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When the entire Future Foundation shows up on his doorstep, Valeria at their head, on what she calls a 'fieldtrip', Victor has half a mind to shut the door in their collective face and go back to his experiments. He then thinks of Richards’ face when he found out and invites the children into his lab.
There is something odd about the group. The brown-haired young man at the back is new, and there are children missing. He isn't sure who, but no matter, he can't be expected to lower himself to following Richards' logic on who is worthy of his patronage. As though the man would know genius if it walked up to him and saved his daughter's life.
"Uncle Doom," Valeria says, holding a sheet of equations in her hands.
"Tetrakaidekeract, not triskaidekeract," he says, knowing that at her age, her eyes wouldn't be able to tell the difference on the diagram.
"Yes," she says, "but something else is wrong."
He can feel it too, in the way his mask doesn't fit over his skin and his skin doesn't fit over his bones. Not that they had for a long time but the way they had used to not fit is different from the way they don't fit now.
"Sometimes," Valeria says, "I remember things all wrong. Things that didn't happen. Things that couldn't have happened."
He has been having the same problem. In his mind, he remembers a goddess of Hel, long limbs, pale skin and hair black as night. It is foolish. In Hell, Mephisto reigns supreme and has since the ancient past. He remembers, too, wielding the power of a god and refusing the offer of the woman he loves. They are to be married at the end of the month. There are more things he remembers; things that had never happened, people he had never met and places he had never been.
Valeria is still speaking, softly, "I remember having a brother. A real one. Not just Nate," she gestures at the brown-haired boy, "or the rest of the Foundation."
"Who's Nate?" he asks, because he remembers the boy, even though it is the first time he has seen him. In the background, one of the security systems informs him that a magic user has tried to teleport inside the castle. Victor doesn’t concern himself with it.
"Nathaniel Richards is my brother from the far future," she says. Then she adds, like she’s confessing a secret, "He's not really my brother."
The boy comes over when he notices them speaking. He is older than the rest of the Foundation and there is such a look of pure hatred in his eyes when he picks Valeria up, in a way Victor knows she hates, that Victor says, "I have a need of Valeria for an experiment."
Nate looks at him like he has just suggested that Valeria is the experiment. Valeria wriggles free and Victor pointedly doesn't notice the bright, excited smile on her face. He waves at the machine hovering a quarter a meter above the floor, hands her a cylinder engraved with runes and doesn't notice either the way her face falls in disappointment.
Valeria takes the cylinder and goes towards the machine. It doesn't take her long to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it. When she crawls under the machine to replace the burnt out cylinder, it lits up. Inside her mind, she sees the unfolding of a cube in 19 dimensions, one at a time and she weeps for the beauty of it.
That neither Victor has needed Valeria’s help with the repairs, nor the machine needed repairs in the first place are as inconsequential as the fact that, in the world that has never been, her birthday is today (in the world that is, it was two weeks ago.)
The machine is a timestream anomaly detector combined with a temporospatial continuum analyser. It does not ping in the presence of an anomaly, which is a relief as it would be pinging constantly.
Not that Victor is surprised by this, he has been doing quite a lot of “recreational” timetravel himself, but still, that does not account for all of the pinging. Hence, the analyser part that Valeria just brought online.
There’s a pitter-patter of tiny feet and a blur of green followed by a crash and Valeria’s, “ow” before Victor realises that a miniature superhero is, presumably, trying to defeat him. He is impeded in this by having tripped on Valeria’s legs. Victor picks him up.
“Wanda,” he says, “I do not remember any of the Young Avengers being so young.”
Wanda walks in, followed by a gaggle of small children between ages 5 and 7, and Victor turns off the machine. He has learned the hard way that Wanda’s presence is sometimes detrimental to his experiments, most notably the ones dealing with quantum chaos.
“There was a mutant,” Wanda starts. She doesn’t get much further before the children are all explaining at once.
“We were big and then we were glowy and then we were little!”
“And Teddy was going vroom and then Teddy was going crash and then Teddy was all green and then Teddy...”
“I got small only I didn’t wanna got small so I got big but I didn’t got big-big...”
“There was a glowing woman who had rays and she hit us and we were young and she looked sad.”
“I can be big again, look!”
At these words, Changeling transforms into a reasonable approximation of his elder self. He walks around briefly before toppling over. In Victor’s arms, Tommy laughs.
Victor is distracted. It seems to him that the group is missing members but also has too many. The boy Valeria calls Nate is looking at one of the girls in the group, Cassandra Lang, as though he misses her and loves her so very much. She, on the other hand, doesn’t even notice him, babbling excitedly about the mutant that deaged them.
If Victor is not mistaken, and he never is, the effect is merely physical, not mental. Of course, children of five and seven are not the most focused of people, but they have no problem remembering him or Wanda or each other and so, there must be something else at play here.
“Can you help?” Wanda asks, when five out of six of the children pause for breath simultaneously.
“I can!” Valeria says. This causes Victor to question what, exactly, Richards is teaching his daughter if something so simple can make her so excited. She does not head towards the machine (reverse those two power couplings, connect that part to that one, plug in the temporal partial shifter and done) but starts coding a batch of medical nanomachines. He wonders if he should tell her that he’s disabled collective coding and inter-nanites uplink, but decides that if she doesn’t notice that, then she deserves to code each nanite individually.
“Let me go, Dad!” Tommy says. Victor lets him go, partly out of surprise.
“He’s not your dad!” Billy says. “You’re stupid! Your dad’s not a supervillain!”
“You don’t know my dad!” Tommy says. There’s something in his voice that makes Victor decide that as soon as this is over, he is paying a visit to Frank Shepherd.
The Foundation’s children are quick to accept the Young Avengers as playmates. Victor’s lab is just that, a lab, not a daycare center.
But there is nothing in danger of being disturbed in this particular lab, so he lets them be.
The lab next door, however...
It should be empty, unless Loki is alive. Loki must be alive then, because no one else has ever broached Victor’s magical defenses (except Stephen Strange, but that was one time and it doesn't count). To be fair, Victor lets him, because Loki is many things but boring is not one of them.
The cameras in the room tell him that there are two children in that lab. If Victor were the sort of person that did this sort of thing, he would be bashing his head against a wall repeatedly by now. He has never liked children. They are so rarely able to converse meaningfully on string theory or synthetisation of alkahest. They do, if today is anything to go by, have a secret plan to conquer the world, starting with his labs.
This is when the Fantastic Four come knocking on his door, because Richards has always had terrible timing and seems to delight in ruining everything.
Victor opens the door and the Fantastic Four get in. The Future Foundation is disappointed at being picked up so soon. Valeria is so deep in thought about the nanites that she doesn't notice until her father picks her up, all the way from the door.
Richards does not question the presence of his children in Victor's castle and Victor, in turn, does not question his silence. Though she is only four, he knows how persuasive the girl can be.
With the Future Foundation gone, Victor's lab is less crowded as it contains a lone Young Avenger drawing on the walls. It is Cassandra Lang and she is drawing an endless series of Dali mustaches at knee level. Victor isn't even going to ask.
He doesn't know how to talk to children, but they can't be that much different from minions. Valeria excepted, of course. She's much closer to 'tentative ally' than to 'minion'. "Don't move," he tells Cassandra and she draws a mustache on his armour in response. He figures that's good enough.
Having taken care of two thirds of the invading force in his labs, he goes after the last third.
In the lab Victor privately calls ‘magic lab n°3’ (as opposed to ‘science lab n°1’ where he just was), which is more a prison cell than a lab, are a girl, a boy and a magpie. Their eyes are all the exact same shade of green.
“Which one of you is Loki?” Victor asks. It is not as stupid a question as it sounds. Loki has been many things, in the time that Victor has known him: a god, a jotunn, a man, a woman and, on one memorable occasion, a sabertooth tiger. A boy, a girl and even a magpie are well within the realm of possibility. Besides, the room is shielded so that only Loki and those he brings with him might go in but not leave the circle carved in the floor. Loki might not be boring, but he is still dangerous.
The boy looks at the magpie and the magpie pecks him sharply on the cheek. “I am Loki,” the boy says.
“I am Leah of Hel,” the girl says, “and I do not want to be here.”
“What do you want, Loki?” Victor asks.
“I was wondering how you were,” Loki says. By the look on their faces, his companions are as suspicious of this as Victor. That the magpie is able to convey emotion at all makes it suspicious in and of itself.
“Enough of your nonsense,” Leah says to him. Then, to Victor: “You are a sorcerer of some power and, for whatever reason, Loki trusts you.”
“I wouldn’t say trust - ,” the magpie says, at the same time the boy says, “I don’t know him. Ikol does.”
Ikol and Leah of Hel. Clearly, this Loki does not have as deft a hand with pseudonyms as his predecessor. (Those six hours spent explaining to Loki, that, no, really, Luke Skywalker is not a good alias, notwithstanding.)
“Hela is gone,” the girl says, as though this should mean something to him. But it does, strangely enough.
Victor is tired of living with two sets of memories inside his head and across his skin. (Some days, he can’t see the scars, but he can still feel them, lines of pain seared into his flesh, below skin, above bone, and those days are the worst.)
The girl continues, “I doubt you care much for her. But know this, if you help her, she will help you. Hela always pays her debts.”
“Do this, Victor, and you’ll get all you ever wanted,” Ikol says.
To which Victor replies, “That’s what you said last time.”
“This time it’s true,” the magpie says.
“How many of your tricks start with those words?” Victor asks and the girl rolls her eyes at the boy. To her, he says, “There is a book, or several, with the name of the dead and the dying. I want my name taken out.”
“It is done. When Hela is returned to her rightful place, your name will be stricken of the records of the damned,” the girl says.
“Tell me everything,” Victor says.
The story they tell meanders in part, as Loki's stories are wont to do, but comes close to what Victor knows. Someone is messing with the timestream and is not being terribly careful about it. There is something they want and they will not stop until they get it.
At Victor’s last count, there are sixteen paradoxes currently in progress. Some of the paradoxes aren’t, strictly speaking, paradoxes, but it is shorter to call anything that creates a strain on space-time a paradox than to call them a ‘possibly-a-paradox-possibly-a-stable-time-loop-possibly-something-else’. Some are subtle, some are not. (Victor’s favourite is the Zama Paradox. Everyone knows Hannibal won at Zama and yet everything points to the fact that he lost. If Hannibal had won, the balance of power in the Mediterranean would have shufted to such an extent that Carthage would not have fallen until much later than it had. Since it clearly hadn’t, Hannibal must have lost. But Hannibal won, despite evidence to the contrary. Even contemporary evidence provided by Plutarch. Victor suspects that someone had really liked Hannibal and couldn’t stand to see him lose.) All it would take was one more and the fabric of time-space would start to unravel. There are things hiding below the surface of the world that are not to be trifled with. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.
If Hela doesn’t exist, has never existed, how can Leah? It’s a paradox. Which, of course, is the problem.
“I am coming with you,” the girl says, once he has set up the machine to allow easier travel through the flow of time. Fair is fair, were he in her place, so would he.
“I’m coming with Leah,” Loki says.
“I will not protect you,” Victor says and steps through the vortex.
“I do not need your protection,” Leah says and follows him through. Whether to him or to Loki, Victor doesn’t know. Loki is the last one through the portal, his bird having flown ahead.
They step out of the portal in college. It’s Victor’s first day of college and today he meets his roommate for the next three years, Reed Richards. It’s Victor’s first day of college and he will be alone in his room for the next two years and a half.
“Are you alright?” a young woman asks. Victor has cast a glamour over his appearance. Doctor Doom is very noticeable.
“Yes,” he says, even though his head is tearing at the seams, “I am looking for the children.”
The girl and Loki step out from behind the corner that does not exist and where the vortex is.
The woman says, “I see,” and leaves. On her clipboard, the words “Roommate assignments” are visible when she turns away.
“What’s going on?” Loki asks.
“We need to change that file,” Victor says. On the armour’s display of the forcefield analyser’s data, the file has a clear blue halo, indicating an anachronism. The timer attached to it indicates paradox minus five minutes. They have to fix this now, because they can’t return and risk meeting themselves. It’s the problem with time travel: entropic cascade failure. It’s bad enough that Victor is crossing his own timeline, but since his younger self is still in Latveria at this time, he has roughly half an hour before cascade.
As for the children, they have at least twice as much, more even since they are children and their reduced body mass influences the calculations.
Getting the file is easy. It’s changing it that’s hard. Not because doing that will erase Victor’s timeline and he doesn’t know what he’ll get in return, but because the legal jargon is horrendous.
After much consideration and debate on whether or not ‘mandatory’, ‘obligatory’ and ‘required’ mean the same thing, they settle on making the assignments ‘suggested’ and proposing several matches for everyone. Victor proposes both Benjamin Grimm and himself for Richards, as well as Richards and Marc Chateau-Roux for himself. Chateau-Roux had left three days into the term, to go back to France and take care of his family’s vineyard. Victor still orders from him, because they had been lab-partners for those three days and while the man would not stop talking about varietals and terroirs, he clearly knew what he was talking about.
They return to the bridge having effectively short-circuited this paradox.
They are very far from done.
On their next stop, the wind is whistling angrily around Victor’s face and the snow gets in his eyes. It doesn’t matter how many alterations he makes to the armour’s technology or many spells of protection he layers on it, the snow always finds a way. It’s the only rule of Latverian winters: you can’t escape the snow - or the cold - it settles into your bones until spring. This winter had been worst than most.
It's the winter Victor and his father had almost starved to death. It’s the winter Victor’s father died.
“This way,” he says, pointing towards where he remembers finding the food. The food is where he remembers it being. The armour helpfully tells him that the food is a paradox.
It’s the winter Victor’s father lived when he should have died. It’s the winter they’re fixing that. It’s the winter Victor is killing his father.
The girl reaches for the food and lays a single finger on it. Ripples of rot spread through it and Victor can hear his childhood self being comforted by his father, just over the ridge. There’s snow melting on Victor’s face.
Their next stop is Doomstadt. At this point in time, he, Wanda and Wiccan are performing a ritual designed to restore Wanda’s magic and sanity. In one universe, it worked. In another, he went insane and killed a child. They’re both real, he just can’t remember which one happened to this version of him.
This step is complicated. Whoever it is that’s endangering the timeline, there is a version of them in this time and place, on top of the meddler. Victor remotely accesses the castle’s data banks and copies the file of everyone currently in the castle. This gives him a list of suspects, but no motive. Unless... Victor refines paradox search parameters on the armour.
The light is almost blinding but he can see three shades of blue crossing over his field of vision. He has motive, now, and opportunity and a name. Nathaniel Richards is behind this.
It seems that whatever he does, Victor is plagued by Richardses.
There is a thing hidden in the rafters. It is a horrid mish-mash of an anathor and a cryotron computer, immersed in liquid helium mixed with something else, something dark and oozing poison still, even that close to absolute zero. The device makes no sense. It would work, yes, but only for a few seconds, half a minute, maybe, if pressure inside is above twenty-five Pascals, but certainly not more. Nothing can contain the Lifestream, or even a portion of it, for long.
If anything could, Victor would have found it.
That’s exactly how much time Victor has to figure out how to disable the device. Loki punches it, instead, with a viciousness that has Victor wondering at hidden motives. But, then, this is Loki. Hidden motives are to be expected.
The girl throws her magic, sharp and fast, into a net. She is clearly talented, as is to be expected. Victor is glad for it, because while he may not remember the device in the rafters (it’s hard to notice such small details with the power of the universe flowing through your veins), he would have remembered Eitr falling on his face.
None of this turns out be a good idea. In one moment, the device reacts with the open air and the girl’s magic reacts to the Eitr and all of this reacts to the Lifestream, poison green, electric blue, fiery gold, whitest white and blackest black bloom across their eyelids and along their optic nerves like fireworks, and they are, suddenly, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Victor hits the control on his vambrace and they land in college, again. Hitting the control, while the only way to avoid being stranded in the timestream, the Lifestream, or both (uncertain death, Victor’s least favourite kind), leads to overload of the circuits. All the circuits located in his right arm are completely destroyed and it’s only because of layer of thermal clothing of his invention (originally to prevent frostbite, thank you, Wanda) that he doesn’t have melted metal embedded in his arm.
“We’re stuck here,” the girl says.
“Until help comes,” Victor says, and shakes off the remains of his arm guard.
“How’s that gonna happen?” The bird asks.
Victor sets himself up as a professor of what he is least likely to run into himself: Art History of the early 1900s. He pretends that Loki and Leah are his children, a fact that Ikol finds hilarious.
In his spare time, that he has a lot of, some of which is actually class time, Victor plans their rescue. It’s not that getting a message to Valeria would be hard, it’s just that he has to make sure that neither of the other Richardses find it too and that it has to be within a reasonable time frame of his departure while not being earlier.
Halfway through a lecture on Magritte and surrealism, Victor remembers Dali and Cassandra Lang.
He knows her address, through Kristoff, and that she babysits for the children of the Future Foundation sometimes, through Wanda. Cassandra also has this over most superheroes: she is not stupid.
On Tuesday, Victor has lunch with Professor Sherman. Professor Sherman teaches Ethics in Science. One of his classes contains both Victor and Richards. Sherman is talking about what the Victor in his class said. It’s not how Victor remembers that class going. He’d been hoping this wouldn’t happen, foolishly. He’d been making alterations to the armour since they landed, trying to ward off entropic cascade failure. It had worked on his end (certainly, he felt no need to attempt to rescue his mother’s soul), so he had assumed it hadn’t affected the younger him either. Victor remembers the lesson, he had said something trite about the good of all mankind taking precedence over the good of the self, just to spite Reed (he had been having a bad day, Professor Tuonela had shut down his project of cross-referencing the Key of Salomon and the Maleus Maleficarum on the grounds that, “You can do better, Victor,” and someone had borrowed the last copy of the Magnum Opus from the library minutes before he could). Victor finds it hard to believe he was ever that young.
At any rate, this means that, later today, for the second time in his life, Victor is going to kill a man. The way he remembers this going, killing the other Nathaniel Richards had been self defence. Somehow, Victor doesn’t think it’ll go that way this time.
When presented with a message from the past, addressed to both herself and Valeria, requesting assistance, Cassandra Lang will not rush. It will take her some time but she will reach the right conclusion, eventually.
After that, it’s only a matter of time until rescue shows up. Victor occupies his time by trying to find out if Professor Tuonela is indeed a magic user. (The answer is yes, he finds out the day she sings a wendigo into a bog that doesn’t exist.)
When Valeria and Cassandra show up in the living room in a flash of blue light, Victor is suddenly reminded that he hasn’t been paying attention to what Loki and the girl had been doing in the mean time. (He thinks there might be wendigos involved.)
So now Victor has fourteen paradoxes to fix and four children to take care of.
Victor fixes his armour with the materials Valeria brought back as he explains the situation to her.
“Young Kang,” Victor elaborates when Valeria finds it hard to believe her grandfather or the boy who is not her brother would do such a thing, “is also named Nathaniel Richards.”
Valeria nods.
Cassandra says, “I was going to say we should leave it be, but it’s Kang. How do we fix it?”
Valeria rolls her eyes, “Time travel, Cassie, obviously.”
“My favourite,” Cassandra says, in a tone that implies it is anything but.
When Loki and Leah return, Ikol flies close enough to Valeria that she should react. She doesn’t. Cassandra Lang, on the other hand, does. Interesting.
The year is 1229 and it’s the year Latveria begins. Not the year it is founded, or the year it becomes independent. It’s the year where Livonian exiles, following the death of Albert of Buxhoeveden and the coming treaty, tired of having their territory taken over piece by piece by Swedes, Danes, Poles, Russians, Prussians and the entirety of the Christendom head off into the wilderness to find their fortune. Among their numbers are a variety of shamans, mages, witches, warlocks and thaumaturges. If all goes well, they will settle in the shadow of Mount Wungadore, in the mountains of madness. If all goes well.
They are not supposed to be found by Polish troops near the border, but if nothing is done, they will be. The troops have orders to take a detour through farmland instead of marching through the forest.
Valeria pretends to be a lost little girl, looking for her sister, played by Cassandra. This distracts the soldiers long enough for Victor and Leah to transport the refugees far enough away. Loki, as usual, is unhelpful.
In 1804, Latveria and Serbia ally against the Ottoman Empire. In one world, the Revolution fails gloriously and Latverian nationalism is born. In another, it fails pitifully and Latveria remains a non-descript province of the Ottoman Empire, then Romania until the modern day. The Hassens might have been bad but the Ceausescus would have been worse.
This is relatively easy to fix. Victor tips off the dahias about the uprising and returns to the timestream before the children realises what this means. Foolish and counterproductive as it may be, Valeria and Cassandra would surely insist to stay and stave off the massacre.
In 1987, Latveria, with the support of France, becomes a sovereign member of the United Nations. In gratitude, the newly minted Latverian currency is called the Latverian Franc and is on parity with the French Franc. It still is, even though France uses the euro now, which has had the unexpected effect of increasing the number of French tourists, given that they were already familiar with the conversion rate.
“I don’t get it,” Cassandra says. “This is just random bits of Latverian history we’re mucking about with now. What’s the point?”
“The point is me,” Victor says.
“Not everything is about you,” Cassandra says. Valeria is hacking into the UN system to undo the damage Kang has done. Leah and Loki are somewhere, doing something. Victor needs to get better at keeping track of them. This is harrowing enough at it is, without the prospect of going back and doing it all over again to fix Loki’s mistakes.
“You’re right,” Victor says, “this is about you. Kang wants you to live.”
“How does changing Latverian history do that? I’m not Latverian,” belatedly, she adds, “or dead.”
“I am,” Victor says, “Latverian, not dead. In the timeline we’re reestablishing, I killed you.”
“Oh,” Cassandra says. "Why are you telling me this?"
"You deserve to know. We're doing the right thing," Victor adds.
"Are we?" she asks.
The Symkarian and Latverian summit for a united war effort of 1943 is disturbed by a growing man. As a consequence, the alliance falls through and both nations are invaded. This is a thing that never happened, thanks to Cassandra Lang’s expertise with the Growing Man. The Young Avengers have been dealing with Kang too much lately for it to be a coincidence.
The Avenger's Mansion is a ruin. There is a boy, building a synthezoid.
"That's Nathaniel," Valeria says. Victor sees the moment she figures it out. "You never said we were fighting the Future Foundation, Uncle Doom."
"We're not," Leah says. "We're saving Hela."
While Leah and Valeria engage in a debate over what they're doing, exactly, Cassandra says "We're killing me." Then, louder, "That's Vision. Kang killed him."
"I thought Vision created the Young Avengers," Loki says, "and that we were hunting Kang. Them working together doesn't make any sense."
"I think I remember something else," Cassandra says, uncertain. Victor knows the feeling. The first time he remembered something that hadn't happened, that couldn't have happened, he thought he was going mad.
"I think," Cassandra swallows, "I think maybe it wasn't Vision that founded the Young Avengers. It was," she frowns, "Iron Lad? I don't understand."
"It's the timeline," Valeria explains. "The changes we've made while rewriting the timeline have started asserting themselves. It won't be definitive until we return to the new timeline, but since you and Uncle Doom are the focal points, you're already being affected."
Cassandra nods and then says, "What about the bird?"
"What bird?" Valeria asks, at the same time that Ikol caws and Leah says, "There's a reason they call it rewriting the timeline."
That is so incongruous that everyone stops moving. If they hadn't already fixed this point of divergence, it would be a problem. Victor's fixed it already, by making sure that the Vision is inoperable but his data files are accessible.
"What do you mean?" Loki says.
"The bird is not real, Loki," Leah says. "He is a story, as we all are. Ikol is a story you tell yourself so you can sleep at night. Cassandra is the story Nathaniel told the world about the girl he loves never getting killed. Von Doom is the story of the boy would be king dwbut wasn't, because the king was a murderer and the writer couldn't have that. Valeria cannot see the bird, because she is real and we are not."
"What story are you?" Valeria asks of Leah.
Leah does not answer. Much like himself, Victor thinks, the girl does not want to think of another being the master of her fate. He suspects that even with her relationship to Hela, the bonds of that obligation still chafe.
In the far future, there is boy, putting on the armour of a conqueror. The boy’s name is Nathaniel Richards and the conqueror’s name is Kang. It is possible that they are one and the same and it is possible they are not. By that point in the future, linear time has devolved into a myth. The fabric of the space-time continuum has been stretch thin enough, that, were it an actual and non-metaphorical fabric, it would be see-through. The book of Past and Future has turned into a palimpsest. And yet, somehow, they cannot change this. From the moment Doctor Doom kills Cassandra Lang, Nathaniel Richards has become Kang the Conqueror. As they had been able to stop this, their travels would have been much easier. There would not have been much of anything to fix.
The great paradox of this age is that by fixing the reason he had to become Kang, Nathaniel Richards no longer has a reason to be Kang.
By making it so that he does, they, in a way, create the problem themselves and fix the paradox, turning the timeline rewrite into a semi-stable quasi-alternate-universe-creating loop. Time travel, everyone.
The ancient past is a desolate place. There is a girl, or something that was once a girl, in a crater. The twisted thing of anger and hate in the middle of the crater wears Leah's face. She is not Leah as she is now, she is Leah as she will be, a long time from now, in the ancient past.
The crater is huge, about the size of Chicxulub. Exactly the size of Chicxulub, actually. There is dust in the air and nuclear winter settling over the world. It is the end of an era, in more ways than one.
"Why are we here?" Loki asks.
"This is the way my story ends," Leah says.
"Not with a whimper, but a bang," Cassandra says. At Loki's blank look she says, "We're doing "The Hollow Men" in school right now. This is the dead land, This is cactus land..."
Hela starts, inaudible over the dust. Then, louder, she says, "No, this isn't me. That is not my voice and those are not my words. Loki, you killed my best friend."
"I did what?" Loki repeats, getting closer. Cassandra reaches out to stop him, but Leah stops her.
"Why are we here?" Valeria asks. "This isn't a paradox, unless," her eyes narrow, and she says "I see."
"Well, I don't, what's going on?" Cassandra asks.
"Leah is Hela, but Hela is Leah," Valeria says. "If Hela is gone, if Leah never traveled to the ancient past, then Leah cannot exist. But if Leah does not exist, then who is she?" Valeria points at Leah.
“Why is there a Leah here, then?” Cassandra asks. “Not our Leah, I get why she’s here, it’s because the rewritten timeline hadn’t gotten around to erasing her, right? But this other Leah, she shouldn’t exist, because then there wouldn’t be a paradox.”
Valeria nods. “Cassie’s right. Hela is here, she exists, so does Leah, how is this a paradox?”
“Leah requested my help regarding Hela’s disappearance,” Victor says. “The timeline has been stabilised enough that Hela now exists again, therefore, there is no reason for Leah to have requested my assistance.”
“We’re just creating paradoxes by now,” Cassandra says. “Shouldn’t we stop?”
“Loki!” Leah shouts, behind them. Hela has grabbed the magpie and is twisting its neck. Loki has dropped to the floor and is seizing.
Hela is talking to Leah, in a low, raspy voice, “When you are me, you will understand. The boy you know will die, but not before he has killed you, as you are now.”
“Maybe,” Leah says, “but it hasn’t happened yet. I’m not you and he’s my friend. Let him go.”
Hela says, “No,” and Loki stops moving. Whatever it was that made Leah into Hela has not happened yet to Loki and Leah. As a consequence, all three of them are fading fast.
Cassandra grows and gathers Leah in her hands delicately.
“Hit the jump, Uncle Doom!” Valeria says.
Victor hits the jump.
As they float through the timestream, Cassandra asks, “Can we fix the paradox that we just created? Not that I care about Loki, but Leah seems nice and I’ve been thinking. You said I died in the old, or new, I guess, timeline? And that Nate,” she doesn’t seem to register the use of the diminutive, “was trying to save me. If you killed me, it must have been when you went all Tinkerbell Von Doom,” Victor flinches, but says nothing, wanting to see where she’s going, “on us back when Billy was looking for Wanda. If you’d killed me then, I would have been going to Hela’s domain, right?”
In her hand, Leah nods weakly.
“If I had been in Hela’s domain, when the timeline got rewritten, I would still have been dead, just I would have died another way, probably. So before he could rewrite the timeline so that I didn’t die, Nate had to make sure I wouldn’t end up in Hel. So he took out Hela so that there would be a timeline where I didn’t end up there and then changed that timeline so that I wouldn’t die. I’m guessing that Loki did something that made Leah into Hela so if we fix Loki dying, we will have a place to stand on, and we will move the Earth." She adds, “I don’t like time travel, but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand it.”
“How do we fix it?” Valeria asks. “Uncle Doom kills you?”
“Maybe we could do this somewhere that doesn’t look like a bad acid trip?” Cassandra says, sidestepping Valeria’s second question.
They land on the edge of a battle field. There are elephants trampling about and the sound of a thousand horns ringing over the plain. Victor silences the horns with a wave of his hand and an activation of his noise cancellation system.
“We don’t need to save Loki,” Victor says. “He will be restored with the timeline.”
“What is the trick?” Leah asks. “If it were true, you would not have accepted to rewrite the timeline as you would have reaped no benefits. What makes Loki so different?”
“Cassandra is right that a place to stand is needed to change the world. The time machine operates on this principle. It uses the first person who steps through it as an anchor for the new timeline,” Victor says.
“If that were true, I would not remember and you would still reap no benefits. You can’t mean that we are now all anchors as you have said that Loki would be rewritten and neither Valeria nor Cassandra have used your machine,” Leah says.
In the background, the elephants march on, into lines of soldiers splitting apart to let them pass. The lines do not move fast enough and the soldiers are trampled underfoot by the elephants. This pleases Victor. He has always liked Hannibal and it had always puzzled him that the man could have lost.
“When we return to the new timeline,” Victor says, “those of us who have used the machine both to leave and re-enter will be restored to their place. It is possible to make you a secondary anchor.”
Victor hands her his vambrace. She fiddles with it and then attaches it to her arm.
“You have the controls for the machine now,” Victor tells her.
She nods. She flexes her fingers experimentally, once, twice, and off they go.
Doom is returned to his labs. Instead of Dali moustaches curling around his equipment, the walls are bare. Strangely enough, for all that this version of him has barely known her, Doom finds he misses Cassandra Lang. She was smarter than he would have thought (insufficient data input), and she had been right. They hadn’t been doing the right thing, but the necessary one. And he killed her, in more ways than one. He does not like to think of himself as a murderer, especially of children.
It’s a little known fact, mostly because the very few people it applies to aren’t likely to publicise it, that being the anchor for a timeline rewrite leaves you with memories of the erased timeline. The memories are not as real as they were when you lived them, and you remember remembering them being real, they are more like memories of events in a book you read long ago. The events are still clear but there is no emotion attached to them, save for the memory of them. Doom remembers everything that happened, even though it never did, and he is waiting, as it were, for the other shoe to drop.
“Hello, Victor,” Hela says. Around her arm, she is wearing a vambrace. It fits her now, as it did then. Over the years, he has seen Hela once or twice and she was never wearing it. He suspects she’s wearing it solely for his benefit.
“We have a book to change,” she says and offers him her arm.
He takes it and the man who was the boy who would be king and the goddess who was the girl who would be queen and who are both murderers walk in death’s dream kingdom. There are, after all, so many stories to tell.