#validatemepls

[iamanartichoke]

I started a blog to write/post original fic, if anyone is interested. I'll mostly just be using it as a space to respond to writing prompts I find here, on Pinterest, and on the internet in general.

[broadwaysweetie]

Quarantine means I’ve been taking a lot of dumb photos where I don’t look at the camera 🤷‍♀️

[gaytheist-bitch]

𝗍𝖾𝗅𝗅 𝗒𝗈𝗎𝗋 𝖻𝗈𝗒𝖿𝗋𝗂𝖾𝗇𝖽 𝗂𝖿 𝗁𝖾 𝗌𝖺𝗒𝗌 𝗁𝖾'𝗌 𝗀𝗈𝗍 𝖻𝖾𝖾𝖿 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗍 𝗂'𝗆 𝖺 𝖿𝗎𝖼𝗄𝗂𝗇𝗀 𝗅𝖾𝗌𝖻𝗂𝖺𝗇 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝗂 𝗀𝗂𝗏𝖾 𝖻𝖾𝗍𝗍𝖾𝗋 𝗁𝖾𝖺𝖽 𝗍𝗁𝖺𝗇 𝗁𝗂𝗆 ______________________________________________ #Selfie #Aesthetic #Edgy #Goth #Black #ValiDATEMEPLS #BaldBitch #Chicago (at LOvE eRA :- I want to live in Ur eyes not as a dream but as a sight.) https://www.instagram.com/p/CAPJc5UDuY4/?igshid=6qqir8wf0ps7

[wife-emailer]

A Fat Boy I drew this sideways on my bed I got #skillz • #drawing #art #bird #sketch #sparrow #validatemepls

[iamanartichoke]

Fic prompt: If you feel like doing another hurt/comfort with Mobius, I would love a version of that end scene where Loki's freaking out but it actually is our Mobius. So Mobius listens to everything Loki has to say, and then they just kind of...take a breath, I suppose, before whatever they're going to do to fight Kang - perhaps Loki gets some tea, and/or an actual meal, a little sleep maybe (has he eaten since that cake on the train or slept since that brief nap in ep 2??), or whatever comfort-y stuff you want - I just need that sweet fic healing lmao.

@scintillatingshortgirl19 Thank you for the prompt and I hope you like it! <3

Summary: Takes place at the end of episode 6, where instead of saying "Who are you?" Mobius knows Loki and they pick up from where they left off in the void. Word Count: 1956 Author’s notes: I'm not feeling super confident with these prompts, so please don't judge me bear with me as I dust off my little writer-brain gears and try to find my footing with these new characters and characterizations.

Completed prompts.

*

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Mobius is saying, holding his hands up, but Loki can’t stop talking. The words are spilling from him; he’s tripping over them, and from the look on Mobius’s face Loki knows he’s not making sense, but still, he can’t stop.

“He’s set on war,” Loki babbles. “We need to prepare, Mobius.”

“Hang on.” When Loki pauses to take a breath, Mobius reaches out and places his hands on Loki’s shoulders. It’s almost comical, the way he needs to reach, as Loki towers over him. Yet Loki feels very small, too, and doesn’t protest the contact. “You’re speaking faster than my brain can process words. Breathe, okay? Start at the beginning.”

Loki doesn’t know when the beginning was. It could have been the moment he’d leapt up and grabbed Sylvie’s arm before she could land a fatal blow to their enemy; it could have been all those days (or months, or hours, Loki has no idea; time, for him, has completely ceased to exist) ago that he’d landed in a Midgardian desert and the TVA immediately swarmed upon him.

“You’re not understanding me.” Frustration colors Loki’s tone. “There’s no time to stop; he’s - they’re - coming.”

“You’re right, I’m not understanding you.” Mobius lets go of Loki’s shoulders and rubs the back of his neck. “I want to, but you gotta slow down and fill me in, okay?”

“Maybe we should take him somewhere,” says B-15. Loki had barely noticed her but now he steps back, his gaze flicking from her to Mobius, taking in the confusion on both of their faces.

“You don’t look so good,” B-15 adds, taking in Loki’s appearance. He must be a sight, he realizes; his hair is matted and tangled and he feels grimy, his skin caked with so much dirt and blood from injuries he doesn’t remember getting.

But, what difference does it make? Loki turns back to Mobius, desperate. “Mobius, listen to me. Sylvie and I -”

“Come on.” Mobius cuts him off. He moves in, taking one of Loki’s arms. “You can tell me everything, okay, Loki? I just need you to calm down and to come with me, preferably before you pass out. Hauling around a five hundred pound demigod wasn’t on my to-do list today.”

Loki bites back a sharp retort. He’s vaguely aware of B-15 taking his other arm, and it’s only once Loki’s shoulders slump and he allows himself to be led away from the shelves that the exhaustion hits him. He’s been running high on adrenaline for hours, and now that he’s moving slowly, supported on either side, all of that energy seems to drain from him at once. His knees buckle.

“Careful,” Mobius says. Were it not for him and B-15 holding him up, Loki is certain he would have collapsed. He squeezes his eyes shut and focuses on placing one foot in front of the other, not caring where they’re going. The archives, the time theater, one place is the same as another.

They move through halls that are bustling with activity, minutemen running and disembodied voices crackling over speakers. They don’t know it’s pointless, no amount of hunters in the field will matter or make a difference.

He thinks he says so, or perhaps he just imagines he does. Neither Mobius nor B-15 acknowledge him, at any rate; they only keep moving and after awhile, they arrive at the dormitories, where Loki has not been since the first day Mobius brought him here as an official TVA employee.

“Why are we here?” Loki asks, confused.

“So you can get a shower and a change of clothes,” Mobius says simply, “and then we can have some coffee and you can tell me what happened after the void.”

Loki sighs, and then nods, resisting the urge to insist that everything else could wait (until when?), because Mobius isn’t understanding the precariousness of the situation, but he knows it won’t do any good.

“Fine,” he says instead, giving up. The sooner he does what Mobius asks, the sooner Mobius will listen.

He’d not realized just how badly he needed that shower and change of clothes until he’s scrubbed the dirt and blood from his skin and allowed the hot water to beat over his sore muscles and rapidly-forming bruises. For lack of anything else to wear, he puts on a clean suit, fastening the cuffs firmly around his wrists and buttoning the collar up to his neck.

He’s sick of this outfit; he never wants to see it again but, without his magic, he has no other choice.

In the dormitory kitchen, Mobius is brewing a pot of coffee. He looks up when Loki walks in, and his mouth quirks in a half smile. “Better,” he says, “but you could still probably use some sleep and a meal.”

“Stop fussing,” Loki snaps, irritated with Mobius’s sudden desire to hover over him like a governess hovering over a petulant child who won’t eat his peas. “I hate coffee, by the way.”

“You’ve never had my coffee,” Mobius retorts, sounding unbothered. “Just sit down, okay? You still look like hell, is my point. When’s the last time anyone fussed over you, anyway?”

Loki makes a scoffing noise as he drops down into a chair at one of the small kitchen tables. “I’m sure my mother did at some point, I don’t remember.” Actually, he remembers very well that it was always his mother who looked after him when he was sick or tired or lonely, until he’d grown too old to allow himself to seek her out for comfort.

But he doesn’t want to think of his mother, who is lost to him and perhaps lost to the real Loki as well, the sacred timeline’s Loki, if enough time has progressed and Malekith has indeed run her through with a sword and left her bleeding out on the palace floor.

Loki shudders as he thinks of it, remembering the sight of his mother’s lifeless body projected onto a screen. He’d been helpless to stop it, utterly powerless, just as ultimately he’d been powerless to stop Sylvie.

His mother, dead. Sylvie, lost to him. The timeline destroyed - the end of everything. The weight of it all crashes over him; had he not already been sitting, the sheer despair of it would have brought him to his knees.

Loki drops his head into his hands instead, thinking back to Mobius’s words that first day: you were born to cause pain and suffering and death.

In retrospect, Loki knows that Mobius was merely fighting dirty, using whatever words necessary to break Loki down - the ends justify the means, and all that - but he wasn’t goddamn wrong.

How could Loki have ever believed, even for a second, that he could possibly change?

We write our own destinies now, he’d told that creepy little clock hologram, and she’d smirked, seen right through the words because they were rubbish and they both knew it.

Good luck with that.

Loki doesn’t realize he’s crying until Mobius sets down a steaming mug of coffee in front of him. He lifts his head and rubs tiredly at his tear-stained cheeks, unable to meet Mobius’s gaze as Mobius sits down across from him with his own mug.

“Here,” Mobius adds, reaching into his inside blazer pocket. He pulls out a slim, red candy stick wrapped in plastic and hands that to Loki as well.

Loki stares at it. “What is this?”

“Something better than grapes or nuts,” Mobius says dryly. “It’s a Twizzler. Popular Earth candy. I’d say don’t tell anyone I’ve stashed a bunch, but …” He trails off and shrugs, glancing around at the kitchen with forced amusement. “Doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”

He pulls out a second Twizzler and unwraps the plastic, then bites into the candy. Loki watches him for a moment, and then imitates him. “Gross,” he says, after he’s taken a bite. It’s a very bland candy, with texture not unlike rubber. “Think I prefer grapes.”

“Well, maybe Twizzlers are an acquired taste,” says Mobius.

Loki finishes the Twizzler anyway, and then takes a sip of coffee. He does usually dislike coffee, but either he’s hungrier than he’d realized or Mobius has a gift, because this cup is actually quite good.

“Okay, now let’s go back to the beginning,” Mobius prompts, after a silence. He drums his fingertips against the table. “What happened? I’m assuming you were able to enchant the murder cloud?”

All of the words that had been spilling from Loki’s lips before, so desperate to be released, now get stuck somewhere in his throat. He wraps his hands around his mug and takes another sip of coffee, wondering idly how long it had been since he’d actually had something warm to drink. Or eat, for that matter. The train on Lamentis, perhaps. A moment ago, a lifetime ago.

“We did,” he finally says. Despite the coffee, a chill breaks out over his skin and he sets the mug down, choosing to fold his arms as if to fold into himself for warmth. “We made it past Alioth and found him - the one who’s responsible for all of this.”

Just like that, the words are no longer stuck. Loki pours out the entire story, starting from when he and Sylvie had crossed the threshold into the citadel and ending with his own tumble back through the tempad’s portal into the TVA.

But he omits the kiss, only mentioning that Sylvie had distracted him to get the upper hand. He’ll never speak of it - either that Sylvie had used his feelings for her in order to betray him, or that he’d fallen for it (of course he’d fallen for it; for a few seconds there, he’d let himself believe - but, it doesn’t matter, it wasn’t real, and there are bigger problems now).

“She closed the portal before I could get back through it,” Loki says. He notices that he’s twisting his fingers together so tightly that his knuckles are turning white. He forces himself to stop. “I can only imagine she finished the job after that because, well.” He barks a laugh that sounds, even to his own ears, broken and pathetic. He used to be so good at maintaining a cool, calm facade but it, like so many other things, had been steadily breaking apart, piece by piece. There is very little left to guard the scared little ice runt who trembles at the core.

“Look at the timeline,” he adds; he laughs again and rubs his eyes against a fresh wave of tears.

For a long time, neither of them say anything. Loki finishes his coffee and Mobius eats two more Twizzlers before another word is spoken.

“So we lost.” Mobius’s voice is hollow. “We lost before we could begin to fight.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mobius shrugs. He runs a hand over his short, gray hair before letting out a laugh of his own. “He Who Remains,” he repeats, more to himself than to Loki.

Loki allows a beat to pass. “We have to try to fix it, Mobius.” The only way to ease the weight of his guilt, Loki knows, is if he goes back and tries to make it right - or to die trying.

“How are we supposed to do that?” It’s Mobius’s turn to rub his eyes. His shoulders slump and for a moment, he looks very tired. Older. Loki studies him and wonders, fleetingly, if the real Mobius is someone’s father. “I don’t even know where to begin, Loki.”

“I might.” Loki straightens. Deep down, beneath the anguish, a seed of determination has taken hold and he focuses on that; a lifeline. “But you’ll need to trust me.”

[iamanartichoke]

work-in-progress wednesday

on Thursday, bc day is a vestigial mode of time measurement based on solar cycles,* and days-of-the-week are an arbitrary social construct to which I refuse to be a slave. Also I didn't have anything to post yesterday.

But, last night I met my goal that I set last weekend to write 200 words so.

From chapter 7 of Set the Fractured Bone:

“Dad called today,” Thor says.

It’s the first thing Thor’s said directly to Loki in over a week, and it comes after they’ve been in their room, ignoring one another, for at least two hours. Loki is laying on his bed, highlighting random passages in his English anthology, while Thor has been engrossed in his phone, his earbuds making him immune to the otherwise oppressive silence of the dorm.

Loki looks up; Thor has removed one of his earbuds and is half looking at Loki, half still involved in his phone. “Okay,” Loki says, uncertainly. “And?”

“And, he and Mom are going to be here on Friday around one. You know,” Thor elaborates, at Loki’s blank look, “for Parents Weekend?”

Because why not torment the Brodinsons with awkward family bonding time lmao.

Join my prayer circle and maybe I'll finish this chapter before 2022.

*I stole this quote from Firefly This is a Firefly reference.

[iamanartichoke]

Congrats on follower milestone! I greatly enjoy your presence on my dash with your thoughts and witty tags and all :) For the Loki writing prompt, here's a sort of idea or mood or emotion, very vague, but maybe you can make something of it, and if not, totally cool! Prompt: Mobius taking care of Loki.

@humbae Thanks so much for your kind words as well as the prompt! I kinda just took the "taking care of" idea and had Mobius do the bare minimum, bc it's angstier that way, but I hope you like it anyway.

Summary: Takes place immediately after the end of episode 1; Loki has a realization and Mobius kinda maybe cares. Word Count: 1460 Author’s notes: Please forgive the quality, I started this earlier today and wanted to post it before watching the finale, so I finished the last bit of it in a less-than-alert state, merp.

*

“What’s this?” Loki asks. He can’t keep the edge of suspicion out of his voice.

“It’s tea,” Mobius says, as if it’s obvious. He sets the red mug down in front of Loki. “What we normally do is drink it.”

The suspicion doesn’t leave him. Loki eyes the mug, wondering if he’d even be able to tell if Mobius had done something nefarious to it - but, there would be little point in Mobius going to the trouble of intervening in Loki’s “trial” and recruiting him to the TVA only to turn around and poison him so, despite himself, Loki picks up the mug and takes a cautious sip.

“Hope you like chamomile,” Mobius adds as he takes the seat across from Loki. “It’s all I could find.”

“It’s passable,” Loki says, after a longer sip. When was the last time he’d had anything to drink? He can’t remember; the blur of New York shifts too sharply into the shock of the TVA and his brain feels too muddled to grasp onto any specifics. There’s been a consistent twisting in his stomach for days; he doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s eaten, either.

Mobius is just watching him and Loki hunches his shoulders, a bit defensively. “What,” he says, setting down the mug.

Mobius shrugs. “You’re not the first Loki variant to come through here,” he responds. Before, when he’d been questioning Loki, everything about his posture had been straight and precise; now that the interrogation is over, Mobius has adopted a much more casual stance, leaning against the back of his chair with his legs slightly outstretched. “There’ve been a lot.”

“How many is a lot?” Loki’s mind is still spinning from the revelation that the rogue variant they’re hunting is another version of himself, but the idea of even more being out there just makes him feel slightly ill. There would be a crisis here, were Loki in a clearer headspace - something about how it could be possible for more than one version of himself to exist, and if those versions existed, what proof does he have that he, himself, in this moment, also exists? How does he know he is the real Loki? Is there a real Loki?

Apparently, he is in a clear enough headspace for a minor crisis. He wraps his hands around the mug, waiting for Mobius to answer.

“I don’t know,” is all Mobius says. “I’ve lost count, to be perfectly honest with you. You’re like a bad penny, you know - you just keep turning up. You’re a stubborn bastard, I’ll give you that.”

“Thank you.” Loki’s tone is icy. “So if there are so many other variants, why not prune me? What do you think I can do for you that they couldn’t?”

Mobius looks thoughtful for a moment before he shrugs. “Call it a hunch, I guess.”

Wonderful. Loki’s entire existence rests on this bureaucrat of a man’s hunch. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t find that particularly reassuring,” he counters. “How do I know you won’t simply prune me either once we find this other variant, or once I stop being useful to you?”

“What, whichever comes first?” Mobius’s lips tilt slightly upward. “I suppose you don’t.”

Loki slumps a bit in his chair. He’s still holding onto the mug and, for lack of anything else to do, brings it back to his lips. Chamomile, Mobius had called it. It tastes like honey, with just the slightest tinge of apples, and it makes Loki think of the fruit in Idunn’s orchard, how they melted on his tongue like sugar. He remembers dewy summer evenings, laying in the grass with Thor, each of them with a golden apple’s sticky sweetness coating their lips and teeth.

The back of his throat tightens and he focuses on the tea, blinking hard against the sudden sting of tears. Crying in front of Mobius is not something he wants to make a habit of.

Still - “In the desert, when your hunters set off those reset chargers …”

“They pruned the alternate timeline you created when you took off with the tesseract, yeah.” Mobius adjusts his position, straightening up and leaning forward, elbows on the table. “You - that is, the you that’s supposed to exist - never escaped. Your brother took you back to Asgard.”

“And the sacred timeline continues as it should.” The twisting in Loki’s stomach worsens, and it has nothing to do with hunger. “Which means I can never return to Asgard, because he’s already there.”

Mobius’s forehead creases a bit as he nods. He looks almost sympathetic. “You don’t have a place there, no,” he agrees.

A heavy silence falls over them. Loki doesn’t need Mobius to spell it out any further. Loki, the Loki he is right now, will never see Thor again. Nor his mother, or even Odin … but mostly, not Thor. His brother is the worst kind of gone, because he’s not dead, nor lost. He exists on the sacred timeline, forever separated from Loki, and none the wiser to Loki’s absence. He’ll never know that Loki is gone, because the correct Loki is still right where he should be - rotting in Asgard’s dungeons, perhaps, but home all the same.

Rage wells up inside of him, swift and cutting. He pushes away from the table and jumps to his feet so abruptly that even Mobius startles, but before he can do anything, Loki has hurled the red mug against the wall and it shatters, tea and glass shards clattering to the floor. “It isn’t fair,” he snarls; he pushes his hands through his hair, yanking hard at the strands yet the sting of it barely even registers. "That's not fair."

“Loki -”

Loki barely hears him. He drops his hands and clenches his fists; the rage is pressing against his throat, desperate for escape. He wants to scream. He wants to hurl magic in every direction. He truly wants to burn this place to the ground - the TVA, the timekeepers, and every person within it who is complicit in taking away entire realities with hardly a thought spared to the variants left behind.

He’s breathing hard. The trouble is, all of that anger has nowhere to go. Loki cannot bring himself to explode the way he wants to - with neither his magic nor the ability to set fire to the timekeepers’ hearts here and now, the only other option he’s got is to throw things, and he’s hurled enough chairs for today.

Closing his eyes, Loki turns in a circle, grabbing the back of his chair. Instead of throwing it, he leans forward, pressing all of his weight against it because he isn’t sure he can hold himself up. The effort it takes to keep from screaming is leaving him light-headed. Not Thor. Please, please don’t take Thor from me.

“Loki,” Mobius says again. Loki draws in a breath and lets it out slowly, and then opens his eyes and looks up. Mobius is hovering over him, but somehow he’s less dominating than he’d been before. He seems almost concerned - either that, or just plain tired. “Look, I get it. I get that you’re upset, but -”

“How?” Loki demands. His voice is hardly more than a growl. “The timekeepers made you. You’ve never lost anyone. You’ve never known anything besides this … this nightmare.” Frustrated, he pushes away from the chair and gestures broadly at the room around them. “Don’t tell me you get it.”

Mobius sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You’re right,” he agrees, “I suppose I don’t get it. But I can’t change what you’ve lost, either. All I can do is -”

“I know,” Loki cuts him off, and now he is the one who feels just plain tired. Just as swiftly as the rage had crashed over him, it was now receding again, leaving Loki feeling drained and so, so exhausted. “All you can do is offer me opportunity.” Not salvation. Not anything useful.

Instead of replying, Mobius just puts his hands in his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “Why don’t we start fresh tomorrow,” he suggests. “Okay? ‘Cause I can also offer you your benefits package, if you’re interested. Involves a hot meal and a place to sleep.” His lips quirk a little. “No offense, but you look like you could use both, like, yesterday.”

Loki eyes the other man. Mobius’s features blur a bit, and he realizes it’s because his eyes have welled up. He rubs them and then sighs and nods, giving in because what else is he to do? This is what he has been reduced to - powerless, with nowhere else to go, his entire existence contingent upon getting in - and staying in - Mobius’s good graces.

He’ll start with a hot meal.

[iamanartichoke]

work-in-progress wednesday

Bc I’ve actually been writing this week! 

From chapter 6 of Set the Fractured Bone:

“Are you sorry?” Loki suddenly looked like the younger of the two of them, which was odd because Thor always considered them more or less the same age. 

[...]

“No.” Thor found his voice. He shook his head vehemently. “I’m not sorry. Are you?” 

“No.” Loki pressed his lips together and dropped his gaze. He was tracing absent little circles on the sheets with his finger. “I’ve, you know, kinda wanted to do that for … for awhile.” 

“Me too,” Thor admitted, even though he hadn’t realized how much he’d wanted to until it finally happened. “Longer than awhile.” 

(For context, if anyone remembers, chapter 5 ended with Loki impulsively kissing Thor and I was like LOL next update will be quick bc ch 6 picks up in this exact place and then I abandoned it for two years). 

[iamanartichoke]

Title: Set the Fractured Bone Rating: Mature Categories: M/M Relationships: Thor/Loki Archive Warnings: Chose Not to Use Chapter: 6/? Chapter Summary:  July flashback - Thor and Loki approach the point of no return. Present day - Tony "confronts" Thor.

~Follow the link to Chapter 6~

(If you would like to read/re-read from the beginning: Chapter 1 )

I wish this were a longer chapter, but here we are. Comments are greatly appreciated.

[iamanartichoke]

work-in-progress wednesday

Gonna post a double excerpt bc I do what I want. 

From current WIP: 

[Loki] gestures weakly toward Thor - “ ... how could she have bested you? Nothing can hurt you, Thor. Not like this. And here we sit, reduced to rubble and ash, drifting aimlessly through the stars. I’ve had nightmares more plausible than this.”

“You’re certainly poetic when you’re maudlin,” Thor remarks, the corner of his mouth tilting a little bit.

“You don’t even know what maudlin means,” Loki shoots back. It makes Thor laugh, though the sound fades again a moment later. Loki watches as Thor rubs his eye, and then shifts even closer, resting his forehead against Loki’s temple.

From Ch. 6 of Set the Fractured Bone: 

We’re brothers. That was what Thor meant to say. He caught himself just in time, pressing his lips tightly together. He simply meant it as a statement of fact, and possibly even a reminder of why they’ve left this thing between them alone for their entire lives - but, Thor knew Loki and he absolutely knew that Loki would take it as flat out rejection.

It was supposed to be a rejection, though, wasn’t it? We’re brothers. We’re brothers, and because we’re brothers, you can’t kiss me. The words were on the tip of Thor’s tongue; the logical part of his brain urged him to say them, to remind Loki and himself of the boundaries that existed between them.

It was just …

Loki had opened the door on something, and if Thor rejected him now, then the door would be slammed shut again before Thor even had a chance to get a look at what was inside.

[iamanartichoke]

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