"Estou procurando por este homem."
"Estou… porkurando…"
"No, procurando. Pro-curando."
Lucky sighed and leaned his elbow heavily on the desk. It was only his first day training with G-59 and he was already weighing the option of running away and hiding in the vents, like Six had. He couldn't imagine being any more bored than he'd been during trainee classes, but at least Miss Minutes had been mostly cheerful and encouraging while teaching. G-59 had done nothing but scowl at him the second he'd gotten there that morning.
Lucky had introduced himself with his nickname, attempting to be friendly, but G-59 had just shaken his head and said, "No nicknames. During training, we are going to call ourselves by our employee numbers. I'm G-59. Sit down here."
He'd gestured brusquely to the seat next to him at a wide desk which held only one computer terminal. Lucky sat down heavily, already feeling disheartened.
"Why can't we use nicknames?" he'd asked.
"I feel it's deeply unprofessional to be on a nickname basis with someone when one is being trained, L-7. It undermines the authority of the trainer, and the respect of the trainee." He turned to face his computer. "Now, we have to get working. You were five minutes late, which means that I'm five minutes late."
Lucky tried really, really hard not to roll his eyes, but G-59 could sense his disdain for him already. It was mutual, and instantaneous, it seemed. At least Lucky finally got a full wardrobe of cool brown agent outfits and ties to wear, just like Mobius.
They'd spent the rest of the morning haphazardly going through all the most boring parts of the job. G-59 wasn't a good teacher, either, for as much respect as he demanded. He'd typed up an excruciatingly long arrest report, while barely explaining what he was doing or why, and every time Lucky asked a question, he answered it as if Lucky was the stupidest person in the TVA. He'd quickly learned not to ask questions, and doodled in his notebook whenever he could get away with it, just like he had in class.
He flipped to a page somewhere in the middle, which he'd filled in with doodles already, and one of them caught his eye. He'd drawn a circle of hearts around the name 'Six', the letters whimsically curled to look romantic and cute. Lucky let out a sigh, feeling a deep pang of loneliness in his heart. He kept telling himself that they'd find each other again, just like she'd told him days before, just like he'd told her, too, but he was starting to lose hope. Even one division of the TVA was so huge, it felt like there was no way they'd ever find each other, even by accident. He'd never have a chance to find her at all if he had to stay at their stupid shared desk all day.
"Why do I have to learn this-pork-too-geese-stuff anyway?" asked Lucky, starting to spin around in his chair.
"It's pronounced 'Portuguese', L-7," G-59 replied, severely annoyed. "Why do you keep saying, 'pork'?"
"Because I'm starving," grumbled Lucky, making a full rotation before G-59 stopped him, grabbing onto the back of his chair. Lucky glowered at his trainer out of the corner of his eye.
"Learning different languages is part of an agent's job," said G-59. "When you go out into the timeline, you need to know enough of the local language to ask questions and understand the answers." He let go of Lucky's chair and scoffed under his breath, "If you'd been a hunter before, you would have known that."
Lucky sat up straighter in his chair, grinning hopefully. "Does that mean we're going out into the timeline?"
G-59 rolled his eyes and sighed, "Yes. Only because I have to drag you along. If you can manage a few lines of Portuguese without screwing up, then I might let you help question someone."
That brought Lucky's attention into laser focus. He scooted in, put his notebook flat on the desk, and sat with his pencil at the ready, prepared to take notes.
"Once again," said G-59, "How do you say, 'I'm looking for this man'?"
"Estou… pro-curando…" Lucky winced at G-59, waiting for him to correct him.
"...por este homem," G-59 finished the sentence for him, but without irritation in his tone, this time. Perhaps he finally understood that Lucky was trying his best.
After their tiring lesson, G-59 and Lucky went to get some lunch. Lucky jogged out ahead of his trainer and into the cafeteria, scanning the place for any trace of Mobius or Six. To his immense disappointment, they were nowhere to be seen. He took a pulled pork sandwich from the line and sat at a small table across from G-59, who'd taken a chicken salad for himself.
"When we go out into the timeline," asked Lucky, though a mouthful of food, "do you think we'll have to take some hunters, too?"
"No," said G-59, and Lucky's spirit fell instantly. "Our target isn't violent, he's not being protected, he doesn't have superpowers. There's no reason why we can't bring him in alone."
"But, what if he… had a knife, or something?" Lucky ventured hopefully.
G-59 rolled his eyes. "That's why you get the target into a time collar first. Obviously."
"But he could have a gun-"
"L-7," said G-59, putting down his fork and scowling at him, "why are you insisting we take a hunter? I've been around long enough to know when a hunter is necessary for a job."
"I would just feel safer if we had a hunter around, you know?" Lucky lied. It was a longshot, but he was hoping, perhaps, he'd see Six again that way. She'd have to train out on the timeline at some point, too. If not her, then at least he could question a senior hunter and ask where she was.
"We'll be just fine," said G-59, ending the conversation abruptly and going back to his salad.
After a few more minutes of silent chewing, Lucky piped up again. "How much time left before we have to go back to work?"
G-59 glanced at his watch. "Twelve minutes."
Lucky stuffed the last bite of pulled pork sandwich in his face and hurriedly got up to leave.
"Hey, where are you going?"
"I'll be quick," Lucky threw over his shoulder, tossing his tray on the pile and jogging right back out of the cafeteria. He caught one more glimpse of G-59 scowling at him, but couldn't care less.
He whipped around the corner and left down the opposite hallway, to where Mobius' desk was, eager to at least say hi to his friend before being dragged back into G-59's mind-numbing lessons, but Mobius wasn't there. His desk was empty. That was weird… it was definitely his usual lunchtime, and much too early for him to have gone back to his dorm. He must have been on an important mission, or something.
Lucky sighed deeply, and made his way to an elevator in the main terminal. He went back to his new agent dorm, 9HH, and ran back into his own room. It was utterly identical to the trainee rooms, not even an inch of extra space, except that the color of the pile carpet and the lamp on his desk were different from his last room. He really didn't feel like he'd left his trainee room at all, except for the fact that Six was no longer a stone's throw away.
There were only a few minutes left in his lunch break, so he hurriedly grabbed his Eye of Agamotto from underneath his mattress, right where he'd put it last night when he'd moved into his new dorm. It glowed ever so slightly and still felt a bit warm to the touch. A chill ran up his spine. What if it did something terrible to him if he tried to use it? What if the Eye wasn't enough to contain the time stone's immense magical power, and it killed him?
Lucky shook the thoughts out of his head as he stuck the bulky necklace in his pocket. What would more than likely happen was nothing at all. He'd try to use the time stone during their mission, he'd fail, and then that would be that. A burning instinct in him just had to know, for sure, if Six had been rambling or if her madness held some truth in it, somehow.
He rushed back onto the elevator and made it back to G-59's desk just in the nick of time… he thought. G-59 frowned at him and glanced down at his watch as Lucky approached.
"Two minutes late," he grumbled at Lucky. "That means you get two minutes less on your next half hour break. Be more careful, L-7, or you'll have to stay exactly as many minutes after work to make up for all the time you spend lollygagging."
Lucky, for a fleeting moment, thought about picking up his rolling chair and smashing it over G-59's back, but let out a deep, growling sigh and thought better of it.
They spent the next excruciating hour going over the utter tedium of all the things they needed to do in order to prepare for a mission: double checking the variant's file, programming exact coordinates to just after the man's nexus event, in order to have probable cause for the arrest in the first place, compositing a list of his probable locations and people to interview if they couldn't find him, calculating exactly how many reset charges they would need. Lucky spent the whole hour chewing his already mangled pencil into nothing but wood pulp and granite. Just when he felt he was about to leap straight out of his skin, G-59 pushed back his chair, straightened his tie, and took his tempad from his pocket.
"I think we're ready, L-7," he said briskly as he stood.
Lucky jumped out of his chair, trying not to bounce on his heels with excitement.
"Great! I'm ready. Er… what's the name of the place we're going, again?"
G-59 cringed and stopped typing the coordinates into his tempad to reprimand Lucky.
"Weren't you listening to anything I said?" he snapped, with a curt sigh. "Brazil. Rio de Janeiro. Nineteen-eighty-two A.D. Take your notebook," he added dismissively, "you're obviously going to need it."
Lucky did so, stifling a grumble as he put his hand into his pocket and squeezed the Eye of Agamotto hidden there. He'd have to find the right moment to get away from G-59 and use it. That bastard would surely report Lucky to Miss Minutes for having stolen property if he saw.
G-59 opened the timedoor and stepped out into sunshine, and Lucky hopped through right behind. The bright light, the new sounds, the sheer immensity of wherever they were blinded and deafened him. He focused instead on G-59, who looked just as disoriented as Lucky felt, for a second. Then, without warning, G-59 gasped and pulled Lucky towards him just as a loud 'honk' and whoosh of air sped past faster than he could think.
"We're in the middle of a god damned highway!" shouted G-59, looking around him, eyes wide. "How the hell did this happen?"
Lucky stared helplessly as cars beeped and flew past the two of them standing on the yellow middle line. He was completely stunned at how big everything was, even bigger than the TVA, and vast, like it wasn't hemmed in by anything, like it would go on forever. On the right side of the freeway stood dozens of tall, rectangular buildings, unlike anything he'd ever seen in the TVA, all right next to each other. On his left lay a parking lot full of cars, and past that, a sandy beach filled with hundreds of barely-clothed people, and beyond that, the ocean. A real ocean, with white, winged animals flying effortlessly through the sky and making weird noises. A breeze picked up and blew the briny scent of saltwater to them. It looked just like Mobius' fake beach, except with a lot more people. Someone out on the water was riding a jet ski almost exactly like Mobius', too, and it wasn't breaking down, either.
Something stirred deep inside of him, something forbidden and beautiful. A yearning to break free and run away, play on the beach, feel what real ocean water was like, feel the light of a real sun burning on his face. Maybe he could talk to some of the well-tanned people walking about… maybe, for a second, he could just be, not work, or learn how to work.
That pipe dream was cut short when he felt G-59 tugging at his sleeve once again.
"Come on!" he shouted, sprinting across a gap in the busy highway and going to the sidewalk. Lucky followed close behind, still dazzled by the strange sounds and new smells and blistering heat, as G-59 frowned at and fiddled with his tempad.
"Something must be wrong with the coordinates," he said, shaking his head. "It was supposed to put us in Rocinha, not Copacabana. We're miles away."
"Suppose you'd better be more careful, then," said Lucky sardonically, just to piss G-59 off. It had the intended effect. G-59 gave him a nasty glower while Lucky barely suppressed a smirk.
The senior agent typed something into his tempad while muttering under his breath, and another timedoor opened, this time in a much more run-down looking place, with claustrophobic streets and smaller buildings.
"There we go. Much better," said G-59, and stepped through the second timedoor. It was a surreal feeling, for as it closed, Lucky looked behind him down the steep hillside and could see right where they'd been. The busy highway was far away, now, with cars driving next to the beach, the tall skyscrapers nearly blocking the stunning view of the ocean.
Lucky followed closely behind G-59 as he trekked up the steep streets of Rocinha, looking completely out of place among the locals. People wearing baggy tee shirts and dirt-scuffed pants and sandals stared at them suspiciously as they walked by. The smell of delicious cooking wafted through windows, making Lucky's mouth water even though he'd just eaten. It smelled better than anything the TVA could ever make. Children laughed and screamed as they kicked a soccer ball down the street in front of them, then moved away, staring at the two agents just as suspiciously as the grownups had.
The place didn't look as nice as the big buildings and the beach far below, but the apartments stacked on top of each other were painted in bright, beautiful colors, and the people who weren't staring at him and G-59 were smiling between each other as they went about their day. Someone played a lively tune on a beaten-up guitar as they sat on a street corner. He could only guess from their clothes and houses that their lives weren't as comfortable as his, but everyone felt more… alive.
G-59 stopped and looked around them, squinting into the sunlight, obviously unimpressed by anything at all. "Let's see," he said, glancing back at his tempad and switching to the mugshot of their intended target. "He should be very close." He then turned around and, in fluent Portuguese, called out to a small group of men leaning against a wall.
As G-59 made his way towards the men, Lucky saw his chance to escape. He ducked into a narrow alley out of G-59's sight and pulled the Eye of Agamotto out of his pocket. It was even warmer than it should have been from his body heat and its natural warmth; almost hot, but not scalding, like the mind stone had been. The time stone inside was glowing much brighter as well, as if it had been starved of air in the TVA and could finally breathe.
To Lucky's terror and amazement, he felt a deep, throbbing pulse coming from the Eye, as if he was holding a living heart in his hand. Somehow, though, he knew that the power wasn't just coming from within the Eye, but it was something inside of him coming to greet it, too, awakening itself just like his soul had stirred seeing the timeline for the first time.
Lucky was caught between laughter and tears. It couldn't possibly be true, but it was. He did have magic within him.
That meant that Six somehow had magic, too.
How could she have known? How could they have been made that way when no one else in the TVA was? Was there something wrong with them?
Before he could ponder it any further, he realized he only had a few seconds before he had to duck back out again and follow G-59 to wherever he was going. He squeezed the Eye tightly in his hand, having absolutely no idea what to do with the power rushing through him like a dam breaking open. He had to use it, though. It was irresistible. And if he screwed something up, he could just blame it on G-59's glitchy tempad.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on what he wanted it to do, then quietly muttered the command to himself.
"Go back in time."
Speaking out loud seemed to focus the energy spread throughout his body, quickly gathering it back into his hand and into the Eye. He gasped as the green glow turned almost blinding, and the delicate metal pieces around the Eye started to move like clockwork.
Then, without warning, the buildings around him started to shift themselves into smaller and shoddier buildings, and the alley turned into an open lane in full view of G-59.
G-59 looked up from where he'd been questioning the locals, who had now disappeared, holding a time collar in his hand. A red light shone on it, meaning it was activated, and somehow working against the time stone's power to keep G-59 from vanishing along with everything else.
"What are you doing?!" he shouted, with true terror etched on his face. "Make it stop!"
Lucky only shook his head, bewildered and mute. He couldn't possibly stop the time stone now. It was going to stop whenever it felt like.
The scene continued to shift around them, turning from small buildings to even flimsier shacks surrounded by trees. The big buildings down next to the beach were long gone. G-59 slowly made his way towards Lucky, as if the flow of time around him was trying to whip him about like a hurricane.
"Give it to me, L-7!" he shouted as the environment continued to regress back into wild rainforest. He reached out a hand, just barely touched by the time stone's power, his fingers glitching out of and back into existence.
Lucky shook his head again, completely unaffected by the stone as he held the Eye loosely in his palm.
Just as suddenly and frighteningly as it began, it stopped. G-59 let out a breath and leaned on his knees, dropping the time collar on the leaf litter on the ground. All around them, a dense, untouched rainforest grew, full of the sounds of a million types of birds and insects droning and chirping. The air was wet, now, instead of just hot.
"Is that an Eye of Agamotto?" G-59 gasped through heavy breaths, bullets of sweat streaming down his face, his eyes wide in alarm. "Where did you even…?"
Lucky let a mischievous grin cross his mouth, suddenly not caring about any consequences he might face for what he'd done. G-59 was afraid. Of him.
G-59 swallowed and nodded to the Eye, which Lucky still held in his palm. "Here, Lucky," he rasped, reaching out his hand again nervously. "You don't know what you're doing with that. Let me have it. Please."
G-59's other hand was reaching down to the ground to pick up the time collar, and it didn't take a genius to figure out what he meant to do with it. Lucky grasped the Eye tightly.
"Ah-ah-ah," he chided G-59, making him stop while half bent over. Lucky began walking around his trainer, making a wide half-circle. "I think I'll be the one making the decisions right now."
A bit of a chuckle came from him, surprising even himself. He couldn't believe how… casual… all of this felt, how easily power came to him, how eager he was to use it. It didn't matter that G-59 was right, that he didn't have a clue what he meant to do. At the moment, he just wanted to see the bastard squirm a little bit after he'd tortured Lucky all morning and afternoon with his stupid lessons.
G-59's tone turned dark, his eyebrows furrowed together. "This is a grave mistake you're making," he said. "You could absolutely be pruned for doing something like this. Do you understand?"
"Not if I can just go wherever I feel like," Lucky replied, tossing the Eye lightly in one hand, like a softball. "Rather, whenever I feel like."
He saw the cogs ticking in G-59's head as they stared each other down. Then, his trainer's expression turned into a vague facade of friendliness. His mouth twitched upward, as if attempting a smile he hadn't tried in years, and he shrugged his shoulders with a mirthless chuckle.
"Look, Lucky… I know you weren't trying to do anything rash. You were just having some fun. I get it. No one has to know about this when we get back to the TVA. It'll be our secret."
Lucky stopped tossing the Eye into the air, and very nearly believed him, until he saw G-59 once again ever so slowly edge towards the ground and the time collar.
"Freeze!" he said, thrusting out the Eye towards G-59's outstretched hand. The Eye sent out a green burst of energy and hit G-59's hand, enveloping it in some sort of time field. His hand, indeed, looked as if it had been frozen in a block of ice. G-59 pulled on his arm with all his might, put his entire weight into it as he tried to lug himself backwards, but his time-stuck hand wouldn't let him move.
Lucky laughed loudly. G-59 was right, he was having fun.
"Let me go!" he cried, grunting as he continued to tug at his arm in vain.
Lucky tapped on his mouth lightly with his finger, as if considering it, then shook his head. "Nah. You can stay there for a bit. I, however, would love to go exploring with my new toy."
"That is not a toy!" yelled G-59, still tugging. "That is an infinity stone! What the hell do they teach you in-"
He stopped tugging suddenly, and looked straight in front of him, beyond Lucky, his entire body frozen now instead of just his hand. Lucky thought for a moment that he'd accidentally used the time stone again, but then G-59's mouth dangled open, quivering, and he whispered a single word.
"Jaguar."
Lucky slowly turned around and looked where G-59 was staring, and saw nothing at all in the dense forest for a moment. Then, the jaguar's camouflage broke, and a pair of golden eyes materialized close to the forest floor attached to a massive head and a huge body, with yellow fur and black spots. It looked quite a bit like Adam's cat, Quibble, except it was much, much bigger-and instinct told him, a lot less friendly. It had its head down, body close to the ground, slinking towards them ever so slowly, stalking them.
G-59 reached his trembling free hand into his suit pocket and grabbed his tempad, trying his best to dial up a timedoor with only one hand.
"Lucky," he whispered, voice wavering. "We have to get out of here. Free my hand, quick."
Lucky was paralyzed by terror. He simply stood there and stared at the huge cat coming ever closer to them. His mind went utterly blank.
"Use the time stone! Do something, for god's sake!" G-59 rasped between gritted teeth. He cursed, trying as best as he could to use the tempad with only one hand.
Lucky couldn't run or speak or even scream. The golden eyes moved closer. The Eye of Agamotto slipped from his sweaty palm and landed on the leaf litter. He thought about picking it up, but his basest primeval instinct knew that the moment he bent down and broke eye contact with the big cat, it would kill him. The jaguar licked its lips, then paused, its shoulders moving up and down, preparing to pounce.
"L-7!"
G-59's shout finally spurred him into action. If he hadn't been completely terrified, and had a few more seconds, he could have done two things at once. Unfortunately, his frazzled instincts could only think of one thing. He grabbed G-59's tempad out of his hand, whose screen was set with coordinates and a single button below them that said 'open timedoor?'.
Without hesitation, he tapped it, then jumped through the door the second he saw it, without even waiting for it to open all the way. He didn't turn to look at G-59, who didn't scream again, but he thought he heard the huge cat's paws rushing through the leaves.
The door closed, cutting off the rainforest behind him. Lucky was safe in one of the wide hallways of the TVA, with other employees walking about, minding their own business. He leaned over and breathed heavily, his mind trying to parse the surreal events that had just taken place.
Then he truly realized what he'd done.
Lucky gasped, then started to pace the hallway in a tight, crazed circle.
"Oh… oh shit, oh no, oh fuck," he muttered to himself, drawing a few confused stares. He grabbed at his hair, whimpered, feeling as if he was about to collapse. He'd basically just killed someone. Not just someone, but a TVA employee. Miss Minutes would do much, much worse than just silencing him or reprogramming him. The second anyone found out, he was going to disappear.
He looked at G-59's tempad, trying to figure out how to use the timedoor function. G-59 had barely even let him look at his tempad, much less touch it. Nothing about it made any sense. He had no idea where anything was, or how to type anything in himself. He didn't even entirely understand the concept of coordinates. G-59 hadn't explained it well at all.
"Mobius! Mobius!" he screamed into the hallway as he ran, scaring everyone else to death. It took him longer than it should have, in his state of panic, to realize that Mobius wasn't even on that floor. He did finally take the correct elevator to get to the floor with Mobius' desk, trying not to vomit or fall over as he clumsily ran up to his cubicle.
Mobius was there this time, thankfully, but he looked nearly as disheveled as the shapeshifter had when Lucky had seen him in the karaoke room. He had a silvery five-o-clock shadow, and purplish bags under his vacant eyes, like he hadn't slept. He was sitting in front of his computer, staring blankly at his black computer screen. It wasn't even turned on.
Lucky didn't even care at that moment if the Mobius he was looking at was actually the shapeshifter. As long as he could help him, it didn't matter.
"Mobius?" he asked, voice trembling.
Mobius only then seemed to come back to life and realize Lucky was there. He turned to him, blinked a few times, looked him up and down as if he'd never seen him before.
Lucky took a deep breath, did his best to gather his thoughts, but everything spilled out of him in a nearly incoherent mess.
"G-59 took us to the timeline and we went to Rio de Something but we went to the wrong spot so we had to go to Roci-something and he was talking to some guys about a variant and I decided to use the Eye of Agamotto because I wanted to know if I had magic or not-"
Mobius' eyes lit up for a moment. "Magic?"
Lucky nodded, but took another breath and kept talking. "And I used the time stone and we went back in time but there was this huge cat-thing and I think it ate him. He's dead."
Lucky's story stopped abruptly, as if his mouth had hit a brick wall. Mobius didn't move a muscle for quite a long time, then suddenly shook his head and pressed his palms against his eyes.
"You-I-what?" he whispered hoarsely, with a grimace.
"I left him there… I just left him… oh god…"
Lucky felt his knees wobble and give out from underneath him. He knelt down on the floor, much to the curiosity of an archivist passing by with a cup of coffee. She stared at them both for a moment until Mobius snarled, "what the hell are you looking at?", which made her jolt and take off quickly down the hall again.
Mobius let out a deep breath, starting to go pale, which only made his messy appearance even worse. "Get up, Lucky," he rasped, and Lucky did so. "G. can't be dead. He can't be. I can't deal with this. Wait, did you actually see him die?"
"N-no, but-"
"Alright," he interrupted, with a decisive nod. "There's a way to fix this, okay? Do you have the exact coordinates of where you left him?"
Lucky wordlessly held out G-59's tempad, and Mobius snatched it from him. He studied it carefully, scrolling and tapping on the screen, eyebrows furrowed, deep in thought. He then squished his mouth into an 'O', the way Lucky'd noticed he did when he was stumped by something.
"How did you get from nineteen-eighty-two to thirteen-seventy-six without activating a timedoor?"
"I told you already, Mobius," Lucky whispered, "I used the Eye of Agamotto. I wanted to see if I could use magic out in the timeline."
"Why?"
Lucky pressed his lips shut. He trusted Mobius with his life, but he wasn't ready to attempt to explain Six's strange behavior, and his own. Mobius shook his head again, dismissing the question, then tapped a few more buttons on the tempad.
"I really should get a team for this," he grumbled, giving Lucky a sidelong look, "but I don't want this getting out to anyone, so it's just going to be you and me and… what did you say it was that attacked you?"
"A… cat?" said Lucky. "A really, really big one. Like, really big."
Mobius blinked a few times, as if reconsidering bringing hunters along. Suddenly, he pointed and snapped his fingers at a guard passing by.
"Hey, you!"
The guard turned around and stared at Mobius, wide eyed. He was young and gangly, and his helmet looked too big for him, like he'd just graduated from trainee class, too.
"Give me your time baton," Mobius commanded, holding out his hand.
The guard faltered, and put a hand protectively on the time baton strapped to his belt.
"I-I'm not supposed to be without a weapon," he stammered. "I'll get in trouble…"
Mobius took a quick step forward, looking almost frighteningly imposing towards the young guard, an expression that Lucky wasn't used to seeing on Mobius' face. "Are you disobeying a direct order from your superior?" he asked.
The guard dropped his gaze to the floor and shook his head, then handed over the baton. Without any acknowledgment, Mobius turned back to Lucky, handed the telescoped-down baton to him, and grabbed the tempad again.
"Get ready," he told Lucky. "We have to time this just right. Or else…" Mobius trailed off, a look of desperation in his eyes.
Lucky grasped the baton tightly and swallowed. He hoped they weren't going to open a timedoor to a bloody mess… or an angry jaguar.
Mobius tapped a button, and the timedoor opened back into the rainforest. To their surprise, it was empty. No agent, no jaguar, no mess of bones and blood. Lucky and Mobius gave each other a confused look.
"Maybe you went back too far?" asked Lucky, holding onto the time baton for dear life, like a billy club, waiting to swing it at anything that could pop up.
Mobius grunted and stepped through the timedoor, and Lucky had no choice but to follow. The door closed behind them both. The scene was just as serene and beautiful and muggy as it had been when Lucky had transported them there with the time stone. This time, though, there was no sign of the jaguar, or G-59, anywhere at all.
"Did we even get to the right place, do you think?" asked Lucky. "G-59's tempad was acting weird. It didn't get us to the exact right place the first time."
"That usually happens when the tempad's batteries are dying," Mobius answered, squinting, thinking. "But it's not like G. at all, to be unprepared like that."
Mobius was right. Lucky clearly remembered G-59 telling him to always check the battery levels of the tempad before going on a mission.
They silently scanned the dense forest around them, looking for signs of life besides the cacophony of birds and frogs and insects singing in the trees. A rustle of leaves made Lucky jump and turn around. It was only Mobius, to his relief. He'd kicked something in the leaf litter, something solid and unnatural. Lucky hoped it was the Eye, but instead Mobius picked up the time collar off the ground, just where G-59 had dropped it, and held it gingerly between two fingers. Water dripped steadily out of the small control box of the collar, as if it had been rained on repeatedly. The little red light was off.
With a shuddering sigh, Mobius dropped the collar back on the ground.
"It probably dragged him off into a tree," he groaned, then covered his eyes with one hand, grimacing, as if he was about to cry.
"I'm sorry, Mobius," whispered Lucky, horror and shame welling up into his chest, making it hurt.
Mobius sniffled and drew his hand away, his face red and wet with tears.
"He was my friend, Lucky," he said, voice breaking. "I can't believe this is happening. I never thought…"
Mobius trailed off, badly masking a sob, and Lucky wished he could just drop dead right there on the forest floor. He'd never felt worse in his whole life. It was as if his terrible nightmares were prophecies; he was doomed to hurt people over and over, no matter how much he didn't mean to. Not to mention, he'd be just as dead the second anyone besides Mobius found out about this.
Lucky's lip quivered, and all he could say was, "I'm sorry," over and over.
To Lucky's great surprise, Mobius came over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder, then brought him in for a hug. Lucky was grateful to hug him back, knowing that Mobius didn't hate him, but still ached inwardly for being so stupid and thoughtless.
Then, the gut-freezing sound of rustling leaves made them separate from each other. Lucky held his time baton at the ready, and Mobius' blue eyes were as wide as they could go.
Almost as surreptitiously as the jaguar had materialized out of the forest, several humans appeared from behind the trees, making their way cautiously towards them. They were all men, tall and tanned, wearing almost nothing at all except feathers in their black hair. They had painted their skin with some sort of oily, black paint, some in big patches across their bodies and others in smaller, intricate decorations. They all had a weapon of some kind, too; some held long spears, others carried bows and arrows. The archers held their strings taut, with an arrow poised to fire through expert fingers, but pointed safely down towards the ground as they walked.
Lucky instinctively raised the time baton, but Mobius quickly held on to his hand.
"Put that away," he whispered.
"But-"
"Put it down."
Lucky slowly slipped the baton into his suit pocket. The agents and the tribesman looked each other up and down, both seemingly too stunned to speak for a moment, until one of the men-the one with the most necklaces around his neck and decorations in his hair-edged as close as he dared and called out to them in a strange language that sounded nothing like Portuguese.
Mobius suddenly went back to the tempad and started swiping and tapping at it again.
"What are you doing?" asked Lucky.
"Analyzing the language," he muttered, "so we can tell which tribe these people are from."
The man called out to them again, and a little line across the tempad screen oscillated up and down, picking up the noise. It paused for a few seconds, thinking, then a small article popped up on the screen.
"Goitacá," said Mobius. "Hunter-gatherer tribe. Let me look at greetings, here…"
The tribesman, losing their fear, came ever closer to Mobius and Lucky, while Lucky felt as if he might soil himself any second. They still didn't look much friendlier than they had a minute ago.
Mobius then said something brief in their language, and the entire troop stood up straight, eyes wide in a moment of shock. Then, the man wearing the necklaces laughed and turned to the men behind him, who began to laugh as well. The archers unstringed the arrows from their bows and slung them over their shoulders, and the spearmen leaned on the butts of their spears, using them like walking sticks instead of weapons.
The leader and Mobius chatted back and forth, their manner easy, all the tension in the air disappearing like a puff of smoke. The other men stood around as Mobius spoke. One of them, the youngest, no more than a teenager, tentatively examined the hem of Lucky's new suit jacket, as if he wouldn't mind taking it for himself. Lucky pulled it away from him and gave him a dirty look, which the young man returned with a sly grin.
Suddenly Mobius gasped and said, "Oh my god, really?" in the only language Lucky could understand. The leader tugged at the sleeve of Mobius' jacket and pointed to Lucky's too, then the teenager said something which made all the men roar with laughter.
Lucky turned to Mobius, utterly confused. "What's going on?" he said, as the leader gave them a universal hand gesture to follow them.
Mobius spoke as they walked through the forest behind the men, picking their way through dense underbrush and vines, both of them already sweating profusely.
"They said they found a man like us with his hand stuck in the air while they were out hunting a jaguar… I don't know what they meant by having his hand stuck in the air, but it's got to be G. He's alive!"
Lucky looked away guiltily, knowing exactly what it meant, but he was still grateful that G-59 wasn't dead. "Why did they point out our jackets and laugh at us?"
"The chief said he was wearing brown clothes just like us, and then the young guy said his skin wasn't nearly as pink as ours. I'm one hundred percent sure they've never seen white people before."
Lucky rolled his eyes. His trainer's skin was darker than his, closer to the tribesmen than his own, but he didn't see it as a particularly funny joke.
"Hey, Mobius? Can you ask them if they happened to find the Eye of Agamotto?"
Mobius cocked an eyebrow at him, but tried to explain what it looked like as best as he could in the tribe's language as they walked. The chief just looked back at him like he was insane.
"No dice," said Mobius, to Lucky's disappointment. "Bet a monkey saw something shiny and stole it."
The forest suddenly gave way to a clearing where dozens of men, women, and children milled about basically unclothed. Children ducked into and out of small huts made of branches and leaves and brush, chasing each other with sticks. Women wove grass together to make mats and cooked at an open fire and talked. Grandmothers watched the babies and broke nuts open. A few men skinned and cut apart a couple of unfortunate monkeys they'd just hunted. All of them looked up and watched their fellow tribesmen and the strange, new, pale people approach.
The chief called out suddenly, looking around the camp, as if searching for someone. "Zhee!" he cried. "Zhee!"
From a little deeper in the forest, G-59 emerged, though Lucky could barely tell it was him, for a second. He was almost as naked as everyone else, wearing only his boxers, and his graying, tightly curled hair had grown out several inches on his head, giving him a wild, untamed salt-and-pepper coif. He'd grown an equally gray and curly beard.
Mobius and G. stared at each other for a minute in silence, then G. gave him the most genuine smile Lucky'd ever seen, ran over to Mobius, arms outstretched, and enveloped him in a hug. Lucky could only look on in total bewilderment. He never imagined G-59 acting like that-or looking like that-in his wildest dreams. Judging from the stunned look plastered on Mobius' face, neither could he.
G.'s face fell all of a sudden. "I caused a nexus event, didn't I?" he asked. "You're coming to arrest me."
"No," said Mobius, shaking his head. "We thought you were about to die, so we came to save you." He looked down at the tempad in his hand and shook it around a little. "Something's off with this thing, though. It obviously took us months into the future."
"It's been almost a year, actually," said G. "The chieftain, Awike, killed the jaguar with an arrow just before it could get to me. They'd been tracking it when we appeared out of nowhere. They fed me and gave me water, too, until the spell wore off." G.'s face formed back into the scowl and dirty look that Lucky was unfortunately too familiar with. He shrank down a bit and avoided G.'s eye.
"What spell?" asked Mobius.
Lucky scratched at his arm uncomfortably. "Er…"
"He froze my hand in place with the time stone and then left."
Lucky couldn't breathe for a second as he felt Mobius' gaze boring through him.
"But," G. added, a bit more gently, "If he hadn't done that, then I wouldn't be here right now, so thank you, I suppose." G. crossed his arms across his chest, not offering Lucky a hug like he had for Mobius. That was just fine with Lucky.
When he could lift his head to look at Mobius again, he was surprised to see a smirk under his mustache.
"Pure chaos," he whispered, with a soft chuckle, for some indiscernible reason.
"I'm glad to see you, Mobius," G. continued, "but I don't think I can bring myself to go back."
"You want to be here," said Mobius with a nod. It wasn't a question. There was no astonishment behind it, just a simple statement of fact.
G.'s smile came back as he spoke. "I can't explain any of this, but living here feels so much better than being in the TVA. It's not like there's a lack of work to do or problems to have. There's no air conditioning, there's flies everywhere, I live in a hut and eat tapir meat and maracuya, but…" G.'s eyes momentarily filled with tears. "But I feel like I'm supposed to be here. These people took me in, like I was part of their family. I can't go back to the life I had before. I don't even know how I lived that way; fourteen hours of mindless paperwork, day in and day out. No sunlight or moonlight or outside."
Instead of trying to convince G. to come to his senses, Mobius only smiled at him warmly and patted him on the shoulder.
"I don't know if you can believe this, but-" he stopped himself, then took another glance at Lucky, who by now was utterly confounded by their behavior. "Well, let's just say that I wouldn't dream of taking you from here. If you feel like you belong, then you do."
"Thank you, Mobius," G. whispered, all of the tension that he'd held onto his entire life seemingly melting out of his body. "Thank you."
They gave each other one more long hug, then Mobius turned around to open another timedoor and G. went back to his new tribe, talking with the chieftain. Lucky wondered if the two agents had both been replaced by shapeshifters. Why wasn't Mobius doing anything about this? Lucky had thought about escaping himself, momentarily… but only for a little while. He was still going to go back to the TVA, even if he'd succeeded in using the time stone to go exploring.
Mobius turned back around quickly and called out to G., waving his tempad in the air.
"Hey, do you want this thing back? You know, just in case you change your mind?"
G. shook his head. "I won't change my mind. I don't care what you do with it."
Mobius shrugged, and he and Lucky stepped into the humidity-controlled environment of the TVA, right back to Mobius' cubicle.
Lucky, dazed, opened his mouth to speak, but Mobius butted in before he could.
"I'm sure you have a million questions," he said, reading his mind somehow, "but I can't really tell you anything right now. It's too… too big to explain."
"But Mobius, if someone finds out what what I did to G.-"
"I won't let anything happen to you, Lo-Lucky," Mobius said, inexplicably stumbling over his name. "I can't. You're a part of the answer to the question. So is Six."
He perked up at her name. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, I need a plan to keep both of you in my sight at all times."
Mobius' eye wandered over to the inbox files on his desk, and he squinted as he took a manilla folder from the bottom, covered in urgent red flag stickers. He smiled again and held the folder under his arm, then took off down the hallway at a brisk walk.
"Where are we going now?" asked Lucky, feeling like he was just being dragged along for the ride that Mobius was making up as he went.
"Which agent is Six training with? Do you know?"
"She wasn't chosen to be an agent, Mobius."
He stopped dead in his tracks. "How? She was a shoo-in."
"She failed her final exam," Lucky explained, almost embarrassed on her behalf. "She's a hunter."
Mobius took off again, shaking his head, the smirk coming back to his lip. "Pure chaos," he muttered under his breath. "The both of you."