Chapter Text
Getting stabbed hadn’t been a great start to Loki’s day.
His mistake was not taking into account how much of a toll however-long-it’s-been of nonstop searching the multiverse for one irritatingly elusive, beautiful analyst would take on his body. He was much hardier than a mortal, sure, but that long with only stolen snatches of sleep and the occasional meal had dulled his senses far more than he initially realized.
It’s not like he had a choice. The multiverse had been freed, and somewhere in its tangled threads was Mobius. His Mobius, not any of the many men with his face, his lovely face that stayed free of any recognition when Loki approached the imposters. His Mobius had to be out there. He couldn’t have just ceased to exist after He Who Remains’s death. He couldn’t have. So almost as soon as Loki had arrived in the altered TVA, shoved by the woman he had been beginning to consider a sister, Loki had stolen a TemPad and begun his frantic search for the man he was rapidly coming to realize he loved.
Which was why Loki was here. New York, 2012. Being stabbed by a mugger with a pocketknife. Not very long ago, he would have lamented about how pathetic it was that a Prince of Asgard would be bested like this, by a simple mortal ruffian. But right now, all he did was stumble away from the woman—who looked about as shocked as he felt under the layers of exhaustion and numbness—and started fumbling with the TemPad. Loki had learned quite a lot in his time searching, especially about Midgard. One such factoid was that if he was visibly injured, people would contact what was called an ambulance. The ambulance would take him to a healing center, a hospital, which would ask him all sorts of questions he couldn’t answer, like “What year were you born?”, “What’s your insurance?”, and his least favorite, “Do you have any family we can get in contact with?” That meant no being injured on Midgard.
So he punched some numbers into the TemPad, trusting that it would take him somewhere he could deal with the wound in peace and quiet. He could come back to this New York later.
He distantly realized that the mugger was saying something to him as he staggered towards the time door he’d opened, but for the life of him, he couldn’t focus on the words enough to decipher them. No matter. Loki would hardly be seeing her again. Any social faux pas would be irrelevant. Ha. A criminal, his would-be murderer had she aimed a little to the right or had he been mortal, offended by his inattentiveness. Loki chuckled to himself as he all but fell through the door and slid down onto the tasteful gray marble that made up the floor on the other side.
He didn’t bother looking around, which a little corner of his mind argued was strange. Always take in your surroundings when stepping through a time door. The change could be jarring, and you never knew what exactly you were walking into. Mobius had taught him that, when they were searching for Sylvie. It made a lot of sense; they were going into apocalypses! Of course things were dangerous and needed attention. Then the suspicious little corner of his mind got distracted thinking about Pompeii and the look on Mobius’s face as Loki freed the goats, leaving the rest to focus unbothered on taking out his meager medical supplies out of his bag and preparing to pull out the knife.
Loki grasped the handle with both hands, gritting his teeth in apprehension. Alright, Laufeyson, on the count of three. One… two…
“Excuse us!” an unpleasantly familiar voice made Loki startle, jostling the knife and causing red to fill his vision for a few seconds. When it cleared, Loki was incredibly dismayed to see none other than Iron Man standing over him, fully suited up with a repulsor aimed at his face. Behind Stark, Loki could also see the Captain and the Doctor that hid the green beast. The assassins, he noticed with a hint of embarrassment, were already on either side of him, aiming their respective weapons at his temple. Judging from the crater in the marble not too far away from him, Loki knew that he wasn’t much farther forward than when he left the timeline in the first place, meaning that he could only hope that Thor wasn’t still around with another Loki.
What was that Midgardian curse Sylvie had taught him again? Oh, yes:
“Fuck.”