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: Vague warnings for a sci-fi-esque body horror in coming chapters. Also, this is deliberately ambiguous slash, so you may read into Loki and Mobius as you wish.

'Coalescence – the process by which two separate masses pull each other together, should they make contact.'

Chapter One: On entropy related issues

Three hundred and fifty eight TVA cycles post-Event – the Event being his unexplained disappearance into the Void with the timelines in tow – the universe begins to collapse.

Mobius gets two and a half years on his linear timeline before he's hoisted back into the TVA by B-15, at the behest of the Council. He goes with little complaint because, to be honest, he's losing his mind a little bit. Being stuck down there on Earth alone brings about as much joy as being stuck in those fluorescent corridors alone. At least the TVA gives him a purpose beyond scanning late returns at the library on Sundays, and he gets access to their entire catalogue of hot drinks whenever he desires.

Though he probably just misses it. The aforementioned drinks catalogue contains three beverages on a good day, and the filing system is definitely less intuitive than the technology of twenty-first century Earth. So he cannot realistically classify either of those as a selling point.

And, yeah, maybe he just misses him. Maybe being back where they'd made a home together keeps that memory alive.

Hell, what does he know? He's just glad to be back.

But sitting in Repairs and Advancement now, with O.B. attempting to explain the issue using a lot of hand waving, Mobius is beginning to wish he stayed home. He's got the kind of headache only sleeping can fix, the temporal equivalent of severe jet lag and a distinct impression of standing out in his non-uniform clothing. And from the limited physics he understands, things are looking pretty bad.

"So sorry," he repeats, for the seventh time, "can you go through that last bit again?"

"Sure," O.B. says, no less cheery for all the misunderstandings. He points again to the holographic representation of the multiverse. The branches near the top are lit up in brilliant shades of sage and cyan. "Here. The colouring of these furthest branches is typical. This far from the centre they are like leaves. Self-sufficient almost. Not reliant on, uh… on the power source."

Mobius elects to ignore the stumble. "That's… good, right?"

"Oh, yes. These are all healthy branches."

Mobius' stomach does an unpleasant flip. "So you're telling me the whole tree is meant to be that colour?"

The rest of the tree is definitely not that colour.

B-15, hovering to the side, clears her throat. "Show him the readings we last got."

O.B. rushes to the console with a characteristic enthusiasm, but even his voice becomes tempered as he cycles through variations of the universe. "I'll do you one better. These are snapshots of the multiverse through chronological TVA time. First one taken just after he left."

The earliest tree is much smaller, contained almost like a sapling, a spindle for a trunk and the impression of crow's feet branching outwards. Mobius was still here at the TVA when they got that one. He remembers the sick feeling when they didn't find a reasonable sign of life in the core. But it painted a lovely picture, all a shade of bright green. O.B. flicks forward and the impression changes. The multiverse grows. The timelines curl and expand, reaching for the furthest corners of the Void. New colours, purples and blues and pinks, fading into the green trunk. At a point it stops growing, and becomes denser. Timelines waver and some die, but new ones bloom in their place.

It's beautiful.

"It's been like this the whole time. We've got enough data to conclude this is the baseline standard." O.B. flicks over onto the next reading. "But this is what it looked like two readings before last."

The room goes dark briefly before the next hologram appears. The outer edges of the tree remain as before.

But Mobius can barely tear his eyes away from the centre. A fracture right in the heart of the trunk, an off-white colour. Small to start, it grows in a spider's web of cracks. At first it looks more beautiful than before. The kind of image you might expect in a cathedral – some depiction of heaven. The white has a similar luminosity to stars in the night sky, gleaming with a faint rainbow twinkle. But the longer Mobius looks, the more the colour looks sickly. Like television static. Hospital walls. Fluorescent lights. Skin drained of colour.

"The density of healthy branches in the centre has halved," O.B. explains, voice deadly serious. "I can't tell if it's a connection issue or if they're literally dying due to the source."

"Is one of those worse?"

"The first points to the idea that he's either exhausted his enchantment or that he's…"

"Dead." Mobius supplies.

"I was going to say dying. But yeah. Maybe."

Neither of them mention him by name. They don't need to.

O.B. takes a seat on his desk, kicking his feet. "We could theoretically sort that via locating another power source. I say theoretically because it would be almost impossible, but we've got teams looking into it."

Mobius raises an eyebrow. He ignores the weight near-crushing his chest. "The tone of your voice is making me think that him being dead is the good option here."

O.B. has the decency to look abashed, but his nod is firm. "I'm afraid it probably is. If he's not dead, and the branches are dying because they're connected, it means something's wrong with him."

"Wrong in a worse-than-death way?"

The silence in the room answers that question.

Mobius raises a hand to his face, shielding his eyes briefly. He brushes it downwards and then shoves them in his pockets. He digs his nails into his palms. "Okay. Okay. And I'm here because?"

"Because you might be able to help." B-15 steps forward, a comforting figure in the corner of his eye. "And we figured you should know."

He lowers his head. His hands don't feel right in his pockets so he puts them on his hips instead. Then he folds his arms. Then he rubs his forehead. "Ah, shit. Can I think it through before resubmitting my job application?" His tone is light, but a hint of a shake must seep through.

A warm hand on his shoulder. "Why don't we take a walk? Let you digest it." When he nods, B-15 says to O.B., "Give us twenty."

As they walk, the corridors come back to him in flashes of memories, knife wounds to his mind. Here's where they argued about the validity of pruning branches now the universe was free. Here's where he first timeslipped in front of him. Here's where he taught him to play rock-paper-scissors. And proceeded to win every round.

They keep walking until they reach a bench. It's situated in an atrium of some kind, artificial golden light leaking through upper windows. He's not been here before. Mobius slumps onto the seat with a sigh, clasping his fingers together. Opposite, a mosaic of panels depicts the tree in its original colours. In the centre, like a heart, stands a stick figure in green, golden horns arching above its head. Mobius tries to forget the image of white curling around it like disease.

When he goes to speak, his voice is steadier. "It's really weird. Being back. Got me thinking."

B-15 sits next to him. "About anything in particular?"

"Thinking about… well, thinking about him."

"You didn't think about him before?"

He shakes his head firmly. "Never." A huff of a laugh. "Willful omission."

"That's unhealthy."

"Yeah, probably. 'S just easier to try and forget it all happened." He taps his foot. "Doesn't mean I didn't miss him. Just that I tried really hard not to."

They sit in silence for a while. Safe in its own way, but tinged with an anxious sense of waiting. There's only so long Mobius can stand the quiet when his head aches and he feels so out of place. "How've you been?"

B-15 does laugh at that, her lips curling upwards. "Thanks for asking. I've been okay. They've had me on judiciary work now, on top of the administration you used to do, on top of all my field work. You can guess which is my least favourite."

"Oh, so this is a ploy to get me back then?" he replies with a grin. "Can't stand the paperwork?"

"I'll never know why you enjoyed it so much."

"Patterns, you know?" He shrugs. "All pretty intuitive to me. And you know I got my ass kicked whenever I stepped onto the timelines."

"You didn't even need to go out in the end."

Mobius nudges her feet with his own playfully. "Hey." Memories of his wonderful performance in the office fight with Ravonna flood back. He doesn't half regret telling B-15 the story. "You promised not to bring that up."

She performs her way through a dry apology and then they're left back in the silence. Except Mobius can sense her eyes.

"You know, after you left, the Council suggested we work out a rotary of breaks for everyone. Give people time to find themselves after the Event."

"You say Event like it's got a capital 'E'. It's like every time people mention him. Capital 'H'. Might as well start calling it the second coming. Or the second going."

The joke falls flat. Not an easy audience.

Or maybe it's the fact his voice wobbles a little on the delivery.

B-15, unamused, considers her next words. "As if you don't avoid mentioning him at all."

It's not so much accusative as bluntly honest, in the sharp way she can be. It still hurts. Really badly. He manages a watery smile despite. "Ouch," he says, raising a wounded hand to his chest. "That was devastating."

"Not sorry. Besides, as I was saying, they encouraged everyone to pick up a hobby. Casey's growing petunias. I don't even know how that works here, but my guess is he weaselled a compromise in the temporal system from O.B.." She looks away, eyes crinkling in the corners as her mouth turns up. "O.B. won't shut up about his writing. Half the pin boards in his department aren't science anymore; he's plotting a novel about time travel, of all things."

Mobius can imagine that clearly. He resolves to ask him about it later. "What about you?"

B-15's face, bright in the soft yellow light, glows. She reaches into her jacket – a soft green colour these days – and pulls out a leather book. It fits in the palm of her hand. When she passes it to him, he leafs through, pinching the corners of each worn page carefully. The title is outlined in silver on the cover. "Paediatric medicine?"

"I – in my past life, I was a paediatrician. A doctor for children." Her voice is light with memory. "I remember it all, thanks to Sylvie, but I wanted to… I don't know. Learn it again. For me."

Each page contains scribbles in her neat print, diagrams and notes on improved methods. She's circled big sections with question marks, then revisited in a different colour ink when she's worked out the answer. Mobius doesn't understand any of it. It's insanely impressive. "This is amazing, B. I'm serious, this is –"

"Awesome?" she supplies. "Don't compliment me too much. Casey is already acting as my personal hype man."

"God, taken my job too. Should've never left."

"While that is also true, what I'm trying to say," B-15 continues, fixed on finishing her point, "is that we're all discovering ourselves. But we're all discovering ourselves as we're grieving. Don't let the grief be the only thing that makes you."

Mobius sits with that for a while. A junior analyst passes by and gives B-15 a shy wave, which is returned with confidence. It's a different place. A different TVA. A new place, where people who have never been people can learn to live. A place thoroughly wracked with loss, but better for it. A peace emerging after a storm.

Except Mobius is being left behind. He's very much in the storm. He never left. He can't leave.

"You've been rehearsing that speech, haven't you?" He says eventually, voice rougher than he would like.

B-15 nods. "For a very long time. Since you left, probably."

He laughs, and it wavers a little too close to breaking. He swallows. "It shows. Good talk."

"I'm glad. I just don't think you're healing, Mobius."

"Well, I'm locking up all the sadness too, so I'm doing okay. Just cruising."

"He wouldn't want you to live like that." She pauses delicately, and Mobius senses the name before it arrives. "Loki wouldn't want that."

It's the first time he's heard it in years.

There's a torrential downpour of words sitting at the tip of his tongue. A lot of them angry, a lot of them lonely, and a lot of them just so confused. But none of it is directed at B-15. She doesn't deserve any of it. He chokes them back, and elects for something as minimally hopeless as he can manage. "How can I move on if I don't know anything?" He detests his next words, but they've been swimming in his mind for too long. "It would be easier he'd just died. How can I move on if there's a chance he's out there? Alone? Forever?"

"You can't," she says simply. "I don't think you can until we know."

His heart is resting in the hands of a god he doesn't fully believe is still alive. It's crushing, cold in his chest. "What if we don't ever know?"

"We will. It's why you're back here. We're going to find out. Now we've got reason to, so we will." There's enough conviction in her voice to set a spark of warmth alight in his ribcage. "And, while we're at it, you're going to get a hobby."

"Discovery through grief?"

"Working to find out about Loki is the discovery through grief. Getting a hobby is the discovery in spite of it," she corrects. "I think you need something just for you. In case…" she exhales, taking a second, "in case we do find out he's gone."

The truth doesn't hurt so bad when said aloud in her voice. He expected it, like a bullet to the skull, to hit with a killing force. But in this unfamiliar room in a familiar place, with a familiar friend in unfamiliar waters, it seems simpler.

Maybe he's gone. Maybe he's not. Maybe the process of finding out will be the grief.

Maybe he can find himself while he's at it.

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, okay." He straightens. "Where do I send my CV?"

"Count it as submitted." B-15 smiles. "Welcome back."

He inhales. He returns the smile. "Glad to be back."

It works out to ten cycles worth of shifts at the TVA, then two days on his timeline. He lives branchside life much the same as he did before, but with perhaps more emphasis on the break side of things. When it comes down to it, he finds jumping straight back into complicated work does take its toll, and there's something to be said for having the equivalent of a weekend to cool off.

He doesn't quit volunteering at the library, because he enjoys that, but he does shuffle his shifts around so he gets some time to just exist. And then, as per B-15's instructions to find something, anything, he takes up mechanics. Very basic to start – tinkering with the underside of a broken toaster sets it off – and then soon he's wobbling his way through a manual on refitting car engines.

Naturally, he tries jet skis, but finds they're less intuitive. And, to be completely honest, a bit boring when broken into parts. But he likes boats, and he likes building up equipment from scratch.

When he's not motivated, he reminds himself that this skill might come in handy. O.B. is dangerously short of spare hands, and Mobius is only three months into this new hobby before he finds some very low-level TVA equipment offloaded onto his desk for repairs.

One Tuesday was taken up entirely by fixing his TemPad, because he wondered if there was a way to integrate it with Earth's twenty-first century Internet, and upon succeeding found he couldn't get back to the TVA. Granted it was his fault for dissecting it, but he really didn't mean to lock himself out of the entire mainframe. It was too embarrassing to open a remote connection to ask B-15 to come get him, so the rest of that break was spent trying to get a lock on the coordinates.

And he did fix it. Eventually. So that's on him.

O.B. seemed to have some idea what happened when he clocked in again, but didn't bring it up beyond a vaguely amused look. So Mobius pretended that didn't happen.

Until next time he clocked out and found a faulty TemPad waiting for repair on his desk. The sticky note read: Good luck, followed by a smiley face.

He deserved that.

Reintegrating into the TVA itself has its ups and downs. On one hand, his position as a long running but now non-permanent member grants him a certain level of freedom. A lot of freedom.

He's aware he was always seen as vaguely unorthodox, bordering on eccentric when people put it more honestly, to about the highest level achievable in the old TVA. As radical as feasible without being pruned for insubordination. But now he's been given control over all the resources previously locked up, and an unreasonable sway over sector management. He's left entirely to his own devices. It's a lot, from an organisational point of view, and it's definitely not helping his image as the slightly avant-garde analyst. But once he settles into the groove of it, it's wonderful. He's encouraged to chase up whatever he can think of in relation to the new format of the multiverse. Of the tree.

Of him.

He's been trying to say his name again. Hasn't quite got there yet.

On the other hand, the work is impossible. It soon becomes clear why they've recruited him. Mobius' first fifteen ideas are shot down with an 'already tried that' from the team. Then, when he finally starts making headway with his own theories, he reaches a brick wall two pages in. Every single time.

His first good one is when he reckons there's a chance the exponential scaling of Time, all converging to a point, is causing a crush in the centre, killing off excess branches. That seems reasonable until Casey pulls off the mathematical equation and confirms that the rate of scaling doesn't match an entity overload in the centre. The branches, in theory, have enough space to draw together infinitely in the middle, as the whole tree stems from the remnants of the singular sacred timeline.

Back to square one.

He experiments with the visuals, trying to determine if the growing off-white colour of the tree has some magical connection he's not aware of. He sections off a deserted timeline branch, one dying due to a universal apocalypse, and uses his access to confiscated artefacts to try to cause a similar effect of his own accord.

Not his brightest idea, going on a dying branch and trying to destroy it further while he's still on it. O.B. monitors it remotely, watching for a visible change in the branch's colouring.

Mobius mutters a quick message to his own personal god while he's at it. Just a, don't worry about this, so he doesn't get the jumpscare of his life if Mobius does manage to cause a catastrophe and disintegrate himself. If he's listening. If he can listen.

After throwing some infinity stones around to no effect, Mobius recruits a somewhat-ally in a pruned Dr. Strange Variant currently living in the Void (a conversation that was less than fun to have) and gets him to chuck as many spells as he can at the timeline. Again, nothing. He finds the child Variant he met all that time ago, the kid who'd killed Thor, and convinces him to give it a go too. Nothing.

He tries more Variants of a similar kind, but talking to them is both unsuccessful and edging on the wrong side of painful. So he doesn't try for long.

In the end, they have to call the magic theory off when the branch naturally dies as it was originally going to, and not because Mobius has been doing the equivalent of trying to make it magically explode for the past twenty cycles. O.B.'s equipment didn't detect even the slightest variation from its initial dull green.

Back to square one.

His most recent hypothesis holds up the longest.

That maybe, simply, something is wrong with the tree.

The linear progression suggests a disease, an illness born at the source. Spreading outwards, but isolated to singular branches. Unaffected timeline thrive, while others fade into a veritable non-existence. It's not dying, as O.B. assumed. Physically they exist as before – only entirely empty. Empty to the point they're not really there. They demonstrate a reversal of entropy – which takes Mobius hours upon hours of physics textbooks to determine a) reverse entropy literally cannot exist, and b) that somehow it is currently existing in white timelines.

They can't get good enough readings to tell anything more detailed. Not remotely. Figuring out what's going on is the entire problem, and is not made easier by the fact they have no physical scientific basis.

So Mobius comes up with a plan.

And then spends a long time trying to convince everyone he's not gone mad.

Once he's convinced the team, he has them rehearse their presentation about eight times before actually delivering it to the Council, each successive run-through descending into confusion about two thirds of the way through, where there's a fifty percent chance O.B. gets a new scientific revelation debunking the old one, and a fifty percent chance that B-15 – their resident non-scientist test audience – asks them to stop before her headache gets worse.

Casey ends up sorting it, albeit by getting so frustrated he drops into an apocalypse and steals a canister of hairspray, then charges back into Repairs and Advancement halfway through yet another attempt. "Look." He presses the nozzle and a sheen of particles fills the air. "The bottle is the start of the universe. The hairspray is… the universe, I guess. Everything is orderly. Then when I release it –" he presses it again, and a very faint floral smell begins to drift throughout the lab, "– everything descends into chaos. It won't go back into the bottle. That's how the normal timelines work. But on these white timelines, the hairspray is going from spreading throughout the room to concentrating back in the bottle."

"Everything in the branch is reversing back to an orderly start point," O.B. says, nodding, "Hence the nothingness. Yeah, I like that."

Mobius isn't sure if the hairspray analogy has made it more or less confusing.

Given the lack of better options, they go with it anyways and, remarkably, the Council approves their plan without alteration.

Mobius resolves to locate some flower bulbs next time he's on a break, to give to Casey as thanks.

Building a system that can navigate a place of reversed Time is not easy. Locking onto the branches and mapping the route to get back to the TVA is the simple part, and even that takes a month's worth of charting.

Building a suit that will contain a wearer in forward linear time while the timeline acts in reverse? Nearly impossible.

But they manage.

Mobius' insistence it be him to go is downtrodden by everyone. He begins to regret proving his quality as a valuable in-agent, because getting permission to go onto a branch is one of the few things they're regulating him on nowadays.

"Hey." B-15. They're in the Loom observation room, in the bowels of the TVA. Mobius can hear everyone else scurrying about upstairs, shouting off readings and silencing alarms. He refocuses on B-15. They're alone together, in the room opening to the bridge into the Void. She's strapping protective gloves to her arms. A lightweight suit, designed to protect her from the effects of infinite mass combined with infinite Time, as well as the radiation peaking at much higher than the Loom had at its worst. "Don't look so worried. I'll be fine." She waves the scanner at him, the one Casey has painstakingly designed and built to survive long-term in the white branches, and deposits it in its zip-up compartment.

"Yeah, I know." Mobius hopes his voice sounds confident. He leans against the wall, fingers tight around his coffee mug. The ceramic is hot to touch, burning his palm. "You don't… you don't have to go." When she scoffs, he continues with greater earnest, "You heard O.B., the readings we've got from the probes are pretty bad. I'd really hate to see you spaghettified."

Her smile is decidedly weaker than usual. "Me too. But I trust O.B. I trust you. You've done the math. I'll be fine."

"They've done the math," he grumbles heatlessly, "I've just kind of hovered in their peripheries."

"Well, if it fails, at least I get to be the first person to say they were stretched into the fourth dimension."

Mobius is the tough crowd this time. He throws her a glare then turns away. He punches the button to close the blast doors behind him. He tries not to think about the last time those doors closed. The last time he saw someone in that room.

"Mobius?" she calls.

He turns back, looking at her through the small window. It won't be like last time. It won't be like him. She's coming back. She is.

"See you in a minute," she says, eyebrows upturned even as she gives him a small smile. "I promise."

He returns the expression in kind, then gives a lazy salute and retreats up the stairs. "O.B.? We ready?"

A thumbs up. "Found an anchor. I've plotted a trajectory that should automatically bring her back here, even if her TemPad fails."

Mobius dodges Hunter L-23, who he roped into this scientific department out of sheer need for more hands. She's shown an aptitude for data entry, and is proving her worth now, her fingers flying over a keyboard. At her back, Intern A-145 taps his foot nervously, eyes locked on the infographic displaying B-15's vitals.

They're a good team. Mobius tried to dub them the Multiverse Inquiry unit, this new department he's built, but he's been made aware they're affectionately known as the Tree division to literally everyone else.

He can live with that.

"Hunter B-15's health is suitable to proceed," Intern A-145 says.

Mobius laughs, and looks about the room. "You get that, B?"

A crackle as she speaks through the comms system. "Glad to hear it. I'm good to go on your signal."

"I've got an okay from the suit," Casey throws over the dashboard. He's typing frantically, hopping between monitors. "It's sealed and binded to the right points. All green."

"Final checks coming up clear." O.B. pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. The flurry of activity dies. Mobius can sense the weight of everyone waiting for his mark. The trainees with a bounce of excitement in their shuffling, and a thinly-spread apprehension from the others who were present last time something went terribly wrong in this room.

Mobius sets his mug on the side. Some of the drink lurches over the rim and forms a ring in the dust. He looks at it. He sighs. "Okay. I'm happy. Go ahead, O.B.."

A nod. "Loading the stationary coordinates. Dropping in three. Two. One."

A Time Door wasn't suitable given the lack of physical ground to connect to. So instead, B-15's disappearance is instant, bolstered by the suit. Mobius can't help the wince when he hears a muffled movement of limbs, and then silence.

The silence stretches.

His heartbeat spikes. "B? You hear us?"

An endless jaw of silence.

Then a muffled static as the comms connect. "I'm fine. Survived the drop-in, at least."

Mobius barely hears the whoops and cheers behind him. He exhales, leaning heavily on O.B.'s desk to steady himself. Relief is dizzying in this intensity.

He didn't realise how strung he'd been.

"Can you give us a visual analysis?" O.B. asks, flipping open a notebook. He clicks his pen and begins to write as B-15 talks.

"You're going to be absolutely shocked, but there's a whole lot of white."

"What kind of reality is it? Tangible? Subjective?"

Her dry incredulity is dampened by the static in the connection. "Can I get a breakdown of what those mean?"

Mobius cuts in, waving to quieten O.B. "Don't worry about that. Describe where you are in as much detail as you can."

"On it. Uh – there's no floor. Or ceiling. Imagine being in a void, but it's light instead of dark."

"How are you walking?"

"There's no visible ground, but currently I'm moving just fine on empty space. Not floating, but not exactly walking."

"Two more minutes," A-145 calls. "Radiation is both extreme and unusual."

"Store those readings so we can figure out what 'unusual' is later," Mobius replies. He gets an affirmative, so spins back around to face the empty dark of the Void ahead. "Okay. Phase two. Can you merge the scanner with the branch?"

He waits with bated breath. He imagines her taking the device from her pocket, fumbling with the controls through those padded gloves. Letting it free into the timeline and –

"It isn't working. It's on but it's not locking."

Mobius brushes the failure off easier than he expected, amongst a greater number of successes – namely B-15 reaching a white branch without dying. But Casey frowns, saying, "How? I thought we accounted for the reversed entropy?" He hurries to the other side of the room. "If you hold position, I might be able to analyse the temporal signature of the branch. Then we can get a better prototype going for next time."

A-145 shakes his head. "One minute left."

"I'm holding. I'll be fine." B-15's voice, steady though it is, dances towards trepidation. The crew are focused on the data, and conversation dies on their end. She fills it."It's eerie out here."

Mobius folds his arms, moving away. He doesn't want to leave her alone. "I bet it is."

"It doesn't feel dead. It feels like… like something was here. It's been wiped but it's still – it's still living." The unsettlement grows sharper.

"Thirty seconds," A-145 says. "Should I start the recall?"

"No!" Casey's voice, panicked. "I've almost got a clear signature."

Mobius raises an eyebrow at A-145. "Can she survive another minute?"

His worried expression does not instil confidence. "Yes, but it's risky. If the suit breaks up any sooner than we thought –"

"You good to wait?" Mobius asks B-15.

"Absolutely."

The relative anxiety has broken into scattered panic. Mobius, separated physically from the movement near the controls, inhales deeply. Maintaining a cool head is key. It's easier over here, an external view of the team.

"You'll start to feel some heat related effects on your hands and lower legs," L-23 says, looking over A-145's shoulder at B-15's vital signs. Her voice is a controlled calm. "Radiation is beginning to wear down the top layer."

"I figured." There's a discomfort, a tension in her voice.

Mobius, spurred on by worry, turns to Casey. "How much longer are we looking?

Casey raises a hand, pinching his fingers together. "I'm this close. So close."

"Sir, we have to pull her back –"

"No. We need the reading." Oh, that is not a small amount of pain she's hiding.

"If we don't recall now she won't – she won't make it." A beat. "Sir?"

Mobius closes his eyes. One second to think.

He can't risk this again. He can't lose someone else.

"Recall."

The process is fairly instant. A heartbeat and a few button presses, then the comms wink out. They blink on again as a thud sounds downstairs.

Mobius makes for the stairwell. "B?" For a heart stopping moment, there's no answer. He looks through the window and sees nothing. A blast door and an empty room. No. Not again. Please.

A curse. B-15 clambers to her feet, coming into view through the glass. "Tell O.B. his return y-coordinates are way, way too high. I got recalled to the ceiling."

Mobius takes her in. Standing in front of him. Then he laughs, the sound light and breathy, and a little bit manic. "Glad you made it. Good work."

"Glad to be back." Her forehead is creased in pain, her eyes dark, but she's in one piece. "Tell O.B. to start the decontamination. I want to get out of this thing."

Mobius flashes a thumbs up.

Upstairs, his smile eliminates the last jittery nerves of the team. He reiterates what she said to O.B., and a woosh sounds as the mechanism to de-radiate her suit activates. Once O.B.'s done this, he throws his arms around Mobius. Unexpected, but nice. He laughs. A-145 high-fives L-23.

Only Casey, the tapping from his keyboard loud above the noise, doesn't relax.

"You got anything useful?" Mobius asks, untangling himself from O.B.'s hug and making his way over.

"I'm – I'm not sure. The temporal signature doesn't make any sense."

"How so?" He leans his elbows on the workspace to peer at the screen.

"See, the theory we had was the temporal signature –"

"Would be inverted due to the reverse entropy," Mobius cuts in. He's finally getting a grip of some of this physics stuff. Slowly.

"Yeah. But this isn't – it's not what we expected. That's why the scanner wouldn't lock."

Mobius looks at the assortment of numbers and symbols on the screen. A diagram of a hemihelix temporal sample. None of it makes sense. Maybe he's not got as good a grip on physics as he thought. "What's the issue?"

"It's got the temporal signature we expected. But it's infused with… with another one. Another signature. They're grafted together."

"Can we extract the other one to figure out its source?"

"On it," O.B. calls. Mobius turns and looks up. B-15, suitless and in her normal clothes, is climbing up to the main deck. She gives a smile that looks more like a wince, limping on her left foot.

"You okay?" He murmurs, meeting her in the middle. A nod. He grips her elbow gently, guiding her along. Testament to her exhaustion, she doesn't throw him off. It reminds him of someone else he knows.

The memory isn't as painful as usual.

"Casey, come look at this," O.B. says. Deep lines mark his forehead, his brow furrowed. Hesitance slows his movements. A lack of surety unfamiliar to him.

"What's happening? What have we got?" Mobius asks, one hand still supporting B-15, the other reaching out to tilt the screen towards him. Casey draws next to him and leans forward, scanning the information displayed.

O.B. watches Casey, gauging his reaction. "I've separated the signatures, and run the foreign one against the TVA database –"

"No way," Casey breathes. "Are you sure that's right?"

"If you think my separation is correct, then yeah, I'm sure."

"It's correct. It's definitely correct." They share a look, a thick layer of shared startle painted in their wide eyes.

Mobius, though not impatient, grows aware of B-15 leaning more on him. She needs a checkup, and he needs a nap, and he's ready to set this aside and deal with the results later. "I hate to spoil the moment, but could you tell us non-physicists what –"

Casey stands up straight. Turns to him with his hands behind his back. "It's Loki's."

Mobius' heart stutters. The name twists a knife in his gut. His breath catches in his throat, his words following. "What? What are you –"

"The external temporal signature is Loki's. It's intertwined with the branch's, that's why we couldn't lock."

"Oh." A nauseating pause. "What does that mean?"

O.B., the shock lighter on his shoulders, gives a weak smile. "Mobius. Temporal signatures fade when people die. They're only detectable from living entities. Which means –"

"Loki –" Mobius' voice, weak, trembles around the name. His tongue forgot how it felt in his mouth. "Loki's still alive?" Still tentative. Fearing rejection. Fearing miscommunication. Fearing the worst.

O.B. gives a nod of affirmation. "Yeah. He is."

Mobius manages a soft breath out. "Oh."

Oh.

Oh.

A/N: Despite being a physics student, I took one look at the hell that is thermodynamics and then decided to make all of the science up, in classic Marvel fashion.

Please note, I am now over on AO3 too, so if you prefer reading over there I'm under the same name. That being said, feel free to leave a review here if you are so inclined :D (I will lay down my life for you)