Variants

“Please confirm to your knowledge that you are not a fully robotic being, were born an organic creature, and do in fact possess what many cultures would call a soul.”

Well. There it was. The existential question that had consumed Coulson since he’d woken up in this new body. Just laid out there by a bored bureaucrat. 

And to think, five minutes ago when he’d been stripped of all his clothes, he’d thought this place couldn’t get any more degrading. If this was some twisted simulation, whoever was running it had a sick sense of humor. 

“Sir, if you do not understand the question, it can be repeated, but we need to log a response before proceeding.”

Coulson glared. “I really don’t want to debate the state of my soul in a collar and a cheap prison jumpsuit. But I am a robotic being, if that’s important.”

The man looked up at him for the first time. “Could you repeat that for confirmation?”

“I’d really rather not say it again.”

“I need to confirm the response before proceeding.”

“And what would we be proceeding to, exactly?”

“Just repeat yourself, sir.”

“Fine. I’m a robotic being. Is that what you want to hear?”

Irritation laced through the bureaucrat's eyes. He dropped his clipboard, seemed to search for something in his pockets, began to grumble under his breath. “Just once they could catch this in early intake stages, just once. This is gonna be a whole separate set of forms. “

The bureaucrat produced a remote from his pocket. 

Coulson didn’t need years of intelligence training and practice to know he was in trouble. He lunged-

But it was too late. A button had been pressed, a current ran around his neck, and Coulson knew no more. 

He almost seemed to dream, sometimes. Never of pleasant things, not of Daisy or May or the family he’d built. 

No, Coulson only dreamed of the days approaching his first death. Of being scared, of being tricked, of being stabbed in the back. 

It wasn’t peaceful. 

Couslon didn’t know how long he drifted in those dreams, didn’t know how long total darkness claimed him. 

But then, suddenly, it was gone. 

Coulson’s eyes snapped open. 

The room he was trapped in was tiny, grey, metal. There were no decorations of any kind, no color. Only the light of charging posts at each side broke the monotony. More a coffin than a room.

He was naked. Coulson grabbed for his neck, ensuring the collar wasn’t still there. And he confirmed it was gone but...there was a strange seam around his neck. Almost as if his throat had been split.

Coulson felt grimy, like he was badly in need of a shower. Something was irritating his skin, tickling at it, making him feel as if the tiniest of gnats were crawling all over his body. 

He lifted an arm experimentally. Blew on it. Dust filled the air, spiralling in the low light of the charging ports. 

Good God, how long had he been here? Had the others tried to find him?

As much as he hated to do so, Coulson reached for the more robotic part of himself, tried to make the calculations. But there was an error in the dataset, information catching around in a loop, just out of his reach. 

The door opened. Coulson tried not to flinch. 

A moustached greying man stood beyond the threshold. He at least had the decency to avert his eyes. 

He threw a pair of sweats at Coulson, which he caught one-handed. “Glad to see you up,” the mystery man said. “Put those on, follow me, and we’ll talk.”

“So...you expect me to believe this agency controls time?”

The man, Mobius apparently, nodded. “That we do.”

He’d been brought to a room straight from the 70’s and was seated across from Mobius in an uncomfortable plastic chair. He wasn’t going to listen to this evasive crap for long.

“Are you working on behalf of a particular planet, or an order of planets? Whose authority are you acting under exactly?”

“Just the TimeKeepers.”

“The...I’m sorry the what?”

Mobius leaned forward, “Listen, I would love to discuss the innerworkings of the TVA with you all day, I really would. But unfortunately, taking you out of the evidence locker bends protocol a bit, so I’d rather not get too sidetracked.”

“The evidence locker?” Coulson repeated incredulously. 

Mobius grimaced a bit. “Yeah, afraid so. Sorry about that, not my call.”

“You just put people, your ’variants’ or whatever, in cells to rot?”

The man was rubbing at the back of his neck. He almost looked embarrassed. “Well, no, variants actually stand trial and get processed. But since you’re a robotic being, it means you’re officially classed as-”

“Evidence,” Coulson finished, something cold settling into his gut.

Mobius nodded. 

Jesus Christ. “How long have I been under?”

The man shifted in his seat a bit. “Well, it’s a bit hard to say, time here doesn’t move quite the same-”

“Where are the others? My team? Daisy and Mack and everyone. If I’m some sort of time criminal, they must be here too.”

“Believe me, they’re all alive and well on the Sacred Timeline.”

“Show me. Bring me to them.”

“Can’t exactly do that. Or I could, but I’m not sure what you’d get out of it.”

Coulson glared. “I’d get the knowledge of knowing that you’re not lying to me.”

“I’m not-”

“Your heart rate is elevated. You’re sweating more than you were 30 seconds ago when I made this request. You’re certainly hiding something.”

Mobius grinned a bit, pointed at Coulson with an almost sheepish smile on his face. “See, this is why the TVA generally doesn’t tangle with robots. Especially robots that were super-secret agents. You’re very good-”

“Stop trying to distract me. Tell me what you aren’t saying.”

The man sighed, pressed his palms on the table. “Okay, I’ll lay it out for you. I could show you their lives on that screen up there, I could get a TempPad and bring you to see them. But it wouldn’t do any good. Because they wouldn’t know you.”

Mobius ran a hand through his hair, leaned forward, and continued, hands moving nervously with his body.

“Listen, Agent Coulson. The nexus event that split your timeline happened before you got to know your team. They’ve been completely reset, and all the experiences you had essentially never happened for them. They aren’t the people you know.”

Coulson stared silently, mind refusing to process this. “But...it was years. I’ve known them for years of my life, we traveled across the universe, went through time together. Hell, we went to the 1940’s together, did you just erase 80 years of human history?”

“Yeah your timeline was a bit hard to untangle. You really got around, created a whole bunch of sub-branches. You should see how thick your file is. A real bear of a case. I wasn’t on it, but it was back in the early days when we were initially pruning out major branches, way before we set redline protocol. But that’s a bit off topic, I was trying to avoid tangents.”

He felt frozen. All the people he loved, gone. All those things they’d done to help people, save people, erased. 

Like none of it ever mattered. 

Coulson’s voice was thick when he spoke again. “What was the event that split the timeline? Where did it diverge?”

Mobius flipped open a manilla folder. “That’s actually what I want to talk to you about. Your divergence point is actually related to another case I’m working on right now, and I could use your perspective.”

“Where!” Coulson repeated, voice bordering on a yell. 

The man sitting across from him swallowed. He looked guilty as he spoke. “Your first death, when Loki stabbed you with his scepter. You weren’t supposed to survive.”

Jesus.

All that time. All those years. Just...gone. 

Mobius was still talking, words rushing through Coulson’s ears. Saying something about how they’d picked up the wrong variant, how they’d actually been looking for Nick Fury, how he’d been processed, how it was “a real stroke of luck when I found out we still had you in storage.”

Yeah. Luck.

Coulson stared at the man across from him. “What is it you want from me?” he asked, voice haggard.

The man paused, looked at Coulson's face. “I’m sorry, I know this must be a horrible shock. I didn’t want to make you feel-”

“Just tell me.”

After a long silence, Mobius continued. “I’m working on a case about a Loki variant. I was hoping, as someone who has hands-on experience with Lokis, that I could pick your brain a bit.”

Coulson snorted. “You think I’d help you with a case?”

“Well, you’ve seen how dangerous Lokis can be. I was hoping, since you’re someone in the business of world saving, that you’d recognize a great threat and help us neutralize it.”

“And if I do,” Coulson brought his head up, met Mobius’s eyes. “If I do, will someone else’s timeline get erased?”

Mobius at least had the grace to look guilty. 

Coulson rubbed the palms of his hands, staring at the lines there. “How do you know I won’t run? You didn’t put a collar on me.”

The man cleared his throat awkwardly. “It’s uh, it’s protocol to insert TimeTwister controls into any device we enter into evidence.”

Coulson’s hand drifted to that thin seam in his neck. He was collared. Permanently.

He laughed, a little madly. “And what happens to me? What happens to me if I say no? What happens to me if I say yes?”

“Well, unfortunately either way you’ll have to go back to the evidence locker. We aren’t supposed to keep robots powered up for too long.”

Placed on a shelf until the end of eternity, able to be brought back into this Hell at any moment. 

Mobius seemed to sense his mood. The man dropped his voice. “If you help me with this case, I could make a case to have your memory wiped. That way you wouldn’t have to be...stuck.”

But it would be like killing him. 

What world was he in, where suicide was the preferable option? 

Coulson opened his mouth, unsure of what he’d say. 

But the words were stolen from his mouth when another agent entered, chided Mobius for ‘bringing an LMD to the main floor,’ and reached for the dreaded remote. 

I should have asked if they were happy, Couslon thought as the darkness took him.