Chapter Text
“Is this Hel?” Loki looked around. “Am I dead?” It certainly looked like Hel. But he didn’t feel dead. He’d been dead before.
“Not yet,” came a voice from above. “But you will be, unless you come with us.”
Loki looked up into the face of the oldest man he had ever seen. He was wearing a ridiculous costume, with a pair of yellow underwear over green tights— and a pair of familiar golden horns on his head. Loki groaned.
“More variants, I presume.”
The old man said nothing, but the figure in front of him moved. It took a couple of blinks before Loki registered what he was looking at: himself, as a kid, clutching a small alligator. The alligator was also wearing a miniature horned cap, and she was nodding. Behind them stood another Loki, although he didn’t entirely look the part. He was muscular, like Thor muscular, and carrying a hammer to match. It wasn’t the Mjolnir he knew, exactly, but it still seemed enchanted, and Loki wasn’t sure he wanted to know what his double had done to get a hold of it.
“Molly says we should go. We don’t want to be late,” said the swole Loki. Loki — who still thought of himself as the Loki, despite his status as a Variant himself— had a feeling Molly was the hammer. He decided he really didn’t want to know how he got it.
“Go where?” Loki took the old man’s hand as he was helped to his feet. Old Man Loki pointed one bony finger behind them. They were in a wasteland of asphalt and cold shadows, the ground littered with remnants of brick and steel. Something resembling a city block rose up around them, if a city block was spat out by a copier low on toner, every line distorted and broken. It looked like a cosmic dumping ground, ground zero of some horrible war, but there was one thing that stood apart. Against the green haze glowed a bright yellow neon arrow, pointing to a clearing in the wreckage no wider than a deer path.
Loki looked around. The Lokis weren’t the only ones on this world, far from it, and he saw dozens of other people milling about, looking confused, climbing over chunks of metal. No one seemed to pay the neon sign any mind.
“They can’t see it,” he realized.
“Lokis only.” The old man turned his back on the others, who followed him as he walked towards the hidden path. “Makes sense. We don’t belong here with these mortals. We need to get to where it’s safe.”
Loki stayed where he was, confused. “Safe from what? I still don’t understand where we are—“ As if in answer, the sky rang out with the deafening sound of metal on metal. The air shimmered, and suddenly everyone was running, scrambling to get away. He felt something small close around his hand— Kid Loki had grabbed it in his own free hand, and pulled both Loki and the alligator to safety as a half-formed building materialized in the space where he was just standing. Waves of green-blue dust settled over him, and suddenly everything was normal again.
The boy with the alligator tugged on his hand again, urging him to follow the others, but still Loki stopped, looking back at the thing that had almost killed him. He felt his stomach sink as he realized why it looked so familiar. It was Tony Stark’s tower— albeit, a few letters shorter than it had been the day of his attack on New York.
Finally, Loki gave in and let the boy pull him back towards the group, who were closer to the arrow now. “These— these people are in danger out here. We should do something. Between the four of us,” he looked down at the horned reptile, who cleared her throat impatiently. “the five of us,” he continued, “we’ve got a whole Asgardian pantheon. There’s got to be something we can do.”
The old man grunted, a coarse, unpleasant sound. “Leave them,” he said. “We have a path to safety, and there’s a reason only we can see it. Out of all of this chaos and violence, we were chosen for this. To meet up with our other selves, clearly, as we well deserve. You’re a Loki, aren’t you?”
“I— of course I’m a Loki. I’m the Loki-est Loki. But the people here—“
“They’re mortals, kid. There will always be more of them. They don’t matter.”
Loki sighed. He wondered what Sylvie would do if she was there with them. She always seemed so serious, and had the same Loki instinct of self-preservation, but she grew up in all those apocalypses. Around people she knew she couldn’t save. She was hardly a spoiled princess of Asgard. If the TVA was villainous, that meant all of her plans were, he had to admit, heroic. But that just made him think of Thor— his brother would have jumped at the chance for heroics, just for the accolades, the selfish bastard.
That would have been enough to make him let it go and follow the others, if it weren’t for a shock of white hair that suddenly caught his eye.
“I’ll catch up with the rest of you,” Loki shouted, already running the other way. “I just follow the signs, right?”
“It’s your funeral,” he heard the Loki with the hammer growl, and the odd quartet continued into the maze of urban wreckage, out of sight. It didn’t matter— Loki wasn’t looking— his eyes were fixed on the figure in the brown suit in front of him. Or was it dark green? It was almost impossible to tell with all the dust in the air, and Loki cursed himself for not noticing which it was earlier.
“Mobius.” The two men crashed into each other in a rough embrace. Loki’s mind raced. Of course. If the pruner didn’t kill him, it must not have killed Mobius either.
“She didn’t even hesitate.” The analyst was crying, his eyes cloudy and distant. “After all these years… She knew, she must have known, this whole time…”
Loki held him. “I know. I’m sorry.”
Mobius looked up and his eyes finally focused on Loki. “And you? Did you know? When we were sitting there, shooting the shit about, about jet skis and salads. Did you know?”
“No. No.” Loki’s heart broke as he struggled to find some way to make Mobius believe him. They’d both lied to each other, so many times, but he needed him to know this was the truth. “I didn’t find out until we got stranded on Lamentis.”
“Okay.” Mobius looked like he wanted to believe Loki, which was something, at least. “Okay.” He wiped away his tears and looked at their surroundings, the fragments of buildings and toppled telephone lines and rubble. “So, we rebelled against the Time Keepers. We didn’t die. What’s next?”
“Oh! That’s right, you don’t know!” Loki finally untangled himself from Mobius and took a step back, magicking away his own tears as if they’d never been there. “After you, well, bzzt, your boss took Sylvie and me down to see the Time Keepers, and there was this whole fight and we were extremely cool, and I was like—“ Loki made some very undignified woosh noises. “and Sylvie was like, ka-shing, ah! ” Loki mimed slashing someone across the chest. “And then she threw her sword at the Time Keepers, well, the one in the middle, you know, with the eyes? And, Mobius—“ The god of mischief grabbed the man by the shoulders. “ They’re fakes. ”
“What?”
“Fakes. Decoys. Androids. It’s all a lie! Every word of it! The most powerful force in the universe, and it’s an illusion! I can’t believe I didn’t see it!”
“Illusions,” Mobius repeated.
“I’ve no idea who could have created it all. It could be— it could be just some guy!”
“Just some guy.”
The two men stared at each other for a moment, deathly serious, before bursting out into laughter. It was desperate laughter, the laughter of two people, two variants , whose worlds have been thrown into chaos. Laughter made of as much fear as mirth.
When they calmed down, Loki guided Mobius towards the arrow and explained what he’d seen since his arrival.
“Avengers tower? Here? How is that possible? Unless— Loki, look.” He pointed to a pair of buildings with medieval facades, framed by bits of piping and electric wiring that betrayed their origins in the mid- twentieth century. A gaggle of faire-goers in corsets and dark green cloth looked lost in its shadow. “From our first mission.”
“First mission of two. I really thought we would have had more.”
“Loki, look . Those people, they weren’t pruned. They were reset. They must have seen us— and the building came with them?” Mobius took a deep breath, looking out at the ruined city of a thousand doomed timelines. “This must be the refuse from every mission the TVA has ever run, every Nexus event. It all ends up here. And I knew nothing about it. All this time...”
“Well, don’t beat yourself up about it, Moby,” Loki said with a smile. “I’m just finding out about it at the same time, and I mean, I’m a god. So you’re already pretty ahead of things, for a mortal.” Loki hoped Mobius could decipher the compliment he’d meant to give instead.
“It’s chaos out here, Loki. We thought we were cleaning the timeline, making it better, but we were just creating something… much worse. This has to be worse.” Mobius was already forming a plan. “Where’d you say your other variants went?”
“Ah! Follow me.” Grabbing the former analyst’s wrist, Loki led Mobius towards the arrow and down the path it marked, winding around crumbled city streets and downed electrical wiring until at last, it stopped in front of a building. Both men could see it; as anachronistic as the place already was, this building stood out from the rest. It was tan, towering many stories over the rest of the city, with three familiar letters painted smugly over the entrance. T-V-A.
“Right back where we started, it would seem,” said Loki.
“Be ready,” said Mobius, who could still feel the acid sting deep in his chest of the weapon that brought him here.
But when they entered the spotless revolving doors into the building’s front lobby, it had none of the retro-futuristic grandeur of the headquarters where they’d met. It felt so… mundane.
“Must be a satellite office,” said Mobius.
In front of them stood the quartet from earlier: the old man, the kid, the alligator, and the one with the hammer, at the end of a long line of other Lokis. If he stood up on his toes, he could see the front of the line: a single metal archway with TVA guards standing on either side. They weren’t wielding the glowing orange pruning sticks, but they had another problem. On the walls leading up to the gate, there were posters. Wanted posters, with his face on them. He shared a face with plenty of the people in the line, but he knew it was his face specifically, blue dress shirt and all. Variant L1130.
Loki grabbed Mobius by the arm and turned him around, steering him back out through the revolving door.
“Hey, what are you doing? Loki?” Mobius asked.
“We can’t go in like this. They know we’re coming. New plan.” Loki waved his hand and a wave of green illusion magic washed over him.
Loki felt her hair grow down past her shoulders, and ran a hand over the new crown that sat atop her head. “Are the horns too much? Sometimes I worry that they’re too much. Maybe Sylvie had the right idea with her shorter ones…?”
“A disguise? That’s your plan? Are you even sure they’ll recognize you as a different variant?”
“Of course. It’s not often I get to go undercover as myself. It only takes one decision to become a variant, right? Up until then, my life could be exactly the same. Sylvie and...” Loki gestured towards the building in front of her. “Our friend with the hammer are outliers, clearly. They’ve led significantly different lives. But me— I’ll just claim to be from slightly earlier in the timeline. I wore this gown to Thor’s birthday party a couple of years ago.” She examined one gloved hand. “This will do.”
“Okay, but what about me? I’m not even supposed to be here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not a Loki!” Mobius hissed. At this, Loki grinned.
“No, but you know how to think like one.” Again, she meant this as a compliment. “Don’t worry, I have a plan for you.”
A few minutes of arguing later, Loki swept back into the TVA building’s atrium, her dark green cape trailing behind her and a fluffy white cat perched in her arms. The cat glowered from beneath a little winged helmet.
“I can't believe this was the best you could come up with,” grumbled the feline Mobius.
“It was a prank I pulled on Thor! It involved some trickery with a mirror, and a lot of fish, but trust me, it was hilarious. Hey— Stop scratching me! Just— just calm down.” Loki struggled with the cat in her arms. “Well, most people found it hilarious. Some people— okay, I found it to be very funny.”
“I’m starting to see why your brother had such a problem with you,” said Mobius.
“Quiet! We’re here.” The pair had bickered all the way up to the gate. The Minuteman on the right was looking at a clipboard.
“Hmm. It doesn’t look like we’re expecting any more humanoid variants. Have you been processed by the head office?”
“Oh, no, I haven’t been processed by anybody,” claimed Loki, the picture of indignant innocence. “Do you know who I am? I am a goddess . What am I doing here?”
The guard sighed. “Must have put up a fight, been pruned in the field. Just go through the gate, ma’am.” He motioned to the other Minuteman, who punched something into a control pad. A light at the top of the gate turned green.
Loki clutched Mobius to her chest, remembering the TVA worker’s earlier warning about robots and replicants. She trusted her magic to fool the guards, but she was afraid what would happen if the machine could tell that Mobius wasn’t really a Loki— or a cat, for that matter.
“And my feline companion? He can come too, of course?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the Minuteman droned. “Cat Thor Loki. Variant L1991, pulled from the timeline after chasing a mouse straight into a portal to Niflheim. He’s on my list.”
“Oh! Oh, good,” said Loki, holding her breath and stepping through. The machine beeped again, and she continued onwards with Mobius in hand, the both of them intact.
“Told you it would work,” she said under her breath. Mobius scratched her arm in return.
“Just follow the signs,” said one of the Minutemen, already turning back to his post.
There were more arrows on the walls here, and they guided Loki through a series of depressing, compact hallways. As soon as she turned the first corner and was out of earshot, she sighed. “Okay, Mobius, just a bit farther.”
“And then what, genius? You team up with your squad of doubles and ditch me like you did back at Roxxcart?”
Loki stopped and held the cat up to her face. In this position, Mobius’s front paws stood straight out in an extremely undignified manner, his shoulders hunched in a permanent state of displeasure. “I’m not leaving you behind again. Mobius, look at me. I swear, it’s the truth this time. I was going to come back for you, we were just— gods.”
“And here it is, the god thing again, you’re both Asgardians and I’m not—”
“No, shut up, look.” Loki turned Mobius around to look at a spot on the wall next to one of the arrows, where there hung a poster. In style, it was a lot like the TVA’s “motivational” posters, the ones encouraging its workers to clean up the timeline, and to do their part— except for one key difference. Every poster bore an image of Loki, or a Loki, and a slogan celebrating her visage. “Remember— he’s watching,” read one. Another simply said “kneel.”
“I’ve died. I’ve died and this is hell,” said Mobius.
Loki tucked Mobius under her arm and continued through the maze of hallways, the posters growing in density as she progressed, until finally the arrows led her to a single room. The other rooms she’d passed around the way were locked and unlabelled, and as she peered through their small windows she could see nothing but darkness. But in this final room, a strobing bright green light shone through in, and she had to use her free arm to shield her eyes. She heard shouts echo through the door.
“If this goes south, turn me back into myself, okay?” Mobius was very quiet. “I don’t want to die as a cat.”
Loki said nothing, but slowly lowered her hand away from her eyes, pressing down on the door’s handle.
On the other side of the door sat a room almost impossibly large, which was in character for the TVA, but nothing could have prepared the duo for its contents. Hundreds of Lokis milled about, laughing and drinking. The lights they’d seen from the hallway were strobe lights, gliding over the partygoers. A group of Lokis crowded around the alligator, who was knocking back shots like a frat boy.
It was like a nightclub, a private party just for the god of mischief and her variants. Loki jumped as a hand clamped down on her shoulder, a hand connected to a version of herself with heavy eyeliner and fashionably ripped clothing.
“Looks like we’ve got another one,” the other Loki said with a smile in his eyes. “Welcome to Valhalla.”