CW for some gore
The steady pinging of Mobius' tracker was like the thunder of his heartbeat, growing faster as he honed in on the tracking device. He was so excited, and so terrified, that he could barely think of a coherent sentence to ask the shapeshifter once they met.
Why? How? When? Who? Especially 'Who?'
Before he lost himself completely in his giddiness, his logical side butted in with the sobering realization that this was more than likely a trap of some kind. Taking that into consideration, he'd nipped someone's time baton from an armory, keeping it safely telescoped down into a small cylinder in his pocket. He didn't want to believe the logical part of his brain, for once, but it didn't hurt to be prepared.
The tracker pinged more urgently when Mobius went up one floor. He followed it, playing a game of hot-and-cold until he determined that the shapeshifter was definitely on that floor… and he had a good feeling about where he'd find him. The tracker led him to the doors of a film archive room, the same one that Ravonna said he'd checked into over a dozen times.
Mobius took a deep breath, turned off his tracker, put it in his pocket, then placed his other hand in his other pocket to grab on to the time baton, just in case he needed it.
He opened and closed the door as quietly as he possibly could, scanning the room with his eyes, listening closely for any signs of life. It was still and quiet. The hair stood up at the back of his neck, but he swallowed and forced himself to go down one of the aisles, still without a clue about what the shapeshifter had in store for him.
An even more frightening thought hit him hard, almost made him turn around. What if, somehow, he was being elaborately framed by the TVA? What if they'd planted evidence and clues for him to find, only to arrest him for undermining the institution?
He really wished he'd thought of that scenario earlier. It was too late, now. He was already there. Whoever had planted the clues must know he was there, too.
"Anyone in here?" he called out. "It's me."
Nothing answered him. Well, if there would be one place where he'd find something, it would be at the back of the room, near the vent.
His hunch was rewarded handsomely. He smiled again. Someone had left the Josta, he assumed with the tracking device still stuck to the bottom of the can, along with a pile of neatly rubber-banded bits of film, the keychain, and a manilla folder. The Josta had tipped over, red, sticky soda edging towards the precious film and folder, still fizzing ever so slightly. The vent was left wide open. There was not a living soul around.
Mobius rushed over to the archived objects and saved them from the creep of the soda threatening to destroy them. Breathing heavily, hands sweaty, he unraveled a bit of film and held it up to the light, squinting. He didn't have his diamond magnifying glass with him, but he could just make out the person in the film; a younger man, with scruffy blonde hair, no mustache, wearing a green cap and red plaid shirt. It was absolutely, unequivocally him; Mobius, but years younger, almost the same as he'd looked when he'd woken up on his first day at the TVA.
"Oh my god," he whispered.
He held one balled up hand to his face, letting out a strangled breath. He frantically glanced through the other parts of the film, some happy scenes, others sad, others angry. A whole life that had been reduced down to one of the films hanging in the archive, gathering dust.
His life.
Mobius wanted to scream, wanted to cry, wanted to run out into the TVA and tell everyone right then and there. But of course, he couldn't, no matter how strongly his conscience begged him to. His head felt light all of a sudden, as if he might faint again, and he leaned on the wall for support.
Before he could examine the manilla folder, something struck him… a hunch, an instinct, whatever you wanted to call it. Something about the room was wrong, even though he couldn't see or hear any movement. Perhaps that was it. It was too quiet, all except for the smallest fizz of the soda on the floor. He knelt down to take a closer look. The can hadn't just been tipped over; there were splatters of red soda all over the side of the wall next to the vent, too. The vent grate was tilted at an odd angle, like someone had accidentally knocked it to the side. If the shapeshifter had heard him coming, and took off down the vents again in response, surely Mobius would have been able to hear something.
Just then, a horrible groan came from the bowels of the air ducts, scaring Mobius half to death. He scrambled backwards, splattering through the puddle of Josta. Someone was inside, and in terrible pain.
"Help," called a thin, weak voice from the darkness, like a ghost. "Help me…"
What made Mobius' mind go blank with fear wasn't just the voice of the shapeshifter. It was the fact that it was his voice. If a Skrull was in enough pain, or about to die, they wouldn't stay in their disguise. They'd shift back to their original form.
This had to be a trap, then. Mobius' spirit fell. He'd hoped against hope that it wasn't some kind of trick. And yet… if the Skrull was smart enough to make his own badge and potentially forge evidence that convincing, then why wouldn't he know not to cry wolf in Mobius' voice?
He was about to call for backup on his tempad when it called out again.
"Help… help…" it moaned, the voice wavering and breaking into a sob.
Mobius paused and put his tempad back in his pocket. He felt like he was about to make the biggest mistake of his life, but he had to know for himself before turning the guy in. Besides, he could actually be in trouble, given what could be lurking around in there. He rolled up his sleeves as best he could and crawled into the vent.
The stagnant air was even more suffocating than before, and there was a hint of some other scent, as well. He chalked it up to the soda on his shoes as he continued to crawl, but some niggling feeling in the back of his mind wouldn't leave him alone. It wasn't just the acidic, fruity fragrance of Josta that he knew so well. There was an undertone to it, too, though he couldn't quite tell what it was.
As he thudded clumsily through the vents, his hand swept through some thick, sticky liquid on the bottom of the air duct. It definitely didn't feel like soda. He brought his hand up to his face in the darkness and sniffed it tentatively, unable to see its color. It smelled coppery, almost sour.
Blood. Congealing blood. And a lot of it.
He picked up the pace, not caring how much blood he was getting on his suit as he crawled. He had to get to the guy. He'd reached a point where two air ducts crossed each other, when he heard the voice cry out again suddenly.
"Stop!" it hissed, still from far away. "Hide! Go back!"
Mobius paused, unable to do anything else. There was nowhere to hide, no way to run away that didn't involve fumbling backwards. His heart seized in his chest, knowing exactly what was coming even before he heard it clambering noisily through the air ducts to his right, the same direction he'd heard the voice coming from.
A robot.
He pressed himself to the bottom of the duct, keeping his head down, like a fawn freezing in front of a predator, as if that could possibly help him. He'd been in plenty of life threatening situations out on the timeline, but he'd never felt the same kind of terror that he felt at that moment, with the knowledge that he was being hunted. That thing could sense body heat, surely. He was trapped.
A scream ripped through the air, sending a shudder straight through him. Mobius gritted his teeth and held in a scream as well, one of sympathetic agony and terror. He was too late. The intruder had tried to give Mobius a few precious moments to run, but had given away his own position in the process. The robot was killing him.
He had to think of something, anything he could do. He couldn't just lay there and listen to someone get murdered.
A bit of desperate inspiration came in the form of the time baton in his pocket. He fumbled with it, scooched forward a bit, then shouted, "Hey!" as loud as he could into the vent to his right, where all the noise was coming from.
All he could make out in the darkness was a red light turning itself toward him, reflecting off of sharp metal teeth twisting around in the circle of a robotic maw. After it 'looked' at him for a pause, it rushed toward him in a clanging and clattering of metal. Mobius held himself as steady as he could, the monster banging around the vent as it approached, then, when it was nearly close enough for Mobius to make out its outline in the dark, he let out a guttural yell and sprang the time baton to full size. It activated, and the orange pruning light smashed straight into the robot's red eye, blinding it for a moment with a metallic screech before the robot disintegrated into fizzling light.
Mobius let out a few breaths, feeling not quite tethered to reality, wondering if any of that had actually just happened. The voice groaned again, much weaker this time, and he snapped out of it quickly. He turned off the time baton and crawled down the darkened vent as fast as he could, feeling more sticky blood coating the air duct.
He found a man shivering pitifully in a small alcove, where he'd obviously attempted to hide, but had instead cornered himself. The only sounds out of him now were small, shallow, shuddering breaths. Mobius couldn't see his face or any of his features, only heard and felt his presence as he blindly fumbled in the dark.
"Come on," he whispered to the man, pulling on his clothes. "There might be another one in here, let's go."
The man didn't respond. He slumped limply against Mobius as he pulled on him, still breathing, but barely.
With all the strength he had left in him, Mobius pulled the man backwards by his shoulders, determined to drag him all the way back to the vent opening. It seemed to take an eternity, wasting time the guy didn't have, if he was to survive. Mobius, shaking and sweating profusely, finally dragged him through the vent and into the relatively fresh air of the film archive room.
He couldn't quite process what he was looking at once he got the man into the light. Maybe it was his mind trying to shield him from the horror, the gore, the massive amounts of blood. The man's face, one that should have been instantly familiar to him despite his injuries, just wasn't connecting. The best thing he could liken the sensation to was a bug smashing itself into a window trying to get through to the other side.
Suddenly, though, the realization did smash through, and he gasped. He didn't know how it was possible, how this man could exist, but Mobius had been wrong about everything. He grabbed his tempad with a bloodied hand, pressed a few buttons, and spoke hoarsely into the intercom.
"Dr. Alltid," he said, "Dr. Alltid, I need you in the film archive room of floor WL1, right now. ASAP."
"What? Is this Mobius?" she replied.
"Yes!"
"Mobius, I'm a little busy right now, can't you get-"
"No! I can't get another doctor, it has to be you, specifically. Just you. Please, bring everything you have, right away. Floor WL1. Now!"
He shut off the com and the slippery tempad fell out of his hands and onto the floor. He didn't care if it was broken. He didn't care about the TVA at that moment. He wasn't sure he could care about the TVA ever again.
Mobius knelt down and pressed his index and middle finger against the man's jugular vein. Good. There was still a pulse, but very, very weak. To help Dr. Alltid once she arrived, he started to take off the guy's jacket and unbutton his shirt, both identical to Mobius' except for the fact that they were utterly drenched in blood and hiding massive gashes beneath them. He started ripping the shirt into pieces to use as tourniquets. Mobius noticed a wound on the guy's arm so deep it made him turn away in horror. A flash of white stuck out between slabs of bleeding flesh… it had cut him all the way to the bone.
"You have to live," he told the man bleeding out on the floor in front of him as he pressed the ruined jacket against the wounds on his abdomen. "You're going to live, okay?"
The man's blue eyes, open, vacant, nearly lifeless, didn't respond, his mouth didn't utter the slightest noise. He was pale and cold.
On the inside of the man's jacket, Mobius felt something flat and hard and thin. He took it out, at first just to toss it to the side, but through the blood covering the clear plastic sleeve of the badge, he saw his own face, his own employee number.
J-888.
Before he could lose his marbles, the door opened and snapped him back into reality. Hurried footsteps echoed through the film archives.
"Mobius?" Dr. Alltid's voice.
"Back here!" he called out, and the doctor rushed down the aisle to them, carrying a huge bag bulging with medical equipment.
She stopped and gasped as she saw all the blood, but only for a moment. Without a word, she opened her bag, knelt down and began to work.
"Mobius," she scolded him as she placed an oxygen mask over the man's mouth attached to a small, portable tank, "I need a team in here! Why did you tell me to come alone?"
"Because… just look at him, doctor!" he responded, pointing to the guy's face.
She finally got a good look at his face for the first time, and her expression changed to pure confusion. She looked between the two men, shook her head, then went straight back to her work, tying the tourniquets above the worst wounds on the injured man's arms.
"It's… it's a shapeshifter, right? A Skrull?" she asked.
Mobius shook his head and started fumbling for words. "No. I know it doesn't make sense… this guy… this man is… he's me, somehow. We're the same person."
Dr. Alltid let out something between a scoff and a sigh, like she simply couldn't deal with that idea at the moment. He couldn't blame her. He could barely grapple with it, himself.
"Mobius, he's bleeding out. He's dying. If I can't get the right kind of blood for a transfusion right away-"
"Use mine," he said, and without a second thought, he took off his jacket and folded up his sleeve as far as it would go.
"Don't be stupid!" she yelled, startling him. He'd never seen her angry before. "You can't just put any blood into any body! I have to know his species and his blood type. What other kind of shapeshifter-"
"I'm telling you, doctor," he said firmly, "this man is not a shapeshifter. If I'm wrong, he dies because we won't be able to figure out the kind of blood he needs fast enough. But I'm not wrong. Use my blood." He desperately offered his bare arm to her. "Please."
After a small pause, she let out a breath and started digging around again in her bag. "I can only take about 500 milliliters from you at a time, maybe up to 800. That probably won't be enough, but we'll be able to tell if it worked by then."
"How?"
She gave him a hardened glance.
"Because he'll either be dead or he won't."
She fished out a long tube with needles at the end, capped with safety plastic, and connected in the middle by a small, clear bottle with measurements marked on its side. "God, I just wish we didn't have to do this right here. It's so dusty, and an archivist could wander back here any second."
"I've got an idea," said Mobius. He picked up his tempad off the floor, wiping the quickly drying blood off of it as best he could. He opened the door to the beach timecell. The Yamaha continued to bob uselessly in the fake current, right where he'd left it.
"Sand?" she scoffed. "That's twice as bad as dust."
"It's not real," he retorted. "It's all a simulation, perfectly sterile. Pretty much. And private."
She paused a second, then stood, a determined look on her normally gentle face. "Help me move him."
He did so, as gently-but quickly-as he could. She instructed him to unfold one of the beach chairs and lay down on it while she arranged his doppelganger next to him on the sand.
"Gravity should do most of the work," she said, putting the big, painful needles into each of their arm veins. "Mobius, make a fist and squeeze… that's right, keep going…"
Mobius' blood made its way through the tube, into the bottle, and up into the arm of the identical man, and the doctor continued frantically working on him, occasionally asking Mobius to hand her things from her bag. She hooked sticky electrodes up to his body, attached to a small handheld machine which made fluttering beeps the second she turned it on, then cleaned out and started to sew up the nastiest wounds while smothering the smaller ones with quick healing gel.
He watched his injured twin's every shallow breath, trying to judge if it was getting weaker or stronger. It left only a faint fog under his oxygen mask, and he was still pale as a sheet. He'd really wished, now, that he had asked her to bring a whole team of doctors. It was stupid of him. He was worried more about a different doctor reporting the incident, and sealing his double's fate. After everything he'd shared with Dr. Alltid, he knew she certainly wouldn't say a word. He would have had a greater chance to survive with a team effort, but not for long, the second Miss Minutes got wind of it.
Looking down into the other Mobius' vacant expression, he shuddered, not from blood loss, but from the thought of watching himself die, which seemed to be a very real possibility.
"Keep squeezing, Mobius," said Dr. Alltid, spurring him back into the moment. She was focused, sweating, eyebrows knitted together, her latex-gloved hands and gray coat now covered in blood, too, as she sewed the man's skin together. He opened and closed his fist and focused on Dr. Alltid instead of his twin's face.
After a long while of watching the doctor work, the identical Mobius suddenly surprised them both with a very weak moan. His eyelids fluttered for a second and he let out a stronger huff of breath into his oxygen mask. It may have been Mobius hoping against hope, or a trick of the light, but it seemed like he wasn't quite as pale as before, either.
"That's good, right?" asked Mobius, still flexing his hand to get as much blood out of himself as possible.
"He's nowhere near out of the woods yet," she said, wiping sweat off of her forehead with her arm. She moved on to the next open wound as she spoke. "Don't get your hopes up too high. The good news is, your blood is helping instead of making it worse. I don't know how, but you were right. You do have the same blood type."
"Told ya'," said Mobius, with a bit of a smirk.
The doctor glanced over at the primitive transfusion apparatus and her eyebrows shot up. "Speaking of blood…" she said, then started to remove the needle from his arm.
"What are you doing? He needs more, right? I can give him more."
"No, no you can't," she warned. "You've given way too much already, you were up to almost a liter."
"But I feel fine!" he insisted, sitting up in the beach chair. Almost instantly, he was hit with a wave of dizziness and nausea, and his heart started to flutter wildly in his chest. He laid back down before he lost consciousness. "Oh… yeah. Okay. I'll just lay here for a little bit."
She grumbled at him and tossed him a small package of juice and crackers from her bag. "Eat this. Don't you dare move, either."
He did as the doctor ordered. It wasn't just a trick of the light; his twin's skin had turned a shade pinker than before, and his breath seemed even and deep. The machine taking his vital signs, which had been fluttering madly when she first hooked it up, was beeping with something closer to a steady rhythm.
"There, finally," said Dr. Alltid with a deep sigh, cutting off the last of the stitches. "I got all the big wounds. Is there any more gel in there?" she asked Mobius.
He rummaged through her bag but didn't see any more tubes. "Nope." He did take another small box of juice for himself, though, and poked a hole through the top with the straw.
She stood, took off her bloody gloves, and reflexively dusted the sand off of herself, even though it disappeared without leaving a trace.
"I have to go back to the infirmary storage and get more supplies… and a clean coat. Mobius, will you be okay here?"
"Sure," he said, putting the command into his tempad to open up the timecell door. "Say, do you think it's safe for me to take a nap? I'm feeling… well, pretty drained."
She gave him an alarmed glance, then went over to him, felt his pulse on his neck, felt his temperature on his forehead, looked into his pupils. Finally, she nodded.
"You should be all right," she said. "I'll be back in a minute, anyway."
As Dr. Alltid left, Mobius looked down again at his identical twin, now breathing deeply into his mask. He reached down and gently held on to the other Mobius' naked, bloodied shoulder.
"I told you you were going to make it," he whispered, grinning at him. "I told you. You didn't believe me, did you?" The other Mobius blinked again, slowly, as if he'd heard, but continued to stare at the sky blankly. Mobius turned his head and positioned himself more comfortably on the beach chair, feeling deep waves of fatigue wash over him, from blood loss or the sheer terror and shock of everything that had just happened, he couldn't be sure. With his hand still unconsciously on his twin's shoulder, he fell into a deep sleep.