Our Stories, Our Souls
Loki remembered when he was naïve enough to feel what she felt.
Loss. Sadness.
Sentiment.
He remembered the moment he lost it, too. When it all made sense to him. When the realization hit that the life he’d found himself in was merely a web of lies strung together like puppet strings. It was the day he’d decided to never feel again, even though his heart seemed to miss that memo at first. It was strange, now, seeing the same realization strike her.
Loki saw it in the girl’s eyes, in the sag of her shoulders as he approached her side. With the portal gone, the girl stared into the empty distance, focusing intently on a scattered plane of hillsides and gravel roads. Searching.
Was he meant to comfort her? Loki squirmed, and he once again found himself faced with this strange feeling. This…sentiment. His hand flexed at his side, ready to…to what? To pat her on the head? To take her hand? If this girl was truly a variant of himself, then that was the last thing he’d want.
…Right?
“This is your fault.”
Her voice was so quiet, Loki almost mistook it for the whistling wind.
“I beg your pardon?”
She smacked his chest with the wooden dagger.
“You did this!” She punctuated each word with a blow to his gut. “You killed them!”
Loki swatted her hand away. “I did no such thing.”
“We were fine,” she bit out between gritted teeth. “Everything was okay before you showed up with that-that army .”
“ That army was prepared to slaughter you where you stood,” Loki snapped, satisfied when she winced. Good, be afraid . “I could’ve left you to die. But I saved you.”
Loki didn’t know what he expected her to do. Fall to her knees and kiss his feet and thank him for his kindness? Perhaps she would have, if she were anyone else but another version of him. So instead, she smacked him again with that blasted toy.
“I don’t want to be saved!” She yelled, so loudly it echoed throughout the wasteland. The sound of it was eerily familiar. “I don’t want to be here if they’re not. I just…I want my mother. I want Thor.”
God, he hated her. He hated the wanting in her eyes, the innocence in her desires. If she truly was him, why did she deserve to be spared from his suffering? Why was she allowed to yearn for her family and remember them as good, while he was left with the burden of their betrayal ?
Maybe because she wasn’t.
Loki’s lips twitched into a sneer. He leaned over, close enough to make her skin crawl.
“She was not really your mother,” he whispered.
The girl stopped breathing, and her brows curled down in confusion. Maybe a bit of anger, too.
“Why would you say that?” she asked, her voice small and weak.
Because I’m a monster, and you are too. You just don’t know it yet.
“Because it’s the truth,” he said instead. “And you’ve been lied to your whole life.” Her eyes flashed, and Loki’s heart began to race with excitement. “How does that make you feel?”
Rage. Loneliness. Fear. Any one of them would suffice. Truly, the only thing that wouldn’t suffice would be-
“I haven’t been lied to at all.” She blinked, and her expression settled. “I know Odin adopted me, and I know my family is not that of my blood.” She bared her teeth, inching closer to his face, until Loki was the one who finally backed down. “But it doesn’t make them any less mine.”
He straightened. Perplexed.
“Wait, you knew?” he asked. “You knew you were the child of Laufey?”
“Yes,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Then, something seemed to click in her mind. “Wait, how do you know that?” She took a few steps back, raising that blasted sword again. “Who are you?”
Loki wished there was some protocol for encountering another version of yourself in another reality. But alas, there was not. He contemplated lying, telling her he was just another man passing by, and that her family would surely be alive if she set out to find them.
But it wasn’t his duty to protect any semblance of this distorted timeline, nor this girls fleeting innocence. So he bent down, leveling his eyes with hers.
“How much are you willing to believe?”
She glared up at him. “Whatever I need to to get my family back.”
If he were a sentimental man, he’d probably feel pity.
“Your family is gone, Loki.” Saying her name, his name, left a rotten taste on his tongue. “That bomb killed them, and it erased your entire timeline. You are all that’s left.”
For a moment, all he could do was sit there and watch the fury flash in her eyes. She controlled it well, but Loki saw through the cracks.
“That’s not true,” she finally bit out.
“It is.”
“You’re lying.”
“You know I’m not.”
He felt the sting of her slap on his cheek before he even registered her hand barreling towards him. “Just answer my question!”
Who are you?
Loki straightened, tracing his fingers across the red mark she left on his face. “Fine,” he said after a moment. “I’m you.”
Loki didn’t know what he’d expected the girl to do, and he truly didn’t care. Whether she believed him or not meant nothing to him. So why did he wait anxiously in silence for her to respond?
“I told you to stop lying,” she growled with surprising ferocity.
“I’m not lying.”
“How are you me?”
“It’s complicated-”
She dug the point of the dagger into his stomach.
“Then explain it to me,” she demanded. “ Loki ,” she added in a mocking tone.
Loki grabbed the toy, spun it until the blade faced her, and placed it at her throat. “Only if you ask nicely.”
He was pleasantly surprised when the girl barely flinched. Had he been this fearless as a child?
When her eyes met his, the realization of just how ridiculous this all was slowly began to sink in. Granted, Loki was the farthest of what anyone could call ‘normal’, but holding a toy weapon to a little girl variant of himself was unexpected. Even for him.
The girl pushed the toy away, and Loki let her. She said nothing for a moment, so Loki said, “I’m you.”
She didn’t hesitate this time. “No, you’re not,” she spat before spinning on her heel and rushing further down the grassy hill.
“Your first memory,” he called after her. The girl froze midstep. “It isn’t of your mother or your father. It isn’t of Thor, either.”
Loki calmed the ache in his own chest to approach the girl. “It’s of a pain, sharp in your chest. Its murky blue, and there’s nothing to see. Just your little hands, reaching for something. Anything. But there’s nothing there.” He was behind her now. “There’s no one there.”
Loki cleared his throat. “It’s cold and dark and it’s not even the memory of it that you see, but the feel of it. The phantom pain.” Slowly, the girl began to turn around. “And it never goes away.”
Her eyes crawled up his body until they met his, her face a mixture of fear and fury. And something else.
The girl’s lips trembled.
“How?” she fought for the words to come out, like they were sealed behind her lips.
“I told you.” He took another step in her direction. “I’m you. Our stories, our souls,” he said, “they’re the same. We’re just a couple of poorly crafted copies scattered onto a timeline.”
She looked at him, making no indication whether or not she even understood the gravity of his words. Perhaps she didn’t.
“Copies?” she repeated. Her confusion was palpable, given the fact that she was most likely noting the sizeable laundry list of physical differences between the two. Loki had done the same, just much, much earlier.
“In a sense,” he settled on saying, because he, too, was still on the fence of understanding what that truly meant.
“And the army?” she asked. “The ones who destroyed my home?”
“They are the keepers of the timeline they hold sacred. And they’ll do anything to protect it, even if it means wiping out whole….” he hesitated, but realized that there should be nothing to hesitate for. Her feelings weren’t his problem, “civilizations. The TVA force the universe into order by killing the chaos.”
There it was again. Her lips were drawn into a line and her teeth worried at her lower lip just a bit. Then she huffed and said, “and what do they want with me? With us?”
“Don’t you see?” he scoffed humorlessly. “They’re the order,” he explained. “You and I, we’re the chaos.”
She set her jaw and nodded, and in her it looked foreign. Forced. Then her eyes fluttered, fighting back tears, Loki assumed, before she looked up at him.
“I never knew what it was,” she breathed, her voice shaking just a bit. “That feeling, that blue, murky hue. I see it whenever I close my eyes. And that ache...I never knew if it was a vision, or…or a dream.”
“It’s a memory,” Loki said in no uncertain terms. “You came into this life alone. And that feeling you have, that pain, is a constant reminder that we’re destined to stay that way.”
The word felt foreign on his tongue. We. He hadn’t meant to say it, but once he started he couldn’t stop.
Loki could see that she was fighting the way her lip trembled, but eventually, she surrendered to her sadness. What started as a single tear trailing down her dirt stained cheeks descended into a fit of sobs. She made one last effort to stay upright before collapsing into a heap of sagging limbs, clutching the grass in her white knuckled fists.
“I don’t want to be alone,” she heaved between sobs.
Loki supposed he’d done this to her, but he never liked blame. It was useless. He let his arms fall to his side but allowed nothing more.
Only his mind was allowed to wander, and he pressed his lips together so the thought that crept in couldn’t escape from his mind through his mouth.
No one does .
***
Natasha tugged at the collar around her neck.
“Enjoying your accommodations?” Mobius asked. He was sitting across from her in a flimsy plastic chair, silently skimming through a manila folder labeled in a language she didn’t understand.
Natasha glanced around the room before settling back on him. “Am I supposed to be?”
He looked up. Mobius sighed, shutting the folder and leaning forward across the table. “Listen, Natasha. As Variants go, I respect you. I do. The more…distasteful aspects of the TVA are reserved for the real nasty ones.”
“Like Loki?”
Mobius shrugged. “Most Loki’s, yes.”
“Most?” Natasha raised an eyebrow. She didn’t consider herself well-versed in the likes of Loki’s, but she wasn’t clueless. “Not all?”
Mobius blinked a few times before he cleared his throat, but Natasha caught the slightest flush spread from his neck to his cheeks. He was quiet for a moment before he crossed his arms, leaned back, and said, “Curiosity.”
Natasha’s hand fell from her collar. “Curiosity?”
Mobius nodded. “It’s the TVA’s weakness. Our Achilles Heel, if you will.” His crooked lips formed a smile. “And it’s yours, too.”
She scoffed, an unamused, forced sound. “How would you know my weakness?”
In his eyes was a look Natasha had seen so many times before, but seemed so misplaced on the man’s face.
Wisdom. The kind of wisdom that comes with age.
Agent Mobius, Natasha had learned was his name, had a strange tendency to look at a person as if he could see right through them. Even after a lifetime of closing herself off, building defenses that even the most experienced interrogators have failed to crumble, Natasha felt exposed as he set his eyes on her. “There’s no magic here,” Mobius began. “That was hard for Loki to accept, but not you. You’re logical. Practical. You value order.”
She'd sat through quite enough lectures for one lifetime. Given as this was, technically, another, Natasha reasoned that she didn't feel like sitting through another one. So she sighed. “Does this have a point?”
“Does anything?”
To that, Natasha didn’t reply.
“Whatever the TVA does, we do it to maintain that order. Logic. Control. Without it, the universe will crumble into disarray. Timelines would smash together, worlds would intertwine, and the order we all hold dear would disintegrate.” Mobius observed her intently, and Natasha assumed that he was looking for a crack. A tell. Two things Natasha knew she wouldn't show. “But curiosity resists order at every turn. The TVA does what it can to eliminate that curiosity, but as you’ve seen, it always finds a way.”
“If you have to fight so hard to control something, maybe it isn’t meant to be controlled,” Natasha said, and was rewarded with a wide grin.
“And that’s what makes you humans so intriguing,” he replied, “Chaos, curiosity, it all finds a way.”
Natasha enjoyed the sentiment, she did. But it was rather annoying and…pointless.
She raised a brow. “So is this the part where you explain what any of this has to do with me?”
Mobius’ smile dipped. It was odd, unexpected, and to Natasha, a relief. He quickly schooled his expression. “Humans express their curiosity in thousands of ways. In innovation, politics, exploration, faith, love, war.” He looked at her. “Hope.”
“What does any of this have to do with-“
“Your nexus event,” he finished.
Natasha froze with her lips parted. Her nexus event. The thing that turned her from a sacrifice to a stowaway.
“What was it?” Natasha breathed, and she couldn’t fathom how this passing curiosity suddenly turned into the thing she wondered most. What finally deemed her a renegade, a rogue, after all those years of pain and suffering and mistakes and failed redemptions?
“It’s not always what Variants think they’ll be. They expect a specific event, or a decisive choice they made, to send them spiraling from their timelines. But it’s not that simple,” Mobius explained.
“Don’t tell me what it isn’t, tell me what it is.”
Mobius laughed. “Man, you really are something.”
“I used to be more,” she said. Had he any idea what she’d been through? What she hoped to achieve? Only to be forced to cut it all short for the sake of a universe that didn’t need saving? “I just want to know what I was supposed to become,” she continued. “And if I did the right thing.”
Mobius folded his hands together on the table. Then he sighed, and looked up at her.
“Before Loki arrived, you were on Vormir. You were dead, yes, but you were brought back to life.”
“How.”
“The Infinity Stones. The Avengers reversed Thanos’ actions, including your death.”
Natasha exhaled a shaky breath. “So I wasn’t dead?”
Mobius winced. “You were somewhere in between. Vormir wouldn’t have let you leave. You may have been brought back, but you would always belong to the Soul Stone; to everything it possessed.”
Natasha could pretend to understand that. It was easier, now that she wasn’t there.
“But I was supposed to come back to life.” It wasn’t a question really, but she had to say it, just to ease her mind.
Mobius nodded. “And you were meant to stay alive. For years. Alone, waiting for rescue until you would decide to rescue yourself. Then you would spend the rest of your life trying to find a way back home. To your friends. To your family. Until one day, with the determination you still possessed, you would die in an attempt to return home.”
It all hurt so much, Natasha couldn’t tell which part of it hurt the most. Her friends, her family, or her fate.
But something about it wasn’t enough.
“But that’s what I planned to do,” Natasha said, her voice even and strong. “Before Loki came-“
“Is it?” Mobius asked. It wasn’t an accusation, but it stung Natasha like one.
So she said, with less certainty, “yes.”
Giving her a look full of sadness and pity, Mobius shook his head. “No, Natasha. It isn’t.”
He didn’t know. There was no way he could understand what she thought, what she felt as she sat there, staring at the eternal sunset. If there was anything Natasha knew how to do, it was go down swinging.
“You’re wrong. I was prepared to do all of that-“
“You were prepared to die,” Mobius said. The force of it made Natasha flinch, or maybe it was the reality, all sinking in at once. “You gave up, Natasha. Long before Loki showed up. You sat yourself on that boulder and told yourself it was the last sunset you’d ever see.”
A tightening sensation spread through her throat, and Natasha blinked back the moisture in her eyes.
“And then you gave up. You resigned yourself to your fate, and chose to stop hoping for anything.”
Natasha shuttered. “That hope would only prolong my suffering,” she spat. “You said it yourself.”
“The sacred timeline determines the people who are meant to suffer,” Mobius explained. “You, Natasha, are one of them.”