Chapter 7
Sigyn's knuckles turned white as her fists gripped tightly at her daggers, a fraction of her face barely visible over the edge of her hideout. She watched –not without a heavy heart— as one Asgardian after the other was swatted away like a mere fly, killed instantly by the towering invader who was murdering his way across the ship. The maiden tried to keep her breathing as steady as possible, waiting for the most optimal moment to strike when the titan's back was turned towards her. Her own chances of survival were by no means larger than those who had been murdered before her, yet she couldn't stand by and watched that bloodbath unravel without at least attempting to do her part in stopping it, assuming Thanos could be stopped in the first place.
Just as she was beginning to emerge from where she hid, an arm wrapped itself firmly around her waist from behind, a hand clasping upon her lips as she was pulled back.
"What are you doing?" Sigyn whispered to her husband after having overcome her shock and pushed his hand off her mouth.
Pressing a finger to his lips, urging her to stay quiet, Loki took her by the hand. Together they ran towards a compartment deep within the ship that opened a door into an escape pod. Brunnhilde, rushing to smuggle as many Asgardians as she could into the vessel, glanced over the line of fleers at the Prince and nodded her head reassuringly. Through a transparent opening at the side of the compartment, one could still see the massacre occurring at Thanos' bare hands in the distance.
"Loki, we can't," Sigyn immediately argued, shaking her head. "We can't leave, Thor is still there!"
"I'm not leaving," he stated serenely.
"No."
"Sig…" he pleaded, having anticipated a refutal.
"No!" she insisted as she raised the volume of her voice, now trying to push Loki's hands off of her whenever he tried to take her by the shoulders. "No, I'm not going... I'm not! I'm not leaving!"
"Darling," Loki implored her; only twice had he ever called her that before, therefore Sigyn became aware of the urgency of his supplication. "Please."
Furious as it made her to admit it, she understood, and knew she herself would have found Loki's agreeing to let himself be saved on her behalf to be the ultimate expression of love, for in doing so, he would have been preserving what mattered most to her. Her husband had only beat her to it. Trying her hardest to keep herself composed, she brought a hand up to his cheek, into which Loki immediately leaned.
"Don't you dare die," she commanded. "You promised."
Loki extended a sad yet genuine smile as he brought a hand up to take hers, lowering it to his lips so he could kiss her knuckles.
"And you will," he reassured her.
The God of Mischief then made a swift exit, fearing that one more second beside her would be enough to drain him of all sense of bravery, making it impossible for him to leave her side.
"We have to go," Brunnhilde said gently but firmly, placing a hand on Sigyn's shoulder before she absented herself briefly in order to rush into the escape vessel the last of the refugees that had managed to avoid the slaughter.
In that brief moment, Sigyn had lost the struggle to keep herself from watching over the opening towards the following turn of events, her eyes drawn quickly to very heart of them due to Thanos' size, which immediately stood out. When the Valkyrie came back for her, for soon everyone they could have saved would be upon the ship, the warrior was forced to drag her back, trying to push through the blood curdling scream Sigyn released upon the sight Loki being dropped dead right before his brother. As soon as she had ensured their escape, the Asgardian let herself be moved almost to tears by sympathy, enveloping his fellow-woman in a comforting embrace.
"Sir—" called one of the analyst upon the going off of a subtle alarm, the one warning about the diverting line branching away from the main horizontal one, advancing resolutely towards one of its red parallels.
Mobius turned towards the analyst in question and approached them, catching sight of the phenomenon himself.
"What am I looking at, when is this?" he asked before the analyst presented him with coordinates. "It's always something with this guy, isn't it?" he whispered to himself, sighing like he usually did whenever he was about to deliver an order with which he was not particularly enthusiastic. "Alright, bring her in, reset the timeline. But, hey! No prunning, bring her in for processing alive! She's the only person we've ever seen who can get through to a Loki, she could useful!"
As a squad of Minutemen trotted away and through a Time Portal behind him, Mobius turned back to the screen and began to formulate a solid enough case in defense for what would most likely be one of the most insane requests he would ever make to Judge Renslayer despite having spent an eternity working side by side.
"I'm sorry— you wanna what?" asked Ravonna to the man standing opposite her desk.
"Look, I know it sounds a little unorthodox..."
"A little unorthodox? Mobius, this sounds downright crazy!"
"I know, I know, but think about it," insisted the analyst, visibly enthusiastic with his idea. "With every version of this guy we've hunted, those that were married to 'er anyway, they were each other's biggest weakness. She knows what makes a Loki tick, she knows how to get through to 'em. She could be the key to tracking down the guy that's been killing our units, I can feel it."
"But you can't feel how dangerous this sounds?" Renslayer refused, shaking her head in disbelief. "Those were just variants, Mobius, what makes you think this Loki-variant even knows her, what makes you think she'd be willing to help us in the first place?"
"She's a grieving widow!" Mobius exclaimed, still carried away with fervor, keenly interested as Ravonna had ever seen him when it came to particularly intricate cases. "He just saved her life and got his neck snapped right in front of her, trust me, she's gonna be driven mad with misery. Look, I've seen variants of her catching snake poison with their bare hands to protect this guy, okay? I'm not saying I understand it, but if this version of her feels even a quarter as strongly about 'im, and I know that she does, she could help us track this other version of 'im down. Not just him, a whole other bunch of variants, she could be an agent..."
"A variant working for the TVA?" repeated the woman with distrust.
"Alright, so not an agent, we'll call her… an asset, I don't know, I'm ironing out the details as I go along."
At last, the analyst paused for breath, exhaling as he placed his hands on his hips, gazing upon his superior with unyielding resolution. Sensing he was far from giving up —and most definitely would be until she eventually caved and agreed—, Ravonna sighed.
"Mobius…"
"Look, Ravonna..." He pulled up a chair and took a seat across from her. "I've been chasing Loki Variants for as long as I can remember, alright? That's what I do. I know this guy's life forward and backwards. And listen, if I'm wrong about her…" He leaned back in his seat, gesturing dismissively with his hand. "You can go ahead and process her. Hey, by the way, what was her nexus event, anyway, what did she do?"
It had only just dawned on him that he had seen nothing extraordinary about the turn of events that had led to Sigyn's arrest, for she seemed to have performed exactly as the Sacred Timeline dictated.
Ravonna lowered her gaze momentarily but was able to conceal her hesitation. "Whatever it was, it doesn't matter. The Timeline's already been reset."
It had been a rather vague response, so much he had been able to catch, yet at that moment, Mobius didn't make much of it. Instead, he accepted that for an answer and nodded his head comprehensively. The two TVA workers stared at each other, Ravonna with reluctant reflexion, Mobius with a small smile beginning to form on his lips, foreseeing his superior was on the verge of breaking.
"Fine!" she granted at last, much to the analyst's delight. "But...!" She pointed to him warningly. "She is your responsibility. If this goes sideways, Mobius, it's going to be on you, I don't know if I'll be able to bail you out."
"Alright, that's fair."
Renslayer arched an eyebrow, knowing perfectly well that even if the other promised to be thoroughly lawful about it, he would still manage to turn it into a thorn on her side.
"Okay, go," she commanded, unable to help a subtle smile of her own.
With the judge's permission, Mobius was able to intercept Sigyn's processing just as she was being escorted into the Time Court, being authorized to instead escort her himself to the Time Theatre.
The Asgardian obeyed with an almost robotic demeanor, quiet and expressionless; far from finding it to make his job easier, the analyst found it quite unnerving, especially since when he spoke to her directly, asking her questions, she did not emit the slightest reaction. As a precaution, he kept his thumb on the clicker in his hand at all times, and yet as it turned out, he didn't have to use her Time Collar against her, not even once. Every command he made, everywhere he led her, Sigyn followed.
Eventually, as they sat across the table from each other, Mobius learned asking her anything at all was futile, and so decided to simply explain what it was the TVA did exactly, at least the bits that were pertinent for her to comprehend his upcoming proposal. Just as he was finishing explaining why she had been brought in, how they expected her to help them and what it would entail, he realized Sigyn's eyes were not fixed on him like he'd thought but on the wall behind him. Watching her more closely, he realized her eyes weren't even focused.
"Sigyn?"
Her only response was directing her eyes towards him.
"D'you understand what I'm trying to tell you here, did you hear any of that?"
"I got the gist," she murmured. "My husband hasn't been dead, what? An hour?" she ventured, being in such a groggy state she had lost track of the passing of time. "And already you've recruited me as the wild card you'll keep up your sleeve until you may have use of me."
It was then that Mobius realized —and admitted— that he had indeed let himself be carried away by his enthusiasm beyond the socially admissible. When successfully repressing all of the negative that the TVA entailed and reminding himself it was all for a good cause, his job did truly fascinate him and every breakthrough, every new challenge, every new approach filled him with an energy that he couldn't contain in spite of his vast experience. So eager had he been to put this new idea of his to practice that he had unconsciously overlooked the fact that, while no longer having a place in her universe, Sigyn was still a person. Lowering his head in shame, he paused as he tried to come up with a more tactful way in which to approach the subject.
"Look, I can't imagine what you must be feeling right now…"
"And yet something tells me you'll venture a guess..."
"But I can imagine how hard it must have been to spend your whole life shackled to someone like Loki."
At this, Sigyn visibly reacted, having up until that moment only followed instructions with ghostly obedience, not objecting nor struggling, although most definitely not willingly nor actively participating. Mobius had been right to assume she would be grieving, but he hadn't anticipated he would find her in such state of numbness, as if rendered bored by everything that had happened to her recently all at once instead of affecting her like he had imagined it would have. Then again, at least as far as he remembered, Mobius had never had the experience of such an emotional paralysis, a mechanism of survival that protected those on whom too much pain had been inflected at once lest they should feel all of that deadly anguish and overwhelm their nervous system. When Sigyn's jaw tensed and her brow slightly furrowed, it had been the first hint of emotion Mobius had seen on her face. The Asgardian slowly lifted her head to glare at him.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Come on... I've studied your life like fifty times, your whole world revolved around that guy."
Sigyn exhaled an offended scoff and shook her head in disbelief as she glanced away.
"What, you're gonna tell me I'm wrong? You guys were on-again-off-again, whenever he felt like it, he walked out on ya' and then all he had to do was whistle and you'd come running back."
"That's not true."
"Oh, yeah? Remember him?" He did something on a device sitting upon the table between them —Sigyn didn't bother watching what exactly— and up on the back wall of the room the image of Theoric materialized. "See, I liked this one, I was really rooting for him! And you know what, for a second there, I actually thought you'd go through with it— and then what happened?"
Sigyn did not answer.
"Nah, that's alright, it was rhetorical," Mobius went on as he batted a hand dismissively, perfectly content with carrying on that conversation by himself; the image of Theoric morphed into a reproduction of her wedding day. "This is what happened, right? He decides he'd rather marry you than seeing you happy with somebody else, next thing you know, you're marching down the aisle."
Sigyn only stared at the back wall, minding however not to focus on what it projected, her head faintly yet constantly shaking no. She had heard assumptions of that nature for most of her life and had grown sick of them long ago.
"You know, for someone claiming to be such a scholar in terms of my life, you sure seem to know very little about it."
"Oh, I'm sorry, am I misremembering? Is this someone else's file? 'Cuz, see, right here it says that right after you got married, this guy just went down a path of his own, he started betraying his loved ones, faking his own death, murdering..." He pretended to take a peek at one of the pages in his file. "wow— a whole bunch of people, made his way practically all across the universe in just a couple of years... At no point did he stop to think about the wife he'd left behind. Not that he really had to, right? 'Cuz the moment he showed up again, there you were, faithful as ever— What, no rebuttal?"
Again, she refused to answer.
"Yeah, didn't think so." Mobius pressed a button and the projection disappeared. "I think that, deep down, you know I'm right. I think you know that you married a broken little prick with a superiority complex that kept a toxic hold of you your entire life. And every time you tried to get away, he'd just find a way to drag you back into his twisted little games, am I right?"
Sigyn watched the man as he went on a rant he must have been sure was accurate to the letter —and perhaps some of it actually was— but what she found oddly (if not amusingly) ironic was the way he went out of his way to repudiate the fact that everything in her life seemed to have been decided for her, how little her own will had had to do with anything, especially when it came to her marriage, and yet worked for the people (or beings, or whatever the Time Keepers were in reality) who claimed to have dictated events should develop the way they did.
If she were to speak frankly, she would admit that there had been times throughout her marriage with misbalances in terms of wills, in which Loki's became more dominant over her own, and she would also admit that she had been equally to blame for having allowed it to happen; she refused, however, to be lectured on it, and worse, to have it used against her so she could be easily manipulated to the authority that insisted wanted what was best for the universe, herself included, and yet appeared to be the one that inflicted the most damage upon it, having assigned themselves jurisdiction over quite literally everything in a form far from diplomatic.
Hypocritical as every word Mobius spoke sounded, Sigyn couldn't help feeling it was not intentional; in fact, she doubted he would hear it even if she were to point it out. Before her, she thought, was a poor fool, loyal to a fault to an entity which did very little to reward such a devoted allegiance. She wouldn't go as far as saying she could relate to such a feeling but she did, however, feel genuinely empathetic, pitying Mobius as much as he probably pitied her.
"I mean," concluded the analyst. "don't you wanna make something of yourself, be something besides the Goddess of Fidelity or the Wife of Mischief?"
She exhaled a faint chuckle at the last title he called her.
"And how exactly is becoming your God of Mischief connoisseur supposed to help with that?"
"Well, this would be more of a desk kinda job, you'd be reading about Lokis just not the one that you knew..." He shut the binder on the desk and linked his hands together over it as an indication that he was speaking from a more human perspective other than an analyst's. "I'm sorry, Sigyn, but your Loki? He's gone."
Sigyn's eyes suddenly glistened with forming tears she was visibly struggling to contain, her lips betraying her with a faint quiver. She swallowed, somehow regaining control over her features.
"Yes, I'm aware."
"This would involve hearing and reading about guys that may sound a lot like him, they may even look like him... but you gotta remember they're not him."
"And if I refuse?"
"You'll be processed and tried."
"And killed."
"Not exactly."
"Imprisoned, then."
"Not that either."
She rolled her eyes. She had never been fond of in-betweens.
"Why me? Seems to me you could have had your pick out of quite literally anyone in the universe."
"Because you've got experience with unpredictable people, maybe even more than all of us here combined. And what's more, you actually have a talent getting through to unpredictable people." He shrugged. "You're perceptive, you're studious, we could really use a researcher like you to let us know if there's anything we're overlooking." He hesitated for a moment, eventually nodding his head in admission. "And yeah, you're also a bit of a Loki expert."
Sigyn hummed, lifting her chin with a subtle smirk, as if to say 'ah, there it is'.
"So what's it gonna be?"
It wasn't an easy call so much as it was unfair; compared to being obliterated from existence, any alternative sounded tempting. And so, prioritizing her survival, Sigyn agreed. The flow of time inside the TVA being radically different to the one she had spent her whole life experiencing, it was not long before she had lost track of how long exactly she had been working for them, and somewhere along the way, before she knew it, she actually became rather fond of the work. Needless to say that what the agency did and what it stood for repulsed her still, but the idea of having something to do with herself, having a purpose to fulfill, making herself useful for a change became oddly satisfying.
Flash forward to who-knew-how-long into the future, and there she was, seated at the very same Time Theatre, opposite Mobius' seat —although the analyst was not present at the moment— with the same strange device upon the table, only that by now, she had learned how to operate it. As she recalled her origins as the TVA's asset, she felt as though she had almost forgotten there had been a life before it, a life far from uneventful. That life, however, she thought a beat later, no longer existed— technically, it had never existed. The only remaining evidence that it ever had were now her memories... and, of course, the file loaded into the projector.
While heartbroken beyond repair when she had first arrived at the TVA, in time, the more she thought about her past, the more she tended to focus only on the bad. Suddenly, she resented everything about what her life used to be; moreover, when she thought of her husband, she felt only anger. It wasn't until she had heard of this Variant, identical to him in every aspect save for one, and she had forced herself to face him in order to prove... —come to think of it, she had no idea what she had been trying to prove in the first place— that she came to terms with the fact that her resentment was but a shield, a way to justify her overlooking emotional wounds that were still gushing within her, if only because tending to them would be all the more painful than simply letting them be.
The chances of her making it out of that turn of events alive, she pondered as her eyes landed upon the projector once more, were slim to none. There was nothing she could say or do that would ever convince Mobius that she hadn't succumbed to the charms of either one of her husband's variants enough to be corrupted by them; and even if she managed to convince him, she would never make it past Judge Renslayer, who she figured would gladly prune her for good measure regardless of whether she believed her or not.
Therefore, having nothing left to lose, she wanted to at least part from life holding onto at least one good memory. And so, after glancing at the door momentarily like she expected someone to suddenly burst in and forbid it, she walked around the table and settled on what would have been Mobius' chair, she flicked through her own file. Despite having always had complete and open access to it, she had never been able to face it, her heart clenching at the mere idea of seeing Loki again.
Sigyn stood by a window, arms wrapped around herself cradling her own elbows, as she looked out into the vasty of the universe, more specifically at the painfully empty gap where Asgard should have been visible. Abruptly, most likely reacting to a practically imperceptible sign that there was someone else in the room, the maiden turned swiftly on her heel, immediately wielding her dagger, with which she threatened the newcomer's throat. She found Loki standing before her, hands up and palms out in an attempt to reassure her there was no danger.
"It's me."
Not without exhaling a heavy sigh, she slid her dagger back into its concealed holster.
"I didn't mean to startl—"
He was cut off by a dry, abrupt smack that struck him right across the face with such force that it turned his head to the side.
"Sorry," she said despite not sounded in the least remorseful. "Just wanted to make sure you were really here. Usually, by now, you would have made yourself scarce. Faked your death, or something to that effect."
With a faint shake of his head to help him overcome the shock of the slap, Loki exhaled a faint chuckle.
"I suppose I had that coming."
"At the very least, yes," agreed Sigyn.
"But I do always come back," her husband reminded her, still wearing on his lips a soft smile.
"Not on your own accord," she clarified, pushing away the hands he tried to place upon her shoulders.
"Or is that just what I'd have you believe?" he kept on teasing.
"Is this really how you want to address this? Trying to charm your way out of trouble?"
"Fine, alright," he agreed, lowering his gaze momentarily as he adopted a more serious demeanor; glancing back up at her, he took one of her hands and cradled it between both of his, which Sigyn allowed. "What if I made a promise?"
Seeing as Loki seemed to be genuinely taking matters less lightly, Sigyn partly relaxed her unyielding stance, shoulders lowering slightly, her jaw unclenching.
"Color me intrigued…"
"I promise you'll always see me again. No matter how many times I leave, no matter how... permanent it might seem."
She tried, for her sake, to maintain a strong facade; soon enough, however, Sigyn felt the sting of traitorous tears in her eyes and was forced to glance down momentarily as she composed herself. Allowing herself to give in just a little bit, though not without a fair share of hesitation, she brought her other hand up to rest on his chest.
"Given your record, only a fool would trust anything you say," she remarked and Loki did not disagree. "But I did make you a promise a long time ago, so... I suppose I'll keep my promise as long as you keep yours."
The Prince smiled, bringing her hand up to his lips so he could kiss the back of her fingers. Sigyn was forced to rapidly interrupt the projection when she heard the door being unlocked from the other side and when she turned her heard, she saw two Minutemen marching into the room.
"Let's go, Variant."
"Go where? Where's Mobius?"
Together, the two Minutemen took her by the arms, escorting her out of the Time Theatre.