to reminisce… time to regret. Regret the chances he never took, the time with Ravonna that he'd never get back. She was beyond him, now, in the greenest pastures that the TVA had to offer, while he stayed behind in a frozen simulation.

Mobius swallowed the pain building in his throat as Six slept on, in oblivious peace.