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Mobius finds himself pruned twice in a three day span. Temporally displaced. Moved and managed and regurgitated onto someones front lawn and then behind a bowling alley in Pasco County, Florida. His stomach hurts with the lasting effects of it, like the recoil of kinetic energy that’s seated right into the spaces of his softer organs; so he’s grateful when the waiter tries to place complimentary chips and salsa in front of them and Loki tells him, “No, absolutely not.”
He doesn’t give the poor kid any more of an explanation, but the waiter just isn’t used to the nuances of persnickety norse deities. “Maybe Mexican food wasn’t a great choice.” Mobius picks an ice cube out of his tap water and slides it between his teeth. It’s an instant relief.
“I want their two for one margaritas.” Loki has large framed sunglasses on, but Mobius can still see his eyes dart over to him behind the handles.
“Sugar and tequila— a good choice for a fussy stomach.”
Loki doesn’t acknowledge that. He straightens up in his seat and plants both of his hands palm down on the table and rolls his shoulders back, “So I think—”
“I don’t want to talk about work.” Mobius flinches, a sour taste building behind his tongue, thick and acrid, “About the TVA.” He shakes his head. Loki looks vaguely shell shocked at that, and Mobius thinks that maybe he’s going to argue with him about it. Instead, his face softens and his eyebrow dips crookedly in that concerned way that makes Mobius want to laugh a little manically.
“Me either.” Loki says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “I think that you should pick a name.”
It’s painfully humid outside, and Mobius thinks he might be sweating more than his glass of water. ‘Florida is a godless place’, he thinks and then looks up at Loki and ends up snorting quietly. More eyebrow dipping from him and Mobius shakes his head again, “A name for what?”
“You.” Loki tilts his chin up at the waiter when he reappears and doesn’t let him get a word in edgewise before he tells him, “I’ll have the classic margaritas, frozen, and I want the strawberries but not blended into it. Just stick it on the rim with the salt. He’ll have a ginger ale— or sprite. Whichever one you carry.” He hefts the laminated menus at the waiter.
“Please.” Mobius mouths at the kid and grins tightly at him until he leaves. “What am I naming about myself?”
He needs some clarity about all of this.
Loki breathes in deep, “You. All of you. Mobius is the name that the TVA gave you, so why don’t you pick a name you want. You’re not just a variant you know, you get to be—” He can see the weight of Sylvie ticking behind the pinched dimple between Loki’s eyebrows. How weighty it must be, to be the echo of a god. “Anyways, I just thought you would want to pick something a little more dignified than Mobius.” He says it without a hint of real disdain.
It moves something warm and more than a little soothing to the nausea he’s been dealing with and Mobius grins softly, “I actually like Mobius. It’s kind of fun.”
Loki stares at him for a hard moment, animated even with his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He turns his nose up after a moment, huffs out a stiff, “Maybe.”
There’s moments when Mobius forgets that Loki is some relic of ancient Midgardian worship. That civilizations built shrines to him where they prayed for protection over their children and their boats. That his life consisted of gilded castles and lessons on magic and face to face combat. He forgets because Loki laughs at cheap, slapstick comedy gags on TV, and he’s got a knack for singing along to commercial jingles.
And then Loki does something so uncanny, like uncapping the Cholula bottle, shaking it into his hand, and licking a teaspoon sized amount of it directly off his palm as if he’s not wearing Balenciaga. In a roadside Mexican restaurant. In Zephyrhills Florida.
The waiter places both margaritas in front of Loki, slowly moving the sprite off his tray towards Mobius while he watches Loki house the entirety of his first drink in three swallows. “Would you… like another one, sir?” The waiter asks and Mobius is delighted.
“He needed a chaser for the hot sauce.” He tells him with no explanation.
Loki scowls, “What are you on about? Ignore him, I’ll have another one. Thank you.” He enunciates the ending hard because he’s very proud of his impeccable Earth etiquette.
Mobius digs a water bottle out of the backpack he’s acquired in their travels: An excellent burlap number that Hunter B-15 snagged from an Army surplus store in Vermont, where she started her own evasive maneuvering with Sylvie. He empties the bottle into his glass and holds it out to Loki, “Put the rest in here, we should take it on the go before we both get pruned again.”
Loki makes a humming noise around the rim of his glass and takes it with his freehand. He licks the salt and ice from his lips and says, “Good idea, that man sitting on that strappy plastic chair that we passed on the corner seemed sinister.”
The man in question had offered Loki a Modelo in exchange for his belt and then laughed at Mobius for throwing up, telling him that it’s what he deserves for ‘Buying an 8 ball from Buckshot’. None of it had made sense to them.
They funnel Loki’s drinks into the water bottle and Mobius leaves the waiter a generous tip before they leave.
—
When Mobius wakes up, he stares at the water stain on the ceiling of the motel room and thinks about Sylvie and Hunter B-15. He wonders if they’re doing what Loki and himself are doing now. Moving in a zig zagging run across the world until they can pick up and find another universe that doesn’t have a tyrannical organization following them. He wonders if Sylvie rearranges the furniture of every hotel room they stay in, or if she stares into the middle distance, unblinking until B-15 assumes she’s sleeping or dead.
He wonders whether or not B-15 is overwhelmed by the feelings in her chest that grips around her heart and her lungs anytime Sylvie speaks or moves or breathes, that drives her into fits of affection that burn underneath her skin and make her feel like she’s coming unglued.
Or is that just a Mobius problem?
The bed dips heavily next to his right ankle and then his left, and then Loki is walking up the mattress like a clumsy giraffe, stopping with his feet tucked up under Mobius’s elbows and staring down at him. He’s a curtain of black hair and shadows from this distance and Mobius blinks away the blurry sleep in his eyes and squints up at him. He’s got on hospital socks with the grips on them and pajama pants that stop just above his ankles, with an XXL tie-dye shirt that reads GATORLAND. He looks like a roadside attraction and Mobius wants to grab his ankles and push his legs out from under him until Loki is collapsed on top of him.
“What did you wear to bed on Asgard?” He asks instead.
Loki leans forward, eyes narrowed, “Nothing, I didn’t have to protect my skin from these terrible, subpar sheets.”
He had half expected Loki to say something about the finest silk nightgowns, or even underwear. Under garments? Under things? Whatever Asgardians wore underneath their leather and furs and metal.
Naked wasn’t an option he had considered and now he’s warring with the urge to consume every visible strip of pale skin and piece together an image of what’s underneath all that garish fabric. Before Mobius can ask Loki to sit down, or tell him why he’s hovering over him in the first place, Loki hefts something into Mobius’s face, close enough that he can’t make out what it is. “This is yours.” He says as a way of explanation.
“Uh—” Mobius carefully pushes himself up on his elbows, drawing himself up on his pillow. It looks like a paper weight— a thick glass dome with the name of a hospital magnified at the base and an image of a stethoscope. The top of it is punctured, with veins of nearly shattered glass crawling out from the pressure point. “It’s—”
“Here.” Loki stumbles from the bed and flips on the bedside lamp, holding the paper weight under it. The light fractals over the cracks, casting slivers of golden shapes onto the nightstand. Loki sets it on the nightstand then, turns on his heels and stalks away into the bathroom, leaving Mobius entirely alone with his thoughts and his strange new gift.
Because that’s what it is.
Loki brought him a gift.
Loki spends enough time in the bathroom that he’s deemed appropriate for Mobius to not address the paper weight and by the time he reemerges, Mobius is changing into a long sleeve fishing shirt with an American flag and a sailfish on it. Loki looks him up and down and decides on “Eugh” as the noise he wants to make.
Mobius laughs, “Way to come for a man’s ego.”
Loki scrunches his eyebrows together, nose wrinkled in a way that probably makes him look feral and terrifying when done at the end of a sharp weapon or sharper words, but currently just makes him look sort of— cute. “Your form is plenty pleasing, but this attire is—” He shudders and Mobius tilts his head.
“I’m sorry,” Mobius wants to scream and laugh and tear the carpet out, “My form is what now?”
He’s never been one to let sleeping dogs lie.
Loki’s face does a complicated array of emotions, hands flexing at his sides, “I have to— I have things to do.” He bites out, and ambles into the muggy Florida morning looking entirely the part.
—
They’ve reached three weeks and enough facial hair for Mobius that Loki grimaces and tells him he’s starting to look like Odin. It’s enough to make him shave it all off with a Daisy razor in a Denny’s.
They’ve reached three weeks and one rendezvous with Sylvie and Hunter in the Appalachians when they’ve set a solid plan. The nexus event is contingent on them actually being there and Loki and Sylvie have the wherewithal and omniscience enough to braid a timeline succinct enough to draw out the real Timekeepers. “It’s trickery.” Loki tells Mobius over a stack of state park brochures, “All a distraction to keep us from seeing the real mastermind.”
“Very Wizard of Oz.” Mobius sets his backpack down on a bench, heavy now with trinkets and trash that Loki’s handed to him in their travels. Things that sparkle and whirl and pluck out tinny music. Loki tosses him a confused look, and Mobius laughs, “Don’t look at the man behind the curtain?” He wiggles his fingers in front of his face like that will help Loki understand.
“Oh, I couldn’t get through that one, it was so unnerving.” Loki admits, “Let’s watch the shark one tonight, you’ve brought it up twice today.”
“Jaws.” Mobius reminds him and is tickled that the ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat’ reference stuck the landing. “I’m trying to decide if you’re going to love it or hate it. There’s not going to be an in between though, it’s definitely going to be one or the other.”
Loki grins at that, scratches at his temple where his hair is shorn short now. They had decided to do what they could to blend in and Loki had conceded that his long black hair was easily recognizable and had handed Mobius a pair of scissors in an RV they had crashed in nights before. He had been tense, his body drawn up like a line of a bow when Mobius had run his fingers down a strand in the front and cut it only a couple inches from his scalp. There had been a strange intimacy to it— the locks of black falling into a heap of clippings at their feet, the shadow of Loki’s eyelashes fanned across the tops of his cheeks as he kept his eyes closed. It was an urge that Mobius was shocked even to find himself acting on when he had paused to run his fingertips over the curve of Loki’s face, pressing his palm to his cheek for a moment. He had found himself so overwhelmed by the trust he had been given by a man who had spent hundreds of years cloaking himself in lies just to protect himself.
He had looked up at Mobius then, expression so painfully honest and tilted his face into Mobius’s hand. Just for a moment.
“You know,” Mobius picks up a trail map and wields it, “It’s crazy how much is supposedly roaming around the Appalachians.”
“What, like animals?” Loki looks so human with his sensible, short black hair. So much younger.
“No, like the haunted things. Or the unknown. The demons and the wendigos and the not-deers and the— the feral people!” Mobius had spent the better part of an afternoon years ago listening to a podcast about it. “The indigenous people have centuries old stories about them that all match up despite them being from different tribes that never interacted. These creatures live inside and under the mountain and are probably responsible for a vast majority of the missing people.”
Loki stares at him wide eyed, mouth hanging slightly open. “Mobius,” He says gravely, “We were just in there, what if we had been ambushed?” His voice is frantic.
“You’re a god!” Mobius laughs, “You have magic!”
“Unbelievable.” Loki gripes and he mumbles about the danger and the foolishness while he paces the front of the trail entrance. He pauses, only to reach into the pocket of the waterproof jacket he’s wearing to hold up a closed fist, “These are yours.”
And just like that he’s leaving a handful of colorful rocks in Mobius’s palm.
He moves the pebbles around, inspecting the fleck of red and gold in the surface while Loki carries on about the wendigos. “Hey, Loki,” He curls his fingers over his new bounty, “We should talk about this.”
“That’s what I’m saying!” He gestures wildly into the trees.
Mobius holds up his fist, “Not about the mountain critters, about this.” The rocks feel like they weigh everything when realistically it’s only a few ounces, “You keep giving me things, and now these rocks, I’m starting to feel like a penguin.”
A look of hurt flashes across Loki’s face, “Well, you don’t have to keep them. No one is forcing you.”
Mobius reaches out and tugs on his hand until he stiffly sits down on the bench next to him, “I want to keep them.” He tells him seriously. “I want to know what it means though. From you.”
Loki looks frantic, his blue eyes scanning Mobius’s face and then darting into the openness of the field where hikers park their cars, his pointed features set in sharp contrast against the high afternoon sun. He looks all at once panicked and resigned. “I don’t know how to do this.” He admits, and it’s pained.
He can’t watch Loki get all watery eyed. Tearful and scared of his own emotions the way he does when his carefully crafted control slips away from him and he’s convinced that his own thoughts and feelings exist only to destroy him. It hits a spot inside of Mobius that is effected only by lost pets, children’s toys left behind on grocery store shelves, and Loki crying genuine tears. He definitely can’t handle it when it’s in a round about way because of him.
“I think you could take a wendigo in a fight.” Mobius drapes his arm across the back of the bench, still watching Loki.
He slumps a little, lips quirking and then flashing into that full toothed smile, “Oh, that’s dark magic.” Loki shakes his head, but he looks incredibly fond when he glances over at Mobius.
“I dunno,” Mobius presses his pointer fingers upward against his temples in a mimicry of horns, “Maybe they’re just Loki variants. I got a good repertoire with your type, I bet I could strike up an alliance.”
Loki laughs again but he shivers and looks back towards the woods, “Let’s leave, this place is cursed.” He shoves his fists into the pockets of his jacket and waits only for Mobius to stand as well before he’s practically running away.
“Hey, Loki, real quick—” Mobius has to actually run to keep up with Loki’s stride and thankfully the god slows to a stop for a moment. “This is yours.” Mobius taps his knuckle against the underside of Loki’s chin and doesn’t wait for the confusion to clear up before he kisses him gently.
Loki gets a little starry eyed amidst it all and Mobius could stand to keep putting that look on his face, watching him bite his bottom lip and ramble out a quick, “I was going to— That was—”
“You know, it’s fine if you don’t know what to say.” Mobius tells him sagely, “You don’t have to have the last word this time.”
“I’ll have you know—!” The teasing finally settles in for Loki and he grins despite himself, “I’ll show you the last word.” He grits out and Mobius holds out the crook of his elbow for Loki to take.
“Oh, please do.” He looks down at the long, slender fingers wrapped around his arm— his own Asgardian prince like he’s in some off kilter fairy tale and decides that all the pruning and the time jumping and the variation is well worth it when Loki kisses him on the temple as they head down the road towards the bus stop.