Freedom in the Multiverse

~*~

“Let me get this straight,” Stephen Strange said doubtfully. “I’m supposed to trust the God of Mischief and a man who supposedly works for an organisation I’ve never heard of that controls all of time?”

“The thing is,” Mobius said, “you don’t hear about the TVA unless you need to, and you’ve been following the sacred timeline—or what we thought was the sacred timeline until we learned the truth, and that’s why we’re here.”

Strange gestured at Loki. “The only time I’ve personally encountered this man—”

“God,” Loki interrupted unhelpfully.

Strange continued as though he hadn’t heard.  “—was because he dumped his dad in a retirement home on Earth and pretended to be King of Asgard. And brought Hela to Earth.”

Mobius made a face. “I mean personally, I’d say Odin brought her, though I’ll give you that Odin was on Earth at the time because of Loki, but the point is moot because this Loki is actually not that God of Mischief. He branched from the timeline before that happened.”

Loki leaned forward. “Just to be clear, I branched right after I brought an entire alien army to destroy New York and take over the world.”

Mobius shot him a look. Loki ignored him, all his attention on Strange.

“I learned my entire life was a lie and I’d actually been born a frost giant. I destroyed their homeworld, thinking that could fix things with my family—defeat our enemies, impress all those damn warriors—and when I realised nothing could, I just … gave up. Only instead of committing very dramatic suicide, I drifted through space until Thanos found me. It was … not pleasant.” Loki’s jaw clenched. “It seemed so much easier to let the mind stone scour everything away and give me one glorious purpose than actually try to get my shit together. And, I admit, the idea of sitting on a throne was extremely appealing to me, and it just seemed an added bonus that it was Midgard, where Thor had defeated me and seemed so very fond of everyone.  Instead, I was resoundingly defeated by the team of Earth’s heroes I inadvertently helped create, and then instead of being marched back to Asgard as was ‘supposed’ to happen, I stole the tesseract when Stark botched the attempt to steal it in 2012. That’s when the TVA picked me up and accused my of crimes against the sacred timeline.”

His voice made it clear that he still thought that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

“I was supposed to be reset, a nice, clean way of saying killed, but instead, Mobius convinced the powers that be to let me work for him, try to help capture a dangerous variant.” Loki leaned back in his chair and held out his hands. “I was going to find the Timekeepers that controlled the TVA and take over, naturally. Only somewhere along the way, I started to listen to Mobius instead of all the crap I’d been hearing for years. And he started to listen to me. And we both started listening to Sylvie, that dangerous variant, and the upshot was that we recreated the multiverse and revealed the TVA for the lie that it is. Sylvie was brave enough and maybe crazy enough to do it when I wasn’t sure it was worth the risk. She saved whole universes that had been methodically and carefully snuffed out over centuries—eons, probably—before they could fully form. But it came at a cost, this war that endangers all of those lives again, yet another fight for supremacy that can only end one way—unless Mobius’s idea works.”

“But the word of you two is the best I’m going to get?”

“Well, we can take you on a tour of the TVA if you’d like,” Mobius offered.

“And we brushed up on your life before we came to talk to you, so naturally, we can embarrass you with private moments that no one else should know,” Loki offered with a toothy smile. “You know, to prove that we know things we wouldn’t know in a more reasonable way.”

“Loki,” Mobius protested.

Loki gave him a mock-innocent look. “Oh, I’m sorry, are we now introducing people to the TVA in a way that doesn’t involve emotionally scarring them and exposing their biggest weaknesses?”

“I mean, generally we skip that with actual allies?” Mobius offered.

“Oh, burn,” Loki said with enough theatricality that Mobius could relax again, realising he wasn’t genuinely offended.

“Let’s say that I’m willing to be convinced,” Strange said slowly. “But it’ll take a lot of convincing.”

“Emotionally scarring,” Loki mumbled.

“Not helping,” Mobius mumbled back, and pulled up the Time Door, which Strange eyed carefully.

“One thing,” Loki said.

Strange looked at him.

“I don’t know if you have any non-magic weapons that you’d prefer bringing, but magic doesn’t work in the TVA. It’s endlessly frustrating, and because as Mobius pointed out, we’re hoping you’ll be an actual ally, I’m warning you now.” Strange eyed Mobius, and Loki explained, “He’s endlessly non-magical. He doesn’t appreciate just how disconcerting it is for a sorcerer to be without his magic, especially unexpectedly.”

Mobius had to admit that he hadn’t thought about how it would look to Strange if he came on this tour with them and suddenly couldn’t use any of his powers. He hoped that meant that he and Loki combined could actually sell this thing.

Strange looked faintly disdainful through most of the visit, but Mobius was pretty sure that was because he didn’t much like the aesthetic, or maybe the bureaucracy or the paperwork.

“It’s worse than the hospital,” he commented at one point.

They did make use of the time theatre, and Mobius tried to make them impersonally personal moments like the Cloak picking him and bargaining with Dormammu.

“Wow,” Loki observed. “You really are nice to your actual allies. I’m feeling a little hurt.”

“Maybe he’s just less emotionally stunted than you were, and not, you know, trying to become the King of Space.”

“I would have come up with a way better title,” Loki argued.

Strange interrupted. “Did you spend the entire time flirting like this?”

Mobius said, “No,” at the same time that Loki said, “Yes.”

Mobius shot the other man a look. “I was actually trying to do my job and somewhat concerned about getting stabbed in the back.”

“Rude,” Loki said with a sniff. “I was planning a hostile takeover, one hundred percent amused with the flirting, and totally planning a far more interesting form of betrayal if it became necessary.”

“So why wouldn’t you betray us?” Strange asked pointedly.

“Because I found something endlessly more fulfilling.” He smiled at Mobius, something soft in his features that Mobius rarely saw in company. Then Loki shifted his attention back to Strange, expression sharpening. “And if you don’t believe that, and I don’t suppose there is any reason to do so, then you can at least trust in my self-interest. I nearly died dealing with He Who Endures. I don’t have the slightest interest in dealing with a whole multiverse full of him and worse. He controlled our entire universe for eons, created all of this because of the one thing he feared: himself. I want to see that threat eliminated as badly as you do.”

They returned to the Sanctum Sanctorum.

“I need to think about this,” Strange said. He eyed Loki and his hand came up.

Mobius reached out. “Hey, if you’re going to do the cute portal falling trick, could you send both of us together?”

Strange paused, stared at Mobius for a long moment, and then rolled his eyes. “Fine.” He pointed at Loki. “Don’t touch anything.”

Loki offered his blandest smile, Strange disappeared, and Mobius spent the next couple of hours trailing after Loki trying to get him to at least put things back after he touched them.

“Come on, Mobius. That was a challenge,” Loki cajoled.

It was hard to interpret it as anything else when you were the God of Mischief. The Sanctum Sanctorum was filled with artifacts and relics and strange objects that were guaranteed to intrigue Loki.

By the time Strange found them again, Loki had acquired three daggers, stolen several kisses but not gotten away with anything more, which Mobius was sort of thinking would actually have been the wiser choice never mind the possible accidental voyeurism because Loki had also set off a small explosion, and burned what Strange assured them was a priceless scroll.

“The explosion was an accident,” Loki told him. “The scroll was deliberate.”

“Loki,” Mobius protested.

“The spell on it was nasty,” Loki said flatly. His lips tipped up, but there was no real humour in his expression. “Having enchanted people against their will, I can attest to it.”

Strange’s eyes narrowed, and Mobius worried that things were about to get unpleasant, but then the Sorcerer Supreme’s cloak swirled up in a wind that wasn’t actually there and made several emphatic motions that Mobius could not interpret.

Strange relaxed abruptly—and then held out his hand, palm up.

Loki stared at him for a long moment and then huffed out a breath and reached out, a blade materialising in his hand in a flash of green before he set it on Strange’s palm.

Strange went and put it back in the display that it had come from, and then he turned back to Loki.

“Nice try.”

Loki raised an eyebrow.

Strange gestured in the direction of the displays. “The illusion’s good quality work. But I prefer the real daggers.”

Loki sighed, looking put out, and retrieved these daggers from over either shoulder, as though that was where they’d been stored. He flipped them in his hands, movement sinuous and extremely attractive. There was a hum of sound, almost too soft for Mobius to hear, that sounded almost like singing, and he found that he wanted to keep giving Loki blades to be able to watch such a lovely display.

“Oh,” Strange said, sounding surprised.

They both looked at him.

“I … think perhaps you’d better keep them after all.”

A grin lit up Loki’s face, honest pleasure, and with another flourish that sent a hum of pure appreciation up Mobius’s spine, the daggers disappeared once more.

Strange gestured them into armchairs by the window and got down to business.

“I can cast the spell,” he told them. “But we’re affecting multiple universes. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of energy, and I can only think of one way to acquire it.”

Mobius sighed. He’d considered the likelihood of this, but he had to admit that he didn’t relish dealing with the Infinity Gauntlet, even less now that he knew there was no such thing as a sacred timeline. The consequences of Thanos’s snap had been far-reaching.

“No,” Loki said suddenly.

Mobius and Strange both looked at him.

“It’s not another Infinity Gauntlet that we need. It’s the exact opposite.”

Strange frowned. “Haven’t you been listening? We need—”

“—The power of the Infinity Stones. Yes.” Loki’s eyes were brilliant. “And a team to wield them.”

Strange’s frown deepened for a moment, and then his eyes went distant, and it was clear that his mind was a million miles away. He refocussed on them abruptly.

“Yes. That should work.”

Loki grinned triumphantly.

They spent less time arguing about who was going to power the spell than Mobius had expected, to be honest. The Sorcerer Supreme needed to form the framework of the spell. He had the most experience with formal spellwork, and he already had plenty of experience with the time stone, so he would be ensuring that the spell reached everywhen. It also needed to reach everywhere, and Stephen Strange had worked with Carol Danvers before. She was the obvious choice for the Tesseract, and having an unambiguous hero onside clearly made Strange feel better about the whole thing.

Loki got a little twitchy when they mentioned the mind stone, but he readily agreed that Wanda Maximoff would be the obvious choice, especially since the Scarlet Witch’s chaos magic was really exactly what they were looking for. (Actually, Strange got a little twitchy too, but he was the one who proposed her.) Loki proposed Sylvie, since she was the expert on the enchantment that was needed to free the memories of all the TVA agents, and then with the help of the others, could get them to their own timelines. If she had the reality stone, then working with the others, Strange was confident that they could recreate or braid their realities with an already existing one.

Strange didn’t think that they needed the soul stone, and Mobius would be just as happy to leave that one out of it. It was the rarest to be claimed by anyone, better hidden than the others and one of the costliest to acquire.  Fewer people even made an attempt, and so fewer attempts went wrong.  Mobius was pretty sure it also reassured Strange that the next thing that Loki was going to do wasn’t to make an infinity gauntlet.

That left the power stone, and Loki and Strange had a relatively short staring contest.

“You need someone strong enough to wield it.”

“I’ve got an entire order of sorcerers.”

“All mortals. You know it will kill them.”

“How do I know you won’t do it anyway?”

“Because I’ll be too busy powering your damn spell.”

“And after that?”

Loki’s lip curled up. “You don’t think you, the Scarlet Witch, and Captain Marvel could handle me?”

“I could ask Bruce,” Stephen said like a challenge.

Loki laughed. “Yeah, you could. He’s certainly good at slowing me down. I’m pretty sure he actually helped stop the mind stone’s effects, not that I appreciated it at the time. And although I didn’t experience it personally, I think we worked together at the end of Asgard. I don’t think he wants to deal with any more Infinity Stones, though, and he certainly doesn’t possess the magic to help with the enchantment.”

With a wave of Strange’s hand that Mobius hadn’t been quick enough to catch this time, Loki vanished through the portal that opened up beneath him. Strange turned to Mobius.

“Do you really trust him to do this?”

“I really do,” Mobius said. “I also trust him to be kind of annoyed by that.”

Mobius waved a hand at where Loki had disappeared.

Strange arched an eyebrow. “Payback for earlier.”

Mobius shrugged. “If I were you, I wouldn’t start a prank war with the God of Mischief, but hey, whatever floats your boat.”

“Seriously,” Strange said, brushing this aside.

“Seriously,” Mobius agreed. “I mean, I trusted Loki to work with me back when we first met, at least insofar as our ‘interests aligned’, as he put it. And our interests definitely align right now, as he already said. But the amount that he has changed and grown and become the person he wants to be now…. Yes, I trust him, genuinely. He’s been fighting this war since it started, giving brainwashed people their memories back, relocating endangered civilisations…. I know he can do this.”

Strange stared at him for another long moment, and then gave a decisive nod and a twirl of his hands that resulted in Loki falling out of a portal opened near the ceiling.

He landed on his feet with an annoyed expression.

“Cute.”

“Just something to think about the next time you decide to mess with what’s mine.”

Loki’s lips curled up into a grin that Mobius didn’t trust for an instant, and he smirked to himself and decided he’d leave the two of them to sort out their differences (or similarities).

“So,” Loki continued, “did Mobius give me an adequate character reference or do we need to look for an inferior plus one?”

“If you cross us, it will be the last thing you ever do,” Strange told him.

“I’ve heard that from much scarier people than you.”

“Loki,” Mobius said warningly.

Loki rolled his eyes. “Fine, fine, consider the oh-so-threatening threats received.”

Strange retrieved Danvers and Maximoff, and Loki and Mobius picked up the Infinity Stones in the TVA. Loki looked physically pained as he wrapped them each in a towel to separate them.  He sent Mobius to get a stash of TemPads—”You’re telling me you don’t think it would be useful to have some spares?”—and then as soon as they were back on Earth, the wrapped stones and TemPads disappeared with a flash into his pocket space.

“That was so undignified,” he protested.

Strange apparently explained everything adequately enough that no one tried to attack Loki as soon as they saw him. (It might have helped that the Sanctum Sanctorum was in the same state when they returned as when Strange had left. Mobius … might have encouraged Loki to be on his best behaviour the most effective way he knew how.) Strange made a face at them when he returned, but he didn’t actually say anything.

“We should do our final planning with Sylvie,” Loki said. “You’ll need the Citadel as the focal point anyway.”

Strange looked like he wanted to protest on principle, but he nodded.

“We don’t have the coordinates for the Citadel itself,” Loki said. “We’re going to have to go through the Void. Fortunately, Mobius does have the coordinates for that now, so we don’t have to prune ourselves to get there. You can count yourself lucky on that one, because it hurts a lot and is extremely disconcerting.”

Mobius certainly wasn’t going to argue that.  He punched in the coordinates and pulled up the Time Door. No one looked surprised, exactly, since they’d dealt with a lot of weird things over the years, but Mobius knew this particular technology wasn’t known to them.

Loki sighed. “Really looking forward to doing this again.”

He walked through the door, and Mobius followed him, knowing that the others had to make up their own mind.

A moment later, they were all in the howling wasteland, and the door had winked shut behind them. At sight of the living storm, Danvers’ hands lit up blue, Maximoff’s lit up red, and gold circles formed around Strange’s. They all took up fighting stances.

Loki asked Mobius archly, “Feeling a little magic light?”

Mobius rolled his eyes. “How could I possibly, surrounded by the group of you?”

Loki smirked at him before turning to the others.

“So, that’s Alioth. It consumes the matter, especially living matter, that falls into the Void and guards the entrance to the Citadel. That’s a whole other story that we won’t get into right now, but suffice it to say that we’re not going to try to kill it since it’s currently serving a purpose, and we don’t want the Citadel overrun. If the lot of you can distract it with some showy energy, I’ll enchant it, and then we can slip past it.”

Loki strode into the storm like there was no doubt in his mind that this was a good plan, and Mobius watched as the others challenged Alioth with brilliant flashes of magic, thrown bits of debris, and generally being as obnoxious as magical beings could be.

And then with a sudden ripple of green that flashed across Alioth’s whole, massive body, everything went still and quiet. Loki had clearly succeeded, and Mobius felt like he could breathe again. The four of them joined the God of Mischief, who was holding onto a tendril of storm like that was a perfectly normal thing to do. He flashed a smile at them and then gestured, and sure enough, the clouds had parted, and through what looked like nothing more than a tear in the universe, they could see what definitely looked like a huge, somewhat creepy citadel kind of floating on a big rock in the middle of space.

“If I try to understand why I can still breathe, will my head explode?” Mobius wanted to know as they ventured through the … gap.

Loki smirked at him. “Oh, come on, we’re past the end of the universe. Do you really think any of the regular rules apply?” Loki gestured at the intricate webs of light that surrounded them. “Those are the timelines. When Sylvie and I first arrived, it was that one stupid timeline where everything happened only as He Who Endures decreed. It started to branch just with our arrival, and clearly, it just kept doing it after Sylvie overthrew him.”

It was a truly awe-inspiring sight, and so different from seeing that single solitary line on their screens. Looking at all those branches, at the strength of so many of them, Mobius felt a little sick at how many of them he had helped destroy over the years.

Loki reached out and squeezed his arm, almost like he knew what Mobius was thinking.

“Come on. This way.”

They picked their way up the weird winding path to the doors of the Citadel, and Loki didn’t hesitate to push them open and head inside. The rest of them exchanged glances and then followed.

Loki called out, “Miss Minutes, are you still here, being as obnoxious as always?”

Miss Minutes appeared, larger than normal and even more incongruous in this setting, but still with her cheerful drawl: “I resent that, Loki.”

Loki flashed her a grin. “Make yourself useful and go let Sylvie know that this isn’t an attack. We’ve got a plan to preserve the multiverse. It’s a multi-person job.”

“If you say so,” the clock said doubtfully but obediently disappeared.

They stood around for a long moment.

“Are we really waiting on a cartoon clock?” Danvers asked finally.

“The TVA is so fucking weird,” Loki told her. “Just imagine having to take lessons from her on the proper rules and regulations of the universe’s most needlessly bureaucratic organisation. It could be so much worse.”

Before anyone could comment, the elevator at the end of the hall opened with a loud “ding”. It was empty, but Loki gestured and said, “That’s our ride.”

They all stepped into the elevator, Mobius wondering if he was the only one who felt nervous about this. Loki had come in last so that he was at the head of the group, first one out when the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened—and incidentally, the first target, which had to be deliberate.

The office was opulent but cold and cavernous at the same time. Sylvie was leaning up against a desk at the far end of the room, and three dead bodies were slumped under the window. They looked … like the same person?

“See you’ve been keeping busy,” Loki said conversationally.

“I did actually listen to what he said,” Sylvie said, sounding a bit defensive.

“And that was your plan?” Loki asked, sounding scornful. “Just stay here forever and keep killing He Who Endures over and over.”

She straightened up from the desk. “If I have to.”

Mobius felt like he could actually hear Loki’s eyeroll as he spoke again.

“Fortunately, Mobius is way smarter than that. He came up with this plan.”

“There really is a plan?” She sounded like she was trying not to sound hopeful.

“Of course there is. Did you think I’d come here to kill you?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“That’s not really how this relationship works, you know.”

Although Loki’s tone had still been conversational, Sylvie winced.

“I couldn’t let you stop me.”

“Evidently. I mean, I think it might have been smarter to actually talk it out and come up with a plan before starting a multiversal war, but it wasn’t my centuries-old vendetta.  Now, are you going to let me give you a hug, or are you going to boot me into a random TVA so that I have to search the whole multiverse again to find Mobius?”

Sylvie looked briefly horrified before she smoothed the expression away.  “I thought I was sending you back to him.”

Loki crossed the room.  “I hoped that was what you thought.”  He held out his arms.  “Well?”

She was still for a moment longer, and then she flung her arms around him and buried her face in his chest.  Loki wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.

“It’s all right,” Loki said softly.  “Turns out, in this beautiful multiverse you unleashed, Lokis really don’t have to be alone.”

She mumbled something against his shirt that sounded like, “I’m glad.”

Loki let her rest for another minute and then said, “You want to meet everyone else and hear about this plan?  I’m not quite sure how the only non-magical person in the room is the one who came up with it, but you already knew Mobius was smart.”

Danvers held up her hand.  “Just as a note, I don’t consider myself to be magical.”

“Okay, one non-magical and one delusional human whose lifeforce has bonded with an Infinity Stone.”  He side-eyed her.  “Out of curiosity, what are you calling that?”

“Science.”

Loki opened his mouth, closed it again, and finally said, “Agree to disagree.  Everyone, this is Sylvie.  Sylvie, this is everyone.”

Loki introduced everyone present, indicating what their role would be in the spell, Infinity Stone or otherwise, and then turned it over to Strange.

“Like I said, the spell is his framework, and he’s obviously way better suited to actually explain what he needs.  We’ve got the Infinity Stones for the spell thanks to the TVA and its collection of confiscated stones from different branched timelines that it didn’t approve of.”

“Just how many Infinity Stones are we talking about?” Maximoff wanted to know.

Loki shrugged.  “I don’t know.  Dozens?  Hundreds?  The TVA neutralises all magic, so none of them work there.  Some of the staff use them as paper weights.  It’s truly one of the creepiest things I’ve ever experienced, and that discovery was the point at which I realised how powerful the TVA was and stopped thinking it was all some elaborate joke.  Fortunately for us, it’s dead useful for the multiverse right now.  I suppose if you believe in fate, you could argue that it gave us exactly what we needed for this moment—but now that He Who Endures is dead, I’m pretty sure we’re all supposed to be writing our own destinies.”

As Strange settled down to explaining the technical elements of the spell, Mobius drifted over to the large window, staring out at the awe-inspiring view.  After a few minutes, Loki made his way over.

“Shouldn’t you be listening?”

Loki waved a hand.  “Eh, I got most of it.”

Mobius snorted a laugh.  “Loki, this is more important than the TVA training videos.”

“I was there when he came up with it the first time, I’ve enchanted with Sylvie before, and the power stone is for power.  My role is pretty straightforward.”

“Pretty essential,” Mobius corrected.

“But not requiring of a lot of finesse.  I’ve got it.”

There didn’t seem to be anything more to say to that.  Mobius might be able to chide Loki back over there, but it didn’t mean that he would listen any more than he was listening now.  And truthfully, Mobius was happy not to be alone.

So they stood side by side, staring out at the multiverse, branches growing and twisting, sometimes absorbing into one another, sometimes veering off in their own path, and sometimes disappearing.

“Do you think that’s a TVA’s doing?” Mobius asked.

“Could be,” Loki answered.  “I encountered a few not good ones in my travels.  But most people really seemed to want to do better once they found out the truth.”

Mobius nodded.  He’d noticed the same thing.  There’s been a lot of revolution, sometimes led by him.

Loki continued.  “But there’s even worse versions of He Who Endures out there.  There’s universes where Thanos won.  There must be universes where thing happen that we can’t even imagine.  There’s so much we don’t know.  It’s chaotic.”

“You like it,” Mobius observed.

“I mean, yes?” Loki sounded a little confused.

“It’s just a bit funny coming from the creator of the ‘bright lure of freedom diminishes your life’s joy’ speech,” Mobius smirked.

Loki rolled his eyes.  “Come on, I had to say something that didn’t involve encouraging everyone to fight me.  And it definitely worked with the mind stone master plan.  As people we do genuinely make terrible decisions sometimes, but sometimes we make wonderful ones.  All part of living—at least if you have the free will to actually make your own choices.”

“It might lead you here to saving all the universes,” Mobius pointed out.

“Or simply here with you.”

Mobius’s lips curled up into a smile, and he slipped an arm around Loki’s waist and leaned into him.  “You can be very charming when you want to be.”

“I always want to be charming with you.”

Mobius laughed.  “Lucky me.”

Mobius supposed that it had started because of He Who Endures, but Mobius didn’t think that even that particular man could have envisioned where they were now.  After everything that had happened, everything that they had both done, they’d still found this, and Mobius was beyond grateful.

“I’m so glad we found one another,” Loki admitted quietly, echoing Mobius’s thoughts.

“Me too,” Mobius agreed.  “And if we want to get technical, that’s thanks to your love of Mobiuses.”

Loki raised an eyebrow, and Mobius explained about his expanded search parameters once it had become abundantly clear that Loki wasn’t travelling alone.

“So he was right and you really did think that I’d found a replacement.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” Mobius admitted.  “But I certainly wasn’t giving up without knowing for sure.  And like I said, it helped me find you.  There are what certainly felt like an infinite variety of Lokis and Mobiuses in the multiverse, but there seem to be fewer sets together.”

Loki straightened abruptly, jostling Mobius.

“I’ve got to go run an errand,” Loki announced.

Mobius wasn’t altogether certain that he’d followed Loki’s full train of thought, but it was clear who he was thinking of, and assuming their plan worked, this would be his last opportunity to see him.

“All right,” Mobius said.  “Be careful.”

Loki pulled up a Time Door, which got everyone else’s attention, and there was a brief pause as Strange refused to allow Loki to leave with all the Infinity Stones.  Loki rolled his eyes a lot but actually refrained from pointing out that he could just go get more, presumably because he actually wanted to leave.  With a flourish, he threw the five stones into the middle of the room, where they hovered ten feet off the ground, slowly revolving around one another.

Sylvie gave Loki He Who Endures’ TemPad (which looked like no TemPad that Mobius had ever seen) so that he could actually come directly back here instead of needing to get past Alioth, which made Mobius a lot more comfortable, and which he was pretty sure was Sylvie’s version of an apology for what had happened last time.

“You’re sure he’s not plotting against us?” Danvers asked once Loki had left.  “It’s a weird time to leave.”

“He’s not plotting against us,” Mobius confirmed.  “He doesn’t want a bunch of all-powerful adversaries.”

Her lips quirked.  “So you’re saying he’s going to try to take over only once we’re done?”

Mobius laughed.  “If he were going to try to take over, that would be when.”

“So this could be prep, couldn’t it?” she asked.  “Getting weapons?”

“It could be,” Mobius agreed. “But it’s not.”

Strange eyed him.  “Then what is he doing? Carol’s right, it’s odd timing.”

“I’m not actually his keeper, but at a guess, he’s saying goodbye.  The multiverse is about to become inaccessible, and Loki met some good people while he was searching for me.”

They all looked at him with varying degrees of surprise. It was interesting, really, when you thought about it. The loneliest god, and he was the one who had strong enough connections—and cared enough—to make proper goodbyes.

Mobius’s lips tipped up.  “Alternatively, he’s just bored, and he thought it would be better to burn off a bit of energy instead of destroying your entire set-up.”

There was plenty of eye-rolling, and everyone got back to work.  Mobius had no idea what Strange and Maximoff were actually constructing, and he was fine with keeping it that way.

~*~

When Loki returned, his smile had a bit of a sad turn to it, but he also looked … content, like he was ever so much better at making peace with things than he had been when Mobius had met him, telling Mobius that he’d been right about guessing the errand.  To his amusement, however, Loki immediately produced a huge array of takeaway.

“We don’t actually need to eat here,” Sylvie said.  “Yet another weird thing about this weird place.”

“But we’re not normally performing a spell of this magnitude,” Loki countered immediately.  “We’re all going to be expending a lot of energy, and this is our last chance to eat the food from the multiverse.  Come on.”

Loki laid out all the food, telling them where it came from, and he really had hopped through a variety of times, worlds, and universes to get it.  And no matter what anyone said, Loki could be incredibly sweet and thoughtful when he wanted to be.  Because in addition to the general array of food that he’d collected, he’d stopped by a Sokovia, a Kree home world, a Louisiana, a Kathmandu, an Asgard, a Telemore—“Best salads in the universe!”—and a New York.

“And how is the other Mobius?” Mobius asked.

All the happily eating people were suddenly paying a lot of attention to Mobius and Loki while trying to appear as though they weren’t.  Loki rolled his eyes, grinning.

“Good. Better now that we’ve got him relocated. He says thanks for everything and, you know, treat me right, or he’ll have to find a workaround and come and kick your ass.”

Mobius snorted. “Uh huh. So he’s decided he’s fond of New York, has he?”

“When I let him know what was happening, he pointed out that one time line is as good as another, but he was fooling precisely no one.”

“I’m glad for him,” Mobius said, and meant it.

“I can only hope that every Loki gets as lucky in finding you.” For a moment, Loki’s face was nothing but raw sincerity, and then it was replaced with a smirk. “Or, you know, whoever makes them happy. Because I’m just not seeing it with you two.”

He gestured between Mobius and Sylvie.

“But she’s my favourite,” Mobius pointed out.

“Lies and slander,” Loki said, pouting.

“Judging on intelligence or, er, other attributes?” Sylvie demanded dryly.

They laughed, and Mobius watched as everyone turned back to their carefully selected food, quietly talking to one another or just enjoying the memories, much more relaxed than they had been before Loki had done this.

More quietly, Mobius asked, “Everything really okay?”

Loki nodded. “I’m glad I had the chance to say goodbye.  I mean, it’s not like I was planning to visit all the time.”  He shot a look at Mobius.  “I’m certainly delighted to be back with you.  But it’s … odd, after all that time travelling everywhere, seeing the whole multiverse laid out before us, to think of it being over, of each of them being separate.  Worth it, of course.  But … hard.”

Mobius nodded.  “Hey, you won’t get any arguments from me.  I spent what I thought was my entire very long life alternating between the TVA and a whole lot of branched realities.  This is going to be completely new for me.  Absolutely worth it, especially because I get to spend it with you, but nothing like what I ever expected.”

Loki sighed but smiled slightly and nodded, and the two of them tucked back into their food.  Mobius supposed that he really didn’t need to be eating all this food, it wasn’t like he was doing anything except observing, but one thing you learned when you were hopping around the multiverse was to eat when you had the opportunity, because you didn’t know when it was going to come round again.  When he had presented his plan to Loki, they’d immediately gone to Strange, and all they’d done since then was work to implement it.  Mobius didn’t know about Loki, but he hadn’t thought at all about what was going to happen after.  Where would they go?  What would they do?  There was no point in trying to discuss it now, but he might as well be well fed and thus ever so slightly better prepared for whatever came next.

They made impressive inroads into all the food that Loki had brought.  Mobius wasn’t sure if they all normally ate so much, if they were applying the same principle that Mobius was—he could only imagine what Sylvie’s life had been like—or if it really was essential to eat so much before performing a spell of such magnitude.  Whatever it was, although there were leftovers, it didn’t feel like much had gone to waste, and they were able to condense what was left into a much smaller pile of containers … for after they’d reshaped the multiverse?

Or maybe a little bit of a distraction technique, because as the cleaning finished, tension crept back into the faces of everyone present.  Mobius could feel it in his own jaw and shoulders, and he wasn’t even doing anything.  He could only imagine what it was like for the rest of them.

At Strange’s instruction, they each went to stand on the large golden sigil etched, glowing, into the floor, ringed around the edge like they were each focal points.  The Infinity Stones continued their slow tumble revolving in the air.  Mobius came to stand near Loki, not sure what else to do, well back from the edge of the glowing mark.

Strange’s fingers danced in front of the Eye of Agamotto, and the artifact opened to show that there was nothing inside.  Loki gestured, and the time stone moved out of its orbit and settled inside—just like it belonged there.  Strange didn’t react visibly.

Danvers was next, a flick of Loki’s fingers sending the space stone winging to her, and she caught it in her right hand.  Both hands lit up, blue flames rippling up her arms, and her eyes flashed an otherworldly glow.  She nodded her head.

Mobius started shifting around the outside of the circle so he could see everyone’s faces.

Maximoff’s face was tight, hands already wreathed in red as Loki guided the mind stone to her.  It hovered between her hands, encased in red.

Sylvie had never dealt with an Infinity Stone before, and although her expression was pure determination, Mobius thought he could read the tension there, too.

“Ready to prove that you’re a superior Loki?” Loki asked. “I mean, if you think you can’t handle it—“

“Piss off,” Sylvie said sharply, and Loki grinned and flicked the reality stone her way.

She sucked in a sharp breath upon contact, eyes flashing red. Her brow furrowed and a look of intense concentration etched itself on her face. Then her eyes flashed the bright green of her and Loki’s seidr before fading back to her own eye colour, and she blew out a breath and gave Loki her best “so there” expression.

Loki’s smile was one of genuine pride. He held out his own hand, and the power stone zipped into it. He closed his fist around it, and streaks of purple like jagged lightning arced up his hand and neck and face, flashing across all his exposed skin. A glowing purple corona circled his pupils.

“Huh,” he said. “The power stone is totally different from the mind stone and the tesseract. I think I sort of understand why Hulk smashes things so often now.”

Mobius and Maximoff both laughed, Danvers smirked, and Sylvie and Strange looked at Loki like he was an idiot.

“If we could concentrate on the matter at hand,” Strange said sternly.

“Fine, fine,” Loki said.

“Memories first,” Strange said in a no-nonsense voice, sounding like he was reminding everyone of something they already knew.  “Then people.  Then timelines.  Then the barrier.”

Everyone nodded, serious expressions now on all their faces.

And then it got really quiet. Mobius continued to walk around the outside of the circle, to see everyone and be doing something while everyone else was saving the multiverse.

Loki tensed suddenly, making Mobius freeze, but a moment later, he relaxed again, and Mobius blew out a breath and resumed his circuit.  He was going to have so many questions once they were done.

The longer they worked, the more he heard laboured breathing that you wouldn’t normally expect from five people who were just standing there.  Beads of sweat slid down temples and dripped off chins. Strange’s hands were moving often, creating glowing sigils. Maximoff moved her hands too, sometimes, though her magic just moved with her, and it didn’t seem to do anything discernible to Mobius (but he was clearly not an expert here). Danvers, Sylvie, and Loki simply stayed still, occasionally swaying slightly.  They all had their eyes closed and were clearly concentrating very much on something that Mobius couldn’t see.

“We’ll have to.”

Maximoff’s voice suddenly cut through the intent quiet, and Mobius started violently.

“No loss,” Sylvie spat out.

“We need a shell, at least,” Loki argued.  “A storage depot, if you wish.”

Silence for a long moment, and then, “Fine,” from Strange, and it was quiet once more.

Mobius’s eyes darted between each of them, but whatever had happened, they’d apparently resolved it and kept going.

It was truly bizarre to witness.  Mobius had spent his whole life observing others, but almost never were such far-reaching events actually taking place live in front of him.

And then Strange said, “It’s not enough.”

Maximoff’s voice was tight with strain.  “We need more.”

Mobius stiffened.  That didn’t sound good.  And then Loki opened his eyes, looked right at Mobius where he was standing behind and between Maximoff and Danvers, winked, and mouthed, “Catch!”

Automatically, Mobius reached up at the flash of green, not thinking about what it could be, which was just as well, because had it occurred to him that the thing he was about to catch was an Infinity Stone, he would almost undoubtedly have panicked.  Since he didn’t know, he just wrapped his hand around the small object and was slammed with the weirdest rush of power and knowledge.

He knew immediately that this was the soul stone that had been won by Natasha Romanov as a result of Clint Barton’s sacrifice.  It had caused a branch from the sacred timeline, of course, and Mobius remembered the incident because it had been an odd case of bringing in Romanov when it had really been Barton who had caused the branch.  She was one of the wilier humans that he had ever met, but the explanation that it was meant to be her sacrifice and that Barton was supposed to live had made her accept her fate.  It was the outcome she had wanted as well.  Mobius wondered, now, what had happened to her in the Void, how long she had survived, exactly what had killed her.  Knowing what was waiting for pruned variants now, knowing how much pruning hurt….  It was hard to understand just how much he had refused to see before Loki—this Loki—came into his life.  It was chaos and sometimes painful, but it was also beautiful and ridiculous and … so much brighter than it had been.  Loki lit up his whole life.

The power of the soul stone was … hard to describe.  But it felt a little bit like Mobius was waking up again, another boost of something that Mobius wasn’t totally sure that he could control, but that was okay.  Mobius was distantly aware that holding onto an Infinity Stone was a really bad plan when you were a mortal, but he knew that Loki wouldn’t deliberately harm him, that Mobius was the only other person in the room trying to save the entire multiverse, and that he was, demonstrably, not dead, so he seemed to be doing okay after all.

Mobius didn’t have a damn clue what he was doing, though.  If he’d had the slightest idea that this might happen, he would have paid attention to the briefings—not that he thought that would have done a lot of good, because he wasn’t magical, as Loki had taken pains to point out today.  However, supporting Loki was something that he always wanted to do, and so he found himself drifting back round the circle until he was standing just behind Loki.  He reached out and pressed his palm to Loki’s back, and just thought about how he wanted help, wanted to support, wanted to give what he had to Loki and by extension, the whole group here.  And even though he had no reason to suspect that was how the magic worked, it seemed to give him the focus he needed to somehow channel something he didn’t understand to the person who would understand, and who seemed to be, based on the smoothing out of the expressions on everyone else’s faces, getting the power where it needed to go.  Barton would like this, Mobius thought.  Romanov too.  The TVA hadn’t had the right to interfere, and Mobius would never be able to undo that.  But this one act, this one amazing spell, was going to protect everyone out there so that nothing like that ever happened to them, and Mobius hoped that counted for something.

Mobius lost track of the time—he was pretty sure time didn’t pass here anyway—focussing on the feeling of Loki’s shirt under his fingertips, on the probably absurd notion that this magic could pass via osmosis, except it seemed to be working.  It wasn’t hard, precisely.  Compared to what they were doing, it wasn’t complex at all, and yet it still felt like it was taking a tremendous amount of effort, like he had to bring all of his concentration to it or he didn’t know what would happen.  He didn’t want to find out.  (He’d seen people burn up touching Infinity Stones.  He should probably not be thinking about that right now.)

At the same time, he could … almost sense the bigger picture of what was going on around him, like glimpses out of the corner of his eye, and he mostly just tried not to look.  He was sure that Loki would tell him all about magic in the future if Mobius wanted to know, but now was clearly not the time to risk asking questions or messing up a very complex spell.

“Nearly there,” Strange said in a voice that still betrayed the strain they were all under.  “Just the barrier now.”

And then Mobius found himself opening his eyes and looking at Sylvie.  She definitely hadn’t spoken out loud, and it wasn’t like she’d even spoken in his head, at least not in actual words.  But he knew what she wanted nonetheless.  She had the reality stone, but she needed the soul stone, too.  Mobius wasn’t totally sure that Loki was going to forgive him for this, but if anyone deserved a do-over, it was Sylvie.

He pushed the power to her with his cobbled together understanding of how any of this worked.  She smiled even as she shrank, as her hair grew out and darkened, as her clothes melted into Asgardian non-formal-wear.  She looked to be perhaps eight now, her eyes huge and dark in that sharp little face.  Loki had his hand out, Mobius realised belatedly, and he thought it was a plea, at first, only then Sylvie tossed him the reality stone.  He caught it, even as a ripple of green magic surrounded Sylvie, flashing in her eyes, flaring around her whole head, and she was suddenly gone.  Mobius could feel, somehow, that she’d gone to a reality that came close to matching the one she had been taken from, one with an Asgard, one that had space for a Goddess of Mischief to become what she wanted to become solely under her own influence, centuries of hiding and fighting and plotting erased.

There was a collective intake of breath from the others, and prompted by Mobius didn’t know what urging, he stepped away from Loki and onto the gold sigil that Sylvie had been occupying.  An exhale now, and Mobius felt the tightness in his shoulders ease a little.  It seemed like nothing had gone disastrously wrong.

He was still concentrating on getting the power of the soul stone to Loki, but he found that part of his mind was thinking about Sylvie.  Mobius had just assumed that Sylvie would stay here, like the rest of them.  But this was a timeline without an Asgard anymore, and he knew Lokis well enough to know that no matter how much they denied it, they wanted a home, wanted to belong.  She’d done terrible things, but she’d also done wonderful ones, and she certainly hadn’t started this.

It hadn’t occurred to Mobius that a complete do-over might be an option, perhaps because he had just come from a group of people who’d learned that their memories had been stolen.  Mobius hoped that it was different when it was a conscious choice, not to force someone into the life you had planned for them but to give yourself the chance to become whatever you wanted.  Mobius thought of that terrible Loki variant and all the people they had killed, and then he thought of the TVA and all that pruning.  Nothing could erase the life that Sylvie had been forced to live—except that they were reshaping the multiverse, and they had the Infinity Stones, and so reality could be rewritten after all.  He was glad that she could have a reward, but it did make him wonder a little if Loki wouldn’t have liked this as well.

And then there was a flare of blinding white light, so bright that it felt like it was searing his eyeballs even through his closed eyelids.  Mobius tried to blink through the afterimages, and he finally realised that the golden sigils had all faded away.

“It’s done,” Strange said, sounding exhausted.

Mobius could see that it was, because looking out the window, the branching white timelines had acquired an opalescent sheen that flickered through the colours of the rainbow—the Infinity Stones—and just looked like they were protected.  Or maybe that was more knowledge than Mobius was supposed to have?

He unclenched his hand, and the soul stone hit the floor with a sharp noise that made everyone turn to look at him.

“Sorry,” he said, a little bit hoarsely.  “It just seemed like a good idea to not be holding that anymore.”

Danvers came and set the space stone down beside the soul stone.  Jaw clenched, Maximoff set the mind stone down as well.

They all looked at Loki, who had an Infinity Stone in each hand.

Loki was already looking at Mobius.

“I suppose you’ll leave me if I want to keep these.”

Mobius just smiled at him. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m not ever going to leave you. But I would probably nag a fair bit.”

Loki huffed a breath.

“After all,” Mobius pointed out, “you did already give genocide a try, and it didn’t work out very well.”

“It was a terrible plan,” Loki admitted. “I was traumatised and feeling spiteful.”

Mobius hummed a breath and stepped closer to him.

“So I’m not sure what you think the stones give you that you don’t already have.”

“Security? I always wondered what Thor felt like when he wielded that damn hammer.”

“Well, you’re already super hot, super magical, and super heroic, so I kind of feel like you’ve got it covered.”

Loki huffed out a laugh.

“Are you saying you think my brother is hot?”

“Objectively, I think it’s hard to argue that he’s not. And I’m pretty sure that behaving heroically just naturally increases people’s hotness. But personally, he’s not really my type.”

Loki’s lips had tipped up. “No?”

Mobius shook his head. “No, I much prefer snarky brunets who are also super smart and super tricky and yet think it’s a good idea to contemplate keeping Infinity Stones in a room full of heroes instead of the whole time he was carrying them around on his own.”

Loki unclenched his hands, releasing the stones, face spasming and a shiver running through his whole body. The stones hovered in the air, revolving slowly, and then drifted over to sit with the others.

“I could have kept them,” Loki said, a little bit petulantly.

Mobius kissed his temple. “I know, pussycat.  I’m so proud of you for letting them go.  And for the record, I think you’re already pretty spectacular without them.  I like this reality very much, and you’re already one of the strongest people I know—and already a lot for me to handle.”

Loki huffed out a breath, but he leaned into Mobius’s side.

They all looked at Strange next, who said, “About that—”

Loki glowered.  “You are the biggest hypocrite in all the universes.”

Strange’s lips quirked.  “To be fair, I didn’t actually tell you no.”

A reluctant-sounding laugh was pulled out of Loki.  “I think that’s a technicality.  You know this might be a terrible idea.”

“I know,” Strange agreed.  “But it’s not like it’s the only method of time travel, and it’s always been my sacred duty.”

Loki rolled his eyes.  “Fine, fine.  But don’t come whining to me if it all goes to shit.”

Strange rolled his eyes, but he actually looked a bit relieved, Mobius thought.  Had he been prepared for a fight?  He was a powerful sorcerer, but if Loki, Danvers, and Maximoff had opposed him?

Strange made the complicated hand gestures again, and the Eye of Agamotto closed, hiding the time stone once more.

“Let’s get these wrapped up,” Mobius said, “and reduce our chances of killing anyone, shall we?”

He crouched down, and Loki produced the material that he’d wrapped them in the first time.

“Speaking of Infinity Stones killing mortals who come into direct contact with them, want to explain exactly why you’re not dead?” Strange asked.

Mobius looked at Loki.  “How did you know that would work?”

Loki’s lips quirked, and he leaned in to kiss the side of Mobius’s head.  “Because we were in the middle of a war, and I didn’t want anything to happen to you.”

Oh.  Oh.  Loki had said that the apple was rewriting his genetic makeup, and Mobius supposed that he’d listed the slow ageing and being harder to kill, but Mobius still hadn’t quite grasped the full extent of it.  He wasn’t about to suggest grabbing the power stone any time soon just to see if he was as strong as Loki was, but it was still extremely striking to actually get this real life example of the changes that he had undergone.

“Wow,” Mobius said.  “Thanks again.”

“Thanks to my mother.”

Mobius smiled at Loki. “Yes, thanks to her.”

His smile faltered a little as he considered the fact that they were now trapped in a universe where Loki’s mother was dead.

Loki had clearly followed his train of thought.

“I’ll always miss her, but I already got my amazing second chance.  I had centuries with her, even if I didn’t always use them as well as I could have.”

“You don’t wish you could have done what Sylvie did?”

“I hope not,” Strange said heavily.  “We nearly lost the whole thing before we could actually raise the barrier.”

Loki’s expression was fierce.  “You haven’t spent nearly two millennia trying to bring down the organisation who suddenly swooped in and declared when you were a child that you weren’t supposed to exist and would be killed, chasing after you everywhere you went until you learned to hide and grow up in apocalypses.  You’re not the one who brought back the multiverse.  If anyone deserves the life of her own choosing, it’s Sylvie!”

Strange raised his hands in a placating gesture.  “I’m just saying—”

Loki deflated a little.  “Yeah, yeah.  She likes dramatic exits.”

Mobius nudged Loki.  “And she trusted us to finish the job.”

Loki looked a little surprised, and then his expression softened, and he nodded a little.  “I guess she did.”

They finished gathering up the Infinity Stones, and Loki let Strange talk him into putting them in one of the empty takeaway containers so that Mobius could carry them back to the TVA.  Mobius was entirely certain that the only reason Loki didn’t put up more than a token fuss was because the transfer gave him the opportunity to palm the mind stone and give it back to Maximoff.

Mobius had a hard time keeping his amusement from showing, but he didn’t intervene.  Maybe if Strange hadn’t insisted on keeping the time stone.  But Mobius wasn’t about to argue that the loss of Vision wasn’t a tragedy, and if you were back to believing in fate (luck?  The universe giving them one?) then this seemed pretty close to a direct invitation for Maximoff to take a chance.

Danvers made a fuss over there being some food left because some of them really were just mortals, and soon they were finishing off the leftovers as if they’d all just noticed how hungry they were, Mobius with a cardboard container of Infinity Stones by his elbow.  He’d actually encountered a lot of Infinity Stones in his day, but the fact that these ones were functional was a little bit disconcerting.  It was much easier to forget about them and their potency when Loki had them tucked into his pocket space.  But they needed them accessible to get them back to the TVA anyway.  And Mobius had spent what felt like his whole very long life dealing with strange occurrences.

“How long did that take?” Mobius wanted to know as it occurred to him that he’d just eaten a massive amount of food in what he would at first have said was a ludicrously short amount of time.

But as he tried to actually think about how long it had taken, he wasn’t sure that he could process it.

“Let’s just say it’s a good thing that we did it here, beyond the edge of time and the universe,” Strange said.

Mobius hadn’t aged for who knew how long at the TVA, he supposed this still wasn’t the weirdest thing that had happened to him.

Once they’d finished all the rest of the food, there really didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Mobius didn’t have the slightest interest in staying here for eternity, but it was like he hadn’t mentally or emotionally caught up to this being done and their having succeeded.

They tidied up the containers, got them all into a bag to remove, and then Mobius made a face.

“Are we really going to leave the bodies here for eternity?”

Loki shrugged. “Not sure he deserves a burial. You want to dump them somewhere?”

Could you prune a dead body? Was that even a thing they should consider anymore?

“I can get rid of them if you want,” Danvers offered.

They looked at her, and her hands and arms lit up.

Her lips quirked. “Just because I don’t normally burn things doesn’t mean I can’t.”

They took the bodies outside since that seemed tidier than discovering if destroying the bodies would also destroy part of the Citadel. Sure enough, Danvers could reduce bodies to ash with a powerful and sustained blast from her hands. Thankfully, it was hot enough and fast enough that there wasn’t too much of a smell—or maybe the smell just dissipated quickly in this “not realm”.

Then it was back inside, gathering the last of their debris and proof that they had been there—apart from the hopefully-something-approximating-eternal proof all around them in the form of a beautiful, protected multiverse—and Loki opened the Time Door.  He still had He Who Endures’ TemPad. Mobius hadn’t noticed that Sylvie hadn’t taken it back when Loki returned, and he wondered if she’d had this idea from the moment that she realised what they were here to do.

Mobius went first, the others followed, and Loki emerged last. They were back in the Sanctum Sanctorum.

Loki promptly set down the bags of garbage.

“Carol or Wanda, would you like a door closer to home?” he offered politely.

“I can easily manage portals in the same time,” Strange told him.

Loki raised his hands with an innocent expression. “Whatever you say.” He smiled at the two women. “It was nice to meet you. Thanks for your help.”

“Thank you,” Maximoff said.  “It was a … good reminder of all the people out there and the importance of helping them if you can.  I didn’t think it would be so easy to forget.”

Loki took a step closer to her.  “The grief and the rage are good at obliterating everything in their path.”

She winced. 

“Hey,” Loki said softly.  “You’re talking to the poster boy for being hurt, bitter, and trying to commit genocide and take over entire worlds.  You’re doing all right.”

She huffed something that was almost, but not quite, a laugh.  “Tell that to the inhabitants of Westview.”

“We can’t change what we did in the past, only work on doing better in the future.  And as cliched as it sounds, time does make a difference.  And if you’re really lucky, someone will help reshape the universe for you.”

Her eyes strayed to Mobius and then back to Loki.

“I’m glad you’re happy,” she said quietly.

Loki wrapped his hands around hers, squeezing them gently.  “And I would never in a million years have thought that I could have wound up here.  So just … take care of yourself and work on healing and maybe just … see what the future brings.”

She nodded, eyes faraway, and Mobius wondered what possibilities she was seeing.  Then her gaze sharpened on Strange.

“I’d like to go home now.”

Strange conjured a portal.  “Thank you for your assistance.”

“My cabin in the middle of nowhere was in the middle of nowhere for a reason.”

Strange nodded, and Mobius hoped that she wouldn’t get too lonely while figuring out how to do the possibly crazy thing that she was going to try to do.  Would the Sorcerer Supreme notice anyway?  Perhaps, but it did seem like a good opportunity to try to get him to back off for a while.

Maximoff nodded to Danvers and Mobius, and then she was gone.

Danvers held out her hand to Mobius.

“One for the team of not-entirely-mortal-mortals?”

Mobius smirked and shook.  “Yeah, that sounds about right.  This has been a very interesting experience.”

“It really has,” she agreed.

Her gaze turned to Loki.  Her eyes were assessing.  “You are … not at all like your brother in so many ways, and I think it would be really useful to have you both at my side if I was in a tight spot.”

“He’d cheat,” Mobius said, because Loki had stiffened slightly at the first part of this speech.

Loki’s lips curled up into a grin.  “I absolutely would.”

“All the better,” she said with a smile of her own.  “What’s life without a bit of mischief now and again?”

Loki’s smile grew.  “You, unlike the wizard over there, are definitely invited to my next party.”

“Sounds like fun.”  She eyed Strange.  “Since we’re apparently having a pissing contest, do you want to be the one to put me back where you found me?”

Strange had the grace to look a little embarrassed as he formed the portal for Danvers, and she winked at Loki before she passed through.

And then Strange and Loki were facing one another, and to Mobius’s surprise, Strange held out his hand.

“You’re definitely different from the other version of you that I met.  I’ll work more on trying to judge you on your own merits.  Thank you for coming to me and protecting the multiverse.”

Loki shook the hand, smiled, and said, “I still owe you one for the falling portal trick.”

Strange rolled his eyes.  “God of Mischief, I’ve got it.”

Loki suddenly tilted their hands so that Strange’s was on top.

“They hurt,” Loki said.

It wasn’t a question.

Strange had stiffened faintly, but he answered with seeming calm, holding out the other hand as well, visibly shaking, when Loki put his left hand out, palm up.

“They ache sometimes, certainly.  They were put back together with as much skill as was available at the time, but it’s certainly not the same as not being broken.”

“And then we’re always faced with the costs and limits of magic,” Loki said, staring down at them.  “All the things it cannot do.”

“Or which we choose not to allow it to do.”

“And sometimes astonishing things can be made from that which was broken.”

“We can only hope.”

“My mother was raised by witches, you know,” Loki said conversationally, still staring down at Strange’s hands.  “She taught me most of what I know about magic.  I can’t put your body back together again, but—” 

The green of Loki’s magic suddenly enveloped Strange’s hands.  He startled, but did not withdraw them.  After a long moment, the green glow seemed to sink beneath the skin.  Strange sucked in a sharp breath.

“—that should help a little,” Loki finished and released him completely.

Strange was looking down at his hands like he’d never seen them before.  He clenched and unclenched them several times.  The scars were still there, and they still shook visibly.  But it was clear that Loki had made a significant change.

“I—” Strange’s voice was bewildered and a little, well, strange.  “Thank you.”

“Now you owe me one,” Loki said.  “Clearly useful, the Sorcerer Supreme owing me a favour.”

Mobius had been reluctantly charmed by a man who had scented weaknesses and attacked them viciously because that was what people always did to him, a man who kept being held to a reputation and so then had brazenly and defiantly lived up to it.  Mobius had come to care for the man that he’d seen beneath those masks, and he loved the one who was using his reputation to let the other man pull himself together, protect his emotions.

Strange rolled his eyes and said in a dry tone that was almost right, “You’re not planning on taking up residence on Earth in this time are you?”

Loki’s eyes strayed to Mobius, and then he looked back at Strange.  “We’ve got the entirety of this universe in any time laid out before us.  We’re not committing.  And obviously, I have no intention of letting you know when I’m going to show up here.”

“Obviously,” Strange agreed, now sounding amused more than anything.  He eyed Mobius.  “You’re never going to be bored.”

Mobius grinned at him.  “No, I’m really not.”

They shook hands as well, and then Loki punched in the coordinates for the TVA, and they stepped through.  Mobius looked around himself in surprise.  There was his desk, but now Casey’s desk was located next to it, and everything looked … smaller, like someone had dragged their stuff and the stuff from the dozen or so people nearest them into a new space.

Despite the relocation, Mobius put the Infinity Stones back in the drawer where they had originally taken them, wanting it to be done with.

“We needed more building blocks for the missing universes,” Loki said, apparently seeing Mobius’s confusion.  “The TVAs seemed the logical choice, since we were already restoring all the people.  There was a lot of matter here, and no one who needed it.”  His lips quirked up.  “Well, we needed a little bit of storage.”

Mobius remembered now that Loki had said that during the spell, Mobius simply hadn’t had any context to understand what he was talking about.

“What else is here?” he asked curiously.

Loki pointed.  “Uh, I think time theatre 5 and our table in the cafeteria is that way.  Our table in the extremely reduced archives is that way—a few shelves felt necessary—and your apartment is around the corner, I think.”

Mobius stared down at his desk.  They’d rebuilt the entire multiverse, given TVA members their stolen memories back and restored them, created branches around them, let them forget.  They’d torn down an antiquated symbol of control and fear … and Loki had kept Mobius’s jet ski magazine and the places that had meaning for the two of them.  He thought about tangling his feet with Loki’s under the cafeteria table, working late in his apartment so that Loki’d have an excuse to fall asleep there instead of going back to his time cell….

“You could have obliterated all of it,” Mobius said.

“We needed a place for the Infinity Stones—and Odin knows what other things we may find over the years,” Loki said.

Mobius supposed that was true.

Loki took a step closer.

“And it brought me you.  I can hate everything about it, but not that.”

Mobius closed the last of the distance between them and kissed him.  Loki responded hungrily.

Mobius could honestly say that the thought of having sex at his desk had never crossed his mind, not even once he was working with Loki because the space was just too big and there were simply too many other people around all the time.  He was rapidly reevaluating the idea when he surprised himself by cracking a huge yawn.  Loki blinked at him, looking like he was almost offended, and then he laughed.

“It’s actually been a really long … however long this has been, hasn’t it?  And we need to figure out what we’re doing next and all that, but what do you think about tabling all of that for now and crashing in your apartment?”

It was like Mobius’s body had finally pulled the emergency brakes.  He suddenly felt exhausted, and he wasn’t honestly sure that he would have been able to keep his eyes open for the length of time it would have taken to get to his apartment in the old TVA.  As Loki had said, however, the new tiny TVA was built for their convenience, and his apartment was right around the corner.  Mobius yawned again.

“Sorry.”

“There’s nothing about climbing into bed with me that you need to apologise for.  If you try to suggest one of us can sleep on the couch again, though, you can go sleep at your desk.”

Mobius laughed.  “Hey, I was trying to be a gentleman.”

Loki raised an eyebrow.  “And now you’re not a gentleman?”

Mobius rolled his eyes.  “Now I know that if you didn’t want to be in my bed, you’d feel comfortable telling me so.”

Loki opened his mouth, then sighed a little, and leaned in to press a brief kiss to Mobius’s mouth.  “I think we would have interpreted those actions differently, but I appreciate where that thought came from.  Now come on, let’s go to bed.”

They did the minimum required nightly ablutions and then tumbled into bed together.  Mobius’s last thought before he fell asleep was one of hilarity as he realised that Loki had given his bed an upgrade.  It was way more comfortable than it used to be, and he was sure that these were thousand-count sheets.

~*~

In the morning, they fulfilled several of Mobius’s previously guilty fantasies, altogether guilt-free now because Loki was with him by choice, and the TVA didn’t really exist anymore.  Knowing that there wasn’t a multiversal war anymore, either, and that there really wasn’t anything else that they needed to be doing was pretty amazing too.  Which was probably what was responsible for Mobius feeling so bemused when Loki said there was somewhere that he needed to go.

“You don’t need to come with me,” Loki said carefully enough that Mobius realised he’d been entirely misunderstood.

He tugged Loki to him by way of a hand on either hip.

“Loki, there is literally nowhere that I won’t go with you.  I mean, we’ve gone so far beyond ‘ends of the earth’ that I’ve lost a frame of reference.”  Loki’s lips tipped up slightly, and Mobius explained, “I’d just been thinking that I had absolutely no idea what was coming next, that for the first time in my entire life, I was utterly without a clue.  But I’m very much looking forward to figuring it out with you.  And so if there’s somewhere that you need to go, there’s somewhere that I need to go, too.”

Mobius could see the softness in Loki’s eyes, knew enough about his life to know that the people he cared about rarely trusted him blindly.  Mobius would always expect mischief, of course, but he knew that he could trust Loki with his life.

Loki pulled up the Time Door, and they stepped through together.

~*~