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“What’s it like?” He inquires gently, the curiosity getting the better of him. The dark-haired man sitting on the ground, his knees digging into his chest, draped in the TVA standardised variant jumpsuit, snaps his head at the man in question. His blue-green eyes are red-rimmed, tears shining on the pale skin of his sunken cheeks - a frightened little boy indeed.
The agent in front of him feels a stab of guilt at the plight of the trickster. Watching him heartbroken behind the screen in the time theatre and watching that defeated expression, in reality, is far more jarring for Mobius than he’d anticipated. He knows as the final reel stuck on the grey screen that Loki has seen it all. He’s seen his mother’s death ー something he was not supposed to see. Mobius wants to comfort him, the urge to pull the variant into his arms is novel and strong. But he also knows it would not be well received. He wants to say something, anything, to draw out the persona that Loki has hidden beneath layers and layers of self-loathing, hate, trickery, mischief, and pessimism. Everything carefully curated over time, all justifying his actions.
What comes out is entirely different, his tongue seemingly having a mind of its own as he clarifies the previous question. “What’s it like to have a mother?”
Here’s the thing. Mobius never had one. He was created by the Time-Keepers. An adult. A microscopic cog in the seamlessly complex system for a single glorious purpose. He’d never been a child. Had no parents, no siblings, no significant others- probably not even friends. Maybe Ravonna came in the closest to being a friend he had. Even then she was more of an ally, a colleague, and now a superior.
For a man who’d spent his entire existence studying the lives on the sacred timeline, he sure wished to know what it would have been like to actually live on one of them. Not that he ever dared to voice the dream out loud. Squashing it like a bug in its infancy, lest it come back and fester. Such musings were hazardous. For his work. For his life. However, all the rationalisation did not stop his mind from occasionally wavering into the relationship of mothers with their children. The analyst had yet to decipher the unconditionality and depth of that particular bond.
In all the hours he’s spent studying Lokis, especially this particular Loki, he’s come to envy it a little bit. There is an itch, slowly spreading under his skin, seeing Frigga dote upon her adopted son, believing in him, encouraging him, when no one else would; how would it feel for him to have a mother. If nothing else, observing their interactions over the years has helped Mobius realise that Loki was not a bad guy. The unshaken faith and his reach of trust in this variant is something that Mobius has borrowed from Frigga. Now, at this moment, the silver-haired man only hopes that it is worth it.
"You're not." Loki finally speaks. The voice cracks, charred like burnt coal. The ache is so palpable, that it spills from his eyes. Raw. Unhinged.
"What was that?"
"You're not. You're not my mother." Loki whispers. "That's the last thing I said to her." He buries his face in his hands. Stifling the sobs that threaten to wreck out of him like floods from a poorly constructed dam.
I know. Mobius bites back the reply. He knows what Loki's last words to his mother were. He'd witnessed it all. Like a viewer sees the character in a movie. An audience on the other side of the tragedy. Not a direct part of it, and yet feeling low at the sorrows of the thespian. The universe was a stage and Mobius was the man in front of the screen, Loki being the story's protagonist and antagonist.
The TVA agent shakes his head to get the analogy out. Loki would have loved this metaphor ─ the thought lingers in his subconscious as he tries to figure out a way to grant comfort to the prisoner. "Is it alright if I sit here?" Mobius asks, settling down beside Loki without waiting for an affirmation. The wall is hard on his back, his knees crack, and Mobius pulls back a hiss as lets go, letting the floor take the weight fully. For a place that is within the bounds of a singularity, Mobius sure feels he’s getting old. The cells degenerating at a rate more than they are regenerating.
He has to stop Loki from spiralling down into a well of guilt. His initial question has to wait. He tries another tactic then. This one is deliberate and well thought out. No running away with questions to satisfy his own thirst. “Tell me a happy memory about her.” He urges. Tender. Voicing it out like fingers caressing the soft grass on a dewy winter’s morning.
Loki straightens his neck a little, staring at a wall in front, decidedly avoiding Mobius. They both know it does nothing to hide the still-wet rivulets of tears on his face, the defeated, battered carcass that once glowed with magic and mischief alike. Mobius glances at him for a second, then lowers his gaze for the sake of propriety. The question itself feels like he’s barged into something personal, and private, and as ironic as it is, the agent wants to uphold the illusion of him providing a saving grace to his captive. It is laughably morose.
The silence lingers forming an anthropomorphised entity between the scant inches they have between the two, Mobius almost giving up when Loki speaks, as if sharing a secret. Which he might as well be doing - completely forgetting that there are no secrets between him and Mobius, not from his side anyway.
“When I was little, we used to sneak out after everyone was asleep. Only me and her. No Thor. We’d used to ride to the end of the capital into the meadows and watch the night sky. I used to practice my magic to create drawings in the air connecting the dots of the stars and weave stories about the characters.”
Mobius could easily picture the scene. "Aah, the ol' tale of light in the dark!" He can only imagine how beautiful it would have been. At the same time, Loki thinks about the innocence he possessed, the happiness that he felt as a child, an ephemeral speck of dust in the universe and a couple of other morbidly drab things. He could create a spectacular eulogy for his childhood right then.
"Yeah." He shakes out a breath, running a palm across his face, a manoeuvre to wipe off the tears. A futile attempt to make himself presentable. How very ungodly of him! "Only, I realised as I grew up, that the darkness takes up a lot more space than the light."
"No." Mobius disagrees. "That's not the way I see it. You see, there was only darkness in the beginning. The light is winning." He looks squarely into Loki's eyes as he says the last line.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Loki squints because he catches the care in Mobius' stance. The deep blues twinkle with empathy, acting like there's something more than an interrogation going on in the room. And all he can think about is what could Mobius possibly want from him. He'd gladly take pruning out of existence than sit here, pathetic, watching his life in reels with a mortal who's trying to make him into something he's not. Mobius can take the I-can-fix-him energy and fuck right off.
"You're the big metaphor guy. And you're smart. So you tell me!" Loki wants to punch the mortal's face, split the already broken nose into two and finish the job once and for all.
"Oh please stop it with your cheap parlour tricks." Loki grasps to get his footing back. It's all over anyway. He'll do anything for the man to just leave him alone. He can take crude remarks, cutting dry hatred, and red-hot rage. What he can’t digest is the kindness, the objectivity, the openheartedness he’s being treated with by someone who works for the enemy. "You think you can lure me into a false sense of comfort with little anecdotes about my past?"
"Isn't it working though?" Mobius replies, just a bit too smug for the Asgardian's liking.
"You want to prove I'm good? Is that what you want? You want to prove I had some good in me when I was a kid a few thousand years ago?" Loki gnarls and spits the words out. They feel bitter on his tongue, venom from a snake’s mouth.
"For starters, yeah. Tell me another story." Loki sneers. Mobius jostles around, his shoulder brushing faintly with the god's. "Come on. Indulge me.” He coaxes, calm as a fucking ocean. “We both know you're not going anywhere." Loki puffs out a sigh and narrates another incident about his mother. To his frustration, nostalgia strikes like a rattled viper. Hard and fast. He loathes the fact that Mobius is winning.
“See, I knew you weren’t all bad!” Mobius says with a genuine and triumphant smile.
Loki lets out a wet chuckle. “Yes, it took a lot of hard work to be pure evil. It did help though that I was a monster.” Mobius wants to smack his head at the comment.
“Monsters do not feel regret, Loki. Whatever you are, you are not a monster.” He waits for a comeback, a wile retort, a lash of anger, a humph of frustration. Nothing comes, except for a hollowed-out voice ringing through the room. “Semantics. Why are you here? If you think you can save me, you’re not the first. You know what happens to the ones who try to.”
“Who says I want to offer you salvation? I'm here to offer you something better. Salvation is overrated as it is.” The smirk he catches at the end of Loki's lips is a win that Mobius will wholeheartedly accept.