Chapter Text
“Does he want us to let them all branch?”
“At this point, how are we even gonna stop it?”
Mobius had a very soothing voice. It had been the first thing that Loki had noticed about him back then, after New York. The first thing he remembered absolutely hating, fired up and flying blind on a dizzy mixture of elation and terror as he had been. He had hated it even more than the collar, because the collar didn't speak down to him, didn't underline every inadequacy Loki had with a calm smile and twinkling eyes.
“We can't!”
“What. What did you say?”
Now, it made everything just a little easier to bear. Mobius had wanted to burn the TVA, he had implicitly approved of their plan to go beyond Alioth. He had understood things about Loki no one ever knew where there to be understood. He would understand this, too.
“We've made a terrible mistake. We've freed the timeline. We found him beyond the storm. A Citadel at the end of time. He's terrifying. He planned everything. He's seen everything, he knows everything. ” There was a quivering in Loki's voice that he was quite powerless to avoid. The memories of Sylvie's last shove were fresh on his mind, but looking beyond that moment, the most terrifying thing had been the person who had set the trap and had watched them tear themselves apart with a smile on his face. “And now someone is coming. Countless different versions of a very dangerous person. And they are all set on war.”
“Take it easy.”
The soothing voice was a welcome respite, but everything else was wrong. The alien wrongness crawled down Loki's spine, over his shoulders, down to his knees. His fault, his mistake, his stupidity. Destined to lose... He had needed just one thing to go right. Just the one. He had done everything right. There had been nothing selfish about it, nothing at all about Loki himself, he had not hurt anyone, he had not lied, he had not betrayed. The worthy Thor could not have done it better, the Avengers couldn't have.
Mobius had said that he could be whatever he wanted to be, even someone good, and Mobius had been wrong. Because Loki had done everything right, everything that depended on him, and he had still done wrong.
“You're an analyst, right? What division are you from?”
“What?”
He was so infinitely tired of the wrongness that his life was tumbling down to, and of not being able to make it stop.
“Who are you? What's your name?”
The wrongness became more, twisted around and became even wronger, breathing became painful, the dread thickened and crawled up Loki's spine. The statue in the middle of the TVA archives loomed. No lizards, not anymore. The incongruent, nightmarish clown at the end of time had made Loki's skin crawl, but this figure had a malignance to it that surpassed everything he's seen before. There would be no audience with this. No taking over. This was death, slow and painful, postponed for eternity because one had to lose everything first, and then lose the memory of it, and then beg for liberation before being granted the merciful reprieve.
“Boots on the ground, now. Archives.” B-15 was ever the aggressive one.
The balcony of the library overlooked the statue, its feet so far down that Loki could not see the ground. It would take them all of a minute to figure out that he wasn't an analyst. Less, even. With his tattered clothes and the way he had been ranting about freeing the timeline. The way he had talked about their new overlord.
Mobius gestured at someone Loki could not see; a wave of hand, the gesture for 'please hurry'. And then he stepped away, clearing the place around Loki, anticipating a fight. And Loki had already known, had already understood, but this small gesture gutted him as firmly as the stumble back through the time door had done. There was not enough air around him. TVA had no sky, where did their air come from? Loki took one deep breath. It had worked before, when he had shaken himself out of his stupor, had convinced himself to stand up and do something once more.
It didn't work this time. It didn't even reach Loki's lungs before becoming stuck and then stuttering out of him with a sob.
Alone. He was utterly alone. Again.
What made Loki a Loki was to always be alone, to always go through the same loop, to always take the wrong turn. They lost, and they survived, and they lost again, only to survive once more.
All air was gone from his lungs. He struggled, once and again, a wheezing sound coming through his lips.
It was a curse he was powerless to end. The fall from the balcony would not kill him when even the void under Asgard did not. Nothing would. He would be taken through this TVA's grinder, and because now he obviously knew things he should not, and because this TVA wasn't run by a clown at the end of time or by fake space lizards, he would end up stuck in his memory of Hulk, or Thanos, or anything similarly horrific for the rest of his life. Or maybe, if they were truly creative, he'd spend his days being betrayed by the first person he'd ever trusted in his adult life. Kiss, turn, shove, fall. Over and over and over.
The sound of half a dozen reinforced boots carried through the library. Loki suppressed the urge to shush at them. He felt like laughing, for a second. He remembered laughing at his death, at his glorious purpose. It had to have looked insane. He'd fought B-15 afterward. He'd won, too.
He could fight now.
Except he couldn't.
There was no collar this time, just cuffs on his wrists and his ankles and a temporal door opening in front of him and gleaming with a black hue.
We lose.
We survive.
The cuffs did not loop time, as Loki discovered as the minutemen followed their routine; they just positioned their victim and held it tightly in place. As soon as he had been shoved through the black door he had been frozen in the middle of the small cage that was inside, with his feet held wide and his arms stretched out even wider over his head.
We are alone.
But we survive.
“What are you doing? Look at him, he's not even all there. Just isolate him... Gently.”
This version of Mobius was similar enough to the one Loki had called his friend. He, too, had a soothing voice and an easy empathy for his prisoners. In a way, it made everything worse.
Once Mobius' rebuke was followed, Loki found himself falling to the floor of the cage. At the places where Loki's hand touched the lights on the floor, they deviated from their straight line and clung to him, first sizzling slightly and then starting to burn his skin.
The new TVA didn't go for creatively selected bad memories. They went for something far more quick and painful, it seemed.
A head full of white hair peered at him from outside the door, a benign smile of relaxed superiority firm on Mobius' face. He looked on as Loki struggled back to his feet, attempting to put the lights as far away as possible from his skin. No hand was offered. As Loki stumbled, touched the grid behind himself to regain equilibrium and winced, another entertained smile crossed the investigator's face.
Not all bad... But not all good either. Even the Mobius Loki knew had gone to some very unpleasant heights to get information out of him.
“Sorry about that. You will be out in no time once you've calmed down and explained what is going on. ”
There was no shadow of recognition anywhere, and Loki found that the empty politeness on a well-known face was far more terrifying than the invasive examination he had been subjected to on his first run-in with the man.
“I am...” He had to be doing something, saying something, planning something. The survival instinct had to kick in, it always did. Except that Loki found that he couldn't. Everything was too much, too quickly, too overwhelming, too painful. He had last eaten on Lamentis and had slept briefly in the Void, but otherwise, the time after landing in the TVA was a blur of one crisis after another.
“Not an analyst despite your clothes, to begin with. And saying some very worrying things about our leader, to boot. It will be a very enlightening conversation, I am sure.”
A threat from a stranger, he could handle. A threat from a friend... Except that this wasn't a friend. Just as back in the Citadel... An illusion. A trick. A lie.
The door of the temporal cage closed.
A Loki was a Loki because he'd always fail, and be alone, and survive to see the same thing play out over and over.
There was no air in the cage. Had there been, had Loki been able to form words beyond the lump in his throat, he would have begged Mobius to just let him explain. To listen to his story in the futile hope that this man would believe him. That words, if spoken truthfully, could set this right. But then, Loki had already tried begging Sylvie to stop, over and over, and she didn't, and it was probably his fault for not trying harder, for being a liar, for attempting to do things that were bigger than him. The turn of his road was always wrong.
His chest heaved again, and again. Something hurt inside so strongly, he could not prevent sobs from coming out between his clenched teeth at each failed intake of breath. Loki sank back down to the floor of the cage. The black lights hugged him, buzzing and burning, but the pain was not strong enough to make him move. There was a fantom pressure on his right shoulder, the place where a small hand had touched him during the kiss. He did not remember most of it, strangely enough. There was a hole where the feeling of lips should have been. Instead, there was a clear memory of Sylvie's hand pressing against his body, moving him around. Turning him away from the desk, from the tempad on it. Two steps and a half, he had done. The betrayal had assured that he would remember them perfectly.
Sylvie did manage to win a working tempad from him, after all.
He didn't know how long he had been left alone inside the cage. At some point, the black lights turned off briefly. He fell right onto the floor, got shoved through a gate, got blinded by the scanner lights and was instantly shoved back into the cage, all in one movement.
The violent sobs had eventually run their course and the air had returned to his lungs, but the deep pain in his chest remained. It felt like a wound that was bleeding out, in the sluggish way it slowed Loki down and made his thoughts run away from him and cruise around an abyss of his own creation.
At some other point, a small door opened and a familiar prisoner outfit was thrown at him. Loki had vaguely hoped that even knowing that he wasn't an analyst, Mobius would shield him from the faceless TVA machine, at least for a little while. Out of curiosity, or in face of his strange circumstances. Anything. For a while, he had even hoped that Mobius would remember him. Find his file, read his name. Maybe he had known another Loki with another face. Maybe here, most Lokis were young, or old, or alligators.
Failure to move quickly enough earned him the activation of the handcuffs. From one instant to the next, he found himself yanked up and violently brought to a spread-eagled position, as a minuteman with the sign T-12 on his helm advanced toward him. B-15, staying outside the cage, was asking someone for a pair of scissors.
“Let's just prune it off him and be done,” said the first minuteman.
“Investigation wants everything that belongs to him to be logged in; every piece that might have a residual aura.”
Loki would have preferred the pruning at this point. The cloth-pruning robot at the other TVA had been horrible enough, but being stripped down by another person while tied in place was on another level of personal horror.
“I'll do it. I'll do it, I'll be good. Please.”
He flashed back to Sif's incident briefly- the real one and not the memory of it. He had lied about never thinking about it again. He begged her forgiveness eventually - in the traditional Asgardian way, which incidentally did involve kneeling - and was officially forgiven. It never changed anything. Before and after the incident, Sif tolerated him only because she had to, in order to be close to Thor. Luckily, these people weren't Sif and were just doing their boring and unpleasant job, and they backed off once Loki begged convincingly enough. He spent the next several minutes thinking about Asgard and his rooms there, and his outfits, and the places they were stored, and what he'd have liked to wear right now, and by the time he was done he was clothed again and the door was closed once more.
The exhaustion had made him so lightheaded, he did not feel the burn of the black lights anymore. He wondered whether the grid had truly stopped hurting him and whether it had been Mobius who had made it stop. He thought about trust being a ruinous, dangerous thing. About love being a dagger. Tears run freely from his eyes once again, but he now dimly realized that his grief was not an infinite thing, and was indeed close to finally exhaust itself. And once that happened, he would be able to think.
We lose, but we survive.
Not we. I... I survive.
He was not 'a' Loki. He had seen many, and no two were identical. Sylvie was different from him, that was painfully clear at this point. And so, he was also his own. He would survive on his own. He always did.