DISCLAIMER: I claim no ownership of Marvel's Loki or affiliated branding (sadly).
SUMMARY: Three hundred and fifty eight TVA cycles after Loki's unexplained disappearance into the Void with the timelines in tow, the universe begins to collapse. Metaphysical horror. A fix-it (of sorts).
NOTES: See end.
Chapter Two: Reality continues to break down
The realisation comes with a shattering force. After that it splinters into sharp pieces of loss, a bubble of regret breaking and flooding.
How much time has he wasted? All that self-pity, all that grieving, and the whole while Loki has been alive and alone. This strand of devastation coiled around his chest has blinded him to the possibility of hope. For once the news is good, and it completely blindsides him. He's stepping out into the bright day after living in a cellar, the sunlight crushingly warm.
It takes some time to adjust. But once he has, the path ahead clears. It leads forward, a sharp arrow fading into the horizon. Not branching off into dead ends as it had before. The direction is simple.
Get to Loki. Bring him home.
Easy.
Mobius throws himself into work with a religious fervour. Gone are the branchside days of focusing on cooling down; he arrives with bundles of files and stationery, spends his evenings pouring over papers on perversions of Time and space, then returns to the TVA to do the exact same thing. Over and over.
His dedication is mirrored by the team. An end goal, decided wordlessly but unanimously, spurs them onwards. O.B. and Casey spend countless cycles holed up in Repairs and Advancement, dissecting the readings B-15 got, rebuilding a scanner adapted to the white branches using Loki's temporal signature. Mobius twice has to head down there and drag them out to take a break, clearing out styrofoam cups of old coffee and shepherding loose paper into haphazard piles. L-23 and A-145, relieved of other TVA duty permanently, settle well into administrative roles, labouring over the data cleaning and mechanical parts acquisition.
They're workaholics, all of them, but Mobius takes it upon himself to corral them into a semblance of functionality. And if he forgets himself sometimes, that's okay. When he closes his eyes to sleep the canvas of his eyes is overtaken by diagrams and theories and, more than once, the image of Loki settled at the heart of the tree. Alone.
He's more than happy to avoid that experience when possible.
So endless ink on his hands and copious amounts of caffeine it is. As far as headway goes, they don't make much to start. It's recuperating after the success of mission one, and figuring out where to go next.
There's also that ticking clock lingering permanently over them. The branches are dying slowly and they're dying quietly, but they are dying. And that's trillions of lives spontaneously reverting back into a startpoint – as effectively gone as if the branches were running their course right to the end and reflexively combusting, erasing any existence they ever had.
And it's speeding up.
It's not great.
The central TVA mission, which Mobius largely leaves to the higher ups, has been to tag and monitor Kang Variants heading in a path that could result in branch-hopping or interdimensional interference. No pruning – it's a hands-off policy. Break-offs of the Sacred timeline have yet to reveal any major contestants for the title of He-Who-Remains, not in the capacity Loki described him in, but further out some distant Variants of him are beginning to stir. Even regarding this, it's relatively quiet on the multiverse front, if you ignore the complications with the tree itself.
Then a Nathaniel Richards Variant crosses between timelines, and lights the entire TVA interface up red.
Given the separation of his little division from the rest of the TVA (they're now stationed exclusively at the lower levels of Repairs and Advancement, an endless map of corridors and rooms to hide away in) there are very few occasions where Mobius and the team are summoned to the main hub.
Today is one of those few occasions.
Mobius coordinates the excursion, rather than manning the ground team (see again: proving himself too valuable of an asset to get field clearance). The bustle of so many analysts reporting progress and hollering parameters is already getting to his head. It doesn't help that he's not slept in an ungodly number of cycles.
He's not personally sure that this kerfuffle is necessary. The Council was clear in their orders. They've got confirmation they can prune the Kang Variant. There's a division working on building up the Void as an effective holding ground from dangerous Variants, and it kind of was already, so this will act as a test of the system. They only have to find him and get it done with, just like the old days. Warmongering this type of panic can't be helping the cause, not when an operation like this would be classed as routine a year ago. He's pruned hundreds, thousands of Variants in his life. Most Hunters have far higher counts than him. Sure, a few nerves don't hurt, but they know what they're doing. It'll be fine.
He grits his teeth, working not to snap at the next intern who reads off the current coordinates of the ground team. Like they haven't moved literally five steps from last time. He's got no doubts about the stability of them, B-15 at the head and a host of their best Hunters behind her. Longing hits him, a dull ache, as he thinks of the folder open downstairs, a mug of tea long gone cold. He's wasting time he could be using for practical things. Like looking for a way to get to Loki.
"Hunter B-15?" he says, when handed the comms to the ground team.
"Agent Mobius." A familiar voice, heavy with a dry delight. "They've roped you into this too?"
Mobius lets out a sardonic laugh. "What makes you think that?"
"I haven't seen you upstairs in ages."
"Maybe I just wanted to make sure my favourite Hunter was alright," he replies innocently, ignoring the muted amusement of everyone within earshot.
B-15 seems to find it just as funny. Her laugh rings short and sharp. "Yeah, yeah, whatever you say. I thought you were meant to be directing this thing?" She quietens to a whisper. Mobius can see from the mapped signal that they're approaching the Variant.
"I wouldn't dare try to direct you in anything. 'Sides, you're looking good."
The conversation ceases. Mobius keeps the line open for finalising proceedings, but is wise enough to know when she's concentrating. He hears muttered orders and watches the yellow dots of Hunters expand into formation. "Ready on your order, Mobius."
"Go ahead." He sits back on his old desk. Apprehension bubbles, just a smidge.
A sustained silence.
The operation tumbles forward like a tidal wave, a tinny commotion. Muffled movement and the mechanical echo of Time Sticks powering up. On the map the sharp red point signifying the Kang Variant jolts away from the encroaching yellow. But he's too slow. He disappears a second later, winking off the screen. Pruned. Gone.
Mobius breathes a sigh. Relief weakens his body. The tension drains out like water.
A curse through the comms.
He snaps back. "B?"
"Shit," she exhales again. "It was an illusion. No visual on the real Variant."
"Oh, hell," Mobius says, moving to the nearest desk. "Hold, rescanning the area." He motions to the active tech division, his order followed through in a flurry of movement. To Casey, the only on-duty scientist in the hub with him, he says, "How did he project his temporal signature?" He's met with a floundering curiosity, and no immediate answer.
"M-13, by the door. Everyone else, get together." B-15, regaining her iron calm. "Mobius, update?"
"Nothing yet. Give me a minute."
"We'll head to safer positioning. Keep me posted on –"
A yell of surprise. A flicker on the main screen. Mobius' heart drops. Weren't there more on-field agents a second ago? "B? Update?"
No response. The comm unit clicks off, the dull static dying in the space of a heartbeat. On the visual, the team, halved and scattered, breaks apart, individuals seeking shelter in adjacent rooms.
"Transfer me a copy of the Variant's energy signature," Mobius says, grabbing his jacket from where he's slung it over his desk chair, then pointing at the person manning hunter allocation, "and get me two squadrons ready for deployment by the time I get downstairs."
He waves a hand at the off-duty field agents hovering near the furthest door, beckoning them to follow as he exits the hub. "You guys too."
"Mobius, you can't –" Casey's voice, jogging to keep up with him, "– they won't want you risking –"
"It's B."
He says this as if it explains everything.
Maybe it does.
Shrugging his jacket on, he rounds the corner too quickly and almost clatters into a harried A-145, throwing his hands out to steady him before he tips over.
"Mobius! I was just –"
"Tell me later," he says, passing by him with a hasty pat on the shoulder.
"But it's –"
He doesn't hear the end of that one.
Two flights of stairs above his destination, the comm crackles back into life. Out of breath, he raises the transmitter upwards. "You hear me?"
"Affirmative." A whisper. A raggedy exhale of a word. Still, the sound is beyond welcome.
"Variant still active?"
He gets a hum of confirmation. A bang in the background to highlight her point.
"Hold on, I'm on my way. Losses?" He's lost his makeshift ground team somewhere along the way to the drop room. Footsteps clunk on the stairwell above him, resounding through the stretch of space.
"Bad. No ground. Active conflict."
He wrenches open the door, gratified to find the strained bubble of chatter where at least a dozen hunters await instruction. He makes for the locker, inputting the code and grabbing a short Time Stick from the lock-up, grimacing as he wields it low on his right. He really needs to practise.
Preferably before the life threatening scenario in which he has to actually know how to defend himself.
"Magician, not scientist." Cryptic, and understandably so, B-15's voice wavers towards the end.
That's more than mildly worrying. "What's your status?"
"Not as alive as I'd like to be."
"Oh, great. Good. Hang in there." Mobius turns to the team. "Okay, Kang Variant. Sorcerer. Current team is down. Play defence, and get them out of there. Questions?"
None. Thank god for efficiency.
Mobius gives a firm nod. Tapping in the coordinates, he takes one long breath in the time between the command and the door appearing before him.
When it does, he steps through without hesitation.
And immediately dodges left to avoid the shards of glass catapulting towards his head.
Throwing himself aside, he lands ungracefully near an overturned table, and gives a solid push to take cover behind it. There he finds himself beside three of the first team, armour dented with long incisions and char marks. One of them is not moving as much as a living person should be.
Sounds of altercation soar through the room – a far-reaching hangar but with a low, cramped ceiling, lights a dull, flickering white – the reinforcements doing their best job to get a handle over the Variant. Mobius, not feeling much safer sheltering behind a single stretch of wood, fumbles to pull his TemPad out his pocket. He thrusts it at the least injured of the three. "Get out of here. B-15?"
"Other room, I think. Through there." A nod to the nearest door.
"Gotcha."
He doesn't wait to see if they stick around. Taking advantage of the few seconds of surprise they have left, he gets his feet under him and darts through the doorway. Beyond it he finds a makeshift defence built of the door, which had clearly once been – and no longer is – attached to its hinges. Two others, vaguely more pieced together than the first bunch, crouch over a supine figure, her head propped up on a discarded pack.
"Oh, shit," Mobius whispers, dropping to his knees next to her. Loose in her fingers is the pair to his transmission unit. He thrusts the handle end of the pruning stick towards the nearest of the uninjured hunters. "Don't let him get through that door." To the other, "you got a TemPad?"
"Dropped it." The woman sounds stricken enough that he can't bring himself to get frustrated.
"Right." A moment of indecision. "Both of you go now, before he picks off my team too. They'll be able to drop you back. "
"But –"
"That's an order."
Something in his voice must speak to a greater level of authority than usual, because she doesn't argue again. Both of them, after a second's consideration in the doorway, vanish into the throes of the commotion.
Mobius returns his attention to B-15, her eyes shut and breathing shallow, chest barely rising and falling. He places a gentle hand on the side of her face. He whispers, "B?" and garners no response. Tilting her head, he winces as his fingers find a sticky warmth at her temples. In her side, through a fragmented hole in the metallic armour, a jagged wound is situated, a med-pack compress pushed flush against the skin. He presses it firmer, stemming any blood-flow as best he can. "Would be real great if you could give me a sign."
Dimly, she murmurs something, her eyes flickering open. And then clarity hits, a gasp for air and an attempt to sit up.
"Woah, easy, I've got you." Mobius pushes her back carefully, hands steady on her shoulder plating.
"My – my team –"
"Safe. All of them." He's not sure how much of that last part is true. There were more stationary bodies than he dares think about at the minute. "I left you for last," he says, and he smiles thinly, unable to resist a jab, "because you're my least favourite."
"Thank you." Her gratitude for his priorities, choked, is dulled by a pained grit. "How's – how's the Variant situation?"
A crash from the other room.
"Uh… not great? C'mon, we need to get you out of here. Think you can stand or should I go get one of mine to open a door here?"
She shakes her head minutely. "No time for that. I can stand." But her movements are jerkish and laboured, a weak noise of pain escaping as she sits up. He wraps one of her arms around his shoulders carefully, kneeling beside her.
"Okay, up we go, careful," he mutters, concentrating on taking as much of her weight as he can, her armour clunky and unwieldy. She slumps, just about clinging on, her eyes flicking closed as they stand. "Hey, don't fall asleep on me. We just got to get to the other room."
The few metres to the door are taken in shuffling steps, a dragging pace. Once they reach it, Mobius manoeuvres them so they're just out of view, sheltering to the side. "Right," he breathes, "Gonna get the team's attention so they know to cover us. Hold on."
In one fluid movement, he waves his pruning stick in front of the door. Like a cat to a laser pointer, a magically suspended beam shoots through the opening, just seconds after he withdraws his hand. It lodges deep in the wall opposite, metal splintering like a flesh wound.
Mobius appraises the impact site for longer than he can really spare. "I hate sorcerers," he mumbles, over the noise from the other room amplifying, the team trying to draw the Variant's attention enough for them to enter.
B-15, despite a clear haze fallen over her in wake of injury, practically radiates irony. "I can think of at least one case that disproves that."
"Loki doesn't count," he replies with a huff, shifting to hold his Time Stick in a defensive position. "Right, you ready to run for it?"
"As I'll ever be."
He takes a breath. Tries to clear his head. And then he rotates them into the doorway, entering the fray.
Around them, Time Doors open and vanish sporadically, evacuations occurring wherever is furthest from the Variant at any given time. If he gets through to the TVA, it'll be hell.
Mobius makes eye contact with one of the team leads. She straightens, concern evident, and makes a beeline for them. They head to meet her, pace far slower. But it's a big room, scattered obstructions making a mission of the task.
It's about halfway to the protected zone that the plan falters.
A bodily thump as someone is thrown past them, hitting the wall. Mobius looks to where they came from. Now solitary, pruning stick just seconds away from hitting its mark, the other hunter engaged in direct combat falls, slung backwards.
The Variant turns and makes direct eye contact with Mobius.
Not good.
With a twitch of his fingers, he lifts an assortment of ragged debris into the air. It hangs, suspended.
Then it's hurtling straight towards them.
They can't move in time.
Mobius braces. Shifts, ever so slightly, to cover B-15 as best he can. He shuts his eyes tight.
Through his eyelids, the brightest afterimage of green, brief against the dark.
And then nothing. No tearing pain. No sudden loss of awareness. B-15 is still heavy on his shoulder. Alive.
He opens his eyes.
The Kang Variant, head tilted in question, seems as surprised as they are. A temporary ceasefire – though likely only for seconds more.
A flare of colour catches Mobius' eye, there in the corner of the room.
A dazzling white.
It starts to grow.
Swallowing the reaches of reality, unpicking the branch into threads that twist into nothing, leaving behind emptiness. An unnatural brightness, heavy with vacancy.
B-15's breath catches, he hears it, and he knows she recognises it, solidifying his fear. Stragglers of the team stay crouched over those rendered immobile by injury, refusing to abandon them even in the face of overwhelming nothingness.
It's moving quickly.
They have no way out.
Mobius shifts a half-step backwards, heart in his throat, knowing full well that small movement is about all he has time for before the radiation crawls too close.
A strange way to die.
And then a Time Door opens below him.
He has a split second to think something along the lines of, what the hell, before he lands with a shattering thud on solid ground, the impact knocking him to his knees. B-15, her arms still wrapped firmly around him, crumples forward, letting out a weak exhale.
A split-second later, barely time to blink, and a dozen or so doors open above, depositing the rest of the hunters safely beside them in a spattering of crashes – a little battered from the fall, but not obliterated by radiation. Somehow.
The subdued lighting of the room – the TVA for sure, Mobius just isn't sure where – casts long shadows on the walls. But the Variant does not follow the team, and the numerous doors eventually fizzle out, leaving the rest of them in a state of disarray.
The weight on his arm prompts him to recover composure quicker than most. "Someone get medical in here!"
The time between return and the arrival of a swarm of medical personnel stretches endlessly. Mobius keeps care of B-15, aware she's definitely in a fairer condition than most. When they've finally dealt with transporting the worst cases, and they have time for her, he's reluctant to let go. "Is she okay? How bad is it?"
A cursory examination confirms she will be fine, and that settles him somewhat. But does not explain any of what happened.
O.B. appears, out of breath, at the door. He spots them and directs his course their way. Confident B-15 is in the best hands possible, Mobius meets him in the middle. "O.B., what the hell was that?"
"I don't know. The whole branch just went instantly. No warning."
"How did that happen? I thought you said it was all gradual?"
O.B., eyes wide, shakes his head. "It was, until now. This is new."
Mobius, aware he's more than a little stressed, adrenaline still doing numbers on his control, stretches his arms out in exasperation. "Well, how are we gonna fix it?"
"I don't know, Mobius," O.B. replies, for the first time sounding every bit as crushingly exhausted as he should be. "I don't know."
They don't find any probable cause for the rapid destruction of the timeline. It's a little difficult when all the data they need was lost in said destruction, and Mobius' memory is hazy at best.
Far as they're aware, whatever magic act the Kang Variant pulled somehow tempted the branch to revert back to nothing. Yet that doesn't align with how any of them are still alive. It doesn't align with how Mobius is alive for sure, because one thing he remembers pretty clearly is being very certain of his death at the hand of several sharp metal fragments.
They don't know if the Variant escaped. If he did, they can't find him. Not that they're trying anymore.
The hologram of the Tree looks odd now. Before, the discoloration had been concentrated entirely in the centre. Now, a singular strand stretches outwards, all the way to the furthest edge: the timeline they'd been on when it happened.
There's a small, self-indulgent theory sitting at the back of Mobius' mind. But he doesn't dare even hope, not really. Because when some optimism does slip through the hastily shuttered cracks, it brings with it a wave of potential implications that are rather unpleasant to think about.
B-15, thank god, makes a steady recovery. Steady here meaning unbearably slow for all parties, but with no signs of relapse, which is a small mercy. Driven a little stir crazy, she takes up the habit of making recreational branchside trips once she's healed, and spends far more time in an atypical state of quiet – which is completely fair, given she's been taking the brunt of it all recently, on top of not ever pausing in quite the same way everyone else has since this all tumbled into mayhem initially. Mobius has been preparing to broach the distance, as she did for him, but he's been painfully occupied. Which probably doesn't make him a great friend.
They never get any more information on what happened, despite their best efforts, and eventually it becomes just another strange occurrence sitting on a backlogged pile of unsolved mysteries, way off to the side of the division's focus. Plus one to the setbacks in a long line of failures.
In the end, it's the straw that breaks the camel's back.
One final straw piled on top of a thousand other straws.
Mobius is the camel in this scenario.
He spends hours sorting through his notes, now several stacks of yellowed pages, the corners turned in and words smudged from the side of his hand. He finishes the tidy-up late into the cycle, and is dismayed by how a large proportion of his efforts are in the 'discard' pile. Physics is slippery, ever-changing, and this knowledge he's building is a skyscraper resting on silt. There's no research into Time in this form. No studies conducted on exponential magical power.
No information on why Loki left in the first place.
That's what Mobius really would like to know. He refuses outwardly that he left for the throne, as Sylvie gently implied when he sought her out in the early process. She doesn't know him. She knows herself, and Mobius can't begrudge her the connections she's drawn between them, but he knows his Loki. He wouldn't do that. Desperation drove him away, or despair, or even idiocy – because of course Loki Laufeyson might think sacrifice wins when they have a whole other plan raring to go. He wouldn't just leave. Mobius knows this for sure.
He does.
Yet there's always a nagging doubt.
There's something to be said for pretending that Loki chose this ending. At least he'd be happy, for all Mobius' is beginning to realise he's pretty damn miserable himself.
Yeah. It's definitely time for a break.
He exhales. Carefully, he slots his pen into the manilla file and clips it shut. Tearing off the post-it notes for tasks he's completed from the front, he slips it under his arm and stands. L-23 left her mug when she visited earlier, and he's got two of his own, so balancing them takes concentration. Looping his left hand around each handle, he winces when they clink together. He nudges his chair under with his foot and heads for the door.
He dumps the mugs in their makeshift kitchen – which consists of a pilfered sink in a long-unused washroom. Rinsing the coffee out provides a therapeutic reprieve from solving physics' hardest problems. He sets them aside to dry and leaves.
The elevator is dim, the TVA implementing an artificial night across select departments. Given it's still in the beta testing days, he can amuse himself by formulating complaints about the anti-productivity effect of the light curfew – despite knowing that, in reality, it's a good idea.
He secretly hopes he'll run into someone on the way to the drop room, so he can offload the wave of thoughts sitting behind his teeth. Exhaustion has been chipping away at his inhibitions in that regard. But the corridors are empty, save a huddle of electricians working on a wiring panel beside the Time Theatre. Mobius may be tired, but he's not about to start crying to the first person he sees.
As he steps into a cross-section in the corridor, he once more finds himself sidestepping to avoid A-145 flying past him, at least three folders hugged tight to his chest.
"Woah, careful, " he says, narrowing his eyes as he's hit with a sudden sense of déjà -vu. "Wait, weren't you going to tell me something? Ages ago?"
"Oh! That, yeah."
"I'm sorry I forgot to follow up, just with everything –" he waves his hand absently.
"Yeah, I get it, don't worry. It's… it's all sorted now anyways. All good."
This is said with the tone of someone who has very much not sorted said thing.
Mobius raises his eyebrows. "You sure?"
"Yeah, it's great now. I told Ouroboros and he got it fixed, so it's fine."
He levels him with a stare that he's sure tilts on the uncomfortable side of scrutiny. Eventually, he relents, sighing. "Okay. Whatever you say."
A-145 gives a nod and a relieved smile, then barrels down the corridor, only retreating to a speed-walk when Mobius yells an exasperated, "Slow down!" after him.
In the drop room, he takes a second to breathe. Charts up a draft to-do list in his head. He's packed light for this trip to his branch. He didn't even swing by his TVA quarters. He's got his one folder and that's it. Bedtime reading.
For once, he's going to take a break. An actual break. No tinkering with a metaphysical theory or analysing the Throughput Multiplier blueprints. He's going to go onto his timeline and go for a walk in actual sun, and pick a real novel from his shelf, and watch really bad daytime television.
Inputting the TemPad coordinates saved to his favourites, because he only ever travels to two places nowadays, he draws up a Time Door. When he steps through, the faint smell of his house hits, dusty with disuse. Like stepping into a hotel room, the sheets too clean and the air too still. Rainwater drums on the windows, a light patter of Louisiana spring.
He chucks his folder onto the couch. Wandering to the curtains and drawing them close together, he takes a second to stare into the downpour refracting the peachy orange of the sunset. Beautiful, if a little desolate beyond the stretch of drive leading to the main road. He chose a rural town, a stone's throw west of New Orleans. Somewhere entirely unlike Ohio, because he couldn't stomach the similarities. Here it floods regularly and seems to be sticky with heat eight months a year.
Loki would despise it. It's dreadfully boring in addition to the sweltering weather. Maybe that's why he chose it. Some attempt to move on.
He shuts his eyes tight.
Loki's not dead.
So why does it feel more like he is than before?
As Mobius sits down and sighs, images of his post-Event inactivity haunt the back of his mind. He lays his head back to stare at the ceiling. Three years worth of half-baked grief, a limbo, not knowing why or how or even if Loki was dead. Then nearly two years of nonstop work, scrambling to reinvent entire concepts and perceptions in the name of finding out the 'if' of that initial uncertainty.
B-15 was right in part, in that finding Loki has been the discovery through grief. But now he's not even dead, and Mobius has all this unshed grief in his chest with nowhere to rest it. Releasing it would be like crying at his bedside before he's even laid into it. Stoicism is necessary. There's so much work to do, and if he does it right there won't be a deathbed to mourn beside.
He leans his elbows on his knees and briefly rests his head in his hands. A shaky exhale, followed by another. He grips a fistful of hair. Survival instinct must've kicked in a few weeks ago and told him if he stopped working he'd have a breakdown, because that's sure close to what's happening now he's finally given into exhaustion.
He resurfaces and swallows some air, colder now the AC has kicked in. He blinks quickly, fighting to regain a clasp on fortitude.
It doesn't work.
Wrangling with composure, he works through the breathing exercise he remembers from his hunting days.
It doesn't work.
He drums his fingers against a pillow. Squeezes his hands together. His nails dig into the top layer of skin.
That doesn't work either.
He hums briefly, trying to ground his mind in the physical. The reverberation in his chest helps. He does it again. A short laugh bubbles in the back of his throat. "God." The word falls flat, dulled by the plain wall opposite. But it's real. He can hear it. It helps.
He lets out a breath. All beneficial effects of talking aloud are nullified by the way it makes him feel like he's losing his marbles.
But there's another person he'd really, really like to talk to.
"Uh – hey. Not sure if you're going to get any of this –" his voice dries. He wets his lips and continues, "– but it's worth a shot, I guess." Speaking to the empty room strikes a chord. He's painfully aware of how alone he is. A single drop in the ocean of this timeline. "Yeah. I've not really got anything to say. Nothing your Highness would find interesting. Just thought I'd pop in and see how you were doing." He laughs again, sharper. "God, that sounds like I'm psyching myself up for the worst pick-up scenario in the universe. I feel like a highschooler doing prom."
"I know if you were here you'd be laughing at me right now. Probably still are," he huffs. "Listening to an old man waffle on. It's good I'm not here often, I'd probably drive you up the wall."
The rain dims to a drone, a light background noise. Mobius wrings his hands together, eyes cast to the grey carpet. He takes a few seconds to exist. Quietly.
"I really miss you, Loki," he murmurs. Before he loses his nerve. Before he fractures completely.
Before the timeline starts to collapse around him.
Mobius blinks once and the edges of his vision begin to fray. Strips of white, like bands of insects. Crawling along the walls. Swallowing the world. Tearing apart the corners of his living room.
Behind them, nothing. A white void.
He swears. Lunges across the couch. TemPad. He needs his TemPad.
The Void draws closer. A reset charge of a cosmic magnitude. Before it touches him, he senses it in his mind. A fuzzy noise. A smothering pillow. A searing heat, borne by radiation.
The faint edges of a memory an inch out of reach. A familiar feeling. A sickening one.
His fingers finally make contact with his TemPad. He selects the saved coordinates.
No time to move. He opens the Time Door beneath him and falls through onto solid ground. TVA ground. The smooth dark brown metal tiling, cold and unyielding, but very much welcome in current circumstances. Above him, the green-tinted fluorescence welcomes him home.
The Door shuts. He's safe. He's alive.
His timeline is gone.
He scrambles up. Shoves the TemPad into his pocket. He winces as he puts pressure on his left foot – must've hurt it in the fall. But he remains standing.
Good enough.
He needs to find O.B.. Right now.
"It's amazing!"
Mobius raises an eyebrow. "My entire timeline disappearing is amazing?"
O.B. shoots him a sorry glance. "If you disregard the fact it was your timeline in particular, yeah, this is pretty cool."
"Yeah?" He sighs, the action laced with regret. "I'm not too bothered anyways; I wasn't much attached, it's just… strange feeling."
For all the rattling off of numbers, the ever present time bomb of the universe, it's felt so far removed from reality. From real life. Even on the Kang branch, breaking apart as they stood there, it wasn't as if he had an emotional response beyond fear of dying.
Sympathy, not empathy.
And now, as if flashing a torch into a dark room and illuminating a tangle of cobwebs in shining grey, it's grown so, so much closer.
There were lives on that branch. His library, with all the regulars and the kids taking part in the Summer reading challenge, the elderly couple who spent hours deliberating over which novels to donate. The neighbours, a stone's throw away and nice for all the distance. Billions of people living and breathing and thinking like some massive organism, echoing a million times over through history and rippling into the future.
Gone. Never were. Reversed back into non-existence.
And this is just one branch of hundreds. And of thousands more to come.
Not a wonderful feeling.
"Sorry. About your timeline."
Mobius comes back to himself, blinking to refocus.
O.B., wringing his hands in front of him, tilts forward, eyes wide with remorse. "I didn't meant to – to make it –"
"Don't worry about it," he soothes, starting forward and lightly patting him on the shoulder. He steers them towards the desk, dimly lit in the deserted department, and away from the awkward attempt at social tact. "Least it's got a plus side, right? Another anomaly."
"Two provides a much greater chance of information. If we can reconcile them, draw similarities, we might actually get somewhere."
Mobius pulls up a chair and waits as O.B. fiddles with a knob behind a shuttered panel, pulling up the holographic Tree. Joining the initial lost branch, now Mobius' timeline sprawls outwards in that off-putting shade, one of the only two stretching beyond the centre.
"Tell me again," O.B. says, brow furrowed as he shoves parts of a deconstructed pruning stick aside, searching underneath the mess, "what exactly happened?"
"I'd only just got back. Popped in after work, and I haven't been there in ages, so I was wandering around trying to get a grip of things."
"Uh-huh." He vanishes from sight for a moment, rifling behind the desk, then returns with an 'ah-hah', notebook in hand. "Then?"
Heat crawls up his neck. "I sat down. Wasn't feeling so great."
"Is this not feeling so great from potential radiation or –"
"Yeah, no, not that. I was just… having a moment."
"Ah." O.B. scribbles this down with all seriousness. "And then?"
Mobius raises his eyebrows. "Timeline collapsed."
"That's… that's it?"
Embarrassment puts up a good fight, but does eventually lose to common sense. "Kind of. Actually, no. Not really. I was – I was talking out-loud. To myself at first. And then… then to Loki."
O.B. points the end of the pen at him, face suddenly alight with a bright sort of anticipation. "Interesting."
Mobius watches him scuttle to a blackboard and, as he frantically wipes off diagrams so detailed they must've taken months, says, "Interesting? In a good sort of way, or a bad one?"
"Science is rarely good or bad. But, in this case, we might finally have a chance to look at what triggers the branch breaking. Which is good." In place of the annotated diagrams, now just faint white marks where the chalk has stained the board, he draws a wobbly circle, and then another, leaving a very tiny overlap in the middle. It's a pretty shoddy attempt at a Venn diagram, but Mobius can overlook that given the circumstances. At least it's a task with clear direction, which is exceedingly rare these days.
"So. The Kang timeline." O.B. enunciates each word with the scrape of chalk against the board. "Your timeline. What do both events not have in common?"
"Well, I wasn't about to die on one. It also wasn't being bombarded by magic that we haven't seen before."
O.B. nods. "We can't explain this away with the Variant. So it must not have been him."
"He looked about as confused as we were, so that tracks. And they're not offshoots of the same stem." He drums his fingers on his knee, rattling through everything he can think of. "Not showing any previous signs of any issues. No TVA interference in their entire existence, beyond me."
"So that's one overlap. You." His name goes up in the middle.
"Guess so." Mobius leans back, letting out a long breath as he runs a hand through his hair. "I don't want to sound like I'm desperately reaching here, but could it… could it have been because of…"
O.B. turns around and, in tiny sprawling letters, writes next to his name in the centre of the diagram: Loki. "Him?"
Mobius nods. "Just before the timeline went the first time, I'm pretty sure B made some joke about him."
"And if you were talking to him directly this time, those are the only overlaps we've got." He clicks his fingers.
"What are you saying?"
O.B., briefly, seems to be impressed with indecision, the corners of his mouth downturned. "I had a theory, but I didn't want to say until it seemed probable. If Loki isn't just holding the timelines together – if he has some awareness of the universe, it's possible he's able to interfere remotely. When he saw you guys about to die, and then just now when you talked to him, he might have attempted to alter the timeline."
A buzz of apprehension runs through him, like the floaty feeling that accompanies long-forgone hope. "Actual interference? And you're saying that's possible?"
"No." O.B., painstakingly blunt, shrugs. "It's not. You're the expert, but I know Loki's power supply is finite, and is already well over its theoretical limits just sustaining the Tree. An additional complex spell, from a place removed from our space-time? It's not viable."
Mobius raises a hand, mild exasperation leaking through the less-kempt cracks in his demeanour. "So why did you suggest it?"
"Because we have no idea what's possible right now. None of this should be happening, so one more on the pile?" He gives a small smile, earnestly gesturing at the board. "It's the first potential explanation we've had in a year. And it's only slightly impossible. Not very impossible."
Mobius looks at him. Then he rests his head in his hands, clutching at the implications. Desperate not to hope, not so soon. Almost fumbling for something bad, because the grimly pessimistic approach has proved realistic these days. "Doesn't this mean that Loki's causing the problems? If the timeline collapses every time he's trying to interact?"
"Yes."
"And didn't you say that was the bad option? The worse-than-death one?"
"Only theoretically, and in the much longer run. Now?" O.B.'s enthusiasm, in counterpoint to Mobius' hesitation, only becomes more pronounced. "We can use this. Would you say a conjuring spell of medium magnitude requires more or less effort than an illusion projection?"
Despite the confusion, a lifetime's worth of study takes over, not unlike an automatic response to danger. "More, I guess, but what does that –"
"Great! That means it's likely he has enough in his reserves for illusions, or maybe even a duplication cast, if we're lucky. Enough to make remote contact."
And that eliminates all Mobius' doubts in a heartbeat, because of course it does. "You think we can actually talk to him?"
"I'd give it a fifty-fifty chance either way."
"Fifty?" He sits up straighter. "O.B., that's the best odds we've had since forever."
"Uh-huh. Think I can tweak the suit a little; you'll only have about a minute or two before the radiation spikes, but that might be enough to establish contact –"
The words go straight through Mobius, too much to comprehend combined with the wave of everything else. O.B. continues rambling about the technicalities of it, something along the lines of time dilation and refraction, but none of it settles. All of it lost to a swell that is, for once, optimistic, rebuilding from the devastation.
If this works, it could change everything. It could alter the trajectory towards the goal, finally making use of all the overwhelming work input that's delivered so little output. It could be the key to saving Loki, let alone the entire universe.
And maybe Mobius will get a chance to say everything he's ever wanted to say.
That would be nice.
A/N: I have to apologise, as originally far more exciting things were going to happen in this chapter, but it ended up being so insanely long I've had to divide it into two.
On a sidenote, I feel like the Star Trek writers and their transporter malfunctions with these TemPads. Like how am I going to break them so they cannot be used as a convenient get-out of a situation. This time I gave up and decided the TVA just has terrible organisation when it comes to technology distribution.
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