Chapter Text
The TVA didn’t smell like anything.
That was the first thing Loki had noticed the first time he’d been dragged there, years ago—or centuries, or minutes, time in that place made no sense—and it was what he kept noticing now as the two Minutemen escorted him down a mustard-colored corridor with the expression of people who would very much rather be somewhere else.
The TVA didn’t smell like anything. No damp stone like Asgard, no stench of burning like the battlefields, no hint of ozone before a storm. Just air. Only air, as if the place existed outside the very concept of matter.
Loki found that profoundly offensive.
“Could you at least tell me where we’re going?” he asked, in the tone of someone making a huge concession just by formulating the question.
“Meeting room C,” said the Minuteman on his left, without looking at him.
“Meeting room C.” Loki repeated the words as if they tasted unpleasant. “So not only did you yank me out of my timeline without warning, not only did you confiscate my daggers for the third time in my existence, but you also decided my presence is worth a meeting room C. Not even B. C.”
“B is taken,” said the Minuteman on his right.
“That doesn’t make it better.”
No one answered. The TVA’s corridors slid past him with their impossible geometry—angles that didn’t quite add up, staircases that led downward but seemed to climb, doors numbered in an order that defied any logic. Loki had given up trying to make sense of it. Some things in the multiverse were simply wrong, and the TVA was one of them.
The door to Meeting Room C was identical to every other door they had passed: anonymous, beige, with a number stamped in dull bronze. The two Minutemen stopped. One opened it. The other made a vague gesture that meant go in.
Loki stepped inside.
And froze.
The first thing he saw was Agatha Harkness seated at the head of the table, legs crossed, wearing the expression of someone who had been waiting long enough to have already mentally catalogued every flaw in the room. She was still wearing the purple dress—of course—and drumming her fingers on the table with a deliberate slowness that was, clearly, a form of psychological warfare against anyone forced to listen to it.
The second thing he saw was Wanda Maximoff standing by the window—a window that looked out onto a swirling orange nothing, because of course it did—with her arms folded and her gaze fixed on the void. She didn’t turn when he came in. Maybe she hadn’t heard him. Maybe she’d decided he wasn’t worth the effort.
The third thing he saw was Thor.
Thor, sitting on the other side of the table with Mjolnir resting on the chair next to him like a guest he’d brought along. Thor, who looked up at him with an expression Loki knew very well—relief mixed with resignation mixed with that particular variant of brotherly affection that felt a lot like oh no, him too.
“Loki,” Thor said.
“No,” said Loki.
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“Your tone implied a great many things, and I preferred to get ahead of it.”
Agatha rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Oh, wonderful. Dysfunctional sibling dynamic as well. This meeting really has everything.”
“No one asked you anything,” Loki said, sitting as far from Thor as possible, which put him exactly next to Agatha, which was absolutely not what he wanted.
“No, but I’m saying it anyway.” Agatha smiled. It was the kind of smile cats wear right before they knock something valuable to the floor. “I’ve been here for forty minutes. The ones in uniform brought me a coffee that tasted like archives and told me someone would be along to explain everything shortly. That was forty minutes ago. So if any of you knows something, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
“I don’t know anything more than you do,” Loki said.
“That’s depressing.”
Wanda finally turned around. She still had that look—the one Loki had seen in the few scraps of information he had on her, the one people who had met her described as empty but that to him looked more like it was full of something that refused to come out. She assessed him for a moment. Then she assessed Agatha. Then she looked at Thor, like she was searching for an answer that hadn’t yet found the right question.
“Do you know why we’re here?” she asked him.
“In part,” Thor admitted. He had the decency to look uncomfortable. “They contacted me before they contacted you. Said they needed someone to… coordinate.”
“Coordinate,” Loki repeated, dangerously sweet.
“Yes.”
“They sent you to babysit.”
“I wouldn’t use that word—”
“I would,” Agatha said.
“So would I,” Wanda said. She turned back to the window. In the orange nothing outside, something moved, slow and irregular, like a jellyfish in an ocean that didn’t exist. “So we’re four. A god of mischief, a chaos witch, a dark magic witch”—she paused—“and Thor.”
Thor opened his mouth.
Closed it again.
“Right,” he said at last.
The agent who walked in five minutes later was named Verity. Her hair was pulled back so neatly it looked like a political statement, and she carried under her arm a folder thick enough to be used as a weapon. She sat at the opposite end of the table from Agatha—a wise choice—opened the folder, and looked at all four of them with the expression of someone who had already accepted that this conversation would be difficult and had prepared accordingly.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“We didn’t have a choice,” Loki said.
“No,” Verity agreed, with a composure that was almost admirable. “You didn’t. I’ll get to the point: the multiverse is losing magic.”
Silence.
Not the silence of people who hadn’t understood. The silence of people who had understood perfectly and were waiting for the sentence to be withdrawn and replaced with something less catastrophic.
“Losing,” Agatha said slowly. “How does one lose magic?”
“The same way one loses any resource. Someone is extracting it.” Verity opened the folder and pushed a set of charts to the center of the table—charts that looked normal until one really looked at them, at which point they stopped looking normal at all. “For the last six weeks, we’ve been recording a progressive decline in arcane energy across forty-seven distinct timelines. At first it looked random. Then we saw the pattern.”
Wanda stepped closer to the table. She picked up one of the charts and studied it with a kind of professional focus—cold, almost, as if she were looking at weather data instead of the slow death of magic in dozens of universes. Only her hands betrayed anything: she held them still with visible effort.
“The timelines that were hit,” she said. “They have something in common.”
“Yes.” Verity pointed to a column of data on the right. “Each of them contains high-density magic users. The source seems… attracted to whoever has the most power to drain.”
“So you summoned us,” Loki said, and his voice held something that wasn’t exactly fear but lived very close to it, “specifically the three people with the highest concentration of magical power you could find.”
“Yes.”
“To stop something that feeds on magical power.”
“Yes.”
“By using our magical power.”
Verity met his gaze without flinching. “Do you have an alternative solution?”
Loki didn’t answer. Beside him, Agatha had stopped drumming her fingers.
“Where is the source?” Thor asked. His voice was different now—not the uneasy brother, but the prince, the warrior. Loki recognized it. He hated it a little, on principle.
“That’s the problem.” Verity opened another page in the folder. “We don’t know for sure. It moves. But we’ve identified the next concentration point.” She slid another sheet toward the center. “Dimension Sigma-7. You have thirty-six hours before the extraction reaches an irreversible threshold.”
“Irreversible for Sigma-7,” Wanda said. It wasn’t a question.
“Irreversible for Sigma-7,” Verity confirmed. And then, with the same calm as before: “And potentially destabilizing for the forty adjacent dimensions.”
No one spoke for a moment.
Agatha broke the silence with a long, theatrical sigh that carried, if one listened closely, a note of something genuinely tired.
“Fine,” she said. “But I want better coffee.”
Thor waited for them outside while Verity handed out the individual briefings—separate folders, Loki noticed, probably because each contained different information. Interesting. Very interesting.
He stayed seated while Wanda took her folder and moved to the farthest corner of the room to open it, back to the wall and gaze lowered, as if reading were a private act she refused to share. He stayed seated while Agatha flipped through her own at the speed and carelessness of someone hunting for one specific thing and not caring about the rest.
His folder was thin.
Too thin.
Loki opened it. Read it. Closed it again.
“Agent Verity,” he said conversationally.
“Yes?”
“These instructions say I’m supposed to support the other two.”
“Correct.”
“Not lead. Not coordinate. Support.”
“Correct.”
Verity was already gathering her papers. She didn’t look at him. “The TVA has assessed that your inclination to take control of situations represents a risk variable in this specific mission, so your role has been calibrated accordingly.”
Loki smiled. It was a beautiful smile that promised nothing good. “I see,” he said.
He didn’t. Or rather—he understood perfectly, and was already building, brick by brick, an alternative structure. Wanda wanted something from this mission. Agatha wanted something from this mission. He wanted something from this mission.
The only question was who would reach their goal first.
And who would use whom to get there.
Out in the corridor, Thor was waiting with his arms crossed and an expression that tried to project authority and instead read as please behave, I’m begging you.
“We leave in two hours,” he said. “There’s time for—”
“No,” Agatha said, walking past him.
“You don’t know us well enough to want a group moment,” Wanda said, walking past him.
Loki stopped. Looked at him. Thor looked back.
“Little brother,” Thor said, in that voice.
“Don’t.”
“You can trust me.”
“Historically unlikely.”
“Loki.”
Loki stopped. Turned, just enough. Enough to see the look on his brother’s face—that huge, earnest idiot with a heart so big it was almost embarrassing—and felt something tighten in a place he preferred not to identify.
“Two hours,” he said. “You know as well as I do that each of us has an agenda that doesn’t match the one we stated.”
“I know.”
“Then why do you look so optimistic?”
Thor thought about it, with that deliberate slowness Loki had always found irritating and now, inexplicably, almost reassuring.
“Because I know you,” he said. “All three of you, in different ways. And I know that when it matters, you do the right thing.”
“What a romantic, naïve view of… well, everything.”
“You’re not human.”
“Of nature in general.”
Thor smiled. “Maybe. But I’m still right.”
Loki didn’t answer. He started walking again down the mustard-colored corridor, toward the orange nothing beyond the windows, toward Sigma-7 and whatever was waiting for them there, toward thirty-six hours in the company of two women who would cheat him in a heartbeat—and vice versa.
He heard Thor’s footsteps behind him. Steady, sure, as always.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said, without looking back.
“Never,” Thor said brightly.
It was, of course, a lie.
All four of them, in different ways, were full of illusions.
It was perhaps the only thing they had in common