What Remains of Time

He hit the sand hard, lung and mouth filling with grit. The Tesseract thudded beside his cheek and gleamed, a promise he clutched at with a laugh that hadn’t found air yet. He rolled, shoulders tensing for a fight he couldn’t see, and drew himself up to a kneel, fingers closing around cool blue edges—

A rectangular shimmer cracked reality open. A figure stepped through, armor matte, baton in hand. Others followed, boots sinking into the desert. The first one leveled the baton at him with the bored efficiency of a clerk.

“Variant identified,” she said, voice filtered through the helmet.

Loki bared his teeth. “Kneel,” he began, standing, smoothing sand from his lap with a deliberate pause that made the word heavy. “I am—”

The baton moved. A hum, a bright crack, and pain smacked through him like being struck by time itself. He stumbled, mouth still shaped around the next syllable when fingers snapped a metal collar shut around his throat. It bit in, cold and humming, a wrongness that sank beneath skin. Power went dead behind his ribs. He reached inward out of instinct and met a blank wall where his magic should have been—no spark, no familiar gathering storm.

His laugh died. He dropped the Tesseract. It was scooped up, bagged, labelled. The woman grabbed his wrist. He spun, tried to wrench free. His movement slowed as if the air thickened; the guard stepped neatly out of his reach, and an impossible lag caught in his joints, everything out of sync but for the unyielding grip on his arm.

“You’re moving at 1/16 speed,” the guard informed him, almost kind. “Your face is experiencing that in real time.”

He watched his own expression drag long across his skull. He felt the heat of humiliation hit like a slap that took an eternity to arrive. When time snapped back into place, he was panting, cheeks hot, the collar’s buzz a steady reminder at the base of his jaw.

They herded him through another door that wasn’t a door, and the desert fell away.

The new place smelled like paper and metal, like old dust kept in perfect order. Hallways stretched, lit with a weary orange glow that made everything look like late afternoon. Symbols he didn’t recognize lined the walls in clean, unfriendly fonts. He tried again, tested the collar, tried to twist it off; it shocked his fingertips and he hissed, jerking back, only to have a baton press lightly to his sternum.

“Step,” said the guard. “Through processing.”

He was shoved through a gate and into a narrow room where a man behind a window looked up with detached, bureaucratic surprise. “Please take a number,” he said.

Loki stared. “Do you know who I am?”

“Take a number,” the man repeated, sliding a small red token through a slit.

There was no magic to draw on, no blade to call to hand. Loki took the token as if he were accepting a dare and moved forward. The floor vibrated. A conveyor belt of indignities began.

The first room had a robot. It was silver and faceless and had too many arms. “Do you have a soul?” asked a cheery voice from nowhere. “Please confirm you are not a robot.”

He blinked. “What—of course I—”

“Many don’t know,” the voice chirped.

He opened his mouth to argue and was snapped into a frame, arms held out, collar worsening its hum until his teeth ached. Light swept his body in a sterile wave. A metal tray caught the few items ripped from him by snapping mechanisms—a knife he’d hidden that he hadn’t known he was hiding, a strip of leather, the last grit of what he’d called freedom. He flinched as an arm, humming, buzzed along his scalp. Hair fell—no, not hair, just a static charge leaving him. He still ran a hand through it after, just to be sure.

A door opened. The guard’s baton twitched him forward again. Another window, another clerk, this one with a stack of forms that spilled like a deck of cards. “Everything you’ve ever said,” the clerk said, sliding a thick packet toward him. “Sign here.”

Loki blinked down at the pages. The top one bore words he’d said less than a minute ago. His mouth went dry. He looked up with a smile that felt brittle and pressed the pen to paper. He scrawled a name he refused to think of as temporary.

The next room had a man in orange seated by a console. He didn’t look up. “Please stand on the red line,” he said.

Loki stood on the red line.

“Please remove your clothing,” the man added, bored.

Heat crawled over Loki’s skin in a way that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature. He forced himself to stand still, chin high, and undid the clasps, the buckles. Each piece of his Asgardian leather hit a bin with a softened clatter. He stripped to the skin, tried not to shiver under fluorescent light that showed too much. A camera blinked. The console hummed. The man slid his eyes over Loki once, not lingering, not caring, and pressed a button.

A blast of air hit him from below, harsh and sudden, raising a rash along his thighs. He flinched despite himself. Another button. A chute opened. Something dropped onto his arms—a folded bundle, rough fabric, heavy with the smell of recycled cloth and other bodies.

He shook it out. A jumpsuit the color of a bruise—muddy brown-orange with TVA stamped on the chest in black. He pulled it on. It scraped his knuckles. The zipper stuck halfway up and he tugged hard, jaw tight until it caught and jerked higher, biting his throat where the collar already pressed.

A pair of shoes followed, rubber-soled, no laces, no personality. He stepped into them because there was nothing else to do.

The guard was waiting when the door opened. She looked him over once, a line of flat assessment. The baton angled toward the corridor.

He walked, each step muffled. The fabric chafed at the inner curve of his arm, where skin had always known silk and armor, not this woven apology for clothes. Workers passed them without a glance, paper cups of something steaming in their hands, laughter clipped at the edges like someone had cut it down to size.

At the end of the hall, a sign read Intake Theater. The door beneath it was small, the frame low enough that Loki had to bow his head to pass through. The collar hummed, the jumpsuit scratched, and he went where they pushed him, dignity stripped as neatly as his power.

The theater was a room without softness. Rows of bolted metal chairs faced a screen that wasn’t a screen, just a blank wall waiting to become one. The light overhead hummed the same pitch as his collar. A Minuteman pressed him down into a chair. The restraint bar clicked across his lap in a single sure motion.

“You will remain seated,” the guard said. “If you attempt to stand, you will be reset.”

He gave her a smile sharp enough to cut paper. “I’ve been threatened by better.”

She didn’t answer. The door sealed with a hiss. The room swallowed the sound.

A speaker crackled. He tilted his head, every fiber in him bent on finding the seam in this place, the flaw, the person who would make a mistake. Movement drew his eye—above the rows, to the right, a window looked down onto the theater. It wasn’t obvious, tinted and inset, but once he saw it he couldn’t stop seeing it.

A man stood there, not in armor, not in a uniform full of threat, just a suit in a neutral shade that matched the building: gray, with a tie loosened by an inch. He held a file the way some men held weapons. He had lines at the corners of his eyes that said he smiled often and frowned quietly. His hair was light, the edges unruly in a way that looked deliberate. He glanced at Loki, then at the file. That look wasn’t fear, or awe. It was attention. Careful, focused attention.

The man lifted one hand and pressed a button on the panel in front of him. The wall in front of Loki bloomed into animation, a cartoon clock with eyelashes chattering about the TVA. Her voice was a chirp, explaining how the Sacred Timeline worked, how variants were dangerous, how everything he believed about choice was wrong.

Loki didn’t watch it. He watched the man. The man watched him back for a beat, then lowered his gaze again, flipping a page. He tapped the edge of the file against the glass. The gesture sounded like finality even though it was silent here.

Loki cleared his throat. “You there. In the nest.” He pitched his voice to carry. “Send your superior. I’ll speak to someone who matters.”

The man leaned closer to his console as if Loki hadn’t spoken at all. A microphone clipped at his lapel caught his voice when he finally used it. “Hi. Loki, right?” The voice was warm-edged, faintly amused, like someone trying to put a skittish animal at ease. “You’re doing great. Orientation’s not fun for anybody. We’ll get you through.”

Loki bared his teeth. “Release me and I’ll show you what I can do.”

“You’ve already shown us,” the man said, not unkindly. “That’s why you’re here.”

“What do they call you?” Loki demanded. “Clerk? Warder? Coward?”

The man, maddeningly, smiled as if he’d expected every angle of Loki’s pique. “Mobius. Mobius M. Mobius.” He said it like a fact on a page, like the answer to a question he’d asked himself so many times it had lost its sting. “And you can save the god of this and that routine. File says you’ve used seventeen different titles in the last decade. Creative. But we just use ‘variant’ around here.” His eyes lifted, pale and considering. “Keeps things simple.”

Loki felt the flush crawl up under the collar, a heat he refused to name as embarrassment. “I am Loki of Asgard,” he said, each word sharp enough to stand on its own. “I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

Mobius hummed thoughtfully. He glanced at a page. “Mm. Right. And then New York. The attempted subjugation of Earth. You lost. You were arrested. You were… well, you know.” He looked back at Loki, something like sympathy skimming beneath his gaze without taking root. “Purpose is a tricky thing.”

“I will not be lectured by a man in a cheap tie behind glass,” Loki said, the restraint bar pressing into his thighs as he tried to lean forward.

“Good news, then,” Mobius said. “This isn’t a lecture. It’s intake.” He pressed another button lazily, as if he could do it with his eyes closed. The cartoon clock winked out. The wall shifted to a black field, and a white line threaded across it, undulating, settling into a singular path. Points of light appeared. Labelled nodes. Moments.

Mobius’s thumb idly stroked the file’s edge. He didn’t look at the screen. He looked at Loki like he was the screen. Like he was the line to be read. “You don’t like being handled,” Mobius said, not a question. “You don’t like uniforms. You like control. You don’t like that we took it. You’re thinking about how to get it back.”

Loki’s mouth curled. “You’re a detective, then. How quaint.”

“Something like that.” Mobius’s eyes crinkled. Academic curiosity sharpened to a point. “You fascinate me.”

The admission wasn’t delivered with heat or admiration. It was clinical and somehow gentle, like he was saying I notice the shape of you and I’m going to understand it. Loki found himself hating it and wanting more of it in the same breath.

“Fascination,” Loki said, dry. “You can add that to the list of my crimes.”

Mobius laughed once, a soft breath of sound. “Oh, you’ve got better ones. Don’t worry. We keep exhaustive records.”

The line on the wall pulsed, a section highlighted. Mobius’s gaze flicked over, then back. “We’re going to take a look together,” he said conversationally. “Just a highlight reel. Think of it as… context.” He tapped the file. “Helps me do my job. Helps you understand what’s at stake.”

“I understand perfectly,” Loki said, and dragged his eyes away from Mobius by force of will. The hum of his collar was a leash. The room smelled like metal and ghosts. “You fear me. So you cage me. The end.”

Mobius rolled his lips in, patient. “We don’t fear you, Loki. We catalog you.” He tipped his head, almost apologetic. “And then, sometimes, we use you.”

The window threw a pale rectangle over Mobius’s shoulder. He stood easy in it, like he could do this for a hundred years. Loki flexed his fingers under the bar, swallowed grit that wasn’t there. He looked back at the stranger who wasn’t afraid of him and felt for the first time that day something shift in his chest that wasn’t rage or pride.

Mobius opened the file in a slow fan, eyes passing over the first page as if reacquainting himself with an old friend. “Okay,” he said, warmth thinned to professionalism. “Let’s begin.” He pressed the button that would call up the first image, and his gaze stayed on Loki, weighing every flicker of reaction with that same intent curiosity, as if he were standing at the edge of a puzzle he’d waited his whole career to solve.

The screen’s first image blinked alive—Asgard in golden light—and Loki’s laugh cut through it, sharp and practiced. “Stop,” he said, and tilted his jaw as if giving an order on a battlefield. “We’re done.” His wrist turned beneath the restraint bar, probing for give, for a screw out of true. “You think to parade moments like baubles to soften me? No.”

Mobius didn’t argue. He looked at the file again, as if Loki’s words were an expected line of dialogue. “We can pause,” he said mildly, and the screen froze on a frame of Loki’s face he didn’t remember making. “If you need a break.”

“I need freedom,” Loki said, each syllable clipped, ice-edged. “And an apology from whichever bureaucrat decided to decorate with oppression.” He slid his gaze toward the Minuteman near the door. “You. Unfasten this. I’m leaving.”

The Minuteman glanced over him once, then returned to staring at a point on the wall beyond the screen. It was like issuing a command to a statue.

Loki leaned back in the chair he’d been forced into. He flexed his shoulders, then his hands again, drawing bloodless crescents on his palm with his thumbnail for focus. He let his voice go lower, colder. “Do you understand who I am?”

“Variant L-1130,” the guard said, reading off her device, bored.

“I was a prince,” he said. “I am a god.” He lifted his chin at Mobius’s window. “And I have seen the insides of more prisons than you have ever seen stars. None of them held me.”

Mobius made a faint gesture with his fingers, a patient circle, inviting Loki to continue, to spend himself on threats. Loki felt the provocation and reached for it like a blade.

“When I leave,” he said, “I will peel this place down to its copper. I will walk across your timekeepers’ bones. I will—”

“Reset,” the guard said to the room in general and not to him at all. A lazy warning. Not even looking at him when she said it.

Loki’s chest tightened, rage tightening into something bright and focused. “Do it, then,” he said, smirking. “You like your little toys. I’ve broken bigger.”

Mobius’s thumb brushed the edge of a page again. “Let’s try something else,” he said, not to Loki but to his panel. The restraint bar released with a hiss.

The click was unexpected enough that Loki didn’t move at first. Then he did. He flooded the moment with motion, folding forward and rolling to his feet in one smooth line, using the chair for leverage. He was fast. It didn’t matter. The collar sang against his throat, a taunting buzz.

“Sit,” the Minuteman said, almost kind. She didn’t raise the baton.

He stepped away instead, every step a vow, and lifted his hand as if magic should be there to answer. It wasn’t. He knew it wouldn’t be. He lifted it anyway. He let the pantomime be the spell. He bared his teeth and laughed, not because he found anything amusing—because it bought him a heartbeat. He pivoted, calculating the angle to the door, the speed of the nearest guard, the way the floor gripped the rubber soles.

He moved. So did the guard. Her hand snapped, a ripple of blue in the device at her wrist. The world jerked around him like a hooked fish. The floor jumped backward; the chair swallowed him—the bar slammed his lap. He had been reset, pulled backward along a loop he didn’t know he’d already traced.

He grunted, breath knocked short. A second ago he had been on his feet. Now he was in the same chair, in the same posture he’d been in before he’d lunged. The edge of the bar bit the same place on his thigh.

He swallowed surprise and spat disdain instead. “Cowardice,” he said. “You’re afraid to let me stand.”

“Stand again, we’ll do it again,” the guard said. She checked a nail behind her glove.

Loki’s smile went slow. Fine. Then he would break the loop. He leaned forward with deliberate calm until the metal squealed against its housing, then slouched back as if giving up. He watched Mobius through half-lidded eyes. Waited. Counted the breaths between the guard’s shifts of weight. One. Two. Three.

He exploded up again—only to be yanked back, the chair biting, his hips slamming into the seat as if Loki himself were the elastic returned to its resting shape. A flash of heat slid across his cheeks. He hated that more than the motion.

Mobius, damn him, didn’t look triumphant. He looked attentive. “It’s disorienting,” he said. “I know.”

“Do you,” Loki said, voice clean with contempt. He kept moving. He had to keep moving. He rocked his weight even in the chair, testing where the reset hit. A fraction of a second. It stole the moment he stood. He tried standing without moving his legs, a ridiculous thing, bracing his heels and lifting with his spine. Reset. He grabbed for the bar as it reappeared, trying to catch himself in the loop; it slid through his fingers as if time were grease.

The guard sighed. “Variant. Sit.”

He did not. He smiled at her like he was about to do something tender and mercyless. He stood so slowly it could barely be called a stand, like a snake creeping upward, vertebra by vertebra. The reset snagged him anyway, ruthless, precise. His palms skidded against cold metal.

“Enough,” he said, voice flattening. “Enough.”

Mobius’s microphone clicked. “We can stop playing, Loki,” he said, friendly as a winter coat. “It never ends well for you.”

“Nothing has ended,” Loki said, breath even now. “I’m cataloging, remember? Your toy’s timing. Your reactions. Where your eyes go when you pretend not to be watching.” He let his gaze climb to Mobius again, met the cool attention poured over him like a steady hand. “You blink when I mention fear.”

Mobius didn’t blink. His mouth tugged, a wry half-smile. “You’re not wrong. I’m not scared of you, though.” He tapped the file. “I’m scared of wasted potential.”

“File that under patronizing,” Loki snapped. He threw himself into another lunge simply because he needed to. The reset cracked him back into place as if he’d never moved. The humiliation wasn’t pain; it was arithmetic. The certainty that every attempt would be subtracted before it could be counted.

The Minuteman adjusted her stance, the universal body language of boredom. “You done?”

Loki stared at her. He thought of knives, of illusions, of what it felt like to take a room’s air and make it his. He had none of that, and they knew it. They met his rage with forms and procedures.

He eased his hands flat and let the pretense drain from his face. The muscles behind his eyes hurt with the pressure of holding himself together. “For now,” he said lightly.

“Great,” Mobius said, as if they’d agreed on lunch. He let the screen unpause. The line brightened. The first image resumed. Loki’s mother’s face began to form. The guard’s hand hovered near her device without urgency, her expression already forgetting him.

He kept his body still. He could feel the shape of the collar at his throat like an insult and a promise. Later, he vowed. Later he would make them pay attention the way he wanted them to. For now, he absorbed the shape of the room, the rhythms of their indifference, filed each one where he kept the sharpest tools. He didn’t look at Mobius. He didn’t look at the guard. He looked at the light on the wall and said nothing, his jaw tight enough to make his teeth ache.

Mobius let the footage play just long enough for Loki to feel its gravity, then tapped the console. The screen blinked to black. The Minuteman glanced over, waiting. Mobius’s voice came soft over the mic. “Bring him to Interview Theater Three.”

The guard’s baton didn’t come up. She released the restraint bar with a hiss and gestured with two fingers. “Move.”

Loki pushed up, careful not to trigger another reset lurch by trying to be clever. He walked, collar heavy at his throat, guards a loose orbit. The hall they took bent in a gentle arc, walls the same neutral metal—no seams, no rivets, like the place had been poured into existence. It grated. Everything in the TVA felt manufactured to be impervious to him. Doors opened before them, lighting their path as if he belonged to their rhythm.

The theater was small, dark, and almost intimate. Rows of molded seats stepped down to a sunken stage with a low table and two chairs. A screen hung where a proscenium would be, edges soft with age that didn’t make sense. The air had the faint, stale scent of recycled cold. It was theater for one audience and one performer, and Mobius had chosen his seats.

“Down front,” the guard said, nudging him. Loki took the aisle, gliding rather than obeying. He chose the chair that let him face the door and the screen at once. Control where there was none.

Mobius entered without ceremony, closing the door behind him. He didn’t bring the Minuteman inside. It made the room quieter. He set the file on the table and took the opposite chair, enough distance to be safe, close enough to be personal. He didn’t prioritize the controls; he prioritized Loki, as if this were a conversation instead of an inquest.

“Comfortable?” Mobius asked lightly. He said it like he genuinely wanted the answer.

Loki’s smile was teeth. “You build little rooms to make gods small.”

Mobius nodded as if that were thoughtful input. “We build rooms to make things clear.” He folded his hands. “You’re here because you picked up a cube you weren’t supposed to and stepped out of the line that keeps everything from coming apart. The Tesseract wasn’t a bailout. It was a bad decision with big ripples.”

Loki laughed, low. “Everything I do has big ripples.”

“Usually,” Mobius agreed. He reached down and keyed a control. The screen filled with a moving diagram, a bright line curving smooth, other branches budded and pruned before they could mature. An easy visual. “This is the Sacred Timeline. Not sacred like worship. Sacred like…stable. Singular.”

“I suppose you’ll tell me your Time-Keepers wrote it in stone and are the only scribes qualified to correct it,” Loki said, bored.

Mobius’s mouth tugged. “That’s the story. The function is what matters. You stepping out created a branch that, if left alone, threatens to split and keep splitting. We prune branches to keep reality from fracturing beyond repair.” He glanced at Loki. “You know chaos. You like it. But this isn’t the fun kind.”

“You’re terrified of choice,” Loki said. “You’re terrified of anything you can’t chart.”

“We’re terrified of multiversal war,” Mobius said. He didn’t flinch at the word. He let it sit. “You don’t have to believe in Time-Keepers. Believe in consequences. Believe that if everyone does what you did, there’s no Asgard to rule or ruin. No Midgard to conquer or save. Just noise.”

Loki held Mobius’s gaze. “You call me Variant. As if that negates the rest of me.”

“It doesn’t,” Mobius said. “It defines how you got here.” He flipped a page in the file, not to read, but to pace himself. “Variant L-1130. Loki Laufeyson. You were supposed to be captured after your Battle of New York. You were supposed to go on to some…pretty important personal milestones.” He didn’t look at the screen. “We’ll get there. The point is, you weren’t supposed to pick up that cube. But you did. And here we are.”

Loki looked at the diagram again, at the way the offshoot line flared, burning bright, then an animated stamp crushed it back to nothing. “You reset time like you’re sweeping crumbs off a table.”

Mobius’s voice gentled. “We’re janitors. Kind of a thankless gig.” He leaned back. “And then there are the ones who make messes on purpose. Dangerous variants. You’re one of those, Loki. Not because you’re evil for fun. Because you’re smart enough to make trouble that matters.”

A heat slid along Loki’s spine at that and he tried to ignore it. “You flatter me to soften the cage.”

“I tell you the truth because it gets us both farther,” Mobius said. “You’re used to interrogations that start with pain and end with a broken voice. This isn’t that. I want you clearheaded. Invested.”

“In what?” Loki asked, a curl of disdain to hide interest.

“In understanding the system you’re up against,” Mobius said simply. “Because fighting without understanding is a tantrum. And you hate being a child in any room.”

Loki blinked once, slow. The collar hummed faintly when he swallowed. He jerked his chin toward the door. “If this is explanation, not punishment, remove the restraint. Let me—”

“No,” Mobius said, so calm it wasn’t a denial so much as a correction. “You don’t need your magic to listen. You don’t need it to think.” He gestured toward the screen. “Branches get pruned when they reach a redline. Yours was on its way. We brought you here, took away the tools you use to ignore consequences, and we’re asking you to see the pattern. You are dangerous, Loki. Not because you can throw knives made of light, but because you’re willing to do whatever suits you in the moment and you’re very good at convincing yourself that’s noble.”

It should have bounced off. It stuck. Loki looked at the diagram again to avoid showing that.

Mobius kept going, steady. “The TVA exists to keep that line straight. The Time-Keepers say without it, we go back to war. They created us to do this job. We don’t live in your kind of time. We’re outside it. That’s why your magic doesn’t bite here. Different field of play.”

“Created,” Loki said softly. “By your gods.”

Mobius’s smile was wry. “By somebody’s. Doesn’t matter who if the work needs doing. I’m not here to sell you religion. I’m here to tell you the stakes.” He let the silence sit long enough to make Loki fill it if he wanted. When Loki didn’t, Mobius tapped the console and the line minimized to a corner, replaced by a paused frame from the reel. Loki’s own face looked back, older by an ache he couldn’t name.

“The point,” Mobius said, voice even, “is that you don’t have to like us. You don’t have to believe any of the…branding. But you need to know where you stand. You’re a dangerous variant. You’re in our custody. Those are facts. What happens next depends on whether you’re willing to stop trying to outrun them and sit with me, here, and look.”

Loki folded his hands so his knuckles wouldn’t show the tension. “And if I don’t?”

Mobius glanced briefly at the door, then back. “Then your branch ends. Pain-free. Efficient. You’ll be swept into the bin like everything else that doesn’t fit.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t threaten. “If you do, maybe you get to do something with that mind you’re so proud of, instead of letting your worst instincts steer you to the same cliff over and over.”

Loki breathed once, measured. He could feel the shape of his arrogance wanting to flare, to say no out of principle. He could also feel the cold slide of the word prune, and the way Mobius had not taken pleasure in saying it. He hated the choice because it wasn’t one. He hated that the first thing in this place that made sense was the man across from him.

“Fine,” he said, tone dry enough to crack. “Show me your line. Show me my…milestones.” The admission scraped, and he let it sound like a dare.

Mobius’s gaze warmed by a degree. He didn’t gloat. He keyed the control and the image flickered into motion. “All right,” he said softly. “Let’s take it one piece at a time.”

The reel opened on the Gilded halls of Asgard, a memory and not. Loki recognized the sweep of stairs, the burnished gold, the crowd. Odin’s voice filled the theater, heavy with ritual. The coronation. Thor, beaming, taking the first step toward the throne that had never meant peace for anyone.

Loki watched himself, younger by years and arrogance, smirk in the shadow of a pillar, green eyes bright with restless calculation. He remembered the frost giant intrusion he’d engineered, the knives that never left his sleeves. The screen didn’t spare him the moment he looked up to Odin and let the smile fade, something hungry loosening in his face like a wound beginning to weep. Mobius didn’t comment. He kept his hands folded, letting the images do the cutting.

The Battle of New York followed in a rush of noise and sky. Stark Tower lanced by blue light, Chitauri pouring through a ripped seam, himself in leather and metal, chin high, eyes on a horizon only he could see. He saw the terror—theirs—and the effort—his—that he had once named glorious. He saw the panting fatigue that crept in behind the mania in his own eyes when the Hulk slammed him into the floor. He saw Thor kneel and say something low that didn’t carry on the tape and the way his own mouth twisted around a claim he had begun to suspect wouldn’t save him.

Asgard again, later—darker. The fall from the Bifröst replayed, the tearing white that had not killed him. The years between, rendered in clipped images: Jotun fingers turning his forearm blue for the first time with a touch he gave himself; the way he stared at that chill, then pressed harder as if to prove he could bruise what he was. He wanted to bark at the screen for the indecency of showing him that. He didn’t. His jaw worked and went still.

Frigga appeared and everything in him tightened. She was smiling, like she always did when she wanted him to remember something gentle. The reel showed her teaching a young Loki the shape of a simple illusion with a piece of ribbon and a coin. Her hand on his shoulder. The coin in her palm vanishing, reappearing behind his ear. The camera cut. The next image was smoke curling through the palace and her body on the tile, hair black on white, eyes empty. The guards crowded the frame; the chaos closed in. Loki flinched before he could stop it. His breath left him in a quiet, ugly sound that wasn’t a word.

Mobius didn’t look away from the screen. He also didn’t pretend not to see what it did to him.

“Keep watching,” he said softly, not an order so much as a bridge thrown over a break.

More battle. More running. The cell on Asgard, the way he held himself there, perfect and composed, funerary clothes neat, feet bare on the cold floor. The image jumped to the shrapnel of rage he’d let himself have alone, the exploded furniture, the blood on his foot. He remembered the sting of glass and the way that hurt had almost felt like confession. The reel was a thief. It had taken that privacy and made it a scene.

“What is this for?” Loki asked without heat. He needed the question to sit in the air, anchor him. He watched himself sit on the floor, hands limp. He didn’t move in his chair.

“So you understand the path,” Mobius said. “Where it leads.”

Thanos took the screen. The Sanctuary ship swallowing everything they had left. Thor’s face broken with exhaustion, Loki standing in his shadow, back straight, eyes on a monster he finally let himself script as that word. He remembered the weight of the blade in his sleeve, the calculation he did without realizing he was doing it. He remembered deciding to try.

The reel didn’t cut away. It showed the hand closing around his throat. It showed his feet scrambling once and then going still, showed his face darkening, eyes gone bloodshot, mouth trying and failing to pull air. It showed the tremor in his fingers when he reached for Thor and couldn’t make it. It showed the bit of dignity he salvaged when he called himself a prince with a shaking voice and made a promise he almost believed. It showed the crack that went through Thor when the body hit the floor.

Loki squeezed his eyes shut and saw it anyway. He made himself open them. He watched himself die. It was both obscene and irrevocably true. He didn’t look at Mobius. He didn’t give him that kind of plea.

The reel unfolded more he had not lived: Thor on a ship with grief sitting at his shoulders like a mantle. Odin fading into dust by a cliff, not wrathful but very small. Hela walking through a death of a throne room, lazy, lethal, contempt making her beautiful and unbearable. Thor and Loki facing her together and losing the way you lose when winning is too small a word and too late. Asgard burning. Heimdall’s eyes closing. The survivors adrift in space. The pewter taste of Endgame he would never play.

He saw Thor put his hand on his shoulder at the end, in another path, some desperate, wry reconciliation. He saw himself make the only real choice left: to stand next to his brother and go down swearing. He felt the ache of that choice in his bones, the one he hadn’t made here because he’d slipped the timeline. The loss of it caught him by the collar and shook.

Mobius stopped the reel not on the body, not on the ash, but on a frame most people would miss. Loki’s face, somewhere in the middle of all of it, after Frigga, after Odin, after blood, caught in an unguarded second. There was fear there. And behind it, something like clarity he had never let anyone else see.

“That’s what was supposed to happen,” Mobius said. He didn’t wince at hearing it. He said it like a man who filed truths for a living and never pretended they didn’t weigh a certain amount. “Not because the Time-Keepers like to watch you suffer. Because it’s the shape the story took. And you didn’t live all of it. You stepped out.”

Loki’s mouth opened and closed. He wanted to snarl that none of this was his, none of it counted. He wanted to launch himself across the table and tear the file in Mobius’s hands to ribbons until the future was paper on the floor. He wanted his mother back. He wanted the feel of a knife, any knife, something familiar to hold. He wanted to be small enough to fit into the frame where his brother looked at him without pity and called him home.

He did none of those things. He sat. He stared at the frozen face on the screen that belonged to him and also didn’t. He let silence go from punishment to refuge.

Mobius eased the console away, careful not to make a sound too sharp. “Loki?” he asked, not pushing the name, just placing it between them.

Loki drew in air, found it thin. The collar hummed at his pulse like a reminder that this body still had heat in it, breath moving through it. He set his hands flat on the table because they wanted to shake. He locked his fingers together until the joints ached instead.

He looked at the blank screen and finally let the smallest sliver of truth come out.

“I didn’t know,” he said, voice raw against the quiet. He didn’t look at Mobius to see what that admission did to his face. He didn’t think he could stand it if it was pity.

Mobius didn’t stand, didn’t lean in across the distance. “I know,” he said, as if the knowledge had been obvious for a while.

Loki nodded once, tiny. The room held them. The past and the future hung on the black rectangle in front of him like a door that wouldn’t open. He swallowed, and it hurt. Every instinct told him to bark, to posture, to take control by making noise.

He said nothing. He sat with what they had shown him, and for the first time in a long time, he let quiet do the work that bluster never could.