Chapter 6
“Manhunt,” Brunnhilde summarized, grinning. “I like it. Need a hand?”
“I’ll let you know,” Thor said. Except, that would kind of defeat the point of it being only an hour from her point of view. Then again, she would not mind that. But then he’d be without a babysitter for Love and they wouldn’t let her into the TVA. Oh well, if they did need an extra hand, Brunnhilde would know within the hour. “But they did tell me to warn that there’s a small chance he will show up here sometime in the future.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how do they know he might?”
“I don’t know. Sylvie said so.” To Mobius, who then had to tell him. Just for show of course. He’d been within earshot the entire time. “” And she’s technically a female Loki.”
“Interesting. Where did they find a figure like that?”
“Don’t know. She was already there.”
“Aight then.” Brunnhilde shrugged. “But back to actually Loki, you think he’s avoiding you? Like, he wants to be in that tree?”
“I don’t know. It’s one explanation. But I certainly intend to ask.”
“If he does show up here,” Brunnhilde said. “I’ll tie him up for you, all pretty with a bow.”
“That’d be nice. Thanks.”
Love hummed. “You have to hit him first.”
Brunnhilde frowned. “I’ll do that too, no problem. But like for a specific reason, because you’re mad, or just because it’d be funny?”
She smiled. “All of the above.”
“It’s kind of a basic protocol when it comes to Loki,” Thor explained. “With all those illusions. The idea is, throw something, if it hits, tie him up. If not, that’s an illusion, keep looking.”
“Okay, so do I throw something or just hit him?”
“Both, because it’s funny,” Love said. “Also, I’m mad.”
“Go find you some crayons so you can express it through art. No more powers in the house, remember.” Brunnhilde cracked open another beer and threw back half of it. “Gotta love how this went from ‘We have to find him to help him’ to ‘We gotta hunt him down to beat his ass’ in no time.”
That had been a rather smooth transition indeed. “Leave some for me.”
“But here's an idea,” Brunnhilde said. “You know the time and place they saw him, right? For one, you can check whether it’s actually him. Second, if so, you can just chug him through one of those portals while at it. Why not just go back there?”
“Because he’s not there anymore.”
“Then go back before that. That’s a time travel ipad, right?”
He didn’t know the exact time Sylvie had sent Loki through the portal, only for them to disappear, but he remembered the hour during which Tony had confronted Loki. And if he got it wrong, he could just go back at the right time. It was all in his own timeline, so it could do no harm. “I think that might actually work.”
“Good. Now wait, you should wear a disguise, just to be on the safe side.” She opened a drawer and told Love, “Hey, can you grab that throw from the couch?”
New York 2012. Timeline 616-Ex.Dev.01(LegV80.).In.Dev.01(Minor) Composite 12B(Imm.Stable.Dis)
Loki motioned to throw Stark from his own tower, the monument to his own arrogance. It was fitting. Pride comes before the fall.
Before he could extend his arm, another of those orange portals flashed into existence. It was not the woman from before, or a woman at all. Probably. He had to go by general size, given the checkered cloth was royally wrapped around the entire being. Save for the eyes, which were covered by reflective, heart-shaped sunglasses.
Loki looked at Stark. “Who is this?”
Stark himself was too baffled to have made use of the confusion. “I was about to ask you. Hey you, what the hell?”
The cloth-wrapped individual proceeded to scurry around the room in the fashion a sentient, checkered bush might have. As it reached the bar, yet another portal appeared. Yet another person stepped out. Some guy dressed like a Midgardian middlemen salesperson halfway his life expectancy. The only remarkable feature was a crookedly healed broken nose. He tapped the sentient bush on the shoulder. The bush seemed to experience a certain sense of ‘busted!’.
The gray-haired man jabbed his thumb at the portal. “Get in.”
The sentient bush retreated into the portal. The old guy stopped to wave before following. “I’d say carry on, but please, just don’t.”
How far he would’ve fallen if he’d ever follow the nondescript order from a poorly-dressed desk-dweller collecting sentient bushes by the use of sickly orange portals. He threw Stark from the window. Simultaneously, something struck him from behind.
Mobius pinched the bridge of his nose, longing for the simplicity of hunting an unspecified Loki-variant. Said unspecified Loki-variant was currently dying from laughter. As if the fact that at least one Loki-variant had witnessed a walking blanket searching Stark tower at the most inopportune moment possible and had just carried on like he would anyway didn’t reflect back on her as a person just a bit.
B-15 watched the scene with a raised eyebrow. “If nothing else, he’s determined.”
The lady Sif nodded completely and utterly unironically. “Isn’t this the exact thing he did anyway?”
“On the unsacred timeline,” Casey answered, using the term meant to reject the concept of a set timeline while still being concise. “Yes.”
“Which this still is,” B-15 added, pursing her lips. “He was presumably almost assassinated, saw this masked figure- which is his potential future self and a female version of himself disappearing through a timedoor. And then this bull, and he doesn’t deviate from course even an inch.”
Casey laughed, “ If only he’d been this variance-stable before the revolution. Would’ve saved us so much work.”
“Okay, however much I enjoy making fun of Loki,” Mobius said before it devolved. “Let’s find him first so we can make fun of him to his face.”
“Used to be, this would be redlining the TVA into a panic.” B-15 noted. “Now, we’re just laughing about it. What will this even do?”
“It’s technically time travel.” Casey shrugged. “At worst, we get a new timeline out of this.”
Lady Sif rapidly turned her head to look at every person in the room. “That’s bad, right?”
“No, it’s internal,” B-15 said. “Things like this happen surprisingly often. The multiverse is still standing, so it’s probably harmless. Not that we want to push that theory.”
Mobius hadn’t been around here a lot since Loki had gone away, but since he was back, he did gather that a lot of what they thought they knew they had discovered was wrong and they were exceedingly displeased with that development. All the ‘they’s in that sentence referred to O.B. B-15 had broken the news to him about the fact that Kang-variant really had been going back and forth trying to assassinate past Loki with the intention of changing something that had already happened, with them being none the wiser to boot, with all the delicacy of telling someone you’d run over their favorite cate twice. It still had not gone over well.
Thor confidently nodded along as he somehow understood. Between thinking it was a good idea to interrupt Sylvie’s past intervention and giving the time coordinates just a wild guess. “Do we know how to get into that tree yet?”
Sylvie tilted her head as if she was smelling more- in B-15’s words- bull. “Well yes, duh.”
“That’s great,” Thor said, confused. “I was only gone for an hour, at most.”
Mobius chuckled. They’d been just starting to wonder where he’d wandered off to, when Casey had flagged it down. Telling time inside the TVA was wasted energy, but it had definitely been longer than an hour. That’s what you got for uncoordinated time travel. But bottomline, for all his solemn nodding, the mighty god of thunder still had no clue as to how this worked. “First of all, she’s messing with you. Secondly, that’s not how time works here.”
Thor tapped and patted Sif’s shoulder until there wasn’t a single doubt he had her undivided attention. “How long was I gone?’
The lady seemed only very mildly annoyed, especially given she’d already been looking his way and it wasn’t exactly a life-or-death question. Love really upped the frustration threshold. “I couldn’t really tell.”
“Okay, anyways, how do we get into that tree?”
“Conclusion is,” Mobius said. “We don’t.”
“Wait, what?”
“We went over all the lore of Yggdrasil multiple times,” Sif said, quickly touching the hand still on her shoulder. “And it does speak of ways to get to the center, but it’s unclear, inconsistent, and contradictory.”
“We’re not trying to get into Yggdrasil,” Thor remarked, lifting his hand in order to fold his arms. “So maybe not very relevant.”
According to every other Asgardian currently present they were, in fact, trying to get into Yggdrasil. But they’d put that on the backburner for now. “Semantics aside, that route might take ages.”
“Maybe if we’d start looking in the right place,” Thor suggested. “Not much use looking at the train chart to New York if you’re going to Los Angeles.”
Sylvie groaned and rolled her eyes. “Look, we can go around reading all that’s out there and test out every possible theory for getting into whatever you wanna call it and hope we stumble in, or we can make it easy for ourselves and catch his ass while he’s outside of it.”
“On a branch of it,” Casey corrected. In response to the dirty look Sylvie threw him, he added, “Your words.”
She ignored him. “So surprisingly, that just now was only dumb in practice. In theory, you were onto something. Now we’re going to-.”
Now, that almost went wrong. Again, but worse. Mobius quickly interrupted. “Analyze some variables and parameters. We’ll get you once we have all the math in order.”
Asgard, 1898. Timeline 616. In.Dev. 01; Negligible
Apparently, this interdimensional warmonger could adhere to one of two approaches. One, get to Loki in the exact time right before things went as they had and maximize the chances of getting the exact right reality. Two, go back earlier in time and eliminate him from as many potential timelines as possible and hope they got the right branch while at it. Or from as many potential realities as possible and hope they got the right timeline. Branches were made out of timelines and timelines were made out of realities, for clarity’s sake.
The one Sif was sent out to witness was the latter option. As such, she once more wandered the halls of the palace of Asgard. They had told her it was practically time travel for her, but that she should never change the settings regarding reality-navigation in the tempad they’d given her. Something about deforming her own timeline. She had asked Ouroboros to lock it down so she couldn’t even change it by mistake.
But that aside, the plan was simple enough. Walk around as if nothing was amiss. If someone demanded she identify herself, she’d throw back her hood- with her right hand, very important- and apologize for disrupting them with her nightly stroll. She had not cared to ask the TVA how they’d gotten possession of her old clothes.
She was supposed to arrive on location as the anomaly occurred and catch the assassin in the act. Waiting there was less than ideal and jumping out of a time door at said location was less than ideal. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the location was Loki’s chambers. And by all logic, Loki was there, sleeping or keeping himself awake reading. Whatever the case, him catching her lurking or witnessing her emerge from a portal could split the timeline at ‘90 degrees’, whatever that had meant. Apparently, that was fine for everyone except her past self who wouldn’t be her past self anymore if this went wrong. And apparently, that was funny to the TVA’s people.
She showed the guards the book- an exact copy from one already in the libraries of Asgard- she was supposedly returning.
Unsurprisingly, the guards gave her a strange look.
“He said he wanted it back today and not a minute later,” she told them. “So he’s getting it back today and not a minute later.”
The guards communicated to each with a grin and let her pass. There hadn’t been a soul in Asgard that hadn’t enjoyed sending some mischief return to sender to the god of mischief.
The chambers were pitch dark except for a single candle flickering on the nightstand. A book lay upside down on the crumpled blanket next to the sleeping figure. Every time they’d ever made camp, they’d find a blanket haphazardly kicked to a random spot the next morning. Everyone had tripped over it at least once, Loki himself included. The quirk made more sense in hindsight.
The figure lay entirely too still. Too quiet, without even the sound of breathing. Sif grabbed the tempad. The anomaly had occurred only a second before she entered. There was no way the job had been done in under a second. And wasn’t the current Loki supposed to at least try and stop it? Her stomach turned.
She hurried to the bedside and touched his shoulder. His skin’s heat seeped through the fabric of his shirt, as did the sweat. At least, she hoped that it was sweat and not blood. She further inspected the shirt for tears or cuts. There were no signs of stabwounds, but that was not a nightshirt. For some reason, he was in bed wearing his day's clothing.
It was almost a relief to hear him groan in annoyance. “I’m fine, just leave me…Sif? What are you doing?”
The strain in his voice was the last clue to complete the picture. Once, Volstagg had brought a barrel of questionable ale. She’d tried one cup before deciding she trusted the weird tingle in her throat for nothing. Hogunn had declined while questioning everyone else’s sanity. Volstagg, Fandral, and Thor had eventually stumbled to their chambers, swerving and with heads like tomatoes. Loki- goaded into drinking it by Thor- had already retreated long before that, pale, quiet, and seemingly ready to dispose of the drink via the route it had gone in.
He’d spent the subsequent morning in a stupor they’d ascribed to his lack of constitution. Until he’d collapsed around noon and hadn’t gotten up. Thor had been the first to notice the fever and had carried him back to his chambers. The healers went and came with ever more grim expressions, the King and Queen were called, and eventually, Loki’s chambers had been placed under quarantine. While they'd been waiting for news, Thor had confessed to her that Loki had repeatedly whispered that he was dying.
Three days later, Loki was once again prancing around the castle, none the worse for the wear.
“You seemed unwell when you left,” she improvised. There were only so many excuses for groping someone’s chest and waist while they slept. None very good. “In fact, you look like hell. Is there a pitcher? You need water.”
He made a weak attempt at pointing. He didn’t even manage a quip as he accepted the cup and emptied it in one second flat. He had the cup slip from his hand. “Damn it.”
Asking him whether he’d seen or heard something before she came in would be pointless. He’d have trouble finding the door that morning. She lied, “You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“I didn’t drink that much.”
“Who knows what was in it.”
“Fuck Volstagg.”
She caught herself snorting. That might be the first time she heard him say that word. “Good night.” She put the cup back exactly where she found it, so there’d be no physical evidence of her presence. With a bit of luck, he’d assume it to have been a fever dream.
“No significant variance or nexus potential,” Casey said, referring to the energies associated with branching realities apparently. “If anything happened, it was nothing as interesting as an assassination.”
“Could he actually have been poisoned?” Sif asked. ‘On purpose, I mean.”
“Retroactively?” The man asked as if she had lost her mind. “Of course not.”
Sif didn’t find it absolutely necessary to understand the no doubt complex reason behind it and took his word for it.
Sylvie sat two desks over, boots on top of it. She threw back the contents of some brightly coloured bottle. “Y’all actually drank that shit? That is fucked up. What if it was one of those blood-piss concoctions?”
It appeared Loki was more prone to cursing than she’d realized. “One of what?”
“You don’t want to know what people are willing to put in their mouths if the world’s ending.”
Again, she could live without having that clarified.
Mobius and Bee-15 entered the area, the latter reading a temp pad. Their missions had yielded similar results, the only deviation from the flow of the timeline being a mildly confused Loki, which they’d caused themselves.
Sylvie quickly pulled her boots off the desk and made an innocent face.
“So, guess what?” Mobius glanced from the corner of his eye. “I sure hope there’s no mud on my desk. It just magically keeps finding its way there. Miraculously."
“I wiped my feet on the way in.” Sylvie shrugged. “What are we guessing?”
“So, this you will want to see.”
Everyone fell silent as Thor stormed in as if making his way to the battlefield. His mood was hardly surprising. “I believe I missed something. But I’m sure that it’s just an oversight that I was not informed in a timely manner.”
It wasn’t. Mobius had proposed it and found no opposition. Casey and Ouroboros had already been occupied with detangling the nature of the anomalies, so Victor had drawn the short straw and ended up a decoy to keep Thor out of the way. Even Sif understood enough to know that minimizing disturbances was the most prudent course of action. And whereas she’d handed Loki a cup of water, Thor might’ve warned him against Thanos or something alike.
Sylvie’s face fell like an avalanche and she hurled that bright bottle at Thor’s head. “Shut up and listen.”
The bottle must’ve been a plastic one, as it bounced off Thor's head harmlessly. Still, that was uncalled for. Not that he let it show. “To what?”
“To people who actually know what they’re doing, ya heap’a blankets.”
Mobius cleared his throat. “I’ll start with the banger, that anomaly where he showed up, in New York. It isn’t there anymore. Well, it is. A few minutes later. Now even better, all the earlier anomalies she responded to, moved up too or just straight-up gone.”
“That can’t be right. Kang was still there.” Sylvie reached for a temp pad. Some clicking and swiping later, she said, “Well fuck, they’re gone.”
“Upside is,” Mobius said. “The one you didn’t get to yet, still there. Something to do in case you ever get bored.”
Sif suggested, “Perhaps the assassin learned what would happen and changed plans before ever attempting the murder?” In response to the look Casey threw her, she added, “If that’s how it works.”
“Again,” Casey said. “A timeline cannot change itself retroactively. It’s just not something that happens.”
“But what if the assassin isn’t from that timeline, what then?”
Every TVA member present extensively exchanged glances. Just when Sif assumed she’d made the most ignorant inquiry possible, Ouroboros said, “I’d say we’d be seeing timeline destabilization, but there is no incursion potential at any of these points.”
“Then chances are they’re just time traveling and not through realities,” Casey said. “Besides, we don’t even know if they are all different variants or the same one that keeps coming back.”
“If the latter, then that one variant’s shit at dying,” Sylvie said. “Because I killed him like twenty times by now, but that doesn’t matter. They were still there. It’s not like they never showed up.”
“But just because it happened from your point of view,” Sif guessed. “Does it also mean it still happened on that timeline?”
She blinked. “Hell like I know. O.B.?”
“It most certainly does mean that,” the technician said firmly and definitively. “But nothing’s sure these days.”
“That’s all a lot of talk,” Thor said. “We can stand here discussing unknown factors all year or we can go and gather some variables.”
Sylvie raised an eyebrow “Okay, I’ll bite. What kind of variables?”
Sif held down a sigh when Thor looked to her for an answer. She wasn’t the one to have come up with that utterance. How should she even know? “I don’t know. I’m neither a scientist nor a sorceress.”
Sylvie gestured a circle around the room. “Look at this sorceress and all these scientists. You two, get out.”