My first foray into this new fandom, just a little something I that had to get out before I could continue my other WIPs. Full A/Ns on Tumblr and AO3, if anyone cares; I'm not active here on anymore, but still will crosspost as long as the site continues to limp along.
Thank you for reading!
It starts, as these things have before, with an unplanned visit to Repairs & Advancements.
-PRESENT DAY-
Since The Event Impossible To Name, R&A has become far more of a central hub in the main complex of the Time Variance Authority than it's ever been, for literal centuries. That is, assuming the nebulous definition of a century in a place outside of time is actually correct, for anyone tracking its passage.
Where there was previously no physical interaction between the Above and Below, the man known as Ouroboros soon finds that, for some reason known only to everyone else, he's become an essential member of the key Team he'd only heard about previously. And what's more, he's been assimilated into that elite group seamlessly. Welcomed, even.
People like him. Where there was once 400 years between visitors in his humble workshop, it's rare now to go 4 hours without seeing someone.
And he likes people in return, most days. True, interruption can slow productivity; but then again, they have all the time in the worlds on their side now, so productivity just isn't as all-important as it once was. The difference in morale between 'we destroy everything that doesn't conform' to 'we nurture and guide everything so that it doesn't destroy itself' has been a truly cosmic turnaround, and it's a distinct improvement, so far.
As for the resident genius himself, he's had considerably fewer Repairs to do, and much more focus on Advancements, ever since The Event, which is his preferred ratio anyway.
He's rewritten both the TVA guide book and their less-clear bylaws, helped design new posters around those by-laws, started researching what exactly happened on that last day that no one seems to remember with complete clarity, and after all of that? He even has free time left over some days – something unheard-of in the Before – to start writing a science-fiction novel based loosely on the events surrounding the destruction of the Loom.
That said, while most of the time he rather enjoys having visitors, even someone just dropping by to chat for a few minutes: in this particular, fateful instance one suspiciously calm afternoon…
On this afternoon, he looks up from his work to see what appears to be Loki – or at least a strangely desaturated, almost translucent representation of him – standing half a meter from the workstation.
There had been no sound to herald the appearance, no indications at all that something strange was about to happen; and so he's startled enough to drop the pruning stick he'd been modifying. (It promptly overwrites two hours' worth of work and sends a poor unfortunate hot chocolate to the Void in a shower of sparks.)
But the clatter and chaos don't seem to register with the apparition. After another second or two, the image flickers slightly, but there's no other movement.
"…Well, that's new," he observes, leaning forward to poke the image with a screwdriver.
It disappears without a sound.
-EIGHTEEN HOURS LATER-
The next day, it happens again.
This time, he is banging away at one of the vents near the vaulted ceiling, trying to fix a stuck valve that leads somewhere into the extensive chute system that funnels work all the way down to the roots of the TVA. O.B. isn't even sure what the valve does, honestly, but it makes this awful, death-screech every time the climate controls change, which is incredibly annoying when trying to concentrate.
And he has time to fix annoying things now! Instead of being constantly buried in workload, as was standard in the Before. He can afford to be a little self-serving.
But he's so focused on his repairs, head and shoulders inside the shaft in an effort to figure out where the problem is, that when he finally finishes and drops back down to the scaffolding, he drops right through a faded, flickering visual of the god himself, who appears to be sitting in mid-air three inches above the scaffold railing, staring right through him, and wow. That's a little disturbing.
He waves a finger, hesitant, then the whole arm, and then with both arms, but there's no response.
The image vanishes.
-THREE DAYS LATER-
Maybe, just maybe, he'll have a start to the week someday that does not involve repairing every piece of delicate machinery that the less experienced agents take, and promptly break, on their training missions, because it's getting a little tiresome just pushing a master reset button and sending the object back up the chute again. (The random requisition from Analysis for a power-celled pencil sharpener is a little off-the-beaten-path, but it takes him about forty-five seconds to put together, and then he has to go back to boring repairs.)
This morning, though, he receives a Tempad from one of the work chutes leading to Hunting, recently re-christened Field Observation, with a request that he analyze it for glitches. The report from Hunter R-44 says that some odd things have been happening when she uses it in the field. Occasionally it'll indicate a variant is just meters away, when there's clearly no one around; and sometimes it'll give warning that a nexus event is occurring, when there doesn't actually appear to be.
That should, in theory, be impossible, but there's been a lot of that going around lately.
"Please tell me you're not out there randomly making my life harder," he mutters to the ghostly apparition lurking behind the counter.
It doesn't answer; and it's gone when he glances up again.
-TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS LATER-
He has to admit, this is getting a bit tedious. And unsettling.
The appearances (and increasingly strange Tempad repair requests) have happened in variation a dozen more times during the last thirty cycles, and by the time the month concludes, O.B. has slowly formed a hypothesis. He's come around to the idea that he probably isn't losing his mind; and if he is, at least he's smart enough that it's a longer journey than it would be for most. But he really doesn't think so.
Because the Incidents keep happening. And they almost look to be gaining solidity, rather than staying a ghostly outline or fading. For an after-image, even a temporal echo, they seem to be remarkably detailed, even if that detail seems to come and go like a fluctuating fluorescent indicating the need for a bulb change.
Temporal phantasms aren't exactly an unknown phenomenon in the field, although O.B. has never heard of one being able to form within the confines of the time-locked TVA. They occur only when a reset charge has reset either too quickly or too slowly. The residual, out-of-sync temporal energy creates a sort of after-image of the pruned object, one that usually fades within a few minutes.
But these images…they are growing more solid, instead of fading away as phantasms typically do – and it's been way too long since the event for them to be lingering.
And so, Ouroboros comes to the most educated scientific opinion possible with his current, extensive multiversal knowledge.
He really has no idea, and this is well above his pay grade.
The opportunity to consult a second opinion occurs just the next evening. He's sitting behind the counter, humming a song he doesn't remember learning and tinkering with one of the Nightmare Department's dreamtrigger devices, when his concentration is broken by his name being called, somewhat uncertainly, from the doorway.
"Oh, hey!" He scrambles to his feet, and meets Casey's little wave with a wide smile. "I haven't seen you in forever, it feels like. How've you been?"
Casey looks a bit startled by his enthusiasm, but finally smiles back genuinely enough. "I'm good. Thanks for asking." He glances around, and frowns a little at the cluttered workstation. "Aren't you lonely down here?"
"Nope." He shrugs, indifferent to Casey's incredulous look. "Really. I like the quiet, it's better for concentration. And I can come and go when I want, now, where I couldn't do that before. Look, Miss Minutes even made me a "Be Back Later" sign for the desk. And people come and see me sometimes, just for conversation! It's nice."
"Well, we still should've checked on you before now," Casey mutters, briefly picking up the sign and looking at it. "We've been so busy recalibrating the system and retraining hunters, I don't think anyone's really focused on anything else. Sorry about that."
"No worries, I figured. Systemic changes are always time-consuming." He pauses, considering. "Not-time consuming?"
Casey chuckles. "I got it. Are you sure you're doing okay, though? I bet we could relocate this place if you wanna be closer to another department now. Get rid of the capsule delivery system, tell people they have to bring their stuff down to you instead of dropping it in a chute."
O.B. beams just at the idea of making such a radical change – not because he wants to move, but because until very recently, any such suggestion would have been…not well-received, to say the least. Casey's taking his new role of Advancements Specialist very seriously, and it'll be good for everyone in the long run.
"Nope. I like it here. It reminds me of something, I don't know what. But it feels like home."
Skeptical, Casey squints at the vaulted ceilings and industrial fixtures. "Your Sacred Timeline home was in a power plant?"
"Who knows," he replies cheerfully, tossing a circuit board aside with a small crash to grab the magnetic torque controller that had rolled underneath. "But I like my life here. Based on the last report from Retrospective Analytics, it looks like when the original TVA personnel were pulled out of the timeline to begin with, that very first time? The timeline we would have stayed on was pruned immediately. So whatever that life was, it's not there anymore, just its variations. I'm with Mobius on that one, I don't need to know."
Casey's smile dims slightly. "He went back to see his, actually. A few weeks ago."
O.B. pauses in tightening a bolt, and looks up. "Really? That's a change of heart."
"I know. I think Sylvie took him to the closest adjacent branch of his original? He stayed down there for a while. Said it was over a year on his end, but it was just a few cycles here. I dunno how it all works exactly."
"You and me both."
"But there weren't any paradox events while he was down there, so I don't think he interacted with anyone he used to know."
O.B. shudders, because it sounds horrible. Solitude by choice is one thing. Solitude because everything you know and love isn't there, is something else. "That might be worse than not knowing at all."
"Yeah, maybe. But he did need a break, I think. You know in the whole time I've known him, however long that is, I don't think I ever saw him take even an hour off, until Loki came along? He was always working, non-stop."
"Well, that was the business model," O.B. points out, changing the settings on the torque controller.
"Yeah, but even for an analyst, he just never, ever stopped. It was like he was trying to prove something to Renslayer the whole time."
"But you said he's back now?"
"Yeah, a few weeks ago. And the second he got back to the TVA, it was right back to some massive, super-secret project he won't tell anyone about. I honestly don't know if he's left that chair to –" Eyes wide, Casey grinds to a sudden halt mid-sentence. "Are – are you seeing that, too?"
O.B. turns around, and then shrugs. "Yeah, that's been happening," he says, waving at the fluctuating image across the room and receiving no response.
"What?! For how long?"
"I dunno. About a month, maybe? Here, watch." O.B. tosses a pencil in a quick end-over-end arc at the image, and as expected, the hologram-like apparition just gives way before it, reforming after the pencil hits the ground. "See, there's no indication that whatever it is, it even knows we're here. I think it's just a temporal anomaly, but there are a couple radical factors I can't explain in the pattern of appearances."
"We should tell everyone!"
"Not until I can figure out what it actually is, if anything," he warns. "If it's just a residual after-image, an imprint left when the Loom exploded? They'll never be able to interact with it. It's just like smoke, lingering after a fire's been put out."
"Oh. So no reason to get anyone's hopes up?"
"I'm afraid not. 'Cause it'll fade with time. And whatever it is, it never sticks around for more than a few seconds, anyway, so – see, there it goes." He gestures toward the now-empty space. "I need more data, because I've learned all I can from it right now."
"Is it always him?"
"We have no idea if it is him. But yes. At first I thought it might be illusion projection."
"But that doesn't make sense, because –"
"Because if what we think happened did happen, he's basically running time through himself now, like the Loom did. And since time doesn't exist in the TVA, and we're not located on any actual branch, we should be completely invisible to him. Yeah. I told you it didn't make sense."
"Anyway, I thought our Loki was all about duplication casting, not illusion projection. It was a whole thing, a while back, he argued with H-04 over the difference for like an hour at one point. Maybe he's practicing?" Casey suggests. "But it still doesn't explain why it's only happening in R&A."
"That we know of."
"Hm, that we know of. Hey, I'll have Miss Minutes do some looking around. If there's anything weird going on in the rest of the complex, she'll definitely know about it."
"Sure. And I'll let you know if there's any change here. Come visit again sometime!"
-FOUR DAYS LATER-
Not much later in that same weekly cycle, Casey does indeed visit again; but this time, with B-15 in tow. Carrying a very strange, futuristic weapon O.B.'s never seen before, she looks torn between fond tolerance and a silent cry for help, as Casey goes on at length about his latest suggestions for streamlining the outdated monitoring algorithms in Sectors 9 and 10.
"Hello again," O.B. interrupts when there's a fractional pause. "How's the new pruning stick working for you guys?"
"It's working perfectly, O.B.," B-15 assures him, but she then looks thoughtful. "Since we're not pruning anymore except as a last resort, though, we probably should rename the stun version."
"I've been calling it the NAPSA in my Advancements reports," Casey interjects helpfully. At the blank look from B-15, he clarifies, "Not A Pruning Stick Anymore."
"You're joking."
"I like it!"
"You would," she mutters, but there's no real irritation there, so O.B. ignores it. She's all bark and no bite, if you're on her good side.
"It still has the same functional connotation as 'pruning stick', you know. We weren't exactly ground-breaking with the original naming cadence."
"Let's…just put a pin in that for now, please? I'm more interested in this," and she sets the strange gun down on the counter. O.B. pokes at it with a pencil. "Careful. We think the safety's on, but honestly have no real idea."
"This is something I've never seen before," he murmurs, grabbing a magnifier and holding it over the handgrip. "Where did we get it?"
"I brought it back from the K-127 mission this morning." At O.B.'s expectant look, she gestures at the weapon. "Our He Who Remains variant was using it to vaporize parts of his timeline branch who didn't blindly follow his plans for world domination."
"Geez," Casey mutters.
"He's been dealt with," B-15 reassures them. "But that's not why I brought this to you. Something strange is going on."
Casey and O.B. exchange looks.
"Strange enough that I'd like your unbiased opinion of this thing, first off. What's it do. What can we learn from it."
Already running a scanner across the weapon, focused on the barrel and then the hand-grip, O.B. nods absently. "Well, it's not a rifle. It looks like it's designed to be precisely targeted and used at a relatively close distance."
"Close combat, but not close enough to get your hands dirty," she agrees. "That matches what we saw."
"This energy signature, though…some kind of processed plasma?"
"I'm not the weapons expert, but it did look something like what we confiscated a few years ago from the G-446 debacle, yeah. You think it's the same thing?"
Beside them, the second computer monitor shrills out an insistent chime.
"Whoa," O.B. breathes, as he sees what's triggered the notification. "That's it!"
"What's it?" Casey asks.
"This! It's confirmation. It's the missing piece I needed for the mapping project."
"You lost me somewhere, O.B."
"This weapon has the same, very abnormal, temporal signature that has been popping up around the TVA," he replies. "So…let me guess, in the field, either the weapon's discharge stopped short of its target, or the target was moved out of the way with no explanation?"
B-15 stares at him. "The target was me, and basically, yes. I literally felt the radiation an inch from my face, O.B. There's no way I could have dodged it in time. But two seconds later, the variant is nowhere to be seen, the gun is lying on the ground, and I'm three feet away under an awning without even thinking about moving."
"So when you say dealt with –"
"I mean, according to the hunters I had along, the variant apparently spaghettified almost instantly, in the two seconds it took to blink and find myself safely out of range," she replies dryly. "So unless I've suddenly developed hyperspeed and can use that power instinctively, something very strange is happening. And it has to be related to Time, the methodology is too much of a coincidence."
Still scrutinizing the computer screen and occasionally pressing a key to change the scrolling data, O.B. looks up, suddenly deadly serious. "We need Mobius down here. Tell him I have a final confirmation on those readings I mentioned last week."
"Yup. Be right back." Casey scuttles down the corridor at an almost-run, and the distant chime of the elevator drifts back a moment later.
Slightly suspicious, B-15 frowns. "What readings? I thought he was working on something for Human Relations."
"Pretty sure he finished that right after he came back, but I haven't seen him in a week or so," O.B. replies absently, typing into a keypad. The screen lights up in a variety of colors. "But this is a side project. I've been looking into some things for him."
"Meaning…?"
"We've been trying to reconstruct what really happened the day the Loom melted down. We know there was a time loop somewhere, that much was obvious right away – which shouldn't be possible in the TVA, and we'll come back to that in a minute. But Mobius thinks there was even more to it than what we saw. He said something about having weird deja-vu when he walked into Theater 25?"
"What good will learning the details really do us at this point, though?"
"I don't know if good is the word for it. I think he really just wants an explanation."
"We have one," B-15 replies, a little bemused. "We have very clear readings from the branches, and even vague readings from the tree itself, wherever it is exactly. We know what happened, don't we?"
"An explanation about the process, not the outcome," O.B. says quietly. "The how and why, not the what."
Her eyes soften, and she nods. "And more about who. You're right, he deserves that much. You have that data now?"
"I have a theory, which seems to have been given new credence by the temporal aura still lingering on this," he points to the weapon, "and based on some other…anomalies that have been happening."
"What anomalies," Mobius inquires flatly, speaking from the doorway. He hesitates for a second, casting a glance around before moving into the room with purpose.
Casey scoots past him and hops behind the counter, pulling up a stool beside the computer monitor so he can scrutinize it in more detail.
"What anomalies, O.B."
Unperturbed, he glances over his shoulder before turning to enlarge the diagrams. "If you just give me a second, I'll tell you."
"I'm really not in the mood to be dragged down here on a wild goose chase again." B-15 elbows Mobius none-too-gently, and he sighs, setting his coffee mug down on the desk with care and then pinching the bridge of his nose. "Sorry, O.B. What've you found?"
"Well, like I said, we've been trying to unravel what happened here," O.B. explains, turning briefly toward to include B-15. "Part of that was doing consolidated temporal aura mapping across the TVA."
"What's temporal aura mapping?" Casey asks eagerly, still glued to the screen and its readings.
"It's a rough measurement of…well, the aura, that flows around anyone in the TVA, since we're outside the bounds of linear time," O.B. gestures all around them in a brief whirlwind hand motion. "It keeps the TVA outside the boundaries of time without actually freezing us in something like quantum stasis. It maps movement and energy, and it's part of the core temporal laws governing this place. If someone is stationary for too long, or overworks themselves, their energy levels drop below the redline, and the temporal aura sort of –"
"Freezes," Mobius supplies, leaning forward to look at the screen and its incomprehensible strings of numbers.
"Basically, yes. And when time is getting close to frozen, metaphorically speaking, it sets off an alert in the system. Time might not work the same here, but most of the personnel are still human. And the human body has physiological limits. Even if you don't feel like you need sleep in the TVA, your body needs it. Occasionally, at least. The aura helps us calculate that need, in the absence of measurable entropy."
"That's why breaks are mandatory, and Miss Minutes is alerted if they're skipped too often," B-15 adds thoughtfully. "That makes sense, O.B. But what does it have to do with the Loom?"
"Well, I was able to reconstruct, map and consolidate the temporal auras of everyone who was in the room that day, see?" A slightly grainy still from security footage flashes up on the screen, overlaid with colored lines in a variety of opacities, curling and twisting like abstract string art. "The colors don't mean anything, they just make it easier to see who was moving where. This is the compilated temporal aura spectrum for the last thirty minutes prior to the Loom melting down. If it's easier, think of what you see here as traffic patterns."
"And?"
"Well, watch what happens when I isolate each one and filter them out. The pink one's Sylvie, so we remove her, Victor was blue, then we have B-15's orange, my yellow, Casey's red…and finally, Mobius." The purple line is the last to disappear. "You see the problem?"
"Loki doesn't have one," Mobius says quietly.
"I thought he didn't have one," O.B. corrects, bouncing in his excitement. "But he does! Look." He pressed a different button, and nearly the entire screen lights up in vivid, saturated shades of green. The lines are so concentrated and intersected in so many places, that they are basically opaque instead of the partially transparent look of everyone else's. A veritable tangled web of pure chaos.
"Whoa."
"What does that mean?" B-15 asks sharply.
"It means he does have a kind of temporal aura, but it looks like his is made of tachyon particle discharge instead of residual temporal energy. I got the same reading off of this weapon you brought down, and it matches the glitch readings recorded on a couple malfunctioning Tempads the last few weeks. But this weapon had tachyon particle discharge in close proximity at some point in the last twelve hours, which is data I didn't have before."
She frowns. "What exactly are you saying."
"It means within the same time period here, or what passes for it in the TVA, Loki was moving faster than the speed of light, while the rest of us were moving in normal temporal cycles," Mobius interjects eagerly, leaning forward again to scrutinize the screen. "Right, O.B.?"
"Exactly. Tachyon particles move faster than light, which is why his aura didn't show up in a temporal aura map. The mapping process is calibrated to measure and document the passage of time at sub-lightspeed. It wouldn't register anything moving at higher than light speed, because anything moving that fast is actually running the clock backward. Time traveling."
"Or time slipping," B-15 supplies.
"That's a really, really simplified version of the actual science behind it, but yeah. And you see how much more saturated his map is than anyone else's?"
"Meaning we were right. Those weird spots in the footage over the last couple of weeks, O.B., where it fritzes for a second and then he looks different, somehow?"
"He figured out how to control the time-slipping. Those weren't glitches, they were the start of another loop."
"Exactly. He was looping, and in most cases overlapping himself. Like, a thousand times more than we were in that same period," Mobius muses, almost to himself, as he steps back. "O.B., you can estimate the passage of time with one of these, right? Based on the consolidated distance of each marker end-to-end with contextual data, adjusted for entropic decay and the length of the footage analyzed?"
"I can make a rough estimate, yes. Contextual data and markers all indicate this happened in about thirty minutes for us, which matches the length of the footage I analyzed."
Mobius closes his eyes, hands braced on the desk and head bowed over them. "How long."
"Uhm."
"How long, O.B."
He finally caves under the authoritative tone. "Minimum? Somewhere around three hundred and ninety years."
"Dear god."
"And maximum?" B-15 asks, clearly dreading the answer.
"It could be over 600. There's no precise way to tell right now, I just don't have enough information. The aura is too concentrated, it overlaps in too many places."
B-15 sits heavily in the other stool by the counter. "So he…what. Tried one thing after another, over and over, for all that time? All by himself?"
"And none of us remember anything, because we were inside the closed loop," Casey supplies, looking suitably horrified. "But this is proof, isn't it? He didn't just randomly decide to go out there himself, he spent hundreds of years trying to fix the meltdown."
"That's my best guess." O.B. fidgets with a tool on the counter. "I'm still digging, but there's a residual echo of that same concentrated tachyon signature in different parts of the TVA, like the main workroom upstairs, the Automat, the atrium. If it was him, he was all over the place and all over the timeline. Trying something different each time. For centuries. So when that final loop came…"
"We were literally out of options. We'd tried everything." B-15 shakes her head. "I wish we'd known."
"At least we know now." Mobius looks once more at the screen, still frozen on a sea of green obscuring the figures beneath, and then sighs. He picks up his coffee cup without meeting anyone else's eyes. "Good work, O.B. And…thanks."
"Huh? But there's –" However, the analyst has left the room as quickly and silently as he entered, leaving the other three standing there in befuddlement. "There's more," O.B. finishes the sentence, more subdued, and then turns to B-15. "Is he all right?"
She clears her throat in a sandpaper-rough rasp. "Honestly? I don't think so. But at least we know now that there was no other option. No time for explanations, or goodbyes."
"That's correct. Based on the final readings, even delaying five seconds could have been catastrophic. I don't think there was any other way, based on what we know now."
"I think the not knowing was the worst part of it," she adds, glancing at the empty archway. "He's a damn good analyst, and the Loki expert. I think he feels guilty he didn't anticipate or do anything to change it."
O.B. hums in sympathetic agreement.
"But what did you mean when you said there's more?" she asks, after a beat of silence.
"Oh!" He spins back around to the computer, then back to face her, fairly bouncing in his excitement. "There's been, well, some strange things happening, in R&A. And a couple times, with minor incidents on the branches, like your problem this morning. The common denominator, which I couldn't conclusively prove until now because the readings degrade pretty quickly, is this strange tachyon discharge!"
"What minor branch incidents? And what's been happening down here?"
"Well. This is going to sound a little like science fiction."
B-15 gestures wryly at the weapon on the counter. "Try me."
"We think…I mean, to put it in simpler terms…"
"We think Loki's ghost is haunting Repairs & Advancements," Casey says in a rush.
Down the corridor, there's the sound of shattering ceramic on tile flooring.
"Make that R&A, and the surrounding area," O.B. adds, wincing.