Tva Time Cops

Most stories have endings. They begin in one place. They go through some adventures. They wrap up. The hero learns a lesson. The book closes.

But Loki's story is funny. Because the version of Loki who said "you will never be a god" to Thanos on the Statesman — that Loki really did die that day. His story really did end. The brother who fell beside Thor is gone.

This story is about a DIFFERENT Loki.

A younger one.

Hop with me back in time, to the Battle of New York. Loki is in Stark Tower, looking smug, scepter in hand, about to be smacked into the floor by Hulk. We know what happens next for that Loki. Asgard. The years of pretending to be Odin. Ragnarok. The Statesman. The brave end with Thanos.

But what if something different happened?

The Avengers, years later, traveled BACK in time to get the Infinity Stones to undo Thanos's terrible snap. They went back to that exact moment in 2012 New York. And while they were running around in the past, Tony Stark dropped a suitcase by accident, the Tesseract rolled out, and the Loki who was sitting bound and muzzled on the lobby floor — he grabbed it.

POOF.

That Loki vanished out of the year 2012.

He landed in a hot, sandy desert he did not recognize. Stone walls rose up around him. There were strange bright tents on the horizon. He brushed off his green coat. He stood up tall. He began, out of pure Loki habit, to give a victory speech to nobody.

"I am Loki of Asgard, and I am burdened with glorious purpose..."

That is when the doors slid open behind him.

WHOOSH.

A squad of officers in orange tactical jackets marched out of nowhere — clean, military, with glowing batons in their hands. They surrounded Loki in a circle. Click. They pressed buttons on the batons.

Time froze around Loki. The desert wind stopped. His coat stopped flapping. The sand grains in the air hung still. Only Loki's eyes — going wider by the second — could still move.

"You are under arrest," one of them said, very calmly, "for crimes against the sacred timeline. You'll be coming with us."

The what??

Loki was teleported in a flash of light to a place he could not have imagined if he had tried. It was an office building. The most office of office buildings. Beige walls. Buzzing fluorescent lights overhead. Tile floors. Hallways that went on forever, with doors marked with little stenciled numbers.

This was the TVA. The Time Variance Authority. Time cops. They watched the universe to make sure nothing wandered off the one approved storyline. If you stepped out of line — if you became what they called a Variant — they came and got you, and either reset you or, much more often, pruned you.

To "prune" someone was to wipe them out of existence with one of those glowing batons. Just — POOF. Gone.

Miss Minutes, an animated orange cartoon clock with a friendly Southern accent, floated through the corridor explaining all this to Loki in the cheeriest possible voice. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, ticked once, and said:

"Hi, hon! Looks like you broke the sacred timeline! Whoopsie-daisy! The TVA will now have to prune you. Real sorry about that. Have a magical day!"

Loki blinked at her.

He was marched through processing. A scanner buzzed at him. A robotic voice announced, "You are not a robot." A clerk named Casey, behind a counter, asked Loki if he was a robot too and looked very relieved when Loki said no. Casey did not know what fish were. Casey had never seen a fish in his life. The TVA, it turned out, was a kind of strange in-between place that existed outside of time.

Loki was given an orange jumpsuit. He hated it. It clashed with everything. The back of it said one word — VARIANT — and he could not even untuck the bottom of the jumpsuit to make it look cooler. He tried. It did not work.

He was made to wait in a giant beige courtroom, where a stone-faced judge named Ravonna Renslayer told him he would be pruned. And that was that, except that someone in the back of the room politely raised his hand.

"Excuse me," said the someone. "I'd like to borrow him."

His name was Mobius M. Mobius. He wore a tie and a soft blazer. He had a kind face and very tired eyes. He collected old motorcycle magazines. He was an analyst at the TVA, and he had been doing the job a long, long time.

Mobius walked Loki out of the courtroom and into a cluttered little office full of files. There were a lot of magazines. There was a jet ski poster on the wall. Mobius sat down across from Loki, folded his hands, and looked at him.

"Hi, Loki," he said. "Have a seat."

Loki sat.

Mobius did something nobody had ever done with Loki before.

He just — looked at him. Calmly. With curiosity.

Not as a villain. Not as Thor's troublesome brother. Not as Odin's disappointing second son. Not as a Frost Giant. Not as the Battle of New York guy. Just — Loki. A person.

"Here's the deal," Mobius said. "There's a dangerous Variant out there. Murdering my Hunters. Causing real trouble across the timeline. And here's the funny part." He smiled slightly. "The Variant is a Loki."

Loki tilted his head. "What."

"A different version of you. Or maybe a similar version of you. We're not entirely sure. Help me catch this other Loki, and the TVA won't prune you. What do you say?"

The other TVA people did not love this idea. Hunter B-15 was a tough, no-nonsense officer who had been chasing Variants for years, and she made it very clear with her eyes that she did not trust Loki one bit. Casey, the fish-confused clerk, just looked nervous. Even Ravonna Renslayer, in her chambers, raised an eyebrow at the plan.

Mobius did it anyway.

And here is where something quiet and strange and beautiful started to happen.

Mobius asked Loki questions Loki had never been asked before.

"Why do you do what you do?"

Loki started his usual answer — something about destiny, something about thrones — and Mobius cut him off.

"No, I mean really. Why?"

Loki opened his mouth.

He stopped.

He did not have an answer.

He had spent his whole life being clever. Being prepared. Being one step ahead. He had built up so many cool dramatic answers to every possible question that he had stopped paying attention to whether any of them were actually true.

Mobius asked, "What do you actually want?"

Loki, the trickster, the silver-tongued, the cleverest person in any Asgardian room, sat in his itchy orange jumpsuit under the buzzing TVA lights, and he had to think about it for a minute.

A real minute.

He was thirty centuries old and nobody had asked.

He stumbled out half an answer. Something about ruling. Something about respect. Mobius nodded, not unkindly, and asked another question. And another.

By the end of that first afternoon at the TVA, Loki was beginning to understand something. The TVA was not a punishment. Or — it was, but it was also something stranger. It was the first place where someone had treated him not like a problem to be managed, but like a person to be talked to.

The orange jumpsuit was awful. The fluorescent lights were buzzing. Miss Minutes was tick-tocking past every few minutes, announcing time-related fun facts in her cheerful cartoon voice. Casey didn't know what fish were. Hunter B-15 was glaring at him from across the room.

But Mobius, in his tired soft way, was looking at Loki with curiosity.

And that — that was the beginning of Loki becoming Loki for the very first time in his life.

The boy who had spent so long trying to be Thor, trying to please Odin, trying to outshine everyone in the room — he was finally about to find out who he was when nobody else was watching.

It would take more adventures. It would take meeting the other Loki. It would take finding out who really ran the TVA. It would take everything in him.

But the journey started here, in a cluttered TVA office, with a man in a soft tie asking him "Why?"

And meaning it.