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❛ ᴇᴡᴛʀᴛᴡ. ❜ ° . ༄
- ͙۪۪˚   ▎❛ 𝐓𝐖𝐎 ❜   ▎˚ ͙۪۪̥◌
»»————- ꒰ ʟᴏᴋɪ ɢᴇᴛs ᴀ
ᴛᴀsᴛᴇ ᴏғ ʜɪs ᴏᴡɴ ᴍᴇᴅɪᴄɪɴᴇ ꒱　


❝ DAMN, DOES  THAT MEAN I'M
THE YOUNGEST ONE HERE? ❞

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"It's been a while since I've been down here," Mobius commented as they entered a very cluttered room. He paused to take in the mess as he tried to remember exactly when that had been. "Actually, I'm not sure I've ever been down here."

Jimin grimaced at the chaos before them. There were shelves upon shelves of various items and papers with no apparent order of how they were organized. Overflowing boxes were stacked to person-height in some places around the room. There was hardly a square inch of available space on the desk in front of them, despite its wide, oval shape. A pneumatic tube circled around the wall to deliver memos from the T.V.A., ending in a large chute towards the back of the room.

Then, from somewhere above them, a man appeared as he lowered himself down from the ceiling by wires. While he was probably surprised to see them, his greeting was cheerful as he welcomed them, "oh, hey, welcome to R & A."

"Good. We're in the right place," Mobius muttered. He raised his voice to address his coworker: "we have a little bit of a situation we wanted to run by you."

The unknown man unbuckled himself from the seat and came over to talk to them at the front of the desk. "Mobius! Wow. Great to see you again."

He didn't answer for a second before he quickly covered up his confusion by replying, "good to see you, too. Yeah, I. . . Loki, Jimin, I wanna introduce you to. . ." He gestured to the employee, clearly not remembering the other man's name.

"I'm Ouroboros," he finally supplied. The Asian man extended a hand to introduce himself. Loki followed suit to accept the gesture, though his hand knocked into one of the many tubes that littered the surface of the desk. As he retracted his hand from the handshake, he tried to play it off as if the tube had never fallen. Ouroboros didn't even seem to notice that it had happened. "Nice to meet you, Loki, Jimin."

When Jimin shook his hand, she raised an eyebrow at his name. "Ouroboros? Like the alchemical symbol?"

He gave her a puzzled look in return. "No; Ouroboros, like me. That's my name."

"No, an Ouroboros is an alchemical symbol that represents the cycle of destruction and. . ." she trailed off when all three men stared at her as if she'd grown another head. "Never mind."

"If Ouroboros is too confusing for you, he calls me O.B.," Ouroboros offered, misinterpreting her question about his name.

Mobius latched on to any information that the other man offered to hide his lack of memory. He agreed quickly, "yeah, I call him O.B. That's like— a nickname I have."

"Wow. How long has it been?"

"How long has it been?" he echoed. "Uh. . . Could it be three or four. . ."

"Four hundred years," O.B. finished for him.

"What?"

Jimin let out a low whistle. "Damn. Does that mean I'm the youngest one here?"

"How old are you?" Loki asked, more out of curiosity than anything else. After all, the Midgardian aging system was much different than his Asgardian one.

She gave him a look of disapproval and sniffed haughtily. "Hasn't anyone ever told you that it's rude to ask a woman her age?"

The god raised an eyebrow, an amused smirk playing on his lips. "Well, forgive my lack of Midgardian etiquette, but I am not well-versed in your customs. Besides, you seem to be dodging the question quite skillfully."

Jimin's eyes narrowed with irritation. "I am not dodging the question. If you really must know, I'm thirty."

Loki scoffed, feigning surprise. "Thirty? Oh, how quaint. I was destroying realms when you were still learning to walk."

"Oh yeah? Well how old—"

A sharp sound interrupted what would be a devolvement into petty arguing, and they both jerked backwards slightly, away from the sound as Mobius had snapped his fingers between them. "Thank you. Now, back to the matter at hand—"

"Do they do that often?" O.B. interrupted him, gesturing to pair.

"Who, them?" the older man asked, pointing the duo. "Yeah, all the time—"

"Excuse me?" Jimin demanded, at the same time Loki denied, "no we don't!"

Mobius nodded at that, as if it explained everything. "See? Anyway—"

There was a woosh of one of the pneumatic tubes and a cannister shot out from the chute at the far side of the room. It landed in the waiting bin with a loud clatter, catching Ouroboro's attention. "Oh. Hang on."

"Hold on, O.B. Okay," the gray-haired man tried to stop his coworker.

He didn't listen and jogged over to the bin to take care of the tube. He began to meddle with the container, even locating a hammer to flatten something out on the counter. As worked, he called out to them: "the work orders really pile up if I take a break, so I just keep at it. Forever. No sleep."

Jimin sort of felt bad for the guy, honestly. Pity wasn't one of her usual emotions, but the thought of working for S.H.I.E.L.D. for four hundred years with no rest made her. . . well, it didn't sound pleasant. Did she love her career? Of course (though maybe a little less due to this particular mission.) But did she want to work for four hundred year? Definitely not; being an agent at S.H.I.E.L.D. was already a thankless job and she couldn't imagine doing it as long as O.B. had worked for the T.V.A..

Mobius caught his focus again as he returned to tube up the chute: "O.B., we just have a quick question for you."

O.B. returned to them once he was done. The smile on his face remained as he told them happily, "great being part of a team. So, how is the team doing up there?"

"Pretty great," Mobius lied. "Yeah. I mean, well. . . You know about the Time-Keepers and, you know. . ."

✧✧✧

That was all Jimin and Loki heard before they were pulled from time. They reappeared in the same room. It was hardly changed from when they were last in it, just as messy as ever. The only thing that was different was Ouroboros himself; he had yet to need glasses as he did in their present.

"God damn it," Jimin cursed as they landed on their feet. She braced her hands against the counter and took a deep breath to steady herself.

Remembering her moment of weakness back in the Chrono bay, the god gave her a concerned look. "You alright?"

The woman straightened determinedly, setting her jaw as her eyes hardened. "I'm fine. Let's get this fixed and then we can move on to the next problem. Ouroboros!" she called, keeping Loki from asking her anything else.

His brows furrowed as the Asian man came over to them. He knew that this must be a lot for a mortal to handle— hell, it was a lot for him to handle— and Jimin wasn't the type to throw herself a pity party. She was an agent, a soldier; she would keep fighting until she was dead before admitting to a deficiency.

When the man arrived before them, Loki began, "Ouroboros. Uh, may I call you O.B.?"

"O.B.?" the T.V.A. employee repeated. He smiled as he decided, "I like that. Uh, do I know you?"

"Yes," the god replied. "In the future. Well, it's your future. Our present. It's complicated. we've been pulled through different times in the T.V.A. . ."

"Time slipping."

"That," Jimin agreed. "We've been time slipping in the T.V.A. — and yes, we know it's hypothetically impossible to do so, but you just saw us do it, so clearly it's possible."

"Yeah," O.B. said thoughtfully. "I'm having trouble reconciling that."

"Well, you better reconcile that real fast because we're going to need your help," the Asian woman told him shortly. "It's extremely unpleasant."

He nodded. "It looks like it."

✧✧✧

"That's impossible," Ouroboros stated several minutes later after they finished explaining the situation to him.

Jimin sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose with exasperation. "Clearly it's not impossible because we were just with you in the future."

"Mmm. . ." he hummed critically. "I think I would remember that."

"Yes, but it hasn't happened to you yet," Loki jumped in, casting the brunette a wary glance since she looked minutes away from either throttling (or at least shaking some sense into) O.B.. "Do you see?"

"Good point," he conceded. "It would be convenient if we were having this conversation in the future and this were the past."

"We were," the god insisted. "This is the. . . Never mind. O.B., look, for the sake of argument, let's just say, if it were possible to time slip in the TVA, how might one. . ."

"It's not," Ouroboros cut across him definitively.

"I understand that. But theoretically, if it were possible to time slip in the TVA, how might one remedy that?"

Then, as if it made all the sense in the world, O.B. explained matter-of-factly: "first off, someone in the time you want to end up in would need a Temporal Aura Extractor."

"A what?" Jimin asked. She brought her hand up to massage her temples where she felt a headache was forming. Why did time travel have to be so complicated? With missions, she was used to following orders. It was fight or be killed— something that was simple and straightforward. (After all, there was a reason why she went to S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Special Ops college and not the one for Science and Technology. Not that she was stupid, but she just didn't need all the details.) "Forget it. Yes or no: can you build one?"

"Of course," he replied brightly.

"Is there anything that we can do to help?" she asked, motioning between herself and Loki.

O.B. shook his head. "It won't take long."

Since there was nothing to occupy her time, Jimin moved away from the desk to stand in what little open space remained in the room. With all the change and unknown events going on around her, she felt the need to center herself and anchor to something concrete, so she turned to Kimoodo. It was a form of healing martial arts that helped to refocus one's energy. Although the memories of her father teaching it to her weren't. . . the best (which was putting it lightly), it she had to admit that it was a useful tool; one that she had used more often since Katrina's fatal mission.

With her eyes closed, she didn't see Loki's attention switch to watch what she was doing. He took in her purposeful movements with interest as it appeared that she was practicing fighting moves, but very slowly. He wondered how she could look so calm with O.B. banging away at the Temporal Extractor just feet from them. Growing bored with the wait, he began to mimic her motions. Of course, his execution lacked the finesse that came with years of practice and his gestures were clumsy compared to Jimin's.

She completed the final form and opened her eyes to see the god copying her. His actions were several seconds behind hers and he was so concentrated on them that he hadn't realized she'd finished. She watched him critically for a moment before questioning him, "what are you doing?"

He startled a little at her blunt tone and hastily put his hands by his sides and straightened. "Nothing."

Jimin let out a hmm of doubt, but Loki was saved from any more criticism by Ouroboros announcing: "ha! I got it. One Temporal Aura Extractor."

"Great. Can you hold onto that until our friend Mobius drops by?"

✧✧✧

"Violently rip ourselves from every thread of time and space?" Loki demanded after O.B. finished telling them what they had to do. "All at once?"

"That means prune yourself."

"Oh, that sounds much better," Jimin huffed. "Couldn't you have led with that?"

The Asian man shrugged. "Well, that's what happens when you're pruned. You're released from time, so the hope is that after you prune yourself, the Extractor will pull you into the present."

"'Hope' doesn't sound very promising," the agent remarked. "Isn't there a better adjective you could have used? What if it doesn't work?"

"You heard about how if you fall into a black hole you turn into spaghetti?"

Jimin said "yes" just as Loki responded "no"— clearly he hadn't attended S.H.I.E.L.D.'s required 'accept-this-job-at-your-own-risk' orientation, which had covered everything from spaghettification to disintegration.

"That's unfortunate for you," O.B. told the brunette. "The less you know about that, the better."

✧✧✧

This time when they returned to the present, they reappeared so forcefully that they ran into Mobius and startled him. Ouroboros remained unphased as he exclaimed, "hey, they're back. I guess you three are ready to go."

Mobius lifted a hand to slow the other man down. "Wait, am I ready to get my skin peeled off? I don't know."

"Am I ready to rip myself from every thread of time?" Loki added, causing the other man to turn to him.

"I'd rather have that."

Jimin looked at him incredulously. "Really? You would rather have every fiber of your being turn into spaghetti?"

"At least you get to taste good at your death. What's the quality of life without skin?"

Loki's brows furrowed as he considered their options, neither one sounding particularly appealing. "There has to be another way."

O.B. merely held out the pruning stick without another word, prompting the god to take it from him. He was soon distracted by the flickering lamp and went over to try and adjust the lighting of it. "Huh. Been doing that all day."

"No, it's not the lamp," Mobius told him. "We're having power surges all through the TVA."

That finally made the other man's smile slide off his face as a serious expression overtook it. "What did you say?"

✧✧✧

They walked rapidly down the hall towards the Temporal Loom as they filled O.B. in. Once they had told him everything, he concluded, "so, the timeline is branching now? I bet that's what's causing the power surges. And maybe your time slipping."

"Really? How?"

Hunter B-15 joined them from a side door, wasting no time in sharing her side of things. "Things are a mess upstairs. This better be important."

"It is."

"The branching is overloading the Temporal Loom," Ouroboros continued as if no one had spoken.

Jimin frowned. "That doesn't sound good." She paused, then added, "what's the Temporal Loom?"

"You know, the Temporal Loom," the T.V.A. employee answered. "It's in the T.V.A. Guidebook."

"The what?" Loki asked.

He threw a small orange book carelessly behind him so that the brunette could catch it. "There's one on every desk at the T.V.A.. It's a detailed index of every mechanical classification and maintenance routine in each sector, on each device, and inside every computer program at the T.V.A.. I wrote it myself."

The agent began to rifle through it with interest, the prospect of reading a rulebook even more appealing than usual with all the disorder going on around her. (Yes, she had been one of those agents who'd read— and memorized— every section and subsection of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s handbook.) Rather expectedly, Loki yanked the manual from her grasp. "There's no time for reading now."

She shot him an annoyed look as the double doors ahead of them opened, thanks to O.B. sliding his keycard through reader on the wall.. A light exploded above them just as they passed underneath it, causing the group to turn and look at the source of the noise.

Moving on from the abrupt sound, they made their way to the end of the hall, where the rumbling of a machine grew louder. The final set of metal doors were painted red, a warning of the danger that lay beyond them. If that wasn't enough, 'DANGER' was written in big letters on the floor in front of them as well.

"Something tells me that the Temporal Loom is dangerous," Jimin commented sarcastically, though she did appreciate the safety precautions. The task of what they were about to do was daunting enough that it was making her short-tempered.

The room beyond was more brightly lit than any other in the T.V.A.. It was almost hospital-like in its whiteness, though the machines flush in the wall and facing the large windows gave it too much of a sci-fi feel for it to be anything other than space age. Past the windows, the darkness of space only made the time stream appear to glow brighter than the sun. Jimin had to squint her eyes against the glare to see the individual branches.

O.B. hurriedly began to work on the controls on various machines as he explained, "the Temporal Loom is the heart of the TVA. It's where raw time is refined into physical timeline. And it's not constructed to weave together so many new branches, so it's overloading. I've never seen it like this."

"It looks like a disaster," Loki commented.

"It is a disaster," the other man confirmed.

Mobius took note of the dust that coated the side of some of the equipment. "You don't get down here too much, I guess."

"I never had to," Ouroboros answered. "Miss Minutes took care of everything. I just ran diagnostics every few hundred years."

The brunette approached the large window to gaze out at the vacuum of space. While she had seen many new and impressive (or terrifying) sights during this adventure, being able to see space itself was a concept that she was still getting used to. It was, admittedly, beautiful, especially with the golden light of the time stream weaving itself into complicated patterns.

Loki turned to the Asian man, his voice urgent as he asked, "so, O.B., what do we do? How do we stop it? The meltdown?"

"We need to prune those extra branches," he told them practically.

Hunter B-15 shook her head. "That means the death of countless people. We can't do that."

"Then I'll need to close the blast doors to protect the TVA while I figure out how to retrofit it to handle those branches."

The agent pulled her gaze away from the view outside the glass. "Wait a second, what about the time slipping?"

"Once those doors close, we won't be able to re-sync you two, so, it's now or never."

Loki let out a worried breath. "What?"

His breathing grew heavier as he psyched himself up to prune himself. Coming to a decision, he started the weapon up and turned it towards him. "Now!"

O.B. reached out hastily. "Wait! It's now, but now isn't for a little bit. We still gotta get Mobius into position. But first. . ." He addressed the gray-haired man, who was just finishing writing 'skin?' in the dust. "Mobius, to fix Loki's time slipping, you'll go out there and launch the Extractor, which will pull Loki from the time stream before I need to close the blast doors."

When he received a thumbs-up from the T.V.A. agent, Ouroboros spoke to Loki and Jimin again as he handed them a stopwatch: "this timer is synced to the Loom. You'll stand by to prune yourself within moments after this turns green. Green means Mobius succeeded. Green means prune. If you're too late, you will be lost to time forever and Mobius will lose all of his skin. Okay, you've got about an hour." Then, one of the energies from the time stream whipped out to hit the window glass, which cracked it, causing the Asian man to correct himself: "you've got about five minutes. Anyway, I'm gonna get everything ready."

The brunette stared at the timer in Loki's hand as unease coursed through her (she was far too proud to call it fear.) This was it. If they failed, they wouldn't exist anywhere. They'd be set adrift, cast out from every time and place that ever was. Her heart pounded in her chest as she swallowed against a dry throat.

A rough voice momentarily pulled them away from the events at hand. "Dox and her crew are raiding the armory."

The news immediately distracted Loki, who turned towards the exit without hesitation. "They're going after Sylvie. That's their only lead."

Jimin grabbed the back of the leather straps that wrapped around his shoulders, brining the god to a halt. "Uh-uh. I don't know about you, but I don't plan on time slipping for the rest of my life. We can deal with Sylvie after we fix our problem."

"I'll handle Dox," B-15 offered, already moving for the door. "Good luck."

"Mobius, if, uh. . ." Loki began uncertainly. "If we don't make it back, I. . ."

"You'll make it back," he replied firmly.

"Right, but when I use this thing, I might not make it back. . ." The sentence was never finished as both Loki and Jimin were pulled through time once more.

✧✧✧

They arrived in the T.V.A.'s future, though it was a bleak one. The Temporal Loom room was dark and a warning alarm sounded eerily throughout the building. The timestream outside the window had lost its light so just the blackness of space was visible beyond.

"It's the future," Jimin said quietly.

"We need to find another Timestick," Loki added.

Chaos reigned in the main corridors of the T.V.A.. Agents ran around in panic as unnerving orange lighting lit the hall. Chairs were overturned haphazardly and a robotic voice warning them of imminent doom played overhead. The Asian woman froze as she took in the scene, her head on a swivel as she tried to see everything at once. The god was already feet ahead of her, and getting further without noticing that she'd fallen behind.

Don't get her wrong— Jimin had been on tough missions. She'd gone days without food, she'd lost friends and a lover, she'd even taken a dagger to the stomach and lived to tell the tale. But she'd always been given recuperation time before S.H.I.E.L.D. sent her back out into the field. This— days on end of life-changing events that a mortal mind could barely comprehend would understandably have her reaching a breaking point unlike any other assignment.

So, no one could blame her when she called out above the noise: "Loki!"

He turned around with some surprise at the fact that she wasn't beside him, but back by the Temporal Loom doors. He ran back to her, his expression urgent with an undertone of concern. "What's the matter? We don't have much time."

"I—" she began, her gaze once again falling on the disorder around them. "I can't navigate this. I-I don't know how. But. . . but you do, so—" (Which was the closest she would ever come to saying 'I need you.')

To his great surprise, she put her hand out between them, her palm face up. He stared at it for a moment as the alarms continued to blare above them. Some agent knocked into his shoulder as they ran, but he hardly paid attention as he tried to figure out what she was asking for. Despite the note of desperation in her voice, there was still some of her usual shortness as she demanded, "don't make me spell it out for you."

Tentatively, half expecting that she would pull her hand away at any moment (or worse, slap him), he took her hand in his. As his fingers folded between hers, he was startled at how small her hand seemed in his. For a warrior of such great strength, he'd thought that her hands would be stouter, larger. Instead, they were almost. . . delicate in structure, though their calloused roughness was certainly expected.

With her hand firmly in his, he led the way through the pandemonium around them. She ran slightly behind him to allow the god to act as a buffer for any oncoming agent that wasn't looking where they were going, and she kept up more easily than if she'd been running beside him.

They made their way to the room where Casey worked and paused to look at the branching timeline. Each thread now extended far past the red warning line on either side of the black screen. But, there was no Timestick in the room. Loki glanced down at the stopwatch. "Still green," he said, both to reassure himself and the woman beside him.

The next place they looked was down a less crowded hallway. The stillness of it made them pause, which gave the god time to look down at the clock once more. Except, this time, it turned to green.

"Shit," Jimin breathed out, her heart thundering in her chest due to rapidly approaching deadline. Instinctively, her hand tightened in Loki's, not ready to face the thought of disappearing from all of existence by herself.

Then, cutting through the relative silence of the corridor, a phone rang at the end of the hall. They looked towards the sound, unusual in the midst of such a situation, before they began to approach it. However, a more important sound caught their attention: the doors of the elevator were opening as someone inside tried to get out— quite possibly the last person they could have predicted it to be.

"There you are," Sylvie grunted as she held the doors open just wide enough for them to see a sliver of her.

They could only stare at her, stunned for a moment, before a burning sensation tore through them. It started at Jimin's chest, and she had just enough time to look down to see that part of her already disappearing. Someone had pruned her— them— stabbing them right in the back.

✧✧✧

When they quite literally exploded from the time stream, they were sent hurtling through space towards the Temporal Loom doors. Since they could barely control their trajectory or speed, Loki did his best to shift them in transit so that the brunette was securely positioned in front of him. Unlike their first harsh landing the Gobi desert, he made a purposeful effort to shield Jimin from what would surely be a bone-crushing impact for a mortal. He wrapped his arms around her as they collided with Mobius, who was on his way back from starting up the Temporal Aura Extractor.

The force of the collision sent them sailing through the T.V.A's doors just as they were sliding shut, allowing them to land safely inside. Everything was quiet for a moment as they realized that, for a few precious seconds, they were safe. And, in this time, Jimin allowed herself the smallest of respites to rest her head briefly on Loki's chest with her eyes closed. (After all, if anyone were to say anything, everyone in the room knew she'd be perfectly willing to knock them upside the head.)

A/n: I'm sorry it's taken so long to publish another update! (Although I did say I didn't know when the next one would be.) I've been in a very Loki mood recently so I wanted to write the next part— and I did so in one 3-hour sitting :)

I've been thinking recently that I want to revamp my other Loki book (Etoile) that's MCU (and not the series) based. I have a lot of ideas for it but I just have so many other things to write that Idk if I have the time. Maybe once I finish this book I'll work on that one. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! (There will definitely be more Loki/Jimin moments this season 😉)