Work Text:
Loki’s first thought, once he realises he’s still conscious, is that he must be in Hel. Alright, that’s not strictly true; his first thought, obviously, is a hearty ‘What the fuck?’ - but the Hel thing is a pretty close second. He’s halfway through making the latter of these two musings aloud before his brain catches up to the fact that his mouth is full of some kind of soft, fluffy… blanket? And it’s also sort of warm and cosy and overall so unlike anything he can imagine Hel being that for an awful moment he almost thinks that some terrible cosmic mix-up might actually have landed him in Valhalla. The prospect of an eternity surrounded by his brother’s rowdy friends and his father’s unfunny drinking buddies is one of the more terrifying prospects he’s ever faced. And he did, technically, sort of die fighting, so…
But no, surely not. It’s too quiet here to be Valhalla, apart from anything else. Wherever the fuck ‘here’ is.
That’s probably the first thing he should work out, so he rolls over, blinking warily in the half-light. He’s… in a bed. A soft one. Huh. So a hospital, maybe? It would make sense, he supposes - only this room doesn’t look like any hospital Loki has ever seen. A thin trickle of sunlight filters in through the blinds, and he takes in the ugly carpet, and the handsome armchair, and the Sports Illustrated calendar pinned up rather incongruously next to a very nice landscape of some bathing nymphs. And the gleaming bronze dagger mounted on the wall beneath… is that a singing fish?
He’s still trying to figure out what to make of the madcap interior decorating scheme when the covers next to him shift, and a broad, tan arm flops itself over his chest with a sleep addled grumble of, “Will you quit stealing so much of the blanket?”
Loki is bolt upright and halfway out of the bed before he realises who the voice belongs to. “Mobius?” he asks, with an incredulous glance at the tuft of white-blonde hair sticking up out of the covers on the far side of the bed.
“Last time I checked, yeah,” says Mobius, with a yawn, and the errant arm flails its way over toward his side of the bed once more. “You having nightmares again? S’ been a while. C’mere.”
“What?!” says Loki, “Who- Mobius, it’s me, Loki, where are- what’s going on?”
That gets him another grumbling yawn, and - finally - Mobius turns over and squints up at him. “What do you- hey, what the hell are you wearing?”
Loki glances down at himself, but he’s still wearing exactly the same outfit as he was before. It’s not exactly ideal for bed, but that’s hardly the biggest issue they have right now. “I have no idea - whatever stupid shirt your TVA people put me in! Look, this is beside the point, the Timekeepers are robots, and your boss is definitely super involved in it all, and there’s no way Sylvie is going to be able to deal with this all without a superior Loki being around to call the shots, so-”
“Oh,” says Mobius, his expression abruptly clearing as he hauls himself upright and reaches across Loki to the bedside table. “Right, right, ok,” he says, pulling out a lopsided jumble of wires that might once have been a TemPad, and ignoring Loki’s spluttered exclamations as he gets briefly far too close to sprawling directly on top of him. Then he flops back onto his side of the bed, flips the screen open, and begins tapping away. “So, right, uh, where are we… well, with that shirt, and - hmm, Sylvie doesn’t narrow it down much, but if you just worked out the thing with the automatons…”
“About five minutes ago,” supplies Loki.
“Ah!” Mobius looks up at him with a slightly apologetic expression, “Yeah - so, you’re from the past. Or, well, from your perspective, I guess you could say that this is the future. For a given value of ‘future’. Time is a bit,” he waves a hand, “well. Bit all over the place, you know?”
“Of course,” says Loki, who does not, in fact, know.
Mobius gives him a twinkling smile. It feels… weirdly private. Like he’s intruding on something, somehow, even though it’s aimed at him. “You ever consider any alternatives to just outright lying about stuff as a default response?”
“No, never.”
Mobius chuckles. “That’s my guy! Alright, ok, now if you hold still for a second, I can scan you with this thing and figure out when exactly you...” he squints down at the makeshift TemPad with a frown. “Huh. Lotta static. So probably- aha!”
“Aha?” says Loki.
Mobius snaps his fingers. “Temporal storm. That explains why the signal has been so- right. Ok. So you just got,” he makes a jabbing motion at Loki’s chest. “Got pruned by Ravonna, huh?”
“I…” Loki reaches down to touch his own chest, and the still intact fabric of the TVA issue shirt. “Yes. I think I did. And, hold on a second, so did you!”
Mobius holds his hands in the air with a wry grin. “Guilty as charged.”
“You’re dead!”
“No.”
“I’m dead?”
“Also no.”
“Everyone in the whole universe is dead?!”
“Yes, actually.”
“Wait, really?”
Mobius laughs. “No. You’re fine. Just a bit, uh, displaced in time. For me, the day you're from is... well, it's a couple years back, now.”
Loki narrows his eyes, squinting around the half-dark room again in an attempt to get some kind of a handle on the situation. The bizarrely decorated room isn’t giving him much to work with, but Mobius… Mobius looks different, somehow. It takes him a moment to figure it out; “Your hair is too long.”
Mobius raises a self-conscious hand to his head, and ruffles his hair. “Ah, well, I kinda like it this way. I think it kinda- it suits my face, right?”
“It’s nice,” blurts Loki - and then, when his brain catches up, he adds a hasty, “I mean- I hate it. Um.”
Mobius laughs. “Oh, I forgot how crappy you used to be with compliments. Hah. That brings back memories.”
Loki raises an eyebrow. “Used to be?”
“You’re still pretty bad at it, don’t worry.”
“Good, because I was going to say, if my future self has started going around giving out genuine compliments, he’s probably been replaced by a robot.”
“He’s not been replaced by a robot,” says Mobius, “I’d have noticed.”
“Your track record on noticing that people are robots isn’t great, though, is it?”
“Ah, touché, touché.”
Loki wants to follow up with another witty retort, but he is, abruptly, overwhelmed by a feeling which must be… gratitude? He’s just suddenly flooded with this warmth of emotion at the thought of a future self who is somehow - despite all odds - friends with Mobius. Close friends, perhaps. Maybe even...
“So, I’m in the future,” says Loki, staring fixedly over toward the bookcase, which seems to have an entire shelf dedicated to analysis of the Poetic Edda (excellent), and another dedicated solely to jet ski maintenance manuals (ridiculous). “And this is… your room?”
“Well sure, I don’t make a habit of sleeping in other people’s rooms, do I? Unlike some people I could mention.”
“I wasn’t sleeping ,” splutters Loki, indignant, “I was- I dropped into here out of the- I don’t know. I got pruned, and then I thought I was dead, and next thing I know, here I am!”
“Yeah, that’s a doozy, huh? It’ll really throw you for a loop, getting pruned.”
“So it just… sends you forward in time?”
“Eh, not exactly, it sends you- well, you’ll see when you get there. But you tend to wind up getting bounced through a bunch of points across your timeline along the way, so-”
“What do you mean I’ll see when I get there?”
Mobius fixes him with a frustratingly level gaze. “I mean you’ll see when you get there.”
“You don’t think it might be handy for me to know in advance?”
“No point - you won’t remember any of this when you get there.”
“I might!”
“You remember any of the places you’ve stopped through so far?”
“Any of the… what?!”
Mobius waves the TemPad with an expression of wry amusement. “According to my scans, you’ve been through a good half dozen points along your timeline already. You remember those?”
“... no,” says Loki.
“Well, there you go. No point.”
“But-”
“There’s no guarantee I’d even have time to explain anything much before you get shifted along to the next place. You seem pretty uh,” he taps the TemPad screen, “Pretty temporally unstable. And besides, it’s too early in the morning for me to be getting into all this spacetime stuff, especially if you’re not even going to remember it later. Gives me headaches.”
Loki rolls his eyes, flopping back down onto the pillows with a dramatic sigh. “You know what, fine. Fine!”
He’s dead set on sulking for at least a good few minutes but fails to follow through because he’s almost immediately distracted by how nice the bed is. “Mobius,” he says.
“Mmm?”
“We’re not in the TVA, are we? I’m going to be furious if we are - the bed they gave me at that place was like a rock with a sheet on it, and this one is… it’s very good.”
“Ah,” says Mobius, turning to pat the mattress with an expression of deep fondness Loki has only previously seen him direct toward jet ski magazines, “yeah, she’s a beauty, huh? Memory foam, that’s the ticket. Great stuff. Wonderful on the spine, especially if you’re a side sleeper.”
“... right,” says Loki, making a mental note to find out what the fuck this memory foam stuff is at some point when his life is less utterly absurd , “so, uh…”
Mobius chuckles. “Not the TVA, no. Although I suspect the crappy mattress was more to do with you being a massive arsehole who nobody wanted to put up in a comfy bed, because mine was really pretty nice back there.”
“Bastards,” says Loki, with venom.
“Bastards,” agrees Mobius, with a cheery grin.
“So,” says Loki, after a long moment of companionable silence. “You uh… you decorated this place yourself?”
Mobius takes in Loki’s mildly disdainful expression with a raised eyebrow. Then he grins, like he’s in on some kind of joke that Loki can’t understand. “Why, you not a fan?”
Loki looks slowly around the room. “Well…”
“No, no, go on - I really love nothing more than to have you drop into my room, wake me up, and then insult the decor. Go ahead, tell me your thoughts.”
Loki narrows his eyes. Much as he enjoys insulting people’s taste in interior design - it’s probably his third favourite hobby, after owning knives and annoying Thor - this somehow feels like a trap. So he shrugs politely, and says, “Well, you know I… I actually don’t hate all of it.”
“Oh?”
“About half of it is even rather nice, honestly.”
Mobius makes a sudden wheezing noise that is extremely alarming for a moment - and then Loki realises that he’s laughing .
“What?” he snaps. “I don’t see what’s funny about-”
Mobius makes another strangled wheezing noise. “Oh, you really- sometimes I just- you like half of it ! You are so predictably-”
Loki bristles. “I don’t see what’s so funny about that. I said- that was a compliment!”
Mobius wipes away a tear, “Oh, bless your heart, it sure was. Just not one aimed at me.”
“What? It’s your room, of course it’s-”
“It’s ah, uh - I share it.”
Loki blinks. “You what?”
Mobius yawns, and shoves the covers aside. “Which reminds me, actually - I better go tell the old ball and chain that we’ve got company.”
It’s at this point that Loki finally takes in the fact that Mobius, apparently, sleeps naked. Whatever he’s about to say is abruptly erased by his brain, which replaces it with a spluttered, “You- naked? What?”
Mobius snorts. “Use your words.”
“Why are you- you sleep naked?” Loki is pretty certain that the weird churning he’s feeling in his stomach is… it’s something to do with seeing Mobius out of the suit. That must be it. It’s wrong - like a turtle without a shell.
Mobius chuckles. “Ah, not normally. More of a flannel pjs guy, myself. But,” he shrugs, kicking his legs out of the bed and standing with a stretch, “sometimes things just get away from you. You know how it is.”
Loki’s brain is still trying desperately to process the turn the conversation has taken. “Sorry,” he says, scrambling out of bed after Mobius, “And did you say- I mean, you share- you have a partner?”
“Uh-huh,” says Mobius, ambling over to the wardrobe with absolutely no inclination that he understands the gravity of the situation.
“A partner partner?”
Mobius pulls a robe from the wardrobe door with another yawn. “Yup.”
“You have sex ?”
“You,” says Mobius, shrugging his robe on with that same strange twinkle in his eye from earlier, “sound a little jealous.”
“No I’m not,” says Loki, at precisely the moment that he realises that, oh fuck, yes he is.
“Whatever you say,” says Mobius, giving him a cheerful pat on the arm. “I reckon you’ll like him, though, let me go fetch him for you. Be nice for you two to say hi before you’re back off to timeline hopping again.”
“I don’t think-” Loki begins, but Mobius is already off out the door at a sprightly pace. He can hear him calling out to somebody down the corridor.
Loki sits back down on the bed with a heavy sigh. This is- look, he’s had a lot of embarrassing moments in his past - a lot of failures and bad decisions and mistakes. That’s something he’s slowly learning to live with. But this really takes the biscuit. He’s managed to develop some kind of affection for Mobius? Mobius?! The man is- well, he’s good looking, in an odd sort of way, and he’s far kinder to Loki than he deserves, and apparently he sometimes sleeps naked which is definitely a plus, but…
Loki puts his head, very slowly, into his hands. Distantly, he can hear the sound of Mobius heading back toward the bedroom, rambling away in his annoyingly charming fashion; “... and that explains the weird temporal energy Jane was picking up when she stopped by yesterday, right? Or, well, maybe the other way around. Point is, we’ve got a timeline visitor, so-”
“Yes,” says another voice, one which - Loki is vaguely able to register through the abrupt fog of misery and self-pity he has been cast into - he might actually recognise from somewhere, “but who exactly is it?”
“Come and see! You’ll like him.”
“Well if you would just tell me who- oh no. Not you .”
Loki’s head snaps up. He’s greeted by the sight of Mobius, grinning like the smuggest little shit this side of Asgard, and… himself?
“You- you’re me?” he manages, after a long few seconds.
The other Loki fixes him with an expression of profound disdain. “Absolutely not.”
“Loki…” says Mobius, with a placating squeeze of the other Loki’s shoulder.
Other Loki sighs. “Alright. Fine. Yes, I’m you, but with several years’ life experience and a not insignificant amount of therapy. The last thing I want is to be confronted with my embarrassing former self before I’ve even had a chance to get some mead in.”
“Loki,” says Mobius, more sternly this time.
Other Loki rolls his eyes. “What?”
“Firstly, it's barely 8:30am - way too early for mead. Secondly," he gestures at Loki, "he’s not going to be here much longer, most likely. Don’t you want to say something nice before he gets tossed back into the uncaring winds of time?”
The other Loki turns to leave - and then he turns back, and marches up to Loki with an expression of pained sincerity. “I’m- actually sort of proud of you, I suppose,” he says, after a moment, reaching out to pat Loki’s shoulder with a grimace. “You are… you’re alright.”
Loki stares up at his own frowning face. He’s a good liar, but he’s awful at being sincere. It’s good to see that some things don’t change. “You look old,” he says. “And you’re so incompetent at being friendly to me that I might almost mistake you for Thor.”
Other Loki groans. “See! This is why I didn’t want to talk to you.”
“Because I’m younger and more eloquent?”
“No, because you use a façade of narcissism to distract onlookers from your utter lack of self-worth.”
“Ah,” says Loki. “Hmm.”
Other Loki takes him briefly by the shoulders, and gives him a gentle shake. “I am, sincerely, quite proud of you. However, you are unbelievably annoying, and I cannot bear to be in a room with you a moment longer. I’m going to go and make breakfast. And I’m starting on the mead.”
“It’s still not even 9am,” says Mobius, shaking his head as the other Loki goes breezing past him, ignoring him entirely. He turns back toward Loki with a chuckle. “Well, I guess it’s a funny old day. I suppose we can make allowances.”
“Uh huh,” says Loki, who feels as though his brain might actually have stopped working several minutes previously.
Mobius fixes him with an encouraging smile. “Probably a bit to get your head around, huh?”
Loki snorts. “Just a bit.”
“Mmm. You want me to get you some breakfast?”
“I think,” says Loki, “that I need to lie down for a minute first.” And with that, he crawls back under the covers.
Mobius chuckles, and Loki feels the bed dip slightly as he leaps over to kiss him on the forehead. “Ok, well, you just shout if you need anything.”
And Loki waits until he is entirely certain that Mobius has left the room before slowly, thoughtfully, raising a hand to touch the spot he kissed.