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The halls of the TVA were in chaos.

He shrugged. He did not wait something different. He imagined that, in that place, the same thing was happening as in his own TVA.

Stupefaction.

Astonishment.

Fear.

A lot of fear.

With the difference that, in his TVA, everybody knew what they had to do: nothing. While, in this TVA, surely, the personnel were planning all the necessary steps to intervene. He shook his head, as he avoided the minute men running down the hall, greeting him as he passed.

"Where are you Loki?"

He thought, opening the tempad, as he tuned in to the tracker the judge had placed on the Asgardian when he returned from Lamentis. Obviously Ravonna Renslayer had full confidence that, his Loki, was going to escape and that he was going to help Sylvie and that it was better, then, not to lose track of him as before. And what better weapon than a tracker that could survive time and space?

Especially when it was so small that it was undetectable.

Nano-technology.

Widely surpassed in the distant future and even in the very Asgard that Loki came from.

But they weren't talking about any creator, were they?

He bit his lip remembering his other “temporal obsession,” as the judge had called his fixation with one of the villains and one of the heroes of the team known as the Avengers: Tony Stark.

In one of the talks, he had had with the woman in her office, he had theorized to her amazement that even the Time keepers could probably have learned from him. Since the sacred timeline, it was too much like that critical moment in which, at his home by the lake, Tony Stark had managed to decipher the secret to travel in time.

For god's sake. He had even made a joke about how his name and the theoretical-graphic model that he had developed in his holographic projector with the assistance of his AI, coincided.

It had all been so in front of him.

All the time.

But he was so stupidly human that his brain, far from clinging to the fact that the technology they were using was evidently human in origin, had leaned on the absurd explanation that three lizards with supernatural powers had given them the means to intrude on time. and space and "order" it.

He put a hand to his face and groaned low.

Loki.

His Loki.

He had been right the whole damn time.

Nothing that happened there was "predestined", it was not an "utopia". It was a constantly changing creation, monitored by a being, clearly intelligent, but not on the level of a God… or Tony Stark.

Who in the 21st century, had created the small device that his Loki wore on his neck, as in their respective trips, had been carried by the Avengers.

"In case they got lost. To find them. Not to keep an eye on them, no matter what complex of chase and surveillance Steve has"

The engineer had written on the side of one of the pages of his work that they kept on the TVA. And damn, if he could, he would give a hug to all the variants of that man, because today, that little bit of technology flickered in the tempad, telling him where he was and where the only person who had ever mattered to him was going.

"The archives"

He said to himself closing the tempad and putting it in his suit jacket.

Loki was looking for him.

Naturally he was not deluded enough to go to Renslayer.

His legs started running then.

He had to cut through classification and wardrobe. Since Loki would follow the conventional route. Between the passage of the troops and the central hall.

Fantastic. He was counting with that delay.

The hallways were a worse headache than having to clean up his brother and friends' messes.

Full of minute men who did not look where they were going and constantly stumble upon him on his path.

He cursed inside for not being able to use his magic inside that place and teleport where he needed to go.

He didn't know any of the people he ran into.

By the norns.

Where was Casey when he was needed?

He did not know the internal layout of the TVA. Every time he had sailed it, he had been accompanied by Mobius or had been dragged by B15, the judge and her men, or he had simply drifted, crashing on his head with each wrong turn.

He enter the central hall breathing heavily, then.

The long armchairs in the Midgard 1950s and 1960s living room, with their pastel colors and powerful fluorescent lighting, looked like something out of one of his worst nightmares.

_Copy! Reporting to the armory, sir!

He heard a group of minute men who passed by his side exclaim, while he stopped turning on himself in front of the clock that presided over the place and that, in his days as an advisor there, symbolized the total control that the TVA had over the actions of their agents.

He had never told Mobius, because, well, at the time they weren't exactly friends, only relatively consensual allies, and his opinions about the TVA weren't welcome. And then, in the heat of the battles that followed, the thing had lost importance, but he did not forget the posters that from the walls stated that "behave" or "get your clock cleaned", that you will not forget that "everything here is watched and recorded", that you only had a certain number of minutes to eat and that there would be "zero tolerance" for those who will dare to attack a "stable society".

Mobius.

His heart raced again as he reminded the analyst that had prevented on multiple occasions that he would be "pruned" and that had endured him constantly playing with his good intentions, to the point of forgiving him for running away when his own head was at stake.

"Wait!"

He had yelled at him that time on Roxxcart and he had left him behind.

"You were right, about TVA", “You were right from the beginning”, "You could be whoever, whatever you wanna be, even someone good. I mean, just in case anyone ever told you differently"

Mobius.

That had not been fazed when he leave him alone at the end of time with his respective versions.

Rather, the analyst had spent time chatting with them, while he wasted it discussing impossible scenarios with Sylvie, whose only goal was destruction.

How had he not seen that what happened to the female version of himself was what had happened to him when he had tried to destroy Jotunheim and almost Asgard along the way? How had he not considered that something was not right? How had he not valued the analyst's smile as more important when he found him talking with, nothing more, nothing less, than his alligator version, while his older version translated the answers of the scaly prince of the… reptiles?

Mobius.

He needed to get to Mobius.

Before the one who remained or, one of his variants, did.

A chill ran through his body as he ran again.

That guy... or his versions, they knew who Mobius was. His capacity. What he had done. What he could do.

And they weren't going to have any qualms about "pruning" him seriously this time.

"Finally!"

He said when saw the archive.

If there was one place where he could find the agent, that would be where he always looked for information to solve his problems. All he had to do was follow the archive lines to the center of the building, in front of the Time Keepers sculpture.

Why?

Why the hel were there so many of those archive lines?

Why?

He slowed his steps a little, turning his head from one side to the other, trying to visualize the presence of the analyst between the aisles, until, when he turned a corner, he found him.

Mobius was next to B15 visualizing a tempad.

He took a deep breath and breathed a long sigh of relief, almost followed by a sob.

He was not ashamed to admit it.

Having lost his mother, he couldn't lose another important person in his life. Seeing Mobius safe, fulfilling his duties, not only gave him hope, it also mend his soul a bit.

He swallowed hard and raised one leg to start walking towards him, opening his mouth to call out to him, when, from between the files, two arms came out seizing his waist and his lips, dragging him into the space that existed between one of them.