Chapter 5
Sigyn glanced up from her book after recognizing a distinctive rumble that grew louder by the second. She turned to watch over her shoulder as out in the hallway, formation after formation of Minutemen and women trotted to the alarming chant of "go, go, go, go!" by their commanders. TVA agents had always been strict to a fault, but this was very evidently not their typical rigor; something was clearly the matter.
Before she had even a second to draw her own conclusions as to what could possibly be the cause of such state of panic, the entire room dyed into a bright red and sirens went off, making all of the other oblivious TVA employees in that break room glance about in panic, as though expecting to find a clear protocol to follow in such a seemingly apocalyptic scenario.
Where exactly she was running off to, she was not quite sure. Everyone's shock and agitation evidenced that this was a chaos with no precedent and they all seemed as unprepared to face it as she was. If experience had taught her anything at all, it was that at a time of catastrophe, it was everyone for themselves, and that she should count on absolutely no one but herself to preserve her life. Decently obedient as she had been since her arrival at the Agency, she by no means trusted them to protect anyone, not even their own, much less a variant such as herself.
Completely overlooked by distressed agents that ran the opposite direction, most likely to gear up and face whatever had turned the TVA on its head, Sigyn dashed across the labyrinthine structure, in search for any clues as to what exactly was occurring and what she could do in terms of self-preservation; ideally, she would find where they had been keeping her dagger —if they still kept it around anywhere— but she knew deep down that was but a farfetched expectation.
Unbeknownst to her, back at a Roxxcart on the verge of absolute destruction, the Sacred Timeline had been blown to pieces by the sending of countless stolen reset charges back to various points, apparently creating loads of branches or restoring branches the TVA previously reset, smashing the very foundation upon which the so called Time Keepers had built their irrefutable authority. Sigyn also ignored the fact that within that same mega-market, a time portal had been opened by the ever-feared Variant, yet another version of Loki it was said, and that after she had crossed it, and not without some hesitation, her variant followed before it closed on the noses of other TVA agents, Mobius included.
All of the above remained a mystery to her even when, as she walked briskly down an empty corridor, a time-portal opened up on the ceiling. She glanced up in astonishment and watched how from it, as if it had been a floor trap, both God and Goddess of Mischief alike came falling down onto the floor. Sigyn had only had enough time to swiftly turn around so she could run off in the opposite direction before the other female caught her in her grasp, forcibly turning her to look at Loki, one arm firmly wrapped around her while the other held a blade up to her throat.
"The TemPad," she commanded to her male counterpart.
Loki's eyes glanced slightly to the side to meet Sigyn's and she hoped he had managed to catch the very subtle way in which she had shaken her head no. Even without having a clue of what had happened or who that person threatening her life was in the first place, it took no genius —at least not when they already knew, like she did, about the breakthrough Loki and Mobius had made earlier which had led them to one of the Variant's hideouts— to assume that was the dangerous time-delinquent they had been after; she might not have been part of that case, yet she counted with enough information to assume that regardless of what the Prince decided to do, the fugitive would end her.
While a stubborn, most likely imprudent decision, the Asgardian was perfectly ready to get herself effortlessly killed just as long as she was at least granted the opportunity to go down swinging rather than quietly accepting her fate, something to which she was quite used to and with which actually fed up. She administered a swift and sharp blow to her captor's abdomen with her elbow and freed herself from her grasp with a swift though understandably uncoordinated spin, out of which she did not emerge unharmed.
Loki rushed forwards to stabilize Sigyn after the blade cut a slash across her shoulder, making her stumble. The Variant advanced menacingly, forcing Laufeyson to make a rushed —possibly fatal, definitely stupid— decision: he pressed the TemPad, which needless to say he did not know how to operate, and once again a time-portal materialized under him, through which he fell together with Sigyn for he was still grabbing ahold of her.
Having landed on their backs over solid, dusty ground, Sigyn groaned in pain, her hand instinctively grasping at her upper arm, right underneath her open wound. She opened her eyes again just in time to see the portal disappear, fortunately —or perhaps not so in the long run— before anyone else could join them.
However, her relief upon seeing the Variant had been unable to chase after them was for not; a second later, after having come to terms with how they had escaped in the first place, she rushed to her feet, holding onto her arm to keep her shoulder as still as possible and grinding her teeth through the pain.
"What did you do? Where are we?"
"A little bit of gratitude might not go amiss, I did just save your life," retorted Loki as he too got up, dusting himself off as he rose to his feet.
"By the looks of it, you've merely delayed our deaths by a few minutes!" she yelled in response. "Where did you send us?"
"Believe it or not, I didn't exactly have time to flick through a whole bunch of options!" argued her companion. "It must have been programmed in, I just… pressed it."
"Programmed in? By the Variant?" She paused to take a quick look around that only confirmed her suspicion. "You teleported us… to an apocalypse?!"
Her companion froze a moment as he processed her line of thinking and looked over his shoulder, finding a stormy sky through which fell a shower of flaming meteorites that crashed into the dusty desert before whipping his head back towards her.
"It would appear so, yes."
Sigyn had tried her hardest to behave in a civilized fashion towards him ever since their last conversation, in which she had admitted she had indeed dumped upon him a lot of responsibility and resentment that belonged to someone else entirely. Nevertheless, with each passing moment, and with good reason, her favor distanced itself further and further from the God of Mischief and the longer they remained on that forsaken moon, the more he seemed to be acting in a deliberately stupid manner just to antagonize her; that's what she would have believed were it not for the fact that no one could possibly be that idiotic on purpose, not to mention she had known someone very similar to him who possessed the same remarkable talent of being occasionally witless beyond belief.
Her first instinct, being the one out of the two of them with a bit more experience regarding the TVA, was to turn to the TemPad, only to find it out of charge.
"So all we need to do is charge it," concluded Loki as-a-matter-of-factly.
"Do you even know how to charge it?" asked Sigyn.
"How hard could it be?"
Disbelieving her own bad luck that she should be stuck in a doomed celestial body with him of all people as her sole companion, Sigyn responded only with a sigh of defeat and a roll of her eyes as she proceeded to walk on towards nowhere itself, hoping they would run into something or someone that could be of assistance in any way. Loki was smart enough to stay a few steps behind of the Asgardian for she seemed more energized with rage than he had ever seen her. Wandering aimlessly across that room, all they found was abandoned structures and more meteor showers until eventually, they caught sight of one sole occupied home. Not before she had sent Loki flying several feet into the air after his attempt to trick her, much to Sigyn's short-lived amusement, the woman introduced them to the concept of an escape vessel.
"Right, well… Seems that we've got an Ark to find," sentenced Loki, dusting himself off for the second time that day as he turned back to his counterpart.
"What?"
"The escape vessel?"
"Are you daft?" He raised his eyebrows in offense. "This is one of the Variant's hiding spots," Sigyn went on. "This is an apocalypse. Everything and everyone gets wiped out of existence, there is zero variance detected, she's made sure of it!"
"Well—" He held his arms out. "This apocalypse has never had us on it."
"You are daft."
"It wouldn't exactly be the first time we've changed the course of things, would it? We are variants, after all. If we try and fail, we're doomed, yes, but we are also doomed if he do nothing. We've got nothing to lose and everything to gain."
She mulled over that asinine conclusion that, to her dismay, did make some sort of sense, or at least it sounded better than their alternative, which was to simply sit upon that dusty surface and wait for death.
A hand constantly wrapped around her own chest, for she was still cradling her wounded shoulder, Sigyn turned briskly and walked on in the direction towards which that resident had claimed they would find the train that was supposedly escorting people towards the so-called escape vessel before an asteroid destroyed that moon whole and with it everyone upon its surface.
They found the train, yes, but they also found a sea of people surrounding it; people who, just like them, sought access to their last hope for survival, denied to them by guards dressed in the blue, shoving and beating them back in line to make way for visibly wealthier people to whom they were very evidently extending special treatment.
"How do you suggest we sneak in there?" wondered Sigyn, open to virtually any plan considering the alternative was, well, inaction.
A glow of green swept over Loki's figure, dressing him in an exact replica of the guards' uniform and a smug smile Sigyn could have done without.
"Well? How do I look?"
"This cannot be your plan."
"Why not?"
"Because that is still your face! Have you seen that platform? There are obviously just a selected few up there, do you seriously believe they'll let through someone whose face they don't recognize and who cannot produce a single genuine piece of identification?"
Rolling his eyes in annoyance, the Prince snapped his fingers and the illusion vanished. They paused to think of an alternative.
"We could always do Get Help."
"I am not doing Get Help."
A beat later, they glanced at each other in equal levels of surprise.
"How do you know about Get Help?"
"How do you know about Get Help?"
Neither received an answer, for soon their attention was brought back to the line of pour souls that waited in vain for an entrance that would clearly never be extended towards them.
They saw woman wailing and crying in despair, holding a bundle of blankets that must have been cradling an infant on one hand while the other clutched at the elegant clothes of a wealthy-looking man walking past them.
"Sir, please!" cried the woman. "Please, sir, take my child! She's just a baby, sir, please! Please, just take her with you!"
The apathetic aristocrat wielded his cane and used its metal end to smack the desperate mother's hand off his clothes. He spat at her feet and journeyed on towards the platform.
Loki and Sigyn exchanged a knowing glance.
Moments later, an unconscious body now concealed behind a nearby rock, the Aristocrat walked across the platform with Sigyn —now dressed in cloaks as extravagant as his— on his arm.
She tried carrying the young child in with her, only to have her ripped from her grasp and shoved back to her mother. After that, keeping her chin up as they marched across the platform proved to be more challenging than she had anticipated, especially while hearing the shouts of discontent and cries of desperate disappointment from all of those people who were being denied a seat that man had most likely been bestowed by authorities without hesitation.
"Uh, ma'am?" said the guard, stepping in front of the couple after having checked her companion's ticket. "Your ticket, please."
Unsure how to proceed —mischief had always been, after all, more his trade than hers— Sigyn turned to look at the man at her arm. The features on the Aristocrat's face darkened into a sinister expression of impatience that then turned into a smirk that looked by no means less menacing.
"I'm counting to five," he informed the young man, taking the liberty of reaching over, pretending to be straightening his uniform. "And if by the time I get to three, you haven't moved out of my wife's way—" He now clenched at the uniform and his smirk disappeared as swiftly as it had appeared in the first place. "I will march in there and make sure that within thirty seconds, you and everyone inside that train you have the faintest affection towards are dragged to the other side of that entrance. And then my wife can use one of those tickets. One…"
"S-Sir," stammered the young guard, glancing sideways to seek the help of a colleague or supervisor. "Two…"
"Right this way, sir," he yielded, gesturing inside as he stepped out of their way.
"Good lad," whispered the man before inviting Sigyn to board first.
Once the boy was out of earshot, the woman allowed herself to relax her tense and righteous posture, sighing in disgust at the part she was forced to play, having to pretend she couldn't hear the pleading and begging from those poor people, most of whom most likely deserved a place in that train far more than the two of them did.
"You could at least pretend you're not enjoying yourself," she said to Loki, who now wore a proud grin upon his illusion's countenance.
"I had a ticket for myself, you know, I didn't have to bring you with me."
"Oh, so you could go back to your brilliant plans where you try to fool grieving widows and dress yourself as a guard. Please…" She rolled her eyes. "You—"
"—are nothing without you?" ventured the man with a smirk.
Sigyn glared at him sideways and returned her gaze to the front.
"You'd be dead within the hour without me."
"Right..."
At last, they reached a lounge and within it a booth. Craving a much needed rest, Sigyn slid into a seat, leaning back in an attempt to make herself comfortable.
"No, sit over here," Loki requested, however, pointing to the seat that faced the opposite way.
"What?"
"I can't face the back of a train."
And thus began a childish argument where their words simply overlapped and neither of them paused even for a beat to listen to one another; Sigyn said they weren't even moving, Loki remarked that once they started to move..., she pointed out you could barely see the outside, he insisted, she suggested he just didn't look out the window, he repeated how important it was that he wasn't facin—
"Fine!" bellowed an exasperated Sigyn, making everyone else in that lounge turn to glare daggers of judgement at them. "Fine," she repeated in a whisper, getting up to slid into the opposite seat.
"Thank you," was Loki's cheerful reply as he sat down. "So… what do we do now?"
"Now, we wait, I suppose." answered she. "Either we wait for an opportunity to intervene and change the course of events or we figure out a way to charge the Tem— What do you think you're doing?"
The moment the train had left the platform, to Sigyn's shock, Loki immediately shed the illusion of the Aristocrat and transformed back into his true self. "What?" he wondered with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulder.
"We're already on the train, we're already moving and disaster is imminent, they don't have time to waste on inspections."
"I'm not worried about inspections, I'm worried about people seeing you, reporting you and having us thrown off a moving train," Sigyn whispered back, leaning over the small table between them to make sure she wouldn't be overheard.
"Are you ever relaxed? Honestly, are you ever not concerned?"
"When was the last time anyone relaxed around you and didn’t live to regret it?"
After a few seconds during which they only stared at each other, they both leaned back into their seats, surrendering to helplessness until they could be of use once again.
"As long as we are… merely waiting," Loki remarked after about a minute of silence. "Perhaps we could make use of this time to get to know each other better. Or rather… I could get to know you, you know so much about me already—"
"No."
"Oh, come on…" He crossed his arms over the table. "What if I promise never to bother you again, assuming we live to tell the tale? Besides, these might just be our very last moments left to live, why not make something out of them?"
"Ugh, you're exhausting, fine."
Loki smiled and, for a fleeting moment, he could have sworn he saw the corner of Sigyn's lips give way to a tiny smile that she rushed to repress.
"Tell me about your parents."
Sigyn threw her head back as she summoned the strength to come to terms with the fact that they were doomed either way, that their chances of survival were slim to none, and therefore she had nothing to lose if she were to let her guard down officially and open up to him.
"They died."
"Ragnarok?"
"No. No, long before that. My father was a member of Odin's guard, he died before I was ever even born. And my mother was lady-in-waiting for the Queen, she died when I was a child."
When she looked his way, she managed to catch a glimpse of the way in which his eyes lowered at the mention of his own mother.
"Did yours teach you magic in your timeline as well?"
"She did," he confirmed, nodding his head before clearing his throat. "Who was that young man in your file? The one you were about to marry."
This time, it was Sigyn who looked down, wearing a smile that looked almost longing.
"That was Theoric. My… betrothed."
"What was he like?"
"He was…" She paused to take a deep breath and then exhale a deep sigh. "in Odin's guard as well, he was brave, he was kind and… sweet, I suppose, sweet enough."
"So, why didn't you marry him?"
"Because I'm an idiot," she answered with a tight smile.
Loki smiled softly in spite of himself, though fortunately, she was too busy staring at her own fingertips as she toyed with them to be able to notice.
"So you married me instead."
"No," she immediately corrected, glancing momentarily at him. "Not you."
Loki exhaled a faint chuckle.
"Right… Him, then."
"That's right."
A profound yet not necessarily uncomfortable silence settled naturally into the conversation. Sigyn had experienced silences of that nature so many times before she no longer realized when they manifested, automatically diverting into her personal train of thought until she was prepared to speak again. From Loki's perspective, on the other hand, that was but the first time they had ever experienced it, and he had to admit he did not care for the way in which his heart began to race in account to the sheer sight of the other Asgardian looking away in thought. Fortunately for him, and to his surprise, Sigyn soon brought that silence to an end, coming up with an excuse for conversation without any prompting.
"What about you? Where I'm from, most people in Asgard were just sighing after Thor but yo— my husband…" Loki smiled triumphantly nonetheless at that slip of the tongue. "He always charmed his way around visiting princes and princesses from other realms. Were you the same way?"
"I was," confirmed the God of Mischief with a slow bobbing of his head.
"Did you marry any of them?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He stared at space as he tried to concoct an answer, though after just instant of reflection, he eventually frowned with a slight shrug of his shoulders, as one does when inaudibly replying they have no idea. Instead, he asked her more questions about her.
"How did you two meet?"
"We grew up in the palace together, we'd practically known each other our whole lives… minus five hundred years."
"Five hundred years?" asked Loki, rather taken aback.
"What?" replied Sigyn with a half-smirk. "It's the exact same age difference Odin had with the Queen… Like father, like son, I suppose."
Without meaning to, the thought of his parents brought a warm smile to his features. Upon realizing he was exteriorizing it, however, the Prince tried his hardest to repress it.
"You never did tell me what happened to your husband."
"He died."
"I see. How?"
"Same way you should have."
"Wh— You've seen my file?"
"Of course I've seen your file," she scoffed with a grin.
Loki pretended to huff in offense, though soon enough he was mirroring her smile, if only because he was pleased to see a genuine gesture of jubilation on her face for the first time since he had met her.
"Why are you so upset with him?"
"Haven't you seen your file?" she asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Let's just say I'm interested in a second opinion."
She huffed an airy chuckle.
"Well, he got his brother exiled and tried to kill him to seize the throne of Asgard…"
"In our defense, we had just found out we were adopted."
"Which they were very right to keep from you, considering how you've reacted."
When prideful offense took over his expression, Sigyn playfully imitated it out of reflex. The way in which Loki subtly smiled at the gesture made her heartache all the more bearable, for she had acted out of instinct, responding like she had so many times before, having only now realized her body hadn't seemed to come to terms with the fact the person with which she had originally performed such jesting was gone forever.
"Right," said Loki, almost as if he had known she was on the verge of diverting into a very dark path of thoughts indeed. "What else?"
"He threw himself off the Rainbow Bridge, we thought he had died…"
"He was pushed off of it is more like it, but alright…"
"… turns out he was just trying to seize control of a different realm which had no throne to claim in the first place…"
"So he's been told, moving on…"
"… he got caught, thrown in jail, broken out of jail, then he pretended to die again…"
"I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explan—"
"… he impersonated his father as King of Asgard…"
"Adoptive father."
"… got thrown off the Rainbow Bridge again…"
"Ah, so you do admit he was thrown o—"
"… returned a hero, helped save a great number of Asgardians, myself included…"
"Alright, clear redemption arc…"
"… and then—" She paused to swallow around a lump which had suddenly formed in her throat. "Thanos attacked."
Again, there was a silence, although this one was significantly uncomfortable. Playfulness had washed off Sigyn's features and as he watched her, Loki wondered if perhaps he had been mistaking anger for grief all along— perhaps, so had she.
"It just seems a little unfair that, after all those times he had me believe he was dead, he should get himself actually killed right in front of me, just as he was..."
She decided to let herself trail off, the tightness in her throat warning her that any other word she spoke would only come out with a shattered voice. A single tear escaped one of her eyes and Sigyn rushed to brush it away, most likely wanting to conceal the fact that it had ever existed. Humoring her, the God of Mischief did not bring it up.
"I doubt he did that on purpose," he tried to reassure her instead.
"I know." She nodded her head, trying to convince herself more than anyone else, her eyes once again lowering to her hands as she nervously twirled her ring around her own finger. "Doesn't make him any less of an idiot, though." She could feel the other's eyes upon her, just like she could feel the empathy they irradiated, which was why she fought with all her might the urge to gaze back into them. "Anyway, that's when the TVA came after me."
Loki's brow furrowed. "Why?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"I mean... isn't the TVA supposed to know everything that's going to happen? Maybe if they hadn't arrested me, I would have gone into a psychotic rage that disrupted the Sacred Timeline, who knows?"
"Doesn't sound like you."
"Don't get familiar, you've learned two things about me."
"Fair enough," replied Loki with a smile.
Having plucked up the courage to look back at him at last, Sigyn smiled back.
That was the last conscious thought in both their heads, for an instant later, an ill-timed meteorite came crashing onto the train, knocking it right off its tracks, sending it and everyone within it flying into the ground.