Unlikely Allies

Chapter 4

Loki squeezes his eyes shut, rubbing them lazily with his hand. This is exhausting. He wants to do something. He doesn't want to do anything that will help the TVA, but he wants to do something. Anything. Just sitting here is going to bore him to sleep.

Jane, meanwhile, is as enthusiastic as ever. She's been talking to Miss Minutes for the last... however long it's been. They're not even doing their stupid lessons anymore. Jane is just talking. She's asking so many questions that even Miss Minutes seems out of her depth here. Loki's been tuning in and out, uninterested in their conversation but bored when he's not listening.

"But what if there is no butterfly effect?" Jane is asking. "What if it doesn't affect anything? If I went to a conference and I accidentally stuttered during my presentation and I wasn't supposed to, would that create a branch? It pushes the conference back a few seconds, but it doesn't spiral into anything. Can that coexist with the original Sacred Timeline?"

"The Sacred Timeline isn't that black-and-white, dear," Miss Minutes says. "There is no exact path you have to—"

"But it is," Jane insists, cutting her off. "There has to be an exact path, or we wouldn't be able to deviate from it."

"Well," Miss Minutes says awkwardly, and the first few times she seemed a little unsure, Loki had thought it was funny, but now it's just getting annoying, "there's no exact path you have to follow, but there's a general path..."

"So there can be two different versions of the Timeline?" she asks. "One where I stuttered and one where I didn't? Because the end result is the same, but in one timeline I have the memory of stuttering and in the other, I don't. So they're different timelines, but the end result — everything after that — is exactly the same."

"But that wouldn't happen..." Miss Minutes says.

"Why not?" Jane asks. "Because every moment in time coexists, right? And that's how Variants are made. They act differently in that moment than they usually do on the Sacred Timeline. Right? And that spirals into something bigger, and the Timeline branches."

"Yes, that's —"

"But what if it doesn't spiral?" she asks. "And the rest of the Timeline stays the same, but that moment is different in two different timelines. Nothing else changes. Is that a branch?"

"But that wouldn't happen," Miss Minutes says.

"Why not?" Jane asks. "What stops it from happening? Because we all have free will. We don't have to follow every moment that's laid out for us. I didn't. Loki didn't."

Miss Minutes glances at Loki, who just rolls his eyes. This is so boring.

"So what stops us from making one small, harmless change?" Jane asks.

Miss Minutes opens her mouth to answer, but no words come out. She just thinks about it for a while, and Loki finds himself hoping Jane will just give up. She doesn't.

"Can these two instances coexist?" Jane asks again. "It's a simple question. How much freedom do we have? If I had two flavors of chapstick in my car, I put on the cotton candy in one timeline and the cherry in the other, and I put them back the same way, can they coexist or does one have to be pruned?"

Miss Minutes frowns, and Jane looks at her expectantly. Loki groans and hits his head against the desk, exasperated. Maybe he should have just told Mobius to prune him. Death must be a lot less boring than this.

"You having fun yet, Loki?"

Speak of the devil. Mobius comes up behind him and pats him on the back, and Loki sits up and hits his hand away irritably.