AOTree

“Give me a good, buttery graham cracker crust that has just the right amount of crumble yet also the right amount of structure, a creamy and cool filling that sings of the fruit itself - even if the color’s a bit exaggerated to say ‘hey, look at me, you know what I am’ - and a beautiful cloud-like topping that elevates every mouthful? I’m pretty happy with that. I’m looking forward to that. There’s a bit of balance to it. Understandably it’s not something everyone enjoys, heck, some people find it bitter. Sour. Some find it bland. Some find it too sweet. A lot of people just don’t like custard-based pies at all. Or pie. Some people would rather have cake or some other baked good. Croissants. Though the croissants with chocolate in them are pretty tasty.”

Loki listened quietly, a very pleased smile on his face at having successfully pulled this soliloquy out of Mobius.

“And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good pie to be had. Lots of pie recipes lost to time and lots of pies I’d still like to find and try. But even here,” he said, gesturing at the wall of little glass doors, gesturing around the automat itself, gesturing about the TVA in general, “not a single slice has been exactly the same.”

He could see Loki struggling not to laugh.

“It’s true. It’s true! I know you’re on what. Slice three? Four? Since you’ve been here? And I know you’re looking over at all those pretty little identical pieces of pie in each of these tiny identical window boxes and thinking to yourself ‘he’s mad, he’s insane. He’s had too much pie, this guy.’ Am I right?”

There was a chuckle. “You’ve had a lot of pie here.”

“I have.”

“This isn’t graham cracker though. I’ve had graham crackers.”

“Correct.”

“The filling is also a little weird.”

He leaned in and said conspiratorially, “I think they use prepared pudding, honestly. Maybe with extra gelatin.”

“The whipped cream tastes like chemicals as well.”

“There’s this, uh. It’s canned - it sprays?” He made a motion with his hand that mimicked using an aerosol whipped cream can, and then made a “skkhhhhhooo” sound as well. Loki’s grin widened as he watched this display. He shook his head a little bit to signify that no, he didn’t know what this was. Mobius sat back in his chair with a laugh. “Ahh, don’t worry about it, it’s a dispenser… But even still. My point. Could be slices from the same pie and it still wouldn’t taste the same. Perhaps there’s just a smidge too much cream. Crust was slightly thicker in that spot. The slice of candied lime on the top here came from a different fruit that had more pith than the one yours came from. Variants. But every one of them is identifiably green. Golden. A little sweet, a little bitter.”

“What’s the whipped cream?” Loki asked him, and Mobius quickly put a bite of pie into his mouth, biting the fork in his haste. “What’s the cream, Mobius?” he asked again with a laugh. Mobius gestured with the fork while he chewed slowly, deliberately. The god waited patiently for his answer and he could feel those sharp and unwavering green eyes boring a hole into him the whole time.

“...Your ego,” he finally said after a sip of coffee.

“Ah, thank you.”

He felt Loki kick his leg lightly and they both laughed into their mugs.

After a little silence Loki then asked, “How do you propose we fix this?”

Mobius gave a shrug. He cleared the last of the larger crumbs of pie crust off of his plate with the tines of his fork and checked one more cup of coffee against his watch timer. They could walk it back to his desk, he supposed. That’s what he deserved for waxing poetic about pastry for most of their working “break”, he figured.

“I could ask the Council about it; well. Gamble. There’s probably going to be a mountain of paperwork that I’ll have to sign and file in triplicate just to make the request but I’m almost certain we could ask them to source out real Key Limes. It would just be a matter of – oh.”

He noticed that Loki was staring at him intently again, though this time there was a palpable urgency to it.

“Oh, you mean Dox. I’m sorry. I’ve just had a lot on my mind recently, it felt nice to step away from that for a moment. To stop thinking about getting all of my skin potentially peeled off or to fly off into time-not-space or whatever it was that O.B. called it.”

There were multiple concerns to address. The fact that General Dox wasn’t answering any longer. Nor was Hunter X-5. Nothing had surfaced showing that Sylvie was causing any issues, either, though that almost certainly would have been a given considering her hiding habits anyways, but there almost would have been some sort of report back from the field if an entire battalion of Hunters had encountered a rogue variant. Not to mention the fact that a member of the Judge’s Council was directly involved and on the ground. Mobius at first had wanted to sit down with Judge Gamble for more information on her cohort but that was quickly denied, simply due to her lack of time. At this point she was the only one in charge and thanks to B-15 and D-90’s testimonies the sudden yet deliberate changes being made to the agency’s standard operations meant that many things were moving dangerously fast and required her immediate oversight.

Loki stood up to clear their plates and offered to refill their coffee, and Mobius watched him silently for a little bit as he moved about the automat. “That stack of files you’ve pulled there, what’s that about?”

A few of them were some of Dox’s related cases from her stint with the Minutemen, at least the ones that he’d thought would create a nice cross-reference for anything in the personnel files of Hunter X-5 and a good number of others that they were able to confirm and identify as having left with her or with her direct orders. Since X-5 was the one that had received that direct order to find Sylvie, Mobius decided it would be easiest to pick him up off the pile first.

And he was glad he had. It made it all almost too easy to guess what had happened. “Kachow,” he muttered quietly, snapping his fingers and tapping the photo he was staring at.

“Hmm?”

Mobius looked up to see Loki looking over his shoulder at him from the coffee cisterns. “Huh?”

“Did you find something?”

“I did, actually. You like plays. Productions. You’ll love this. Break’s over! We need to find B-15 and get a move on.”

In short order the three of them descended upon O.B.’s office in order for her to ask some questions about the list of equipment Dox and her crew had taken with them from the armory. In her mind it still seemed like too much, and Mobius agreed after she handed him a thick sheaf of papers to peruse on their walk down. Loki took up his perch over Mobius’ shoulder to take a look as well, and he could feel the haughty “That actually might not be enough,” before it was even murmured into his ear. “Although after everything to this point I do respect the attempt. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with it, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s still not throwing everything you’ve got at the problem. It feels like a contingency plan.”

“Something more to consider, thank you,” said B-15. It didn’t carry any venom, Mobius noticed. Just simple gratuity. It was possible that he was wrong, also, Loki wasn’t familiar with Dox from an operational standpoint and he seemed willing to accept that he could only speculate. She held the door to the technician workspace open for the both of them and he felt Loki press a gentle hand to his back to guide him in first.

Their entrance didn’t seem to affect O.B., who at that moment was bent over a magnifying stand, peering at a small device with a look of consternation on his face and a watchmaker’s screwdriver twisting away delicately in his hand. Well. At first it hadn’t seemed to affect him. They watched him for a moment or two, quietly, and just as he had freed the screw he was working at, Loki gave him a loud and friendly “Hello, O.B., how goes the endless toil?” that made B-15 and Mobius jump slightly too.

They watched the engineer drop the screwdriver and the screw, and bump the stand that held the device and the magnifying glass hard enough to knock a circuit board loose. It hung there from a couple of wires for just a moment before another tiny metal piece fell from the device and clattered onto the desk.

Mobius gave him a soft elbow, and if his jump at the disruption hadn’t spilled any of his coffee, this movement did. It spilled a little bit of Loki’s as well. He motioned for the god to grab a nearby oilcloth to clean up.

“Hello,” responded O.B., looking around the desk distractedly for the screw and realizing it might have fallen on the ground. He set his tool aside for the moment, turning his attention to the group before him. B-15 presented her list and query with an apology, saying she knew the Loom took precedence but if he could take a few moments to look it over and help her gain some insight, it would be beyond helpful.

“We’re just tagging along,” Mobius assured him when he asked if he and Loki would need some assistance as well. As O.B. went through the list, B-15 asked what they had found in the personnel files that had him so excited to chat.

“We’d like to borrow you and your unit for a retrieval.”

B-15 regarded Mobius’ thoughts for some time, and he could see her already formulating the retrieval operation they would need to conduct. She was incredibly efficient and he had always valued the way she would thoroughly regard multiple avenues of a given situation, even when her responses weren’t quite what he would anticipate or hope for. Her propensity for that had seemed to only expand even further outward recently. He wondered for just a moment if it was related to the revelations they had been presented with; something he was still rolling about in the back of his own mind, surely, but as it was in the forefront of hers he thought it could serve to their advantage here where they were now dealing with two rogue actors determined to insert themselves along timelines where they shouldn’t be. One in the most literal sense.

At the mention of their target location and a baseline assessment of the mission Loki said, “A film premiere. Sounds fancy. Something to dress up for. Do you even own anything that isn’t a plain brown business suit, Mobius?”

“Actually I do, thank you. And I’ll want you with me, of course, rather than with the Minutemen directly. Be my plus-one inside.”

“Still don’t quite trust me? I suppose we are leaving the realm of the TVA, not much in place to keep me from utilizing any magic and leaving to find Sylvie on my own.”

“You won’t do that. X-5’s got to know where she is. That’d be much easier for you than jumping willy-nilly across ends of times, playing leap-frog with each other.”

“I don’t know what to be more hurt by, that I’m still on a leash with you or that I’m still on a leash with you.” The way he said this sounded comical enough that it pulled a laugh out of Mobius, though immediately he discovered that this was the wrong reaction. It got him an expression that he could really only read as stoic resignation to the task at hand.

“Loki, this is what I do, I have to work hard to be half a step in front of you as it is.”

“At least cut me a little slack, please,” said the god. “If you know I won’t.”

Mobius regarded him quietly.

“Alright, how do you think of me, then? What am I to you? A tool to what, advance your career? To make up for some grievous offense you’ve done? Something I could never guess coming from you. I’ve not sat at a desk for centuries studying you. Sampling every version of me you could find until you’ve gotten the right one? The one that’s malleable enough for the excuses, for the work? For how long? How many Lokis have you… auditioned for this role?”

“No, no, it’s just you, Loki, please. I had no idea that you were going to fall into my lap the way you did. We really, truly lucked out with this. And I’m behind you on it. I don’t even know why, fully, I don’t understand, but I know we have to find Sylvie,” he answered, looking to B-15 for backup on the claim.

“I want you to be honest about why you’re doing what you’re doing,” Loki said, and it created such a silent void between the two of them in that instant.

Mobius didn’t dare round it back on him with the heavy cudgel of the “Now who’s lying” that he was poised to quip back with. This moment didn’t deserve that. Loki didn’t deserve that. He could tell by the look on his face that the god had truly even surprised himself with the outburst. But he was right to make the demand. Mobius hadn’t been honest. And if he were to be honest this was all just a bid to buy time. More time. All the time he could with Loki. This Loki.

How to admit it with the least amount of collateral damage, yet also, how to do so before the amount of collateral damage from not saying anything ruined everything?

With his hands still on his hips and his stomach in knots over the frustration that was spilling over and everywhere, he watched Loki leave the room. “I feel like maybe he’s confused,” he said as he turned to meet the stares of the other two, for a lack of anything better to say.

“I feel like you’re the one confusing him,” said B-15. He gave her a small frown.

O.B. looked at her and gave a small shrug of a shoulder towards Mobius. “Well. I feel like he’s confused too.”

“True, I suppose that wouldn’t help either of them much, would it? It’s certainly not helping us.” B-15 lamented. They both looked at him, annoyed and definitely not hiding it.

He opened his mouth, and then closed it.

“This is going to sound incredibly mean but I’m going to say it from a place of care. You’ve always been so perceptive about everyone but yourself, Mobius.”

He gave a sigh and nodded, letting her know that he’d conceded her point.

“It’s a classic source of interpersonal conflict; a great problem in most fiction. It serves well when we already know there’s a lack of or a lapse in the communication skills of the characters but when both parties are fairly well-communicable it seems clunky and out of place–”

“Thanks, O.B.,” both B-15 and Mobius said, gently interrupting him.

O.B. gave them a genuine and apologetic smile, and went back to hunting down the screw that he had dropped on the floor when they had first arrived in his office. B-15 excused herself, noting that she had to figure out what to wear for this mission and put a briefing together for the hunters they planned to take with them. Mobius leaned forward over the desk and everything on it and asked in a low voice despite the fact that it was just the two of them now, “O.B., we’ve known each other for what. What was it? 400 years? At least? Would you say I communicate well enough? Given the situation? I mean. It feels impossible that I wouldn’t be. I’m just operating under a specific set of circumstances here.”

The engineer held up a hand to signal that he needed a moment more before he could answer, and then suddenly reappeared with the screw pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He adjusted his thick glasses frames and gave Mobius a very earnest look. “Lapses can happen with a disruptive enough ‘why’, it doesn’t always have to be some grand moral failing.”

“Circumstances.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. I appreciate you.” He pushed away from the desk, taking as much care as he could tol not to knock down any of the stacks of files, books, or precariously placed tools as he did.

“You’re welcome! But, ah, Mobius?” O.B. beckoned him in close. “I just saw the impossible happen recently, with the time-slipping, so. Uh. Maybe keep that in mind.”

Another point conceded. He gestured towards O.B. with his coffee mug and took his leave.

It didn’t take too long for B-15 to be ready, surprisingly. She looked absolutely resplendent in yellow and gold, and Mobius did not hesitate to compliment her. Loki did as well, and she beamed at this but still blatantly asked him if he was seeking her favor – to Mobius’ surprise the smile he gave her seemed bashful and genuine enough, as was his response that he wasn’t. Loki’s eyes did meet his for just a moment.

The briefing also didn’t take much time. In the final adjustments before their jump, Mobius approached Loki, placed his hand at the small of his back and made a small face at him in the mirror he was preening in, a very exaggerated squint as if he were examining his appearance. In actuality he looked very good; his hair curled just so, the cut of his suit served him very well, and his little snake-shaped cufflinks were a very nice touch. He looked every little bit the part for their target time frame, but he lacked the usual relaxed posture he’d held since being released into Mobius’ charge. The analyst said, hoping to break the awkwardness jokingly, “Ruffles.”

“They’re in style and they break up the silhouette a bit. Some flourish, a little bravado,” Loki said curtly, adjusting his bow-tie. Mobius was about to remove his hand so as to keep the static levels between them manageable when the god added quietly, “You look really nice in velvet.”

“...Eh, well. It was a little deep in the closet, but it was there. C'mon, it's showtime.”

Loki was annoyed. Anxious. This was already feeling like a bad idea but they had to be sure. Mobius sighed, also anxious over their tasks at hand and the risks involved, but also worried about Loki. The best he could do at the moment was to get him on site and get him moving, walk him through the thought process again. Because he already knew they weren’t going to find Sylvie here, and Loki was still of the hope that they would despite knowing that she’d had a wide head start on either party looking for her. Loki, like Mobius, didn’t like being so far behind.

And they were already so very far behind. “It’s our only lead,” he said as they dove into the crowd outside the theater.

Inside, Loki did what he did best, and that was running interference while they scouted the room, waiting for the arrival of that night’s main star. He had half expected that everyone that talked to him would have walked away with a different story but no, he had a very simple cover that didn’t pull too much attraction and he played it so straightly that even Mobius would have been inclined to believe him. He watched the god work the room candidly and calmly, complimenting the ladies and keeping an open line of sight on the door. It was entertaining to watch, and Mobius wished that they had more time and less at stake so that they might actually enjoy themselves here, or even if a visit to another like event could be arranged when this was all over. Loki was in his element. It was a delight.

The crowd swelled in volume almost suddenly and Loki looked at him instantly, mid-conversation, gauging where Mobius was so they could be ready. Mobius’ view allowed him to see their idiot pausing to sign an item at the door and pose for some photos.

“Kachow,” he mumbled to himself. He nodded to give the visual confirmation, and Loki gracefully excused himself from the company he was in. The god’s posture changed. It seemed contemptuous now.

But here he was at his side, and here they were, just as planned, and here was X-5, greeting him suddenly at the end of the press pool, a little shaken but willing to play the game with an easy “I used to work with this guy!” spilling from his too-wide smile.

He instinctively brought his hand up and away from X-5’s – no, Brad’s – arm as the man reached up to give him a gentle and overly-familiar tap on the chest with a snide compliment, realizing that it was still very aggressive for the environment they were in at that moment. Over Brad’s shoulder he glanced up at Loki, who looked more annoyed than he already had been and ready to strangle their mark the second they could snare him out and away from the public. With the offer of drinks, though, Mobius saw an opportunity to defuse.

It didn’t work, and suddenly things started moving a lot quicker than anticipated. Considering they weren’t going to reset the timeline after nicking Brad, this was very, very bad.

While he was well prepared for a physical fight he was still set off-guard by Brad’s comment as he was shoved into the wall moments later. So much so that he didn’t even hear Loki approaching down the alleyway until Brad was already flying through the air from a pulse of the god’s power – but in turning to look at him he saw instantaneously that there was a completely different demeanor at play on his face; there was a danger in the way he stalked towards them, a confident glint in his eye that said he was stepping in fully now. No weapons, no TemPad, no door, nowhere to run to but out into the dark streets of London. No one but Mobius to call off the hunt.

And yet Brad still decided that he’d take his chances on foot.

Mobius followed them both, praying that he wouldn’t catch up only to find the whole mission thrown away over a rough jostling. “Don’t do it, don’t do it,” he muttered to himself under his breath as he ran after them.

What he did find, thankfully, was Loki toying with Brad. Terrorizing him a bit with the moving shadows on the wall as they held him tight and secure. Despite Brad’s cries at him to call off his guard dog Loki seemed very much like the pussycat Mobius had teased him earlier for being. Playing with his catch. There was some struggle in both trying to catch his breath and control his excitement at the spectacle, then the added tease of addressing the wrong projection; a reminder that Loki really was a clever, frightening powerhouse with the right audience. Even if it was just Mobius.

But Mobius chose to see this as another display of trust - that Loki hadn’t obliterated Brad immediately signaled to him that he knew he was right, he knew that this would be their best bet to find Sylvie and find out what she might know about what was due to happen.

He told him as much later, once they were back at the TVA and after their debriefing. It was just the two of them in the elevator, headed down to O.B.’s office again with the rigged TemPad they’d taken off of Brad. The ties and the (fancy) suits were gone but that incredibly pleased smile was still there on Loki’s face, like a cat that had gotten the cream, and the earnest gratitude. “You’re integral. And I mean that. What you did when you found us in the alley, major control. I’m very proud of you. Have I told you that? Who’s told you that lately?”

“I didn’t like how he touched you,” was all Loki said, and coldly, despite the smile on his face.

And sure, he was blathering now, but he was also running that moment over and over in his mind. No doubt Loki was, too. He felt incandescent at the remark.

There was certainly some camaraderie to be had here. He couldn’t doubt that, didn’t want to doubt it. He wanted nothing more than to be doing the work with a competent partner and he knew he had found that in Loki. There was excitement, and there was fun, and there was friendly competition and genuine discussions! There was trust, as tenuous as it was for either of them. There was mutual respect, as tenuous as that was, too. These could be made better. Lots of things could be, actually, including the TVA itself. But without the agency in their future and without Sylvie in that future, whatever role she would play in fixing it, and however Loki knew there would even be a future, they wouldn’t get that chance. He wanted that chance.

He wanted that future with Loki.

Hell, he wanted it so badly he was willing to beat the daylights out of Brad, which, admittedly, was exactly what he had asked Loki not to do, and what he found himself doing some time later.

“Tactical,” he said, again, half to himself while sitting down with a plate of pie and taking a proffered fork before the adrenaline had even left his system. After a few bites though he was able to focus again.

This was his second helping of pie in a week, surely someone somewhere was writing up an incidental about it, and he couldn’t help but feel like this conversation he was having with Loki about rage and Tony Stark and where he came from was the wrong one they should have been having. So when Loki turned it back to the information they were actually after, he was very, very relieved, and also very well-armed to present the next connection they needed to prove that his initial assumption was right: that Brad wanted nothing more than a life for himself now that every possibility he could ever think to ask for and more was laid before him. Who was to say that Sylvie didn’t want the same thing for herself, and who was to say that she wasn’t the one that walked him into that revelation upon being found?

A life for a life, essentially. What an exchange. It was indeed tempting. To pick up a new little slice of life like that. Reinvent oneself.

Loki settling aloud on the fact that Brad was indeed the only one who would know where Sylvie was hiding was something they both needed to hear. Getting it out of Brad would be another story.

“Well come on, you’re the God of Mischief, right?” He liked the way Loki regarded him most times, he couldn’t lie about that.

“Even I need a cohort sometimes. Short of killing him, what could I potentially get away with?”

He watched Loki stand up and pace about some, and he resisted the urge to check his watch. Let there be another incidental for an extended break. Hell, this wasn’t even much of a break anymore, they were working. “Are you done with your pie?” Mobius asked him, getting up to bus his plate. “Without your magic here it's gonna be difficult. I have an idea, but even that might be too hard to justify.”

“That's just it, Mobius, I'm still painted as a feral animal by some here. You know it, I know it, Brad knows it. Why would they expect me to act in any other manner without you behind me to tighten the lead?”

That metaphor just would not leave or be left and he would be remiss to ignore what Loki had told him not so long ago, that trust was for dogs.

But Loki was right! Brad was no stranger to the by-the-book-tactics, but he was already wary of Loki as well, so whatever they threw at him next had to be something that stuck, had to be something that shook him. He didn’t seem attached to anything but the lifestyle in the timeline they had plucked him from, just that he looked to be playing fast and loose with it and keeping one foot in an open time door. But why? Infinite do-overs? A quick escape? How did this play into what Dox had planned?

Loki presented thought after thought, looking for some sort of foothold, looking for a vulnerability. Looking for a way to do this without having to lean on everyone’s worst assumptions of him. Looking for something that Mobius would approve of. This was painful to realize. This was about to be a serious hands-off moment with the suggestion he had in mind.

He watched the god wander in front of all the little window-boxes of pie, stopping in front of the two empty ones they had created with their visit, side-by-side.

“What would you ask of me here? More restraint? More integrity?” Loki asked, though his back was turned to Mobius still. “What would you have me do?”

He approached him with a gentle hand at his arm, which he slid to his back, ready to be the reassurance, but also maybe to reassure himself.

“Indulge, I think.”

Loki looked at him ardently. It made those knots in his stomach loosen completely. “Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

There was the touch that lingered just a bit too long, a glance to match, and the undeniable feeling that if there were any better moment than this one, that either would have been long past or yet to happen and there would be no better way to find out than to make that move. Now.

Mobius closed the gap between them and for just a moment he could have sworn he felt time shift sideways. Loki met him eagerly, his lips soft and pliant and his hands sure and ready to pull him closer. Everything about this man, this being, this god, had ensnared him completely, grown on and in and around him so intensely that he found he wasn’t entirely sure if any of this was truly meant to be. But this kiss, the soft moan that just came from Loki and shook him to his very core, his hand in his hair, so silky and so full of the earthy scents of pepper and wine and warmth. Warmth! Settling into and against him Mobius wondered, had he been thinking the same thought? How long had he been thinking that same thought? Which, inevitably, snowballed into concern, and he must have been telegraphing that because Loki put a hand to his face as if to reassure him that it was fine, they were here now, this was happening and it was good. Very, very good.

Slowly they parted from one another with shy, gentle smiles, and looking into Loki’s shimmering, mischievous eyes, Mobius knew then that he wasn’t late to it at all, nor too early. He just had to get there in his own time. “Kachow,” he said, under his breath.

Loki laughed. “What? What was that?”

“I don’t know, it seemed right. You seemed into it. I don’t know if I read the moment wrong or–”

“No, no, it’s fine. Maybe not uh – maybe not what I had expected, I was expecting some sort of numbered tactic out of the training material, frankly. But I did ask you to be honest, didn’t I? …What was it you just said, though, is this another ‘Kablooey’ thing?”

He shrugged and shook his head a bit. “S’like. I don’t know, it’s an exclamation I guess. I picked it up somewhere on a case I think. Local dialect.”

“You think? What else have you picked up on cases, hmm? Trinkets, souvenirs…?”

“Well. You.”

“Oh, and what a fine little bauble I am, hmm? And how you must love to turn me over and over and examine every little bit of me.”

“Yes, and memorize everything I can about you. Every little divot and facet. That’s what I do.”

There was a little bit of a thrill in wondering if the next words that would come out of the god’s mouth would be a direct ploy or endless yammering, as he’d already shown time after time, but he hadn’t really prepared himself for what Loki’s actual response would be. “Do you know what else you do? I really enjoy how you laugh with your whole body when you’re genuinely entertained. Has anyone ever told you that?”

This filled him with fire. “Loki, did you read any of the training documents on The Gizmo?”