Work Text:
The Loom doesn't explode.
Mobius isn't sure what he expected, really – an implosion of some sorts, front row seats to the inward collapse of the multiverse, situated well-within the radius of whatever outpouring of energy followed. A fireworks show, all burning lights and centrifugal heat engulfing them at the end of everything.
Truthfully, he rather expected to die.
Yet luck – the thick, exhilarating smell of it – has infused the room, worming its way into the flickering atmosphere. Before them, the timelines coil about the ancient mechanical structure keeping them in place, the cosmic tearing sound settling into silence. And everything is fine.
Someone laughs, sharply, and it ricochets off metal and breaks through the hesitant seal of quiet. Casey mumbles something, and then says it louder, urging Timely back down the gangway. Assuring him it's over. B-15 exhales, slumping forwards – her armour of stoicism dropping away like water running from her shoulders. Relief follows these little actions, the overwhelming nature of it forcing anything else out of mind. The force of their collective alleviation tastes like salt, palpable.
And Mobius, stuck in his never-ending orbit, is enticed to face inwards.
Loki hasn't moved.
He stands, ramrod straight. His shoulders are squared, hands slack at his sides, gaze fixed on the middle-distance, where the multiverse filters through the glazing in pulsing colours – beaming light, casting his face in shades of green and yellow.
Mobius watches for the shift – the sag of adrenaline, the thing that might be reassurance or might be manic exhaustion that permeates the heady, gleeful triumph spinning the room about them. For it to hit him as it has hit everyone else first.
Nothing.
The light shifts again, refracting through the glass in a riot of colour. It dances over Loki's face, gilding the sharp planes of it, catching in his lashes in dazzling white. This time, the brightness brings him to flinch, a whole body tremble tearing up his spine as his elbows lock, half-raised.
Mobius has not stumbled on apprehension so fiercely since he was as young as he can remember being, scared and feeling suddenly not quite in-place where he'd been put in the world. And somewhere along the way he's cultivated a better rein of himself, because what strikes through him now is not emotional hyperventilation but a smooth, contained outburst of feeling. It is a basic fear, intense to the point it passes overwhelm and reaches the calm on the other side.
Call it his old hunter instincts, the acute sense of when something is very, very wrong.
He takes a step towards him. The room is still loud, everyone focused enough on their own relief to afford them a hint of privacy – a few seconds removed from the bubble. "Loki," he says, "you alright?" Manoeuvring into his line of sight, he's close enough now to see the fine tremor in his hands, the rigid set of his jaw. "We're okay," he tries, letting his fingertips settle on his shoulder, a light brush to ground him in reality.
Loki freezes beneath the touch – startled, braced, as though contact is the precursor to something catastrophic. His head turns with a slow, deliberate precision, almost mechanical. His eyes are rich with a keen focus, searching and categorising, the small variations in his stare unpicking the scene in miniscule beats. Cross-referencing thoughts in that ever-racing mind of his. Frantic, entirely fraught behind the mask of stillness.
Mobius exhales a faint breath. He trusts his gut. "Something happened. To you."
Not a question.
The statement does not soothe. Loki's gaze flicks past him – to the Loom, to the vast emptiness far along the gantry, to the others in various stages of laughter and disbelief – cataloguing, counting, an outpouring of vigour going into the verification that they remain where they are meant to be. Alive.
The lights flicker again, a temporary blip, and Loki's entire frame seizes with them: a reflexive tightening. Mobius murmurs out an instinctive reassurance, even as nothing more comes. The monitors hum, steady, and the timelines burn in their gradual, luminous arcs. Gradually, conceding to the evidence, his arms lower. He does not relax. He waits – and in that waiting Mobius, with wordless certainty, comes to a conclusion.
That whatever brink they have just descended, Loki remains stood upon another one entirely.
Loki explains the loop once, and only once, the story coming through in fragmented details. He seems to expel the memories from his mind entirely – speaking of them briefly and then never bringing them up again. But Mobius is still finding the rest of those sharp puzzle pieces elsewhere, scattered around Loki's person, suspended in the negative space around what he won't say.
And hell, they really are sharp.
Mobius works late – they both do, throwing themselves into reorganising the TVA into a haphazard new structure, a teetering mass of old knowledge mashed into new orders – and he comes home to his room to find Loki there. He's not sure when it happened. It certainly didn't follow the immediate fallout.
For several weeks, he barely saw Loki at all.
Yet a little tempting and a little time has slowly brought him back around, and he currently sits in the odd balance between constant and variable – expected, but still a little surprising to find in his living quarters each night, treading circles into the carpet.
That's another thing.
He seems to have forgotten how to sleep.
Mobius collapses onto the couch and watches Loki trace linear paths along his floor. Up and down and up and down. Ceaselessly, endlessly, strides never varying from their average of slightly-too-long. He tracks faint angles, pausing at the walls and ricocheting off in a new direction, like the icon on one of Earth's DVD loading pages. He talks while doing so: easy chatter about the new filing system, and how a specific intern in the Archives keeps pestering him for assistance with his project on illusionary magic, and how O.B. has dragged him into planning better failsafes – which makes sense given he's the architect of the revamped Loom.
But, inevitably, he tails into silence. Comfortable silence. The sort that precedes sleep. Except he won't sleep. He continues on his course, walking from wall to wall, until Mobius gives up trying to convince him and goes to bed.
In the morning, he will be situated at his workstation before anyone else.
Mobius does not doubt he spends every night wandering around, mapping his way through the corridors.
It would drive him insane if it weren't so overwhelmingly concerning. The set of Loki's shoulders, the jitter of fingers brushing the walls, the faint catch of air in his throat – it's like watching a clockwork toy that's been wound up too far, performing the same action relentlessly. He's been waiting and waiting and waiting, presuming that an overtrained automaton will eventually realise the conditions have changed – but nothing happens.
Tonight feels worse than the others. Loki doesn't speak when he enters, hesitating for a split second to stare at him, eyes searching. A short nod, and then he shoves his hands in his pockets, making his way across the room towards him. He's taken to hovering when he's not up to talking, a silent presence at Mobius' shoulder.
Mobius sets his folder on the table, loosening his tie. "Long day?"
"Mm." A hum. Agreement. Kinda.
"You look tired," he says, truthfully. Degradation from lack of sleep isn't something that happens here the same as other places, what with the halted timeflow, and it certainly doesn't impact Loki anywhere near as much as a mortal. But he isn't lying – the shadows under his eyes give his face a hollow look, the skin pulled too tight, and he seems to be drifting between focused and dazed, the boundary undefined.
He shrugs. "No." He never shies away from bluntness, now, efficiency put before everything except lying – which this interaction is proving, as he sways on the balls of his feet, clearly exhausted.
"Sure, Loki," Mobius sighs. He slips his arms from his jacket, tossing it over a chair. It crumples, slipping from the back onto the seat. "Well, I definitely am. You wanna head to bed early?"
He turns to face him, expecting the sharp decline to arrive as usual. Promptly.
But Loki's brow furrows, a faint tug pulling at the corner of his mouth. His eyes flick down at the floor for a moment, shoulders hunching, looking all at once like he might finally crumble, that the weight will come crashing down at the same time the cogs stop whirring.
But then he shakes his head once, briskly, a quick refusal. "Maybe tomorrow," he says, voice low, clipped – the barrier thrown back up between the urge and the act.
Mobius exhales, leaning back slightly. He lets the words hang in the air. "Alright," he murmurs, soft enough to not push. To let him keep his grip on control. "I'm around if you change your mind. Obviously."
Loki doesn't reply. His fingers twitch at his sides, a brief tremor betraying how great his wanting for rest has become. He gives another nod, half-turning his torso towards the door, prepared to continue his sleepless roaming. Yet, for all the stubbornness, his refusal is growing more fragile. It's become a paper shield over bone-deep exhaustion, thin enough to let the light shine through.
They talk about leaving. Not soon, with so many loose ends to untangle and rewind around their familiar spool of TVA protocol, but someday. A little vision of the distant future to keep them going. A topic to discuss idly as they work.
Though discuss might be an ambitious word for it.
"I'm just saying, if we're gonna live anywhere, my vote's on the tropics."
"Mobius, the south of Europe is hardly the tropics. Besides, you seem to have a very minimal conception of what it's actually like there."
Mobius grins, walking into the trap willingly because it's embarrassingly endearing when Loki gets riled up about this sort of thing. "Oh yeah? Are you gonna give me any further info or just keep me guessing?"
Loki launches into a passionate tirade, and spends the next few breaths detailing exactly why he detests the Mediterranean: how he'd prefer the familiar coasts of the North Sea, or even the Baltic – if they must return to Earth at all. He punctuates his point with characteristic enthusiasm, gesturing emphatically and sweeping his arms over the desk, words running a mile a minute.
Mobius is content to listen and nod his head absently. He continues writing up his debrief report, but scribbles offhand notes in the margins. Somewhere not too warm. Less people. Access to a library. No light pollution.
Loki raises his hand in exasperation, and his mug goes with his sleeve. It tumbles to the floor and shatters, splitting cleanly into pieces, soundtracked by the sparkle of ceramic on tiles.
Mobius jumps at the noise, fingers flexing around his pen.
Loki doesn't react at all.
He surges forward on the topic of European climate patterns as if nothing has happened.
"Loki?" Mobius prompts. Nothing. He repeats himself, a little louder.
Finally, Loki meets his eyes, resting his hand on the desk between them. His nails dig into the wood. "What?"
He indicates the mug.
He waves it off, a flippant brush of his fingers over the air. "No worry, I'll fix it later. As I was saying, there is a peer-reviewed journal that suggests the shifting temperatures in early – ah."
Mobius sees the conclusion form in real time, Loki's eyes tightening, a furrow forming in between his brows. Mechanically, as if working through unitary lines in a program, he stills entirely before he casts his gaze down towards the floor. Understanding dawns, and now it escapes neither of them what the theoretical 'later' refers to. The stilted element to his shrug indicates the great exertion of willpower it takes. "Or I won't be fixing it, I suppose," he mumbles.
Mobius really isn't sure what he could say to remedy whatever hellish combination of emotions hide behind that forced detachment. So he shrugs, and sets his pen down very carefully. "There's a dustpan in the supplies closet upstairs, and I kinda needed a break anyway. We can swing around there before we grab lunch." No response again, a flicker of a shadow passing across Loki's face. He lowers his voice, leaning close across the desk – enough to draw his eyes upwards. "Hey. Sound like a plan?"
Briefly, nothing. Then a nod. "Yes. It does."
Mobius smiles, and smiles harder when he gets a smile back.
Getting away from the TVA helps them both. A trial period it might be – a small house off the beaten track of a planet far beyond Earth – but it quickly feels better. Less office-based work. Less corridors. Less of that unshaking sense of timelessness.
Still, Loki doesn't sleep right. Some nights he does, some nights he doesn't. The bad days stretch out into hours of lingering in the living room, or the dining room, and Mobius feels a certain responsibility to join him when he's restless. He counts the kitchen tiles as they talk about the future on better nights, and remains a constant, still presence on the rare occasions – worse nights – where Loki would rather discuss the past. But these chats are becoming less heavy and less frequent, often interrupted by Loki realising he actually would rather just get to sleep instead of lingering around.
The little habits remain, shining through at all hours. He undoes and redoes trivial arrangements of items, leaving things in specific spots. Mobius opens the fridge to find everything laid out in order, as if the time spent finding the milk might be the space between life and death. And it makes his chest hurt because it clearly was – an unthinkable waste of seconds in the loop.
Mobius tries once or twice to convince him it's okay, that he can unlearn these things if he puts himself towards it. But Loki's eyes always flicker past him, darting to some inconsistency, infinitesimal, and he shakes his head. "Not yet," he says. The words are clipped, ironed flat.
And honestly? Mobius really isn't bothered enough to fight him on that one.
He watches him from the sofa, listening to the soft clatter of him working away at some new machine – a task O.B. sent through, a side-project he needs a second pair of eyes on. There's a rhythm to how he moves now: steady, obsessive. From a man who never sat still into a man who hardly moves, absorbed entirely by the combination of a physical and mental challenge. Arguably, far more healthy: though Mobius carries the knowledge that he cannot break the spell, that the work will continue until Loki chooses otherwise – or collapses.
He knows the signs: the tension in his shoulders, the shallow inhale before he splices wires together, the faint twitch of his fingers brushing against his notebook. Never any learning material at his desk; he memorises it all beforehand, says he prefers to work like that.
Late. Very late. Loki has frozen in place, scrutinising his assortment of parts, a mechanical shape starting to form in the centre. Mobius finally rises and approaches. He doesn't touch him and he doesn't speak. He just stands near the door, a quiet presence. Loki glances up, jaw clenched, but this smooths away into relative calm. The brief discomfort of work, rather than anything lingering. "I can't figure out why it's not working."
"Yeah, maybe 'cause you've been at it since noon."
The pinch between his brows returns as he studies his notes. "I was so certain this would fix it."
"You're probably close," Mobius replies. He outstretches his hand, beckoning him. "But you can figure that out tomorrow."
Loki's face softens. "Perhaps." He shuts his notebook, slotting the lid of the pen onto the page to keep place. "I'm tired."
Briefly, Mobius conjures up various ways to tease him, but none settle. "Me too," he replies, sincerely.
Nighttime, for a long while, remains a horrible, unavoidable challenge. Getting Loki to try to sleep was a mountain enough. Sleep itself?
It's impossible, for a time.
Mobius would like to think he's a patient man, but he's certainly not a perfect one. Repetition heralds a natural waning of concern. Not a waning of care, but a slightly less delicate approach to this familiar thing between them. So he doesn't even open his eyes when he hears Loki shoot upwards with a shout – drawing the duvet with him in a sweaty, shivering tangle – and instead blindly fumbles a hand back to get a grasp on him. His fingers find skin and, judging by a surprised "Ouch," he seems to have hit him in the face. Which sparks enough shock to nip any forthcoming hyperventilating in the bud, so to speak.
"Sorry," he mumbles, timbre rough with sleep. Cool fingers encircle his wrist and guide his palm down, his apology welcomed in the brief, wordless press of lips to his knuckles, before Loki shuffles closer and wraps their intertwined arms over his midsection, ducking so his forehead presses against Mobius' back.
The quiet holds, though Loki's inhales are breathy and damp, stifled by the way he clamps his lips together, tight. Tremors travel sporadically up the entire length of his long limbs, reaching a fierce peak before they subside, a wave drawing back and sinking into sand.
Sleep has almost reclaimed Mobius when Loki breaks the silence. "Time passing?" he asks, murmuring the question into the slim space between them. Defeat colours his voice, a high, choking exhaustion.
And yet, this is the third time in a month he's recalled his freedom from the loop without needing reassurance. It's progress. "Time passing," Mobius confirms, and gives his hand a squeeze.
Morning comes without spectacle. As do most mornings after, the boundaries between days blurring in the soft division of sleep. Too late in the evenings and too late again when they wake up at noon, stretching languidly across their shared space until one of them gains the strength to extract themselves and kickstart the coffee-tea process. Very boring, and very repetitive – though not in the bad way.
"We need an alarm clock," Mobius says, when they have both been feigning sleep in the hopes the other will get up first, but have both been breathing at too normal of a pace to really keep with the charade any longer.
"To disturb my relaxing waking? I think not."
"Yeah, but we're missing like… half the day. On the regular."
"Sloth is one of those Midgardian wrongdoings, no?" Loki says, rising a half inch so he can collapse dramatically back into the pillows. "I'm electing that one as my favourite. Besides, I certainly deserve it."
"Maybe you oughtta pick pride, with that attitude."
"It's not pride if it's true."
"Pretty sure it is."
Loki makes a vague, dismissive sound, but doesn't argue further. Instead he rolls closer, pressing his forehead into Mobius' shoulder, radiating warmth through the thin layer of his shirt. "I suppose I wouldn't hate the reminder. Of a clock."
"Uh-huh? Maybe you need a watch. Though they tick every second, so you might find it really annoying."
"Probably. Though it would save me incessantly pestering you to confirm the flow of time."
Mobius shakes his head. "I don't mind."
Loki slides his hand over Mobius' wrist, thumb pressing into the steady pulse. "That's good. I like asking you." The bluntness again, so many pieces weaved into a permanent part of his character now. It's all just him.
Mobius hums, pretending that doesn't do something complicated to his chest.
Loki's thumb lingers over the steady beat, and he looks briefly like he's counting. Eventually his grip loosens and he sinks further into the mattress, breathing evening out against Mobius' shoulder.
And time passes.