Chapter 1
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Mobius couldn’t do it. He couldn’t enter his life on a branch.
It looked nice, sure. Best house on the block, two kids, a job selling jet skis…family and stability…but it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his life anymore. That man, that single father, wasn’t who Mobius was.
He couldn’t enter that life, or any life on the branches, even though being at the TVA hurt.
Just existing in a place that echoed of Loki was agony. The entire place now existed to protect and help maintain what Loki had sacrificed himself for. Loki was everywhere, an inescapable presence, and his memory was even more pervasive.
His ghost was in the empty space beside Mobius in the elevator, across the table from him, at his desk…there was a void everywhere that Loki should have been, with his long limbs and unrestrained chaotic energy.
Mobius couldn’t escape the heartache, but nor did he want to. Heartache was better than a lie.
So he returned to the TVA, and he did his job. Not as well as before, not nearly close to as well as when Loki had been with him, but he did it, and he did it alone, abandoning any pretence of being alright almost as soon as Loki had gone.
Those he called friends understood, and he was too tired to care what everyone else thought.
Mobius had no idea what he was doing really, other than the only thing he could do to honour Loki’s sacrifice. To help protect the tree and its branches. It was the only life he could remember anyway. Easier to bury himself in work and distraction here than in a life that wasn’t his.
Sometimes, when the paperwork was too much and the silence too unbearable, Mobius went to the time theatre and watched. Watched Loki, his Loki. Just chosen moments of his life from the discovery of that frost giant runt by Odin, right up to the nexus event that led him to the TVA.
Never beyond that. The Loki beyond there was not his.
He was part way through watching a moment of typical Loki mischief from his childhood when the door behind him opened. Mobius didn’t turn immediately, considered not turning around at all, but finally paused the recording just as Thor picked up the ‘snake’ that had slithered towards him.
Mobius expected to find B-15 or Casey, the two most likely to both know where to find him, and to bring him either work or attempts at consolation.
O.B. was a surprise. Enough of a surprise to briefly ignite a slight emotion above the background of relentless grief.
“Mobius!” O.B. declared as if surprised to find the analyst exactly where he presumably knew he was going to find him.
“O.B.” Mobius forced a smile, “What brings you up here?”
“Something very important. Come with me. No time to lose!”
Mobius frowned and stood up, not bothering to turn the image off. No one was likely to come in here other than him, and O.B. was already marching out the door.
Really quickly.
He was in the elevator almost before Mobius had reached the corridor.
“What’s going on?” he asked, jogging to catch up, “Please don’t say another we’re all gonna die moment because right now I really can’t…”
“I was thinking about Loki.”
“Yeah, so was I,” Mobius mumbled sadly to himself.
“Not like that,” O.B. replied, continuing too quickly for Mobius to interpret, let alone react, to the response, “I was thinking. It’s sad that he’s not here and he’s all alone in the centre of time.”
That was one hell of an understatement.
“So, I thought, wouldn’t it be good if we could get him back?”
“Yes!” Mobius spun to face him, the impossible dream suddenly a reality in his mind, “Yes! That would be…can we do it? How?”
“We can’t do it.”
The transient moment of hope and elation dissipated more quickly that one of Loki’s illusions, “Oh…”
“Not yet. I’ve been working on something. It still needs to be tested and I need your temporal aura and his.”
“So we can do it?!”
“No. Not yet.”
“But we will be able to?!”
The elevator had stopped and Mobius began following O.B. out.
“In theory. But I need your temporal auras.”
Mobius considered asking why and how and more, but that didn’t matter. If there was something they could do to get to Loki, Mobius didn’t care what it required.
“Okay! I can get those. I’ll get them and meet you in R&A.”
He spun away from the corridor, back to the elevator, and sprinted through the closing doors. Temporal auras of TVA employees had to be somewhere. Presumably with those of variants, since they had been…were…variants. Mobius had never needed to get access to one since it wasn’t part of his job, but Casey might know where they were kept.
But Casey wasn’t at his desk.
Mobius backtracked, found his way to the canteen, and practically bowled into Casey, just as he was sitting down for what was probably his lunch.
Loki has wrecked one of his lunches and Mobius was about to wreck another on the god’s behalf .
“Casey! C’mon!”
Mobius grabbed the tray from his hands and set it down on the nearest table, before ushering Casey towards the corridor.
Casey’s very reasonable protests were ignored, and died away altogether at the mention of Loki’s name.
“We might be able to get him back. Or get to him. Or something. I don’t know, but we need his temporal aura and mine.”
“Oh, then we’re going in the wrong direction…” Casey turned around abruptly, “They’re stored on the same level as R&A. I thought they should be moved to the archives, but as usual no one listened. It just doesn’t make sense when…”
The disgruntled quiet words continued, a backdrop to Mobius’ racing thoughts.
He was getting ahead of himself, already considering everything he wanted to say to Loki if this worked. Everything he wanted to do. He hadn’t even had time for so much as a hug, barely a single touch, before Loki had gone and locked them on the other side of the blast doors.
“Here!” Casey opened the door to a room Mobius had never seen before, “Do you know what variant numbers you and Loki are?”
Mobius didn’t.
“I can look it up,” Casey went over to one of three computers behind a desk in the corner of the room, “Now the truth is out there, all the information is stored in accessible files. So…look in drawer 566 for aura 879B3, and drawer…”
“Wait!” Mobius was still on his way to the first drawer. He found it, searched through the contents and found the first temporal aura.
“That’s yours,” Casey called across the room, “Drawer 7. That’s all Loki variants. Your Loki is aura 703BR.”
A drawer full of Loki variant auras was no surprise. That his Loki was right at the back wasn’t either. Mobius knew there had been no other Lokis enter the TVA after his. Maybe no more would. Things had changed, they only arrested or pruned if absolutely necessary. Loki seemed to find a way to manage new branches, weave them into the tree, and allow those lives their place.
Mobius looked at the two auras. Meaningless to him. Colour and light that he didn’t understand. But there they were.
They had the auras. Part one done.
And O.B. seemed to already have part two in hand.
“It’s a prototype,” O.B. cautioned, taking the two auras from Mobius, “Because we are in a place without time and Loki is in a place at the centre of all time, an ordinary door won’t work. But we use these auras to create anchor points, so we can create a door between you and Loki. But just for a moment. It won’t stay open long. And you cannot go through. Not yet.”
A small part of the building hope dissipated, “Can we send things through?”
“Maybe. If that works and nothing becomes spaghetti or atomically disassembled, then I can work on modifying things so a living being can go through.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was something.
It was a massive something.
“I need a little longer to fix everything together…” O.B. mumbled, disappearing behind the desk.
Mobius wasn’t about to wait idle.
He nodded although O.B. couldn’t see, and ran out the room to get three essential things.
Pen, notepad, and pie.
By the time he returned, the modified tempads were ready, Loki’s temporal aura fixed to one, Mobius’ to the other, and both being stared at by O.B. and Casey.
“Is it ready?”
“Ready to test.”
“Okay,” Mobius put the notepad on the desk and scribbled a quick note on the first page, <Slice of pie?>
“Now everything goes on this tray,” O.B. began placing the note, the plate with its pie, and the pen on a small wheeled tray, followed by another, longer, note of his own and the one modified tempad. He handed the other tempad to Mobius.
“Open a door. It should go straight to Loki.”
“And if not?”
O.B. shrugged. So, it either went to Loki or probably caused some catastrophic event that would lead to a new branch that the TVA would have to deal with.
Less of a gamble than they had faced before.
Mobius’ fingers shook as he opened the door. If this worked, it would be hope. The first hope in ages, and maybe a chance to one day see Loki again.
The door was just small, barely large enough for the tray, and it stuttered unsteadily even at the moment it appeared. But it held. It held long enough for O.B. to slide the tray through, and for a fraction of a second after, before it collapsed.
They didn’t have to wait long to find out if it worked.
Within a few minutes, at least in TVA time, a door appeared, the tray slid back through, now without the other tempad, and the door disappeared once more.
The pie was gone, and beneath the now empty plate, a page from the notepad, with the neat cursive words, <Thank you, Mobius. (Although you might have included a fork).>
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