Loki sat up, rubbing his head. It hurt from... his fall? That must be it - how he ended up here. He coughed - his throat hurt, too. He couldn't quite remember how he had gotten... where was he? He looked around at the featureless white floor, white ceiling, white walls, and grizzled old man in a familiar horned helmet (a bit tarnished), wearing what appeared to be an entire dead animal on his shoulders, who was busily scrawling PRIZON on the wall in black marker. The old Loki looked at Loki and quickly scrawled GOOD BOY above it.
"Hey," Loki jumped to his feet. "What is this?" This must be a dimensional rift. It felt like one. "I'm clearly in the wrong universe! Put me back!"
"Nope!" The old Loki leered at him, capping the pen and tucking it in his sleeve. "I went to a lot of effort to get you here, and you're staying! It's the..." He pointed at the scrawls on the wall proudly.
"Yes, well..." Loki cast an illusion of a door on the wall under the scrawls, walking towards it purposefully.
"Don't you dare!" the old Loki screeched, throwing an illusion of iron bars in front of the door.
"Hey, wait, hang on," a woman's voice snapped behind them, and they both turned. She stood there with her own horned helmet over her black hair, waving a staff topped with a magpie's skull at them. “I’m responsible for the stories around here, and you're making a mess of things,” she noted. "Both of you!" She pulled a sheaf of paper from the space between air molecules, the standard storage place for Lokis. "You're not supposed to be in our universe!" she complained, pointing the staff at Loki. "What kind of fucked-up crossover is this?"
"That's what I was telling him!" Loki pointed at the old Loki. "I shouldn't be here. I need to get back."
"No way!" the old Loki yelped, jumping on to a chair that appeared from nowhere. "This one is messing everything up. You have the stories, Loki, you know it!" He pointed at Lady Loki.
"Stories." She shuffled through the papers. "You're... you're the one who fell into the void," she noted at Loki, grabbing a few pages and glancing over them.
“He's the most good Loki I’ve come across in a long while,” the old Loki noted, “and that’s bad. I mean, I suppose the kid was more good, but he didn’t last long. He's giving us a bad name! I mean, a good name!"
“I invaded New York and killed thousands of people!” Loki protested. How dare they call him good!
Lady Loki waved a page at him, pointing at some notes on it with her staff. “If Thanos hadn’t tortured you to make you do it, you wouldn’t have. Fail! The old twit has a point."
“I tried to kill my brother. Many times!” Loki noted.
“Oh, tried to kill my brother! Many times!” old Loki yipped in a falsetto. “Like you’re the only Loki who did that! And did you ever succeed? No? Well, shut up, then.” Old Loki shook his head. “You saved the life of his idiot girlfriend!"
“Well, that was a bit important. She’s going to take up Mjolnir and become the new Thor,” Lady Loki noted, leafing through some pages, “if you can believe that. And her bananas aren't bad.”
“Mjolnir is broken,” Loki interjected. "Hela smashed it. Nobody's going to be taking it up." Wait, was it even more of a waste of time than he had initially thought? Not only did she dump Thor, but now she wasn't even going to factor into the story moving forward?
“Ah.” Lady Loki scrawled some notes. “That’s going to take some work to sort out. But with a Feige-approved script, anything is possible. Still, that has interesting implications," she noted, thoughtfully. "Butterfly’s wings and all that. Could be fun!”
Fun? Well, maybe if you were spectating and not living it. “Look, I have to get back. Thanos…”
“Still trying to be a hero!” Old Loki shook his head, waving at Lady Loki. “We can’t let him back, he gives us a good name! I mean, a bad n… You know what I mean!!!”
“This one.” Lady Loki shook her head at Loki. “He thinks all Lokis have to end up as evil as him, or it invalidates who he is. Look, it’s in my character notes.”
“I had a bad time of it.” Old Loki drew his legs to his chest and sulked.
“Oh! And of course, you’re the only one who’s had a bad time of it! Dear me, were people mean to you?” she sniffed.
"I was rejected and thrown out of Asgard," he mumbled.
"I was thrown out of Asgard," Loki noted - just one lie to start, but he was on a roll from there, "bound, imprisoned, my mother murdered, was killed saving my brother and his worthless girlfriend, attacked by my sister, beaten to a pulp by a Hulk..."
"This isn't a contest!" Old Loki yelled at him. "At least, not as long as I'm not winning! And I'm the one who arranged for you to be killed!" He jumped to his feet and tipped the chair to the ground in an extravagant gesture, waving his arms. "Both times! I could see you were getting too good already, back on the Dark World, so I did something about it!"
“And you made a mess," Lady Loki noted, laconically. "You killed him when he was a hero! That couldn't stand, and you know it. Do you know what a mess it was sending him back after we SAW HIM DIE?” She shook her head, flipping through her pages. "We really had to wing it to get him back to try to get him to be bad again. And," she pointed her staff at old Loki, who cowered away from it slightly, "now you've done it again!"
And at that, Loki saw his angle. “I have a proposition.” He waved his hands for attention, and they both looked over at him. “Thanks to the old one, I died a hero – bad timing, yes? Send me back, and I still have the chance to cock it all up and go evil again.”
"Ah, yes," Lady Loki noted, "You're the one who bargains."
"I suppose," old Loki grumbled. "If you promise to cock it up and go bad! You did a shit job last time. Oh, look at me, I'm so naughty, I made a big statue of myself. While cleaning up Asgard and making the people happy! You give Loki a bad name. I mean, a good name. You know what I mean!!"
“This is going to be a bitch,” Lady Loki noted. “I mean, the story even said no resurrection. Still, if I throw the fanbase some red meat..." She tapped her lips thoughtfully with her index finger. "Can you kiss your brother? You know, naughty-like, on the lips?” She waved her hand and turned the piles of paper to a slim laptop, and tapped away busily.
"Why not?" Loki agreed. He hadn't had sex or even kissed anyone in his own story so far. He'd take what he could get. And it would disconcert Thor so deliciously.
"Good. I think I have something going." Lady Loki sighed. "It's convoluted as all fucking get-out, but they bought it last time when I was so sick - food poisoning - that I just couldn't even come up with an excuse."
Old Loki hunkered in the corner. If Loki looked closely, he could see another face underneath - younger, too young, barely pubescent, but haunted, sad. "You promise you'll be bad?"
"I'll do my best," Loki promised. The word of the God of Lies was worth exactly what Old Loki should expect.
"All right." Lady Loki waved her hand, and a door appeared in the wall. A shiny brass plaque was engraved with the words Narrative Convenience in beautiful script. "I've got something now."
“I’m here!” Another Loki burst through the PRIZON door, his green and black clothes in rags, coarse hair over his arms and legs, one horn of his helmet broken. “I will save the day!”
“We already did,” Lady Loki sighed.
"Oh." His face fell.