Chapter 3
It had been over a month since Mobius’s last field assignment, but he was already exhausted.
“Just let me through,” he pleaded, his voice already strained with exasperation. He was still in his regular brown suit, apparently he’d been called for goddamn analytics, but he’d managed to at least grab a Time Stick. “I’m a senior officer, please just let me through the damn line.”
“Uh, no ,” said the hunter, for the tenth time. TVA agents were currently sectioning off the street within twenty feet of the entrance to the subway station, establishing a perimeter and driving away civilians, keeping a wary eye on the sparking sling ring portal. Nothing had come out from it since Mobius had arrived, but that had only been about a minute ago. “It’s not safe around there, sir, we don’t know if —”
“Oh, like I give a fuck if it’s safe!” Mobius snapped, agitation bleeding through in his voice. He was a shaking ball of it, fraying at the edges with every second that passed. “The whole multiverse is about to be ripped apart, and we’re still worrying about whether or not it’s safe? Are you shitting me? I won’t just sit over there on analytics, I’ve got to —”
“Mobius!” B-15 was striding towards him, her expression tense. “Any news on your side mission?”
“They’re not back yet,” he said, raking a hand through his hair. “I don’t have any word, not from them, not from Sylvie —”
In a blink, a time door opened behind him. As if on cue, Sylvie blasted out of it, shoving through the line of hunters with a vengeance and streaking towards the subway station. Mobius tore after her, his heart climbing into his throat as they got closer and closer and —
WHAM.
The two of them collided against an invisible wall, just a few feet from the stairs.
“FUCK! ” Sylvie screamed, sliding to the ground and slamming a fist against the barrier. “BITCH!”
“Hey.” Mobius reached out to her, but she jerked away from him. Her eyes were red and furious, brimming with tears. “Sylvie, c’mon.”
“Bitch,” she spat, her shoulders trembling. “She’s going to kill him. She’s going to kill my brother.”
Mobius blinked, the air momentarily stolen from his lungs. He’d suspected that the bond between Loki and Sylvie had shifted more towards that of siblings, but he hadn’t heard her confirm it until now.
He swallowed down his feelings on the matter, pushing himself upright to look her in the eye. This was more important than his latent jealousy, the guilty vindication that bubbled up in his throat. “Sylvie. If anyone can break — whatever this is, it’s you.”
“I can try,” she whispered. “But I — I don’t know —”
“You can,” he said, pouring every ounce of sincerity and confidence he had in this smart, infuriating, incredibly strong woman in front of him into his voice. “I know you can.”
They shared a silent look for a moment, an unspoken argument, but Sylvie eventually nodded. She got to her feet and slammed her hands against the barrier, green light spilling from her fingers and across the dome of force that surrounded the entrance to the subway station.
Mobius got to his feet, glancing over at the portal. Something was swirling beyond it, something more than just sand, something like —
A dog jumped forth from it, a strangely adorable creature that was hairless except for a white tuft on her head, and wore a familiar-looking red and black coat.
Mary Puppins , Wade had said. A dog Deadpool variant? Mobius could easily see how that was possible, but if one Deadpool variant was coming out of that portal, did that mean —
His question was answered about two seconds later, when a distinctly feminine Deadpool stepped out of the portal, long blonde hair spilling down from a high ponytail. TVA agents bristled at her arrival, pruning sticks ready, and she responded by sinking her blades into the nearest one.
Shit. Mobius’s knuckles went white on his Time Stick as the woman shot towards the perimeter of hunters, shattering their lines. After her came a horde. They spilled out from the portal, a crowd of Deadpools in every shape and form, spreading between the TVA and the subway station. B-15 was yelling for Mobius to get out of the line of fire as hunters fell back into a defensive formation, but he remained in front of Sylvie. Maybe he’d die here, but honestly, if it meant that Sylvie could break through the barrier and stop Cassandra, it would be well worth it.
Mobius glanced up towards the sky, brandishing his pruning stick as four variants approached him. Loki, he thought, are you watching?
“We’ve got you,” he whispered, taking the chance. His words vanished in the breeze, lost to time, but Mobius hoped they’d find their way to him. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you.”
As if drawn by his words, the air in front of him fizzed and cracked. Green light spilled forth, and for a wild, heart-stopping moment, Mobius thought his prayers had finally been answered — but no. When the light faded, it was just two bickering, primary-colored men.
“Oh, yikes!” Wade yelped, pulling out a pistol that Mobius knew for a fact was empty. “Are they on her side? This isn’t fun.”
“Are you kidding me?” Logan snorted, reaching behind his neck to pull a familiar-looking cowl over his head. “I get to kill a hundred versions of you, it’s Christmas.”
Wade glanced over his shoulder at Mobius. “You good back there, Jedediah?”
“I —” Mobius’s words faltered. “Where is he?”
“On his way, sweetheart, don’t worry,” Wade said, aiming a shot and then cursing as his gun clicked. “Or maybe do. Ooh, is that Nicepool? Hold my beer.” He tossed the pistol to Mobius, who made a halfhearted attempt to catch it and failed, then darted off towards the approaching variants with swords flashing. Wade seemed to have absolutely no problem cutting down his own variants, slicing through them like butter and then using one as a human shield while he mowed down a few more.
On his way. Mobius’s heart squeezed, and the world seemed to fade in and out for a moment. He lingered in those words for a few moments, in the hope breaking through the clouds around his mind. Loki’s on his way . His mind raced as he finally let himself imagine what he’d do upon seeing Loki again: hug him? Hit him? Yell at him for running into a battle while he was already in so much danger? Yell at him for running the fuck off without even giving Mobius a chance to say goodbye? All of those, consecutively? He was nearly breathless with it, because for the first time, it was actually going to happen. The thought of it no longer came with a stab of anguish, of hopelessness.
God, he missed that man. He hadn’t realized how much he relied on Loki’s presence until he’d vanished, the laughter and color that man brought into every aspect of his life. The days had grown duller without him, stretched and fraying at the edges. Even if he could see Loki for just a few minutes more, it would be worth it.
His thoughts were rudely interrupted by a pair of hands grabbing his shoulders and shaking them. Logan’s eyes were bright and angry as he snarled, “Where’s Laura? ”
“I — I haven’t gotten her yet!” Mobius stammered, frantically trying to pick up the pieces of his brain. “I’ve been a bit busy —”
“You’re fucking not anymore!” Logan roared, spearing the nearest Deadpool in the face before they could get too close. With his free hand, he fished He Who Remains’ TemPad out of his belt and shoved it against Mobius’s chest. The lines of his face were etched with a fierce anger and worry that resonated with the foundation of Mobius’s subconscious, like a stone dropped into a pond. “Go get her. Now.”
“Uh, yep.” Mobius fumbled for the TemPad, flicking it open. All he had to do was type in Laura Kinney 10005 and Void , and there she was. He licked his lips, deciding it was best not to argue with a man who had claws the size of Subway sandwiches coming out of his hands. “I’ll, uh, be back in a minute.”
He flicked open the time door and stuck his head through, blinking rapidly at the heat and dusty air of Cassandra’s courtyard. Bodies littered the sand, and walking among them were four figures.
Mobius shaded his eyes from the sun. “Laura Kinney?”
The smallest of them looked up, a girl with long brown hair and pink sunglasses. She slowly lifted them, revealing wide dark eyes.
One of the other group members slid in front of her, a man in a dark coat with a patch of white in his hair. “Who’re you?”
“I’m Agent Mobius!” he called. “I’m with the TVA. You guys want out?”
A woman stepped forward, giving him a wary look as she flicked a sai in one hand. “You’re just — offering us a way out? After all this time?”
“Well, it was pretty hard to find you,” Mobius pointed out. “And, let’s just say . . . the TVA’s under new management. We’re doing things a bit differently now.” His gaze swept over the four of them as he confirmed their identities: X-23, Elektra, Blade, Gambit. Somehow all still alive. “And you’ve got a friend who’s put in a good word for you.”
Laura stepped forward, her claws retracting, her expression softening into one of hope. “Logan?”
“Yep.” Mobius grinned. “He just gave me shit for not pulling you out earlier. And I’d rather not have him kill me, so if you wouldn’t mind —”
Laura pushed past him, vanishing into the door.
He breathed a small sigh of relief, glancing back up at the others. “I will say, it’s, uh, not exactly pretty on the other side —”
“Oh, that’s our specialty,” Blade chuckled. He gestured to Elektra. “After you.”
She gave him a nod, brushing past Mobius. Gambit followed with a deck of cards already in his hands, with Blade bringing up the rear, and Mobius ducked out after them. The sounds of battle flooded back over him as the door winked out of existence, and sure enough, three out of four resistance fighters had already joined the fight.
The fourth had pulled Logan into a hug, her arms locked around his torso, her cheek pressed against his sternum and her eyes welling with tears. Logan’s arms hovered awkwardly for a second, then rested around her shoulders. His eyes were suspiciously bright.
“Awwww!” Wade swung past them, neatly decapitating a Deadpool with the Welsh flag emblazoned across his suit. “Father and daughter reunited again, how sweet —!”
“Shut the fuck up!” both of them yelled, without moving.
Wade cackled like a witch and proceeded to dismember a Deadpool-looking robot, and Mobius decided to stop questioning his surroundings. Instead he whirled his Time Stick, and got to work pruning the variants that Wade, Gambit, Elektra, Blade, and then Logan and Laura left in their wake.
The horde of Deadpools were attempting to push towards the subway station, but having a swarm of TVA hunters on one flank and a group of mercenaries on the other proved quite effective in cutting their numbers. The sling ring portal was still open, allowing for a few more to slip through, but the time regeneration and pruning took kept them from advancing too quickly. Bullets were still in play, which made life difficult, but either Logan or Wade always seemed to be there whenever one came close to Mobius. At one point, Wade actually shoved him to the ground and proceeded to slice a hail of bullets out of the air, catching the excess on various limbs. Once he’d knocked their source (a child-sized Deadpool) to the ground, Mobius pruned the kid, and Wade finally let him back up.
“The hell was that for?” Mobius snapped, staggering to his feet. “I know how to take cover!”
“Not to my satisfaction, you don’t!” Wade said cheerfully, cutting the legs off another variant. “Do me a favor and get behind something, will you?”
“What, you think this thing’s a ranged weapon?” Mobius scoffed, whacking the now legless corpse with his pruning stick. It vanished in a cloud of multicolored sparks.
“No, I think your boyfriend would turn me into skin spaghetti if you got so much as a scratch,” Wade snorted, shooting a variant in the face with a new gold-plated handgun.
“He — you —” Mobius blinked several times before he could decide what aspect of that sentence to focus on. Laura sent a mangled body skidding across the street, and he pruned it without even thinking. Eventually he shook his head, letting a sharp breath out through his nose. “Listen, you’ve gotta stop talking like that. Me and him, we weren’t —” The words required a fair amount of force to come out. “We weren’t like that.”
No matter how often his heart had leaped at that man’s touch, the time Loki had leaned in just to fix his tie, fallen asleep on his desk, no matter how many laughs or promises or looks from under those long eyelashes, it had never been in the way he’d wanted it. And he’d been happy with it. He’d been happy just to have Loki, but now he had none of him. He’d rip himself into pieces, shelve that stupid part of him in love with a god, blink hard and smile and push through all over again if it meant he could see Loki just one more time. Even if Mobius couldn’t tell him how he felt — which honestly, he didn’t know if he’d even want to — but then again, part of him was ripping itself open from the inside because Loki had been shunned and betrayed his whole life, and he deserved to know that someone, someone alive loved him, even if he didn’t feel the same way — no. No, they’d never been anything more than friends, no matter how much Mobius had wanted it but forced himself to be content without.
“Really?” The white eyes of Wade’s mask went wide, but he sounded absolutely unconvinced. “Have you told him that?”
Before he could answer, a loud crash ripped through the air, like the sound of glass shattering. Mobius whipped around, and sure enough, Cassandra’s barrier was falling in shards of glowing green fragments. Sylvie had done it. The way was clear.
“Alright, go! ” he yelled, grabbing Wade’s shoulder and shoving him in the direction of the subway station. “Get down there! Where’s Logan? Logan! ”
Wade stumbled, glancing back at him. “You coming with me, lover boy?”
“No shit! ” Mobius ducked under a blow, slamming his pruning stick into a variant’s side. He found Logan and grabbed him by the cowl, dragging the fearsome Wolverine towards the subway station like a wayward steer.
“Hey!” Logan yelped, backpedaling to keep up. “I’m comin’, I’m comin’ —!”
A zombified Deadpool head came at them via what looked like a propeller hat, but Mobius whacked it hard enough to send the tattered skull screaming into the gutter. He, Logan, and Wade tumbled down the steps of the subway station, but they came in on a scene that stopped Mobius in his tracks.
A TVA outpost been set up to house the Time-Ripper, but now there was a bald woman with her hands in the machine, her eyes rolling into the back of her head, lights flickering and walls shaking and dust raining from the ceiling.
“No,” he whispered, his blood running cold. “She’s already started.”
“What?” Wade stopped in his tracks, glancing back. “What’s that mean? How do we stop her?”
Mobius’s gaze darted around the room, the flickering computer screens, Paradox wheezing on the floor, the tempered glass pipes that sprouted up from the floor and fed two thrumming currents of energy into the machine. He was an analyst. It was his job to watch these things and predict how they would end, but this one sank a pit in his chest.
“Now that she’s started, we can’t prune her,” he began, swallowing dryly. “With all the temporal energy flowing through her, it would just add more, and it might make the situation even worse.”
Wade threw up his hands. “How could it possibly be worse?”
Mobius pressed his fingers to his temples. “My point is, we can’t do that. The only way to fix it is to get below the machine to the turbines, and disrupt the power flow.”
Wade stared at him. “I’m gonna need a visual.”
Mobius summoned all his strength from his past life as a father of two boys and held up his hands. “Pipe one, matter. Pipe two, antimatter. They mix in the machine, creating a controlled blast that the machine directs into the fabric of time. If they mixed before they hit the machine, they would create an uncontrolled blast, which would destroy the machine, along with everything within a ten foot radius.”
“Oh, cool.” He nodded. “So, how do we do that?”
Logan paused his angry scowling at the machine to look at Wade like he was an idiot. “If the pipes come from a lower chamber, which they do, you dumb fuck, we can get downstairs and connect them there.”
“Oh my God, you do have a brain!”
“Wait, wait.” Mobius sighed. “We don’t have time to do it safely. You’ll have to connect them by hand.”
Logan blinked. “Okay.”
“Which will kill you.”
The two superpowered healing mutants exchanged a look.
Mobius sighed again, significantly more exasperated this time. “It’s matter and antimatter. Those two do not like each other, surprisingly, even more than you two. It will kill whoever connects them. Irrevocably.”
Logan shrugged. “Alright.”
Mobius stared at him, his voice faltering. “You — listen —”
“No, you listen,” Logan snorted, giving him an almost affectionate smirk. “This is the fate of the entire multiverse we’re talking about. And, out of the three of us, I have the least to lose.” He reached over and clapped Mobius’s shoulder. “Thanks for the coffee.”
Mobius’s jaw hung open as Logan walked off towards a maintenance door, calm as anything. That man walked as though he truly had nothing left in the world, as though he didn’t have a daughter literally right upstairs.
“Uh.” Wade winced. “I’ll go handle that. Kiss your boyfriend for me, ’mkay?”
“I —” Mobius spluttered, trying to come up with a witty remark as Wade patted his cheek and strode after Logan, eventually landing on, “Only if you kiss him! ”
Wade froze for a half a second. He turned, shot Mobius a wink, and disappeared.
Shit, Mobius thought, through a haze of stress and anxiety. He’s actually going to do it.
Boots thrummed on the stairs behind him, and he turned to see B-15 and a whole squadron of hunters flooding into the station.
“Idiot,” she muttered, pausing next to him as her hunters swept through the station, keeping a wary distance from Cassandra. Her dark eyes flickered as she scanned the scene. “What’s the situation?”
“We can’t prune her,” he responded, rubbing his forehead in a vain attempt to dispel that interaction from his mind. “Deadpool and the Wolverine just went downstairs to connect the power cables and destroy the machine.”
B-15’s expression tensed. “And if they don’t get there in time?”
Mobius gave her a bright, dry smile. “We’re fucked.”
“Lovely.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “God, could this get any worse?”
“Depends. How’s the situation upstairs?”
“Decent, actually. Sylvie’s getting a lot of catharsis from all the graphic murder and disembowelment she has to do to keep the variants occupied before they can be pruned.”
“Oh, perfect,” he muttered, a smile tugging at his lips. “She’s been needing something like that for a while.”
“Hey, Mobius?”
“Yeah?”
“We need to stop working on multiverse-ending cases,”
“You’re telling me.” A smile tugged at his lips, and he shook his head. “Really, after all this, you’d think we’d earn a vacation, or —”
A flash of color caught Mobius’s eye and he turned, his heart pounding. Just for the briefest moment — maybe he was hallucinating, but he thought he saw —
Green light flooded the stairwell, and Mobius recognized it immediately. Sylvie’s magic was emotional, violent, and deeply personal. This, though — this was quick, shifting, carefully calculated and more powerful than anyone could imagine.
“What?” B-15 tensed. “Mobius, what is it?”
“Loki,” he breathed, the name a whisper on the wind, but he knew it was true. He started forward, shouldering past B-15 and pushing hunters aside as his feet moved faster and faster and then he was running, taking the steps two at a time until sunlight hit his face and he was glancing around the ruined street.
It truly was ruined now. Storefronts crumbling, walls and sidewalks pockmarked with bullet holes, and still several Deadpool variants fighting viciously against the group of Void refugees, who were beginning to look a bit worse for wear. Sylvie was amongst them, her blades catching the sunlight, but it wasn’t her that Mobius’s eyes landed on.
A green shape was flickering through the fight, flashing from opponent to opponent with blinding speed. He was almost intelligible, but every so often when his magic faded, there would be the flash of a knife, a flicker of a dress shirt, a hint of black hair. At one point he solidified, grabbing Gambit’s shoulders, and Mobius could be sure.
Loki was standing there in the street, dressed just as he had been when he walked down the observation deck all those months ago in a white dress shirt and slacks. His coat was gone and his sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, leaving the bare skin of his forearms full in view. His hair hadn’t changed, but it hung stringy around his face as he asked Gambit something with all the urgency of a man whose life was on the line. His eyes were round and spilling with a horrifying kind of fear, his lips moving quickly and remaining open as Gambit presumably answered, frozen in an expression stricken with panic.
Mobius stood completely still. His heart was doing a funny thing in his chest — stumbling over itself like it was trying to decide whether to speed up or just freeze — but he barely even noticed. His whole world zeroed into that one man, looking as he had all those months ago but with a new, heavier weight to the shadows of his face. The air around him shimmered faintly, his temporal aura practically bleeding into the world and giving him the appearance of an illusion, a mirage.
Mobius's throat tightened, and he stepped out into the street. The fight had faded away in his ears, none of it mattered anymore. Loki was nodding slowly at what Gambit was saying, a furrow appearing between his eyebrows — there. Mobius knew that look. The tightness around the eyes, the faintly baffled expression, the sharp focus despite confusion. It was the same look he'd seen when he'd questioned Loki, when they'd hunted Sylvie together, when they'd searched in vain to fix endless problems. That was doubt, setback, grit, humility, vulnerability, determination.
That was his Loki.
An incredulous smile flickered across his face. He couldn’t help but think that it had all been worth it, up until now, just so he could see that man again. How many times had he taken Loki’s presence for granted? A scowling figure across the table, a voice over his shoulder, an annoying remark that secretly made him laugh — he’d tried to play through all of it again in the months since Loki had left. He’d savored those memories, but they paled in comparison to seeing the man himself move in real time, flesh and blood, no longer just a ghost of the past. It was like comparing a blurred photo to the real thing, watching colors sharpen and leap in ways a frozen face never could.
In that moment, all of it was worth it.
That was, until he heard the gunshot.