Archive of Our Own

It takes Mobius a while to adjust to the passage of time. Three months, two weeks, and four days, to be exact. It’s not until he’s standing in line at Starbucks, midway through his usual order of a venti white chocolate mocha with extra caramel drizzle, that he realizes. The barista reminds him a little bit of B-15—not much in appearance, but mostly by the way she holds himself—and Mobius thinks, casual and off-hand, she’s here early today.

The thing about being a displaced variant is that—well, you’re displaced. There’s a man running around with Mobius’s face, with Mobius’s body, with Mobius’s kids. Calling himself Don, which is both a little ridiculous and kinda cool, in an understated sort of way. And, to be honest, he’s doing a lot better at it than Mobius ever did, so Mobius figured he’d leave him to it. After standing across the street for a while and staring like a total creep, Mobius turned right back around, booked a rental car, and high-tailed it as far in the opposite direction as he could go.

Anybody with more than two brain cells to rub together would probably ask a few follow-up questions. Like, why didn’t you just go to a different timeline, Mobius? Or what are you running from, Mobius? Or even—and don’t worry, Mobius asks himself this one, too— what happened to glorious purpose, Mobius?

But that one’s an easy answer. That was always Loki’s thing, not Mobius’s. For a while, it just rubbed off on him by proximity, and as soon as Loki left, so did the purpose. C’est la vie.

Mobius isn’t an analyst anymore. He isn’t even employed. He just sits in his grubby little hotel room in the infamous Big Apple, visits this overpriced and overcrowded Starbucks, maybe just because the capitalist hellscape, corporate-shill aspect of it reminds him of home, and lets the time pass.

Now, someone with a lot more than two brain cells to rub together—someone like Loki, maybe, or by extension Sylvie—would then ask another follow-up question. What are you doing with all this time?

Sylvie has asked him that. Numerously. Repeatedly. So much so that she’s starting to veer more towards bothersome pest than concerned friend, which is just one of the many ways that he knows she’s really a Loki.

He tried to rent a jetski, a few weeks in. He didn’t even make it past the front desk.

Honestly, the main thing he’s been doing with his time is thinking about Loki. Which, to be fair, is the main thing he’s always been doing with his time, for as long as he can remember, so nothing’s changed, when you really think about it.

Then again, everything’s changed.

“Sir?” The B-15-esque barista quirks an eyebrow. “Is that all for you?”

Is that all. God. What a question.

Mobius straightens himself up, pastes on a cheery grin, and waves at the glossy pastry cabinet. “Tack on a banana muffin, would’ja?”

She does, then types his name into the system without even asking for it. Could be a testament to how much he comes here. Could be the fact that his name is Mobius, for Christ’s sake. But hell, it’s New York City. They’ve seen weirder.

He lets her keep the change.

𖧧

Mobius dreams now. That’s a new thing. He didn’t dream back at the TVA, not really, because he didn’t exactly sleep at the TVA. Sure, he took a little power nap here and there, because who wouldn’t? Endless slogging through backlogs and crunching numbers does that to a guy. But it was different. Efficient. Necessary.

These days, he goes all out. As all out as he can, anyway, when all he has to work with is a subpar hotel mattress that feels more like a plank of wood than a place to rest his tired old bones.

Subpar. God, he sounds like Loki.

The thought sends him spiraling, just a little bit, so he stares blankly at the hotel nightstand to clear his head. His phone screen, conveniently placed on top of said nightstand, glows a cheery green, and the speakers obediently begin to emit the McDonald’s theme song.

Speak of the devil. Or the devil’s variant, at least.

Mobius doesn’t move to answer the call, but Sylvie gets through anyway, because of course she does. “Mobius,” she greets.

“That’s my name,” he agrees.

He can hear her rolling her eyes. It’s very loud. “What are you doing right now?” Without pausing to let him answer, even if he had a good answer to give, she barrels on. “Wait, don’t tell me. You’re in your hotel room, staring at the wall…” Nightstand, Mobius corrects absently, but lets her have her fun. Why is it that Lokis always have to have their fun at another guy’s expense? More importantly, why is that guy always Mobius? There’s other people in the world to pick on, he’s pretty sure.

“Eating a slice of pie,” Sylvie concludes triumphantly.

Mobius stares down at the slice of pie on his lap. “Sounds like a good time to me,” he replies, because they both know she’s right on the money. She always is.

“Look, Mobius,” she continues, without acknowledging his pitiful response. “There’s a man at work who I think you’d get along with. Nice hair, cool bike, leather jacket sort of chap.”

Mobius chews thoughtfully on his bite of pie. It’s very pie-like. “...Okay?”

Sylvie waits a second, obviously thinking something’s going to magically click in his brain, before heaving out a long-suffering sigh. “Single?” she adds, meaningfully.

“Oh,” Mobius says. Automatically, his brain jumps on the opportunity, playing it out to all its million possible conclusions. Mobius and leather-jacket chap. Mobius on the back of some guy’s motorbike. Boring old Mobius and Sylvie’s fry cook with daddy issues and nice hair.

Would Loki be watching? Would he see Mobius? Would he think he’d given up on him? Would he be jealous? Upset? Happy for him?

It doesn’t matter, anyway. Mobius was never going to say yes.

Sylvie’s clearly taken his silence for disapproval. “You are into blokes, yeah? I can hunt around for someone a little more your speed—”

“Sylvie, Sylvie,” he butts in, rubbing absently at his temple. God, he would kill for some Advil. “That’s nice of you, really, but I’m okay. I’m not looking for anyone.”

This time, the pause is much heavier. Mobius’s migraine intensifies.

“…Aren’t you?”

Mobius lets out a sigh that rattles his bones, knocks them all around, some into place and some out of it. He wonders again if Loki can see him. If he thinks he’s being pathetic and sad, like Sylvie clearly does. Mobius wonders if he is being pathetic and sad.

If his dreams are anything to go by, then yeah, he’s looking for Loki. He sees him constantly—in flashes of green, watery eyes at the end of the gangplank, the glossy back of a stranger’s head, the upturned collar of a high-fashion mannequin. He sees him in his nightmares. In his fantasies. He dreams that they’re together, that they’re apart, that they’ll be inextricably linked for the rest of their lives, and that it’ll be all Mobius’s fault. He was the one who brought Loki to the TVA, after all. He was the one who told him to hoof it.

Mobius was never supposed to be a part of Loki’s life. It’s just hard, sometimes, to remember that.

Sylvie sighs, and it sounds a touch more sympathetic now. “Mobius,” she says. “He made his choice.”

“I know,” Mobius replies, because he does. “I know he did.”

The thing about looking for someone is that it takes a little more than dreams. It takes action. It takes planning. Right now, Mobius doesn’t seem to be up for either of those things, so it’s all pointless. He thinks up a million ideas, each of them more ridiculous and far-fetched than the last, then gets worked up enough to order a second slice of pie, another iced mocha with an extra espresso shot, and silently stew in his designated corner of Starbucks until knockoff B-15 kicks him out. At the end of the day, he’s no closer to finding Loki. He doesn’t even know where to start.

How do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?

Mobius knows the answer. He knows from decades of hunting the woman that’s currently trying to set him up with a man half his age over the phone. 

You don’t.

“Thanks for calling, Sylvie,” he says, because he can tell the conversation isn’t going anywhere productive any time soon. “But I’ll be okay. Really.”

Sylvie makes an unconvinced noise, which is fair enough.

Mobius stares down at his pie. Key lime, because he’s a predictable sort of guy. He wishes Loki were here to share it with him.

That’s enough of that, probably.

“I just need a little more time,” he says, and he doesn’t know who he’s trying to convince more—her or him. Or maybe even Loki, if he can hear him.

After they hang up, Mobius lifts his fork in the air, closing his eyes. If he concentrates, he can imagine that he sees Loki somewhere in the formless dark. “Cheers,” he murmurs, and takes a bite.

It doesn’t taste as good as he remembers.

𖧧

The thing about wanting is that nothing is ever enough. It’s like that goddamn mouse with the cookie. You give Mobius a case file, he wants the real thing. You give him the real thing, he wants friendship. You give him friendship, and he wants—

Well. A hell of a lot more than that. 

It doesn’t feel right, all this one-sidedness. It feels wrong, in the sense that it feels familiar. It feels like Mobius’s life from before; pre-Loki, but also post. After the Loki he couldn’t prune, the boy on the dock with his brother. The one who was just minding his own business. The one who died by Ravonna’s hand.

In hindsight, that was probably where it all began. The wanting, that is. The obsession, as Von called it, and plenty of others besides her. X-5, definitely. He called it a lot of worse things, too. And Mobius isn’t usually this type of guy, but god, did that punch feel good. 

Obsession, though. As much as Mobius protested the label, it’s a pretty accurate one. It was accurate then, and it’s beginning to feel accurate now. Dreams. Nightmares. Hallucinations. Fixations. One-sided, all of it. Not so much as a peep from Loki, not even a flash of green light when Mobius closes his eyes. 

He’s been praying.

Oof. Talk about an intense label. He’s been having conversations, is maybe a better way to put it, if you ignore the fact that ritualistic, one-sided conversations with someone who, for all intents and purposes, is a lowercase-g god, sounds a lot like a dictionary definition. 

Maybe Loki deserves the uppercase, come to think of it. If anyone does, it’s him.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Mobius muses aloud, crossing his ankles at the foot of his bed. It’s still a little strange, to just be wearing socks. For as long as he can remember, Mobius has been wearing the same pair of shoes. Immovable, like an action figure. Or a cartoon character, more accurately. One of those boring little desk-job guys who never does anything exciting.

The silence echoes, and in it, Mobius finds himself shaking his head. “Nah,” he corrects. “I’m just messing with you. For all that peacocking, you know, you’re really more of a house cat.”

He imagines Loki scrunching up his nose in displeasure, imagines the stiff I beg your pardon that would follow, all mock-offended but secretly pleased, way deep down there, which is really Loki in a nutshell. Always hiding. Always softer than he pretends to be. Uppercase is too harsh for him. Too self-important for someone so sacrificial. 

I know what kind of god I want to be. For you.

Mobius closes his eyes. He’s too much, sometimes. Even for himself. Ravonna told him once that he had a penchant for masochism, and while he kinda thought she meant it in a kinky way at the time, he thinks he sees what she means now. His own thoughts are torturous. Spiraling. Obsessive.

One-sided.

Mobius is talking again before he even decides to open his mouth. “Why’d you do it, Loki?”

It’s a rhetorical question. He knows why. He knows that the Loom was failing, knows that they were out of time, knows that Loki made the hard choice, the only choice. But was it really? Couldn’t Timely have done it? Couldn’t they have figured out another way?

Deep down, he thinks he knows the truth. He gets flashes, sometimes—in his dreams, in his subconscious. Impossible things, scenes from lives he never lived, timelines that don’t exist anymore. He remembers Loki; scrambled, frantic, desperate. Remembers the flash of a pea coat in his driveway, a nervous hand running through glossy hair. Maybe remembers isn’t the right word, but Mobius likes to think that it is. He likes to imagine, even now, that he’s got his finger on the pulse. That he’s two steps ahead.

It’s a nice thought. He’s always been pretty bad at fooling himself, though. 

Case in point: the silence of his hotel room. If he strains his ears, he thinks he can hear his neighbor’s bed squeaking through the wall.

He stops straining his ears.

Well, he’s beat. A long day of doing nothing, as usual, has left him all tuckered out. He’s losing his touch, he thinks. He used to be able to spend eons doing nothing, and he’d never even yawn. Perks of gettin’ older, he guesses.

He shifts against his pillows, taking one in his arms and trying to fluff some life into it, spooning it the same way he would a breathing body, pressing his cheek against the cotton. Then, he stares blankly at his nightstand. Back here again.

Oh.

He blinks.

The Advil is still there. 

Usually, a bottle of Advil on a hotel nightstand wouldn’t be anything to call home about. The thing is, though, Mobius definitely didn’t buy it, and it definitely wasn’t there a few minutes ago. The thing is, Mobius has been complaining about his headaches for the last couple days—nothing serious, just offhand remarks, the typical quips that he knew Loki would roll his eyes at, if he were here.

Loki’s not here. But the Advil is.

Unless there’s some new invisible superhero who gets his rocks off on doing insignificant and slightly creepy favors for old washed-up TVA analysts, there’s really only one explanation. 

Mobius sits up, moving to the edge of his bed. “Thanks, Loki,” he whispers, and it sounds more like a prayer than it ever has before. Soft. Reverent.

He pauses, one hand on the bottle. “I miss you,” he adds, quick and impulsive, before he can back out of it. 

In the adjacent room, his neighbor moans, uncomfortably loudly, then falls silent again. The headboard thumps angrily against the plaster.

Mobius nods. “Right,” he murmurs. “Okay.”

He swallows the pills dry.

𖧧

O.B.’s eyes are really wide behind those glasses. It’s cute. Makes him look all cartoony.

“You want me to analyze this?” he repeats, pinching the bottle between his forefinger and his thumb. A little line of confusion creases between his brows.

Mobius smiles pleasantly. “If you’ve got a minute.”

O.B. shrugs. “Time is relative,” he replies, pulling out a complicated-looking gizmo. Mobius doesn’t ask. “I’ve got plenty of minutes.”

“Great,” Mobius replies, then leans over to peer around O.B.’s head. “Hey, Victor. How’s it going?”

“M-Mobius,” Victor greets, waving a hand in the air. “Good to—see you.” He adjusts his faceplate, apparently in the middle of some dangerous, sparky-looking experiment. “It is going—well.”

Mobius shoots him a thumbs-up. “Glad to hear it, buddy.”

After everything with the Loom, Victor couldn’t exactly return to his timeline. It had already branched and moved on, twisting and re-forming in completely unpredictable ways. He could have chosen another branch, of course, but he chose to stay. Said he liked it better at the TVA, anyway.

Mobius used to know what that felt like.

Technically, he can come back here whenever he wants. And he does, fairly often—to stock up on cash, to say hi to the gang, to get a slice of key lime and a good ol’ cup of hot cocoa. He can get those things on Earth, of course, but it’s never really the same. Despite everything, he still loves this place. It’s still his home.

It’s just not the same without Loki.

Of course, Mobius doesn’t go around saying that to people. It’s embarrassing, really, because Loki was here for way less time than Mobius was, and theoretically, that means his disappearance should be easy to adjust to. Theoretically, Mobius should be able to go back to his old life, pre-Loki, with no kinks in the system.

Mobius has never really been all that good with theoreticals. If there’s one thing he’s learned from a lifetime of desk duty, it’s that nothing is ever as simple as it seems on paper.

“Hey, Mobius.”

Without turning around, Mobius waves a vague hand in greeting. “Hey, Casey.”

“Running low on funds?”

Casey comes up to O.B.’s desk, deposits a hefty stack of files, and turns to Mobius in question. 

Mobius scrunches his nose. “Nah, I’m fine. Just needed to see O.B.”

“Oh.” Casey rings O.B.’s bell, smiling, and O.B. pops right up from behind the counter, like a non-threatening jack-in-the-box. Mobius thinks he prefers this version. Maybe all jack-in-the-boxes should just be replaced with O.B. More kid-friendly. Less nightmare-inducing.

“Casey!” O.B. cheers. “Did you get those files I asked for?”

“Yep.” Casey pats the top of the stack. “All fifty-eight of them, right here.”

“Woah.” Mobius eyes the teetering tower with fresh intimidation. “You goin’ for a world record?”

O.B. furrows his brow. “The world record for consecutive file-reading is three-hundred-and-forty-two,” he informs him. “So no. That sounds like fun, though!”

Something jolts sideways in Mobius’s brain. He blinks. “Wait. Me and Loki went through three-hundred-and-forty-two files,” he remembers. “When we were researching apocalypses.”

“Yes!” O.B. agrees cheerfully. “Congratulations. It’s a tough one to beat.”

To his right, Casey clears his throat. “O.B.,” he says, in a strained sort of tone that Mobius thinks is supposed to resemble a whisper. “We’re trying not to mention—the L-word? Remember?”

O.B.’s lips tug into a frown. “But I didn’t say it,” he protests, and waves at Mobius. “He did.”

Excuse him. Mobius definitely didn’t say anything about love. He thought it, maybe, but unless O.B. can read minds now—which is a terrifying idea—he can’t just associate Loki’s name with love, can’t just assume that Mobius is in—

Oh.

Mobius doesn’t need a mirror to know that his cheeks are flushed a ruddy shade of red. He gives a little chuckle, and can tell from everyone’s pitying expressions that it comes out wrong. “Come on, guys,” he tries. “We can talk about Loki. It’s not like he’s Voldemort.”

In the background, Victor knits his brow. “Who?”

Mobius sighs. “It doesn’t matter,” he dismisses. “It’s—we can talk about Loki, guys. It’s fine. He’s our friend, and he’s—I mean, he’s the whole reason we still have the TVA. It would be weird if we didn’t talk about him.”

O.B. nods. “Oh, we do talk about him,” he replies. “Just not around you.”

There’s a swift smack as Casey lowers his forehead into his palms. “O.B.,” he groans. “That was supposed to be a secret. Remember, we talked about secrets?”

“Ohhh,” O.B. muses. “Sorry. I forgot.” He returns to his workstation, muttering under his breath. “So many rules.”

Mobius isn’t sure that he’s moved in the last several moments. He might be frozen, actually, just like this. Some weird side-effect of frequent Earth-to-TVA travel. He hopes not. That would be really inconvenient. He’d have to get all his food delivered. Does the Starbucks on Main do interdimensional carry-out? He’ll have to look into it next time he goes.

“Mobius,” Casey says, and snaps in front of his face. “You good?”

“Mhm,” Mobius manages, his voice tight and thin. So they don’t think he’s coping well. So they think he needs to be—tiptoed around, like a sleeping baby. So they think he’s some obsessive loser who can’t stop grieving someone who’s not even gone. So what? That’s—fine. It’s fine. He’s peachy-keen.

Casey sighs. “And this is why we don’t say the L-word,” he mutters. He gives Mobius a commiserating clap on the back before leaving.

A resounding silence follows his exit. Mobius fidgets with his fingers, with his clothes, with his hair. He rocks back and forth on his feet. Victor sends him sympathetic glances from across the room, and while Mobius appreciates the sentiment, it’s really not helping.

Finally, there’s a loud clatter as O.B. drops the wrench he’d been holding, followed by a high-pitched gasp. Mobius scrunches his nose, leaning over the counter to peer down at a disheveled pile of scientist. “What? What is it?”

O.B. blinks up at him, eyes huge. “Where did you say you got this?” he asks, holding up the Advil.

“Um,” Mobius starts, and waves his hand in a vague gesture. “You know. It just sort of—appeared.”

O.B. absorbs this information. “Well,” he says, clambering to his feet. He shoves the Advil back inside his machine, tracking through the instantaneous readings that appear on the adjacent screen. “That’s fascinating, really. Because given these readings, the bottle has no temporal aura.”

Mobius frowns. “What does that mean?”

“It means that—” O.B. breaks off, shooting him an apologetic glance. “Permission to say the L-word?”

Mobius pinches the bridge of his nose. “Oh, for Christ’s— yes. Yeah, knock yourself out. Jesus.” 

O.B., to his credit, just nods. “It means that Loki conjured this from a place which has no time. And a place that has all time.” He furrows his brow, looking up at Mobius. “You are looking for Loki, right? That’s why you gave me this?”

“I’m—” Mobius blinks. He shifts back on his heels, clicking his tongue noisily against the roof of his mouth. He stares at the ceiling. It’s really high up there. “I’m not not looking for Loki,” he says, finally, to the left-side air vent. He thinks he sees something skittering around in there, which is mildly concerning. Might just be Miss Minutes, though. Which, come to think of it, is maybe more concerning.

“Right. So you’re looking for Loki,” O.B. says easily. “That’s cool! I’ve been looking for him, too.”

Mobius is so surprised that he forgets to address the air vent. He goggles at O.B. “You have?”

O.B. nods eagerly. “Of course!” He picks up the top file from his teetering stack, beginning to flip through it. Without looking up, he continues, “Loki is the person in charge of all time now. He’s the reason we still have our jobs. He’s the reason we still have our lives. We need to find him, so that we can figure out how this new system works. We need more data.”

“Oh,” Mobius says, absorbing this. “So it’s just about time management.”

“Well, yes,” O.B. admits, then tilts his head. “And no. He’s been there by himself for a while now. Somebody should probably go check on him.”

Mobius feels his heart tap-dance in his chest. It really needs to work on its rhythm. He gives it a four out of ten, at best. “So you’re saying we can do that? Check on him?”

O.B. looks up, pointing at the file. “Not yet,” he replies. “But we’re going to get there. How much do you know about Yggdrasil?”

𖧧

Fifty-eight files later, Mobius is left with aching eye sockets, a tree-shaped afterimage when he blinks, and a renewed appreciation for Norse mythology. He’s always been interested, of course. Kind of comes with the territory of being a certified Loki Expert. But this— oh, god. Loki’s outdone himself. As usual.

The TVA knew, basically, that the branches had re-formed into a sort of tree. It’s not visible, since Loki made the stellar decision to rip a hole in the fabric of time and space and hide himself away in another dimension, but they can get a more or less accurate impression of the timelines from the TVA’s retrofitted devices. The impression in question was vaguely tree-shaped, and it seemed sensible enough, if a little overly poetic, which was Loki all over, so they ran with it.

This, though—Mobius had no idea. He should have thought of it earlier, should have thought of it immediately, and it really smarts that he didn’t. He’s supposed to be the guy for all this. He’s supposed to be the consultant, the specialist, the analyst with high rates and a flawless record. And in a lot of ways, he still is. He’s got a list of facts about Yggdrasil stored neatly away in his brain, right alongside Baldr the Brave and Freyr the Fertile. He knows his stuff.

The thing is, lately, that stuff has been—re-homed. Pushed aside for more useful trains of thought, like how late he can possibly wake up and still make it to the hotel breakfast with time to snag a fresh waffle. And for more useless trains of thought, like realizing that he really should have kissed Loki while he still had the chance. Realizing that there’s a pretty good chance he would have kissed back.

Right. Not thinking about that.

The point is, all of Mobius’s super-special stuff isn’t gonna help anyone by just sitting there. So he’s dusted it off, along with all of O.B.’s files, and they’ve gotten to work.

He forgot how much theoretical paradoxes make his head hurt.

“So Loki’s shaped the timelines after Yggdrasil,” he reiterates, popping an Advil from his magic space bottle. He’s joined O.B. in sitting on the floor behind his desk, which is, at this point, more paper than linoleum. “Technically, that’s supposed to be somewhere people can visit, right? It’s a meeting place.”

“Ah!” O.B. points at him. “A meeting place for gods.”

“Right,” Mobius concedes, slumping again. “Which we aren’t.”

In the pause that follows, he squints over at O.B. He appears to have not heard him, and is instead staring off into space, blinking pleasantly at the empty air. Mobius narrows his eyes. “…Right?”

Sometimes, he’s not so sure about these things. It’s good to double-check. Besides, if anyone is a secret god, it might just be O.B. Mobius wouldn’t put it past him.

“What?” O.B. asks, still distracted. “Oh, right. Anyway, just because the timelines are shaped like Yggdrasil doesn’t mean that it’s actually Yggdrasil. We don’t know if the multiversal tree has any of the same qualities as it does in the legends.”

Mobius quirks a brow. “How’s that even work, huh? Chicken-and-egg sort of situation, isn’t it.”

“Yes,” O.B. agrees. “Which came first—Loki’s creation, or the stories of it?”

They sit in silence for a minute. 

“Boy,” Mobius says. “Time paradoxes sure do make me hungry.” He stands to his feet, stretching his arms over his head until his spine pops like a glow-stick. “You want anything from the automat?”

“Ooh, yes! Pecan pie,” O.B. requests politely. “If they have it.”

From the back room, Victor’s head pokes out. “If—If it’s not too much trouble—”

“One hot cocoa, coming right up,” Mobius says, and does a double thumbs-up, one for each of them. “You got it, fellas.”

As he heads off in search of the automat, his thoughts branching and stretching like tree limbs, he realizes that this is the first time since—well, since— that the TVA has really felt like home.

Maybe he could get used to this.

𖧧

He doesn’t stay. He’s retired, technically, so he really can’t. No one wants him loafing around the place, even if they all say they do. He’d just be taking up space. Sitting at an empty desk.

He didn’t used to feel so lonely, when it was just him. Now, he knows exactly what he’s missing. 

Of course, even retired, Mobius has taken work back with him. He’s curled up in the corner of Starbucks, tangled-up earbuds catching on the buttons of his shirt, playing something that Spotify claims is supposed to be soothing white noise, though it kinda just sounds like garbage. Loki would hate it. He has to admit, though, it’s a pretty good background for all the Norse mythology and theoretical physics that he’s been sifting through. Goes pretty well with his mocha, too.

It’s not work, really. Just a side project. A hustle, as the young kids would say. A thought experiment, a rabbit hole, whatever else you want to call it.

(Obsession.)

The voice in his head sounds a lot like Loki. Mobius wrinkles his nose. Shut it, he thinks, just in case gods of time and space and mischief are able to read minds now. That seems like the sort of thing they would do. It definitely seems like the sort of thing Loki would do—just to mess with him, if nothing else.

Mobius sighs. Shifts position in his chair. He stares down at the legend of Yggdrasil until all the letters blend together. He doesn’t even need to see the words, really—he memorized it a while back.

“Sir?”

Mobius looks up. Barista B-15 is hovering near his chair, mop held between her hands, looking a little nervous. Which is ridiculous, obviously. Mobius doesn’t think he’s a very intimidating guy.

He shoots her a smile, and thankfully, she softens a little. “We’re closing in about ten minutes,” she tells him. “Just so you know.”

Sure enough, when Mobius glances out the window, the sun is already low in the sky, painting the patio in dusky shades of orange and purple. “Aw, man,” he says. “Must’ve really been in the zone.”

Tentatively, she smiles back at him. “Don’t worry about it. It happens.” Her head dips as she looks down at his files, taking in all the scattered papers and chicken-scratch notes. Mobius follows her gaze. It’s a mess, really. He probably looks insane.

“Looks interesting,” she offers, after a second, which is a nice way to put it. Her eyes narrow as she flicks her gaze over his appearance, gathering up information for an educated guess. “Are you… a professor?”

Mobius chuckles. “Something like that.”

He sweeps the papers back into their designated files, and the files back into their designated briefcase. When he’s done, he turns back to the barista. “Have a good night, Julie.”

“Night, Mobius.”

He waves, then heads back to his hotel. 

Of course he knew her name. It was on her nametag, for Christ’s sake.

𖧧

When he gets back to his room, Loki is sitting on his bed.

Mobius would usually be better prepared for this, but it’s been a rough couple of months. He drops his briefcase, steps over all the scattered papers that fall out, and tackles Loki in a hug.

His arms go right through. He tumbles onto the bed, reeling, and blinks at the duvet in shock. Then, once he registers what just happened, in embarrassment. Oh, god. Oh, god. 

After a second, shock wins out. He scrambles to sit up, then goggles unabashedly at Loki’s holographic image. Gratifyingly, he looks just as embarrassed by their botched reunion as Mobius is. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Mobius,” Loki begins, then pauses. He takes a deep breath, clearly fighting for composure. Deep green flickers at the edges of his body, nearly violent in hue. “You need to stop.”

Mobius, because he has a defiant streak a mile wide, doesn’t stop. “Where are you? What were you thinking? Have you been able to do this the whole time? Was that—was that you, with the Advil, and…”

Something about Loki’s expression shuts him up. He looks just like he did that night in the observation room, those precious last few seconds on the gangplank. He looks like he’s grieving a life he never lived.

“Mobius,” he repeats, low and grave. “You need to stop.”

Unfortunately, Mobius’s default reaction is to try and twist Loki’s words into a joke. He thinks he knows what he’s talking about. He thinks he knows what this is. God, he must have been really bad to have warranted an intervention. Still, he ekes out an awkward chuckle, running a hand through his messy hair. “If you wanted me to quit yappin’, you could’ve just said so,” he tries.

Loki’s face is like stone. He doesn’t even twitch. “Mobius,” he says, for the third time, like he’s not sure how to say anything else. Then, most shocking of all: “Please.”

A sharp breath punches out of Mobius’s lungs. He thinks about making another joke— who are you, and what have you done with my—with— but he doesn’t have the heart for it. He can’t stomach the look on Loki’s face. Can’t sit eye-to-eye with his pain and not feel anything about it. 

Loki’s said it, over and over and over again—gods don’t plead. For him to be sitting here, hands folded in his lap, begging Mobius to stop looking for him—it’s important. It’s not something Mobius can take lightly.

He exhales. “Why?”

Finally, a new expression crosses Loki’s face—something between fondness, exasperation, and heartbreak. It wouldn’t be a pretty look, if anyone but Loki was wearing it. As it is, he’s here in Mobius’s bed, and he’s never been more beautiful.

“I did this for you,” he says—matter-of-fact, like it doesn’t rock Mobius’s whole world to hear. “I did this so you would live.”

Mobius flings a hand out, growing more desperate by the minute, frantically brainstorming ways to convince Loki to stay. For a guy who’s made his whole living on time, he knows exactly when he’s running out of it. He can feel the seconds slipping away, each more rushed and ephemeral than the last. “I am living,” he protests. “Look at me!”

Loki stares him dead in the eye. “I’m looking,” he says. “And this is not the life of the man that I know.”

The words have a practiced ring to them, like this isn’t exactly their first go-around. Sure enough, something clicks noisily in Mobius’s memory; expensive loafers on a gravel driveway. He wouldn’t have put it on Loki to reuse lines. But—desperate times, and all that.

He tries to think of an answer. In the heartbeat of time that it takes him, though, Loki has already disappeared. He leaves nothing behind, not even a wrinkle of the duvet where he had been sitting. There’s nothing at all to prove that he was ever there. Nothing at all to prove that Mobius isn’t losing his ever-loving mind.

The Advil bottle has been empty for weeks now, but Mobius still keeps it on his nightstand. Now, driven by some urgent, inane whim, he picks it up and hurls it across the room, throwing his whole arm into the motion. It makes an unsatisfying clink against the plaster, then falls forgotten to the baseboard below.

He feels embarrassed, suddenly, at the thought that Loki might have seen.

“You asshole,” he says, and resists the urge to punch a pre-flattened hotel pillow. “You—Jesus. You absolute asshole.”

None of it feels like enough. The Advil, the curse, the tears that follow. Without removing his shoes, Mobius lays down on the bed, stares at the wall, and closes his eyes. I didn’t mean it, he prays. But he doesn’t say sorry. He can’t.

He blinks. Then, almost shyly, a slice of key lime pie appears on the nightstand. It looks like it was plucked straight from the automat, plastic spork and all.

Mobius stares at it for a very long time. Then, he laughs until he cries.

𖧧

He tries to live. He really does. He stops frequenting the TVA, except for the occasional social call. He has a couple more conversations with Julie at Starbucks. He rents a jetski. For real this time.

It’s peaceful, out here on the water. Back when Mobius used to be Don, and Don used to be Donny, his mother would take him out on the lake. She would let him sit in front, grab the handles with his tiny fists, pretend to drive while she covered his fingers with her own. Her voice was warm. Her skin was soft.

Feel the waves, she told him once, wrapping her arms around his pudgy middle. Isn’t it beautiful?

They had sat just like that, rocking together in the middle of Lake Eerie, two insignificant specks in a big, uncaring world. And she was right. It was beautiful.

She died three months later. Lung cancer, stage four. 

Sylvie’s been helping Mobius recover his memories. They have bi-monthly sessions, because any more would definitely be too much, and any less wouldn’t be enough. It feels a lot like therapy, which is another thing that Mobius is remembering, if only in the way that he never leaves a meeting with dry eyes, and Sylvie always comes prepared with tissues. It’s painful. But someone told him to live, and by god, he’s trying.

Alone, Mobius rocks on the waves. He kills the engine, lets the water carry him. “You would have liked her,” he says softly. “My mom.”

There’s an emerald glint off in the distance, refracted sunlight hitting a shiny rock, and Mobius smiles. “She woulda liked you, too. She was a sucker for strays. Cried at all the dog commercials.”

He pauses. “I know, I know. You’re not a dog. Spare me the rant.” Inadvertently, the corner of his mouth ticks up, trying to hold back a laugh. “A black cat, though. Now we’re talking.”

Except they aren’t. Not really. It’s just Mobius and the lake. His rental Sea-Doo and the tenuous strand of hope that he drags along behind it. Hope that Loki’s still out there. That he’s still watching. That he still cares.

“She woulda liked Frigga, too,” he murmurs. He leans back on his hands, stares up at the sky. “God, they woulda been unstoppable together. A force of nature. They coulda brought the house down.”

There’s a lot in the clouds today. A hammer. A dagger. An alarm clock. And, if Mobius tilts his head and squints his eyes, a three-legged horse with a mustache and a buzz-cut. That one’s his favorite.

He looks back out at the lake. He tries to imagine it; the ghost of his mother’s arms around him. Her chin on his shoulder. Her long dark hair tickling his neck. “I never apologized,” he says. “For what I said to you, when we first met.”

He lets the statement sit. That first day, his dig at Frigga hadn’t been calculated. After watching Loki’s entire life on the timeline, over and over and over again—after finally getting a chance to be in the same room as him, breathe the same air, watch those attractive expressions up close and personal—it hadn’t even taken ten minutes for Mobius’s carefully-constructed control to slip. He’d wanted so badly to get under Loki’s skin, the same way he got under his.

I’ll kill you.

What, like you did your mother?

“You didn’t kill her,” he admits. “Not then. Not ever. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.”

If you’d told the old Mobius, the one from that day, that in a couple years he’d be parked on a jetski in the middle of Newark, praying to Loki, with an empty bottle of Advil tucked into the pocket of his shorts, he would’ve laughed you out of the time theater. 

It’s funny, how time works.

Mobius never imagined that he would have so much in common with a god. He never imagined that losing someone could hollow him out so much. He was wrong on both counts. He was wrong about everything.

“I miss you,” he tells the water.

The waves sigh back at him.

𖧧

Sometimes, Mobius likes to take walks around the city. He’s never seen himself as a big-city guy, to be honest, and he doesn’t think anyone else does, either. Even as an analyst, he always had that sort of build where you could just take one look at him and imagine him raking leaves in the backyard of a blue suburban, or volunteering at a Midwestern bake sale. He’s not quick or cold enough for the city. He smiles too much. Says ope, sorry about that! instead of hey, I’m walkin’ here! Although, he has noticed that people don’t actually say that all that much. Usually they just grunt and give you the ol’ stink eye. It’s kinda a letdown.

Still, he likes to go walking. 

Paulie on the corner of Park and Fourth makes the best hot dogs, charred but not blackened, with a thick layer of ketchup and relish on top. Lisa at the hole-in-the-wall record store always gives him a “regular’s discount,” even though he’s only been going there for a few months. Frank sells him newspapers right by the entrance of Stark Tower, and he gives Mobius daily updates about his wife and three kids. Timmy just won the school spelling bee, which is pretty neat. Mobius definitely wasn’t winning spelling bees at that age. Wasn’t winning much of anything, really, except for participation trophies.

He’s witnessed three sidewalk robberies, two apartment fires, and a high-speed car chase. Every time without fail, a costumed superhero swooped in to save the day, clad in spandex and grinning for the cameras. Spider-Man even offered to help him cross the street, which made Mobius wonder if he should start getting highlights. It was nice of him to ask, though, and all the Peter Parker variants that Mobius has met have always been absolute peaches, so he politely declined. Once Peter realized that Mobius wasn’t geriatric, he seemed more embarrassed than anything else. Mobius assured him that it was an honest mistake. Then he called the barber up for an appointment.

A lot of times, he just looks around the streets, trying to see the city through Loki’s eyes. Trying to imagine what he felt, what he was thinking, when he came here. He didn’t know Paulie or Lisa or Frank. He never got the hot dogs with extra relish, or the regular’s discount at the record store. He was just a scared little kid, making a desperate play for control. Sacrificing his freedom to the highest bidder in hopes of finally belonging somewhere. In hopes of making something of himself.

And he hurt a lot of people in the process.

Mobius won’t say it’s okay, because it’s not. But he understands. He’s hurt people, too. The blood of countless timelines is on his hands. Sometimes, when he closes his eyes at night, he still sees the look on eight-year-old Loki’s face as Ravonna pruned him; the frozen expression of shock, of betrayal. He hadn’t even known Mobius for two minutes, and he already trusted him enough to regret it. 

Other times, he hears the screams. Feels the heat of a reset charge as he stepped through the time door, dooming entire worlds to non-existence.

He cranes his neck up to squint up at Stark Tower. Avengers Tower, really, though some days he forgets exactly where he is in the timeline, or which timeline he’s even in. He thinks Stark and Rogers might have patched it up in this one, which is a nice thought. Nicer than the Sacred Timeline, anyway. 

Technically, there’s a Loki in this timeline.

It’s not like he hasn’t thought about it. But he hasn’t seen him around, not in the papers or the streets or anywhere else, so there’s a good chance he’s just up on Asgard. And even if Mobius managed to get up there, then what? Loki would laugh him out of the palace, if he didn’t slit his throat first.

Yeah, Mobius could probably wriggle his way out of it. He’s a charming guy, and most Lokis have a pre-determined soft spot for him. But he’s too tired, and too old, to try. He doesn’t want to start from scratch with another Loki. He wants his Loki.

But his Loki made it real clear what he thought about that. So here they are.

Mobius takes a hearty bite of hot dog, then flips the paper open as relish drips down his chin. King T’Challa of Wakanda—Gone but not Forgotten, the headline reads. That, at least, situates him a bit. 

It’s not that he doesn’t feel sad about these sorts of things. Funerals for good men, slaughtered planets, nuclear war. It’s gut-wrenching. Devastating. It happens over and over and over again, until Mobius can predict time of death with the accuracy of a coroner. For a lot of his life, apocalypses were just words on a page. People were alive one day, dead the next, then alive again at the beginning. As soon as time starts to loop, so does life. A lot harder to get mopey about death, when everything is so zoomed out. It meant everything, and nothing at all. 

At least now, the story can go a little differently. The endings are limitless. Unwritten. Branching in infinite directions, infinite multiverses. Life begins again.

Mobius closes the paper. Stares up at the sky.

The Advil presses against his leg, secretive and close. A reminder of what he’s lost. A reminder of what he still has.

“I think I get it now,” he says, and a thick slice of pie appears in the clouds.

He goes home.

𖧧

It takes Mobius almost a year to find the right timeline. The more memories Sylvie recovers, the more he misses his boys. The more guilty he feels about leaving them, however accidentally he’d done it. He knows that there are dozens of timelines where he’s still there for them, but that means nothing at all. There’s timelines where all sorts of crazy things happened. There’s timelines where Mary never left, where Don’s mother never died, where he never had kids at all, where he had girls instead of boys. There’s timelines, infinite ones, where he never met Loki, and he never even knew what he was missing.

Mobius doesn’t give a rat’s ass about those timelines. The only ones he cares about are this one, and the one he left behind. The one he originally came from, way back when. He knows he can’t go back—knows it’s impossible, knows it was reset immediately after his arrest. The exact versions of Sean and Kevin that he raised, that he loved, will never exist again. 

But that doesn’t mean he can’t try.

O.B. helps. In-between gathering data on Yggdrasil and helping round up HWR variants, he scans the timelines with Mobius, running analyses on each of their components. They’re trying to find one that’s as close as possible to the spot he was plucked out of—one that’s missing a Don, but wouldn’t be too mixed-up from his sudden reappearance.

Like Mobius said—it takes a while. In the meantime, he breaks the lease on his shitty shoebox of a New York apartment, moves back into his old room at the TVA, and tries not to lose himself too much. Everyone’s got lives these days. Sylvie and B-15 have shacked up; O.B., Casey, and Victor make the perfect team, and the TVA’s running smoother than it ever has. People come in and out, clocking in whenever they want and going home to their timeline when they’re done.

B-15 has assured Mobius that the offer still stands, if he wants to do the same. Once he finds his boys, once he gets his life back. He can pop in any time.

He told her he would think about it.

And he’s still thinking about it, now, as he stands in front of the time door. He can see Don’s house— his house—right on the other side of it, blurred through orange glass. Scattered notes pinned up on the fridge, a Piranha Powersports brochure sitting on the island, decapitated G.I. Joes littered across the tile.

Mobius didn’t ask what happened to this timeline’s Don. He doesn’t want to know. He just knows that as soon as he steps past this door, his life will be completely different. New and old, all at once. He’s already frantically racking his strained memory, trying to remember if Sean’s favorite sandwich is PB&J or ham-and-cheese, trying to remember the name of Kevin’s best friend down the road, and if he’s currently allowed to go visit him or not. He doesn’t know who’s grounded, but it’s a safe bet to assume they both are. He doesn’t even know if these things are the same in this timeline. They’re probably not.

“Mobius,” B-15 says, and places a gentle hand on his shoulder. “What are you waiting for?”

Loki, he thinks, instantly, and regrets it just as fast. Loki’s not here. He won’t ever be here. He has a job to do, and it’s a lot more important than becoming an unwilling co-parent to Mobius’s two brats. This is something he has to do alone. He did it before, and he can do it again. He has to. He will.

He glances over his shoulder. There’s a whole little party gathered to send him off—O.B., Casey, Victor, even Miss Minutes—as if he won’t be coming back in just a few days. As if he won’t ever come back, once he crosses this line. O.B.’s even got tears in his eyes, but that’s probably just because he’s O.B.

There’s a subtle concern in B-15’s expression, just like there has been every day for the last three years. Mobius smiles back at her, hoping it seems reassuring. “Nothing,” he says. “Just taking my time.”

With a final wave to his friends, he heads through the door. 

As soon as the portal dissolves behind him, Kevin streaks across the kitchen, shirt held triumphantly in his fists, and Sean chases behind him, shrieking with exhilarated indignation. Mobius takes a single step, slips on a yo-yo, and crashes down to the tile, banging his head on the island as he goes. Kevin leaps merrily over his sprawled legs, laughs at his predicament, and ditches his pants on the floor. Mobius’s tailbone aches.

“Sorry, Dad!” Sean calls, already nothing more than a blur in the distance. “I’ll pick that up later!”

God. It’s like he never left.

𖧧

Mobius remembers reading, once, that penguins give each other shiny rocks as courting gifts. He always thought it was cute as hell. He has a thing for aquatic animals, go figure. Anyway, he used to give Mary rocks, when they were first going out, as a sort of ode to the penguins, but she never really got into it. He’s pretty sure she threw them out when he wasn’t looking.

Whatever Loki is doing right now feels a lot like that.

He’s got a little collection going, in a shoebox under his bed. Tokens of affection, jealously guarded over the last few years. A pill bottle. A plastic spork. A new tie. A post-it note that says, in elegant cursive: You were supposed to wear that, moron.

These gifts, except for the last two, have been few and far-between. Mobius doesn’t know how much energy it takes Loki to conjure things up, or how much effort he exerts pushing them across timelines, placing them in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time. He has a feeling it’s more difficult than Loki lets on, so he stays grateful. Gives thanks for each present, doesn’t get greedy, doesn’t ask for more than Loki can give.

Lately, though, he’s been giving a lot. 

It started with a snake. Of course it did. Mobius found out pretty quickly that this timeline’s Sean is just as reptile-crazy as the last one, and they’d been in the middle of some pretty intense negotiations when the first gift appeared. Now, to the untrained eye, a random snake in the bushes wouldn’t necessarily signal foul play. But Mobius, the Loki-expert that he is, knows better.

Look at the scales, he’d told O.B., draped over his workbench as he scanned the snake— Skull-Crusher, as Sean had so lovingly named her, before Mobius said absolutely not, and decided to call her Noodle instead—for traces of temporal aura. Look at how shiny they are. Like gold dust, almost. That’s definitely a Loki signature.

More than that, though—it had just been the eyes. Mischievous eyes if Mobius has ever seen them. Which he has. 

Sure enough, a couple minutes later, Noodle had been successfully identified as a bonafide Yggdrasil native. No temporal aura to speak of. Just like the Advil, and the spork, and the tie, and the post-it. Unlike the others, though, she wasn’t sentenced to the shoebox under Mobius’s bed. Even he has his limits. 

Anyway, Mobius had held off on classifying that one as a gift, mostly because it felt more like a cheap shot at his parental authority than a shiny rock. And Mobius is pretty sure that rocks don’t require weekly drives to the exotic pet store for plastic baggies of dead mice and crickets. It would be a little weird if they did. 

The next one, though. That was unmistakable. 

𖧧

“Loki,” Mobius says, stopped dead in the middle of his garage. “What is this?”

Loki doesn’t answer, because why would he? It’s obvious enough, anyway, from the brand-spanking-new Supermarine hooked to the back of his Jeep. “No,” Mobius says out loud, and takes a step backwards. “Loki, this is—it’s too much. Nine-hundred grand.”

More than that, honestly, judging by the modifications. Mobius doesn’t even want to think about it.

In his head, Loki laughs, just the right combination of fond and bemused. What’s a price tag, Mobius, to a god?

He’s not sure if he’s just gotten really good at imagining Loki’s reactions, or if he’s actually saying that. Mobius doesn’t want to think about that, either. He tilts his head up to the ceiling, which is probably the entirely wrong direction, but he doesn’t care. “Take it back!” he calls. “I already have a jetski, Loki! I don’t need another one!”

His sadly neglected Sea-Doo sits in a dusty old corner, frowning at him. He hasn’t been able to take her out much, lately, since he’s still getting back into the swing of things. Besides, he’s pretty sure the battery’s busted.

But still.

“Loki!” Mobius yells, for good measure, when the Supermarine stays stubbornly put.

Kevin comes speeding in through the garage door, covered head-to-toe in what looks like blue mashed potatoes. “Why’re you yelling at the sky, Dad? Is the house on fire?”

He sounds way more excited about that than he should be. Mobius has been looking into parents-of-arsonists support groups in his spare time. It’s a shockingly underutilized market.

Mobius blinks at his son, trying to figure out which part of that to address first. He’s also trying to remember if bleach gets out blue dye, or if it just makes it lighter.

Before he can answer, Kevin’s eyes snap to the Supermarine. Then, they go the size of dinnerplates. “Cool!”

Uh-oh.

“It’s not mine,” Mobius starts, with an extra glare at the ceiling. “I’m just borrowing it—”

But Kevin’s not listening. “Can we take it out next week? Max’s dad just got a boat, but this is way cooler, he’s gonna be so jealous—can we drive it to Max’s house? He has a lake in his backyard, and—”

By this time, Sean’s moseyed on over to bear witness to his brother’s excitement. He is also, unfortunately, covered in blue mashed potatoes. He looks pretty bummed about it. “What’s going on?” he asks, cautiously peeking his head around the corner. “Did Kevin set the house on fire?”

Mobius sighs. “Ya’ know, at this point, I almost wish he had.”

His lamentation goes unheard. Sean, too, is swept up by the sheer awesomeness of the Supermarine. “Woah!”

Loki’s smugness is palpable.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mobius mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Laugh it up, pal.”

But the kids are decided, and the Supermarine’s not going anywhere. So Mobius sucks it up, says a silent thank you, and accepts that he’s gonna look like a total jackass on the lake next week.

𖧧

After that, it’s all small. No more snakes or million-dollar jetskis, thank god. Instead, Loki sends practical things. Thoughtful things. A bottomless bottle of laundry detergent, a delicately-crafted dish rack, a new bookshelf for the boys. They’re clearly meant to be used, so Mobius uses them. Plus, Sylvie’s started teasing him about his quote-unquote Loki shrine.

He doesn’t know what it means. Or—he does, but he doesn’t know what it means now, after Loki’s explicitly told him to stay away, to get his life back, to stop looking for him. Mobius asked around the TVA, and no one else is getting gifts. It’s just him. 

Sometimes, he looks around his house, and all he can see is Loki. If you took the temporal aura of every object in his possession and averaged it all out, you’d probably get close to a zero-sum. Mobius has enough ornate silverware that it’s starting to get a little ridiculous, and he’s already under fire for the Supermarine. There’s only thirty of them in the world, for Christ’s sake. Half the neighbors think he’s in bed with the mafia. 

All of that, and still no one to share it with. Most days, Mobius thinks that he would burn all his fancy gifts in a big ol’ bonfire if it meant that he could come home to see Loki asleep in his queen-sized bed, his cheek all smushed up against the pillowcase. If he could see Loki playing with the boys, with his freakishly intelligent snake, making friends with the neighbors. He’d fit right in. Mobius knows he would. 

One night, he reaches to turn off the bedside lamp, and there’s a rock on his nightstand. Shiny, sleek, unobtrusive. It’s so dark black that it reflects rainbow in the light, just like the hull of Mobius’s Supermarine, a chrome impossibility. It’s beautiful.

Mobius closes his eyes. “Loki,” he murmurs. “We should talk about this.”

There’s a petulant shift in the air.

At the unspoken retort, Mobius scrunches his nose up. “No, I’m not gonna let it go,” he argues, in a harsh whisper now, because the last thing he needs is for the boys to wake up and call Social Services on him. “Loki, you told me to stop. And I stopped. You told me to live, and I lived. But I—”

He exhales sharply, then runs a hand through his hair. God, he’s getting all worked up now. Just like always, Loki’s wormed under his skin. He takes a second to calm down, then recalibrates. Steadies his breathing. “The gifts are great,” he says, more softly now. “They really are. But I just want you.”

It comes out way too honest. He could take it back, could retcon it— I just want to see you, or I just want you to come back. Those things are both true, but Mobius doesn’t offer them up. He meant what he said.

The space next to him shimmers, and a second later, Loki appears. Mobius doesn’t reach out, because he’s learned his lesson. But he does take a minute to look, to notice all the things that he missed the first time. Loki’s in full costume, all towering horns and billowing cloak, properly intimidating and godlike. His eyes glow with electric green power. His fingertips flex against Mobius’s 400-count sheets. 

There’s a long moment before he speaks. When he does, finally, it sounds almost like something’s caught in his throat. “My apologies,” he says, overly-stiff and formal. “I’ve overstepped.”

“No,” Mobius says immediately, and it sounds more punched-out than he wanted it to. All breath, no gut. “No, that’s not what I meant.”

Loki inclines his head, just barely, still not looking at him. “No?”

“Loki.” Frustrated, Mobius turns so that his whole body’s facing the headboard, his leg pretzeled up onto the mattress, his foot tucked under his thigh. “No.”

Glancing over at him, Loki swallows. His eyes flick neatly over Mobius’s body, too intense to be disinterested, then back to the wall. “What, then? Are the gifts not to your liking?”

Mobius rolls his eyes, hoping that Loki can’t tell how hot under the collar that glance just made him. “Now you’re just being obtuse,” he argues.

Loki wrinkles his nose. “You’re obtuse,” he replies—automatic, childish, and it’s so much like their old dynamic that Mobius wants to cry. Bravely, he holds back the waterworks.

“Sure,” he agrees. “Okay, I’m obtuse. Spell it out to me, then.”

He can see it in Loki’s eyes that he doesn’t need to clarify. There’s a heartbeat of time, then another, as Loki mulls over his response. Eventually, staring steadfastly at the wall, he says: “There are infinite variations of you across the multiverse, Mobius. And each of them is perfectly fine without me.”

At first, Mobius doesn’t know what to say. As usual, Loki’s caught him off-guard, millions of steps ahead, so big-picture that he can’t see what’s right in front of his face. How is he supposed to respond to that? 

He exhales, a soft, helpless thing. “Well, none of them were me, were they?”

He should’ve expected the tears. He didn’t, though, and his heart skips a couple beats as Loki’s eyes gloss over, his gaze shifting to the floor in an obvious effort to hide his emotion. A fruitless effort, because even at his worst, Loki’s never been able to appear neutral. His feelings leak out all over the place, big and bold and showy, even if half of them are just covering up something else. 

Loki’s throat bobs as he swallows, the delicate jut of his Adam’s apple protruding. “You’re missing the point,” he says softly. 

“No,” Mobius says, and dares to scoot a little closer, until the lines of their thighs are pressed right up against each other. If he concentrates, he can almost imagine that he’s sidled up against real flesh and bone, not a magic-infused projection. “I’m making a new one.”

“Mobius.” Loki squeezes his eyes shut, turns his face to the ground. His curls dangle gently in front of his forehead, spilling out from around his horns, and Mobius resists the impossible urge to wind his fingers in them. To pull, just once, and watch them recoil. “You’re—I can’t—”

The silver-tongued god. Here, in Mobius’s bed, tripping over his words. It’s a real sight, he’s gotta admit. One that he could get used to. One that he wants to get used to.

For that to happen, though, they’ve gotta get on the same page. Feeling bold, Mobius reaches out a hand, settles it by Loki’s thigh. He can’t touch him, not really, but the gesture is there anyway. “Loki, honey,” he murmurs. “Talk to me.”

It’s like a flipped switch. Loki trembles, thigh flexing by Mobius’s fingertips, eyes squeezing even tighter as he hangs his head. “Mobius,” he says, choked. “I can’t.”

Mobius pauses. Thinks it over. Finally, he asks: “How long has it been? For you?”

Loki shakes his head. “You know it doesn’t work like that,” he says lowly. “There is no time in my realm.”

“And all time,” Mobius remembers, dipping his chin in acknowledgement. “I know, I know. I read the files. But—if you had to ballpark it. How long have you been up there?”

“You and your ridiculous phrases,” Loki mutters, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. But Mobius knows his expressions too well, and he knows there’s a whole lotta fondness in that look. He can tell. “I don’t know, Mobius. I’d say—twelve thousand years? Give or take?”

Mobius nods. He keeps his expression calm, even as his hand jumps against the sheets, an automatic undercurrent of— something —running through his veins. If he had to place it, he thinks he’d call it anger. Not directed at any particular source—except for He Who Remains, maybe. It’s just free-range frustration: at the mere fact of Loki’s situation, at the length of their separation, at the fact that Loki doesn’t even look upset, just resigned. 

Instead of screaming, like he wants to, he says, very evenly: “That’s a long time to be alone, Loki.”

Loki blinks, and the tears finally fall. “I haven’t been alone,” he replies, his voice trembling. “I have—prayers.” He chances a smile, and Mobius thinks, blindingly, that he’s never looked more beautiful. “Some people still pray to me, you know. Poor taste, perhaps, but—”

“Nah,” Mobius says, and pats the bed. “Only wise guys pray to the god of time.”

Loki chuckles, low and watery. “Indeed.”

There’s a long silence, just like that. Bodies side by side, connected but not touching, the caustic heat of skin separated by worlds of time. Then, Loki shifts to face him. His mask of politeness has fully slipped, nothing left but genuine, raw emotion splayed across his features. “Mobius,” he says, intently serious. “You know that I don’t want to be alone, yes? You know that this is not—my first choice.”

“Of course,” Mobius says, nearly breaking apart with it. God, he could cry. What a big, blubbering baby Loki makes him. And he’s not even mad about it, god help him. “Of course, Loki. I know that.”

“Good,” Loki breathes, relaxing a bit. “Good.” He exhales, then looks down at Mobius’s hand. Mobius looks, too, because it seems like the thing to do, and then they’re both just staring at his hand, the fingertips nearly touching Loki’s thigh, and the silence stretches long enough that Mobius wonders if he should just chop off his whole arm, for the hell of it. But Loki shifts, his eyebrows slanting with determination, and then he’s moving his own hand, and—oh. That’s sweet. That’s really something.

Loki’s fingers hover carefully above Mobius’s, their hands stacked one on top of the other, nearly touching, except for all the ways that they’re not. Mobius spreads his knuckles, completely silent, and Loki dips his fingertips into the spaces between them. To anyone else, it would look like they’re holding hands. If the boys walked in right now—

Let them, Mobius thinks, half-dazed and delirious. Let them see.

“I don’t want you to be alone, either,” Mobius says thickly. Then, even more honestly: “I don’t want to be alone.”

“You’re not alone,” Loki says—instantly, reflexively. “You have your family. Your friends.”

“Our friends,” Mobius corrects. Our family, he thinks. “And—yeah, you’re right. I do. But I want you.” He chuckles, shaking his head. He feels himself starting to get a little teary-eyed, too. “God help me, I do. I miss you, Loki. I miss talking to you, and hearing your thoughts, and laughing at your stupid jokes. I even miss you kicking your feet up on my desk. I miss—”

He can’t finish. The words die in his throat, choked at the root. Loki makes a little noise, like he’s in pain, and shuts his eyes.

When he opens them, he says: “You told me to choose my burden. Leaving you was not—it was not a reality that I wanted to accept. But it was the only path forward.”

Mobius frowns. “What? Choose your burden? When the hell did I say that?”

Loki’s mouth twitches. “In a different timeline,” he acknowledges. “Right as we met, in the time theater. You told a story of—the boy you could not prune. The one that Renslayer took care of. You told me that you live with that burden.”

Jesus. Mobius shuts his eyes; takes a deep breath. Thinks of himself on the first day he met Loki, over-confident and eager and green, even though he never would’ve considered himself to be. Hell, he was practically a fresh recruit. He’d lived his whole life at the TVA, but his life had barely even started yet. He had no idea what was coming. He had no idea what would follow.

“Loki,” he says, with difficulty. “I—okay, maybe I believed that. At the time. But I hadn’t met you yet. I didn’t know you yet.”

Loki raises an eyebrow. “What difference does that make?”

Mobius can’t believe he even needs to ask. “I was ready to choose my burden,” he explains. “I went through years, decades, centuries— sleepwalking. Believing that I couldn’t have it all, that I couldn’t get what I wanted, that a good life—an honest life—requires sacrifice. And then I met you.” He closes his eyes, shuddering. “And I—I wanted.”

It feels illicit, still, to admit this. It’s been years since Mobius has been employed at the TVA, and years more since he’s served under Ravonna’s command, but he still feels like X-5 might burst around the corner, pruning stick at the ready, citing TVA handbook guideline 3.250 or something equally as obscure. No fraternizing with the enemy.

But Loki’s not the enemy. And Mobius wants to do a whole lot more than fraternize. 

Loki swallows. “Then I’ve ruined you,” he says, voice strangled. “I diverted your path. Your morals.”

Mobius shakes his head so fast that a cool breeze hits his cheek, skittering past his ear and off into the stillness of his bedroom. “You didn’t ruin me,” he argues, wishing more than anything that he could actually feel Loki’s hand on his. “You saved me, Loki. You changed my life.” He gestures to the house around them, creaking and settling, the soft sounds of his boys’ breathing somewhere down the hall. Safe. Secure. His. “I wouldn’t have— any of this—without you.”

He takes a deep breath, a flicker of nerves lighting just below his ribs. “And—and if you wanted,” he says, careful to look Loki in the eye. “You could have it, too. I—I want you here. With me.” He chances a smile, unable to read the twisting expression on Loki’s face. “I know it’s not much, but—”

“Mobius,” Loki interjects, sounding tortured. “I would love nothing more. But—I can’t. I can’t leave Yggdrasil. Not even for a minute.”

Mobius shrugs, hoping that he looks more confident than he feels. “You’re a smart guy,” he says. “And we have a whole team. I’m sure we can figure something out.”

For the first time, Loki falters. And Mobius can tell that he’s thinking about it, genuinely considering the offer. Trust Loki, to soldier along all these centuries, not even thinking of a possible way out. Not ever realizing that he didn’t have to suffer alone.

That thought gets to Mobius a little bit, itches at him, until he’s opening his mouth again, blurting: “Take me there.”

Loki’s eyes fly open—Mobius hadn’t realized that he’d closed them—big and green and shocked. “Pardon?”

Pardon. Always such a prince.

Mobius clears his throat, deciding to double down. “Take me there. To Yggdrasil. I want to see.”

“It’s not—it’s not meant for mortals,” Loki says, a touch apologetically. 

The corner of Mobius’s lip curls up. “Good thing I’m not mortal,” he reasons. And he’s not. He doesn’t know what he is, exactly, after lifetimes of service to the TVA, but human doesn’t even begin to cover it. “I’m serious, Loki. Take me there.”

“But—your boys,” Loki blusters. “Surely you don’t—”

Mobius waves a hand. “They’ll be fine,” he says. “They won’t even know I’m gone. Am I talking to the god of time, or aren’t I?”

“You’re—” Loki starts, sounding indignant. “Well. You are,” he grants. “I suppose—if only for a moment—”

“Please,” Mobius says, closing his eyes. He’s past embarrassment now. He’s not above begging. He just wants to feel Loki, to touch him, to see him in all his solid, flesh-and-bone glory. It’s been too long, and he can’t hold out any longer. He wasn’t built for this kind of loneliness.

There’s a gentle woosh of air, and the space behind his eyelids goes dark.

When he opens them, he’s in another world.

None of the files prepared him for this. Like always, he thought he knew what to expect, but he couldn’t have been any more wrong. Objectively, it’s all there: the branching timelines, the twisted roots, the shimmers of Loki’s power darting through the trunk. Objectively, it’s exactly what it should be.

Subjectively, though—it’s everything. Beautiful isn’t a big enough word. Overwhelming isn’t, either. Mobius doesn’t have any words to describe how he’s feeling, which might just be a first.

At the center of it all, Loki reigns.

He holds the timelines in a vice grip, eyes locked on Mobius, both actions conveying the same desperate intensity. Like all of it might disappear in the blink of an eye. Like Mobius might disappear.

Mobius swallows. Takes a step forward.

Loki’s mouth opens, but he doesn’t speak. Mobius doesn’t, either. Instead, he takes another step, and another, until he’s ascending the gilded staircase, standing at the foot of Loki’s throne.

Heart in his throat, he kneels.

There’s a harsh, choked noise from above him, but he doesn’t look up. Doesn’t move. Loki said, a million years ago, that he wanted nothing more than to be knelt to. Mobius knows he doesn’t want that anymore, but maybe he does, somewhere deep down, in the secret selfish part of him that he keeps locked away. And Mobius thinks that Loki deserves to be selfish. He thinks he deserves to get what he wants. 

Mobius used to think that the timekeepers made him wrong. He couldn’t understand why he was so different from everyone else, why he was drawn to the gleam of a jetski in the pages of a stolen magazine, why he would sometimes say things like needle in a haystack and for cryin’ out loud, why he stood on the dock that day, completely motionless, and couldn’t do what needed to be done. Why he just stood back and watched, listening to the sound of a young boy’s screams. Why he became so obsessed afterwards, why he scanned through files and variant reports, why he read up on Norse mythology until he was a resident expert, why he wanted and wanted and wanted.

Now, kneeling before the god of time, Mobius knows the truth. Every inch of it was worth it, if it led him here. He was made exactly right.

He was made for Loki.

“Mobius,” Loki says, his voice awed. Fearful, almost. “What are you doing?”

Mobius’s words, when he speaks, come out entirely unbidden. “I’m worshipping.”

It sounds like Loki’s been hit. He keens, high and strangled, then says: “You ridiculous man. You ridiculous, wonderful—”

That’s all he gets out, though, before he’s letting go of the timelines, yanking Mobius up by his shirt collar, and kissing him.

It’s a good angle, Mobius thinks, as he crawls further onto Loki’s lap, legs settled on the sides of his hips, knees pressing into the rich velvet folds of his cape. He’s not young anymore, but he feels young right now, feels invincible, feels like he could press his mouth to Loki’s for the next few hundred centuries, like he could tug at the roots of his hair for a few thousand more. Like he could spend his whole life like this: licking the perfect ridge behind Loki’s perfect teeth, pressing a thumb to the dimple by his jaw, mapping out the high points of his cheekbones. Maybe it was always going to lead here. Maybe this, this moment right here, is the true end of time. The one Mobius has been waiting for his entire life.

Loki nuzzles behind his jaw, eyes blissfully shut. “I missed you, too,” he murmurs, right into Mobius’s ear, and Mobius shivers. “I missed you more than words can express.”

“Smooth talker,” Mobius mutters, tilting his head to give Loki better access. “You got me a Supermarine, you bastard.”

Loki pauses. Chuckles. His breath is warm as it wafts across Mobius’s skin, and it’s all so tactile, so hot and solid and real, that Mobius could cry from it. “I knew you liked it.”

The smugness in his voice is palpable. Mobius hates how far gone he is, that he doesn’t even care. “Bastard,” he repeats, in a petulant mutter, and kisses him again.

Come to think of it, Mobius is glad that this isn’t the end of time. He’s glad that it keeps going.

𖧧

In the end, it’s almost laughably easy. They really are a pair of overthinkers, the two of them. Turns out, O.B.’s been on the case this whole time, researching and scheming and planning, assisted by Victor and Casey and even Miss Minutes, if the situation called for it. Mobius isn’t sure that he trusts that, but whatever. As long as it gets results.

And god, did it. They passed a few more months like that, Mobius stealing pockets of time to come hang out with Loki, to sit on his lap and poke at him and tell bad jokes until they were both in tears from laughing so hard. He doesn’t know why they weren’t doing this the whole time. Probably because Loki’s a stubborn, self-sacrificing, overdramatic asshole. What does it say about Mobius, really, that he loves him anyway?

Nothing good, he thinks. 

Anyway, a few months after Mobius first came to visit, O.B. walked through a time door into the middle of Yggdrasil. Unfortunately, he interrupted a pretty private moment, because it’s not like he and Loki were expecting company, and now Mobius thinks he might not ever be able to look O.B. in the eye ever again. Fortunately, though, he brought some good news.

Yggdrasil, as it turns out, is self-sustaining. It doesn’t need a caretaker—at least not a full-time one, anyway—and it never did. Mobius doesn’t think he’ll ever forget Loki’s expression at the news: wholly eviscerated, torn asunder, broken open and relieved and grief-laden, all at once. Heartbroken for the time that he’d lost, but grateful for the time that he’d gained. They weren’t at the end of things, after all—only the middle of it.

O.B. told them that, barring periodic visits for upkeep and maintenance, Loki was a free man. The timelines would continue to branch without him, would continue to weave together and sprout into the multiverse and burrow roots into the vastness of space. After all, they’d had an excellent teacher.

These days, Mobius doesn’t need a shrine. He doesn’t even need to kneel, except for when he feels like it. He wears his tie to work, takes his Supermarine out on the lake, and polishes his shiny glass case for the obsidian rock he keeps on his nightstand. He wrangles Noodle back into her cage, time and time again, because she’s a goddamn Houdini with locked latches. He wrangles Loki back into his bed, time and time again, because he’s a little bastard who doesn’t go easy on him. That’s okay, though. It wouldn’t be the same if he did.

He flips a patty on the grill—vegan, of course, because Loki’s on a cruelty-free kick. He inhales the scented steam, relishes the slight charring along the edges as the meat substitute goes brown. Along the lake’s shoreline, Kevin and Sean chase each other back and forth, giving each other noogies and wet willies every time they meet in the middle. The sun is shining, bright and hot on his tanned skin. It’s a good day.

A familiar pointy chin juts into his shoulder, followed by a soft kiss to the nape of his neck. “Mobius,” Loki murmurs, low and silky. “I believe Skull-Crusher has torn free of her enclosure.”

The tone sends heat zipping straight down to Mobius’s gut, and in the pleasant brain-fog that follows, it takes a second to actually register what Loki’s said. Once he does, though, he groans, tipping his head back onto Loki’s shoulder. He squints at him, and even from the upside-down angle, Loki looks inordinately pleased. “Remind me whose idea it was to bring her?” He pauses, watching as Loki’s mouth curves even higher. “And her name is Noodle. You can’t keep calling her that, you’re undermining my authority.”

“What authority?” Loki says brightly, and presses a kiss to his forehead. “No formidable creature should be named after such pedestrian fare,” he argues, just like he always does. “It’s insulting. Skull-Crusher is a perfectly respectable name.”

Mobius wrinkles his nose. “It’s a prophecy,” he says, also just like he always does. “One that I don’t want coming true. I like my skull just the way it is, thank you.”

Loki’s eyes soften. “As do I,” he murmurs, stroking a thumb over Mobius’s temple. “I swear on all Nine Realms, she shall bring no harm to you or your boys. You have my word.”

“Well,” Mobius says, not really knowing how to argue with that. “In that case.” He raises his head, scanning the ground for a flash of golden green, but sees nothing. “It’ll be fine,” he reasons. “She always comes back.”

“That she does,” Loki agrees. “Also, I don’t mean to alarm you, but Kevin is attempting to commandeer the jet ski.”

“Shit.” Mobius starts to jog off, then stops, turns, and gives Loki a quick, firm kiss on the lips. “Can you flip the patties when they’re done? Thanks, sweetheart, I love you.”

He’s halfway to the lake before he realizes what he’s said. He winces, slowly turning on the spot to look back at Loki. Sure enough, he’s frozen by the grill, eyes wide and jaw slackened, the patties sizzling away in front of him.

Well. First things first. 

Mobius sprints to the edge of the lake, peels Kevin off the Supermarine, and gives him a stern talking-to, complete with a lot of wagging fingers on his part and a lot of unrepentant giggling on Kevin’s. After he’s done, he tells Sean to keep a better eye on him.

Sean narrows his eyes at him, then peers off into the distance. “What’d you do to Loki?” he asks suspiciously. “He looks really red.”

“Sunburned,” Mobius lies, and ruffles his hair. “Watch your brother. And find Skull-Crusher.”

Sean beams.

When Mobius gets back to the grill, the tofu’s all shriveled up in little black chunks, and he has to scrape it off into the dirt. After he’s done, he turns to Loki, who still looks vaguely catatonic. “…You okay, honey?”

Loki swallows. “I may have misheard you,” he says, after a beat, “but I believe you said something along the lines of—”

“Shit, Loki,” Mobius says, his hands on his hips. He shakes his head, exasperated. “Of course I love you. Are you kidding?”

He’d meant to make it more romantic than this, he thinks. Candles, rose petals, a drive out on the lake, just the two of them. The whole works. But maybe it makes sense that it would happen like this, smack dab in the middle of all this chaos. Burnt tofu on the ground, Skull-Crusher running rampant, his boys burying each other in the dirt. This is their life, and Mobius wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Loki still seems a little speechless, which is flattering. Or concerning. Mobius isn’t sure which, and knowing Loki, it’s probably a mixture of the two.

While he waits, very patiently, for Loki to regain his composure, he casts his gaze along the ground. Finally, he sees it—a shiny-looking rock, a delicately shimmering shade of green, something that looks more like seaglass than a mineral. He crouches down, picks it up, and drops to his knees. His joints creak as he gets down, and he feels a little embarrassed, but it’s worth the gesture, all things considered.

Loki looks down at him, his eyes delightfully wide. He’s wearing an open button-down today, loose and creamy and billowing in the wind, and Mobius thinks he’s never looked more real. More touchable. Here and blushing and his, in every sense of the word. 

“Loki,” Mobius says, overflowing with a choked sort of affection, and presents the rock. “I know that the me’s in other universes never got to meet you. I think, every day, about how lucky I am in this timeline. How lucky I am that you came into my life, and that you stayed. I know I don’t have much to offer. I’m just a simple guy, Loki, but I love you a whole lot. And—hopefully that’s enough.”

“Mobius,” Loki says, after a moment, and Mobius realizes with a jolt that he’s nearly in tears. “Is this—are you proposing?”

Oh. That’s—

Mobius looks out at the scenery, the sunset over the lake, his boys watching from the shore with unabashed curiosity. “Say yes, Loki!” Sean shouts, his hands cupped around his mouth.

Mobius looks down at himself, at his knees pressing into the dirt, at the shining seaglass cupped carefully in his palms. And—he hadn’t been proposing, not really, but hell if he’ll admit that now, with all these eyes on him. He’s an easygoing guy. He can roll with the punches.

Besides, it’s not like he hadn’t been planning on it.

“Well, that depends, I guess,” Mobius says, a little more cautiously now, “on your answer.”

Loki reaches down a hand, eyes shining, and carefully accepts the seaglass. It shimmers in his palm, imbued with the familiar sheen of Loki’s magic. “Mobius,” he says, very seriously. “I love you more than life itself. I would be honored to accept.”

He pulls Mobius to his feet, and the boys holler with excitement from the shoreline. Loki’s good with them, he thinks. They’ll be happy to have him around some more. Forever, really. That sounds like a good amount.

In the grass below, Skull-Crusher winds around Mobius’s ankle, happy and safe and home. It’s not a bad place to be. Not at all.

Mobius smiles into the corner of Loki’s lips, and the seaglass glows between them, and he wonders idly if they’re married, now, by some sort of hand-wavy Asgardian magic. He’d be okay with that, though. He’d be okay with anything, as long as Loki’s there.

And he will be. They have time.