Chapter Text
The alarms were still blaring long after all the minutemen had gone.
Mobius had just stepped back through, Ravonna’s irritated comm on the two variants’ fight and subsequent escape still playing from his device as he had not bothered to finish hearing the news the second he knew he could get on the scene.
The locker area was empty, and everything was like he’d last left it, except for the blaring noise and B-15’s locker door being busted wide open. Walking over, he found an incriminating lack of daggers inside. He frowned, upset that he never got to see them in action. That reminds him: Ravonna might have footage. He hurried along.
As he took his final steps towards the exit, the tell-tell sound of a spawning timedoor had him spinning on his heels, heart leaping to his throat with a desperate wish for a specific person to come waltzing through it while a disappointed brain attempted to rally it back to its reality.
Except it didn’t need to do so since, lo and behold-
“Loki?”
The relieved and joyous tones of his words and heart soon turned sour with the realisation of the sight’s implications, twisting back to the growing venomous rage and discontent that had filled his every waking moment since he saw the man perform the opposite action mere moments before. Mobius saw red.
“Loki-”
He’d begun his berating rant, ready to send the Asgardian to time hell and back for running off and abandoning him, but as the red turned less opaque, he saw the man’s face did not wear an apologetic smile nor a downtrodden grimace ready to attempt to manipulate Mobius into letting the matter drop, and it made him stop. And look again.
The expression seemed so foreign of the god’s face he very nearly thought it to be a newly captured variant, but the TVA issued outfit betrayed the notion. The other Loki, then? No, she had just stepped through behind him, or something to the effect; Mobius was still too stricken by the words so clearly painted on his Loki’s face that the mission objective was the farthest thing from his mind.
Loki’s face, often open like a book of plagiarised texts, ready to be read, showed no script but his own, and the text read ‘grief’. This would not be too surprising, Mobius had already seen such words in the theatre room the day they met, but the grief was not self-comforting or -pitying, it was directed at him; Loki was grieving for him. An empathetic ache, lips drawn into a tight, shaky line, hands out in a placating motion, like he was gesturing to a scared and hurt creature that could scamper off and do nothing but cause itself more damage at any moment. The expression should seem foreign on him, Mobius thought, like odd-fitting clothes unaccommodated to owners with massive egos who had no one but themselves in mind, but it rang of nothing but sincereness, and that is what scared Mobius the most.
“Loki”, he tried again, “and…” his eyes flicked towards
“Sylvie.”
“Alright, thank you, Sylvie. What’s going on? Are you here to”, he swallowed, “Uh. Kill me?”
Was that it? Sadness at losing his asset within the TVA? Forced to prove his loyalty to his new leader? Or just for the hell of it, but he still felt a twang of sorrow at the thought? The anger began to seep back.
“Alright, if that’s what all that”, Mobius vaguely motioned at Loki’s face “is about, then try and get it over with since the variant we need is right here, ready to be captured, and I need to get on with winning this fight if I want to catch her any time soon.”
Again, the pain stayed unchanging in Loki’s face, no hint of malice or witty retort framing the expression. Mobius faltered. Loki stayed silent.
“Hey, man, if this is some kind of way waste my time I’m not falling for it again-”
“Do you remember your time before the TVA?”
He really was not expecting that question. He stared back at Loki, dumbfounded, then glanced at Sylvie as a subtle realisation dawned; the red became opaque again.
“Is this seriously the story she spun for you? Seriously? And you fell for it? There is no ‘time’ for me before the TVA, The Timekeepers made me, you know that-”
“You’re a variant.”
A beat.
“What.”
He searched Loki’s face a final time, looking for strands of evidence to connect with his years and years of research, his unending hours studying the Loki timeline, recalling all the notes and figures on the god who reeked of melancholy before him, yet none of the expected mischiefs appeared to be present. If anything, it seemed to have vaporized completely. He thought of Sylvie once more, the variant now sitting comfortably on a bench, glancing at the opposite wall in lieu of affording privacy to the two of them. Had she really got Loki this good? He seemed to be honestly believing this weird narrative to the point he was genuinely upset over it. The absurdity of it made him laugh. Loki’s eyes seemed to turn glassier as he did, and the look of pure anguish made his laughter dry out.
“Loki, the Time-Keepers made me, I’m not a variant- hell, I’m not human, I’m a- a TVA employee and a damn good one at that, there is literally no reason to suggest I’d be a variant and it’s kind of concerning this is the line of thought you’ve gone down in.”
Loki did not rise to the bait. Instead, he asked another baffling question.
“Do you remember C-20? From the store?”
“Wh- yes? Yes, I do, what does that have to do with anything?”
Loki shut his eyes, the pain etching itself into his features so tightly it seemed it might never leave “Sylvie, she, uh, she knows this technique, she- she calls it enchanting. It lets her go into your memories and projects herself into them, but she has to look for the memories first and- and C-20’s mind was all cloudy and muddled until she found one ringing crystal clear through the fog, one more than a couple of centuries old of C-20 but not as a minuteman but as a human. A normal human who went about their day and- and enjoyed margaritas and laughed and had friends and was, apparently, a variant. Do you think C-20 remembered that? Do you think anyone else at the TVA remembers that for themselves? Because I have a feeling that’s not the case.”
The guffaw escaped Mobius almost as an instinct “Loki. Listen to yourself for a second. You just said she manipulates minds. How do you know she didn’t do that to her- hell, how do you know she didn’t do it to you?”
“I’m too powerful for her to-”
Mobius’s sharp laugh cuts him off “Oh, really, now? That’s convenient.”
“I’m serious,” Loki cuts back mirthlessly, “I am also a magic user, I have defences set up for this type of thing, you and your minutemen don’t.”
Mobius scoffs “Oh, so that’s the angle - get into all of our poor helpless brains as the all-powerful Lokis-”
“Not a Loki.”
“Apologies, all-powerful Loki and Sylvie-”
“Thank you."
"As I was saying, we need to be the poor defenceless damsels in need of saving, is that it. And you thought you’d start by tricking your favourite one; should be easy enough, you’ve done it before, haven’t you?” Mobius bit out.
He was going to continue his little speech, but seeing Loki made him pause. Again. He’d been pausing a lot, he realised. Loki hadn’t yet hurled any insults nor sassed him back, just kept that annoyingly mournful expression on his face.
“What is it?” Mobius definitely said normally and not at all yelled, “What do you want? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Loki paced towards him at an even pace, shaky hands at his sides balling up and uncurling as his eyes flickered from Mobius’s to the floor.
“You’re right.”
Now Mobius was truly lost. This apparently showed on his face as Loki continued.
“About Sylvie’s story. I have no way to corroborate it. No proof that it is true, no evidence nor confirmation from the agent herself. I didn’t even meet her! But I thought- I, I just thought that on the off-chance she was right, that you were a person before,” he gestured to the room, “all of this, and that was taken from you for, what, breaking ‘time law’? You deserved to know, and I think,” here, for the first time, he truly hesitated. His eyes went back to the floor as the knot in his throat quivered, a small cough to compose himself dying at his throat. His eyes went back to meet Mobius’s, face contorting into steadfast determination to deliver his following sentence “I think you’d do the same for me.”
Mobius had never seen this Loki. Mobius had seen every second of that chrono-reel, taught the lectures, kept the journals, knew and indexed every Loki by heart, every last facet of his personality stored away in its rightful methodical place. This face was foreign to those archives. This Loki was foreign to anything he’d ever seen. Mobius was a gambling man, and a voice in his head told him he had nothing to lose, that he did trust this Loki, and that maybe, just maybe, the variant killing all the minutemen was right. More than anything, he wanted to believe in Loki. Not the one on the screen or the dissertations, but the variant standing mere steps away; his Loki.
He wasn’t going to tell him all of that, of course, so he sighed resignedly and hoped to whatever Timekeeper heard that his face had not betrayed him.
“Okay. What do you need me to do?”
“You just need to let your mind be open to mine, I’m going to initiate contact and then we’ll go and find something. Together.”
It was then Mobius realised Loki seemed apprehensive as well, scared for the end result either way. Mobius shook himself where he stood.
“Alright. Together.”
Loki took another step forward, his eyes flicking over Mobius’s face, lingering on his features in a way that made Mobius’s pulse quicken and his previously leaping heart return to said ministrations. Loki then looked straight into his eyes as he slowly raised both hands towards Mobius’s temples on either side.
“May I?”
Mobius gave a short nod and shut his eyes, sweat forming on his brow, heart pounding from the rush the whole situation was giving him. Just as he felt the tips of the fingers brush against his head, he startled and opened his eyes wide, locking them with Loki’s own. Mobius gave him a lopsided smile and tried to soften his eyes as he put his hands on Loki’s shoulders to steady himself, aiming for suaveness but betrayed by how his body still shook with bottled up dread.
“Together, right?”
Loki gave him a small chuckle, replying as his hands fully made contact, cradling Mobius’s head, bringing their foreheads to rest against one another.
“Together.”