Chapter 149
Arc 9 - Ch 16: For All Time, Always
Location: The Time Variance Authority
Tyson stopped abruptly as he flew through the time door. The familiar bronze walls of the TVA materialized around him. He hovered for a moment, boots inches from the floor, taking in the empty time theater.
He Who Remains had just sent him back. After all that.
Sylvie, Throg, Kid Loki, and Loki had also been sent through time doors. But they weren't here. He didn't know where she was. The thought cut sharper than the mission failure, more immediate than the puzzle of He Who Remains. He didn't know if Sylvie was in the Void again. Didn't know if she'd landed in a different branch of reality, or been deposited at the Citadel. He'd told her everything was going to be fine. And then He Who Remains had rearranged the board and scattered her to a destination Tyson couldn't predict.
He'd told her he'd keep her safe. Not in those words, but in every action since Lamentis. And now she was gone, and he was standing in an empty room, and the silence where she should have been was louder than anything else in the theater.
Tyson landed in the empty theater. No Minutemen. No Mobius. No variants. Just him. He didn't have the TemPad. He didn't have a Loki.
He stood in the silence for a long moment and let himself feel the shape of it.
He'd been sent here. Not fled, not escaped. Sent. There was a meaningful difference. He hadn't outfought He Who Remains, hadn't outsmarted him, hadn't found the angle that turned the disadvantage around. He'd been removed from the board. One moment he was flying at a man with Mjölnir and Nexus and everything he had, and the next he was here, in an empty theater, with nothing but the echo of an orange portal closing behind him.
He thought about the apple again. He couldn't help it. The apple, the Hela moment, the absorption wall, the third-person speech. He'd been filing all of it, and now, in the quiet of the theater with no immediate threat demanding his attention, the drawer holding all those pieces opened on its own. He had pieces that pointed to a puzzle he couldn't fully see. The shape of an answer without its final form.
He'd been defeated by He Who Remains.
Not outmaneuvered. Not outplayed in some strategic sense that left room for a rematch with better preparation. Defeated. Not like Annihilus, where the collar had leveled the field, and he'd scraped a win through improvisation. This was clean. Total. He Who Remains had caught Mjölnir in one hand and held it there. The man had backhanded him hard enough to cause a blackout, and his spider-sense hadn't even whispered a warning. It had come so fast his enhanced vision could barely track it, and hit so hard it had reminded him of matching blows with the Juggernaut. His regeneration had fixed the physical damage, but the body remembered. His hands remembered reaching for the man's wrist and pulling with everything his absorption could give, and finding nothing. Not resistance. Not overwhelming power. Nothing. Like reaching into someone and discovering there was no one there to take from, even though his fingers could feel a pulse and his eyes could see a man standing in front of him.
He Who Remains hadn't felt like a wall. He'd felt like a hole in the world. That last part was the one he kept circling back to. Not the speed, not the strength, not even the casual avoidance of every attack. Those were problems of degree, and problems of degree could theoretically be solved with enough preparation and power. The absorption failure was something else. It was a category he didn't have a name for.
He'd think about what that meant, but the answer would evade him for now. The pieces didn't fit. Not yet.
As of right now, he'd failed his mission from Odin.
That made him clench his jaw. Odin had given him a title and sent him to retrieve Loki. Not as a commander issuing orders to a subordinate, as a father asking someone he trusted to bring his son home. The distinction mattered. Tyson had understood it at the time and understood it now, standing in an empty theater with no Loki to show for it. Instead, he'd chased a Variant across apocalypses, fought cosmic entities, and ended up exactly where he'd started. Empty-handed.
He sat with that for a moment. Genuinely sat with it, which wasn't something he did often. He was better at moving than sitting. But Odin's face, the way the All-Father's single eye had carried both command and plea in the same look, deserved a moment.
Odin had given him a job. Find Loki, bring him back. A retrieval mission. The kind of thing that should have been straightforward, given everything at his disposal before the Battle of New York. Tyson had been trusted with someone's child and had returned without him. He'd lost him. Not to a superior force, that might have been forgivable. He'd lost Loki to an organization that existed outside of time, and then lost him again when He Who Remains scattered everyone through separate portals. Loki was somewhere in the multiverse. Alive, probably. Tyson had seen enough to believe the God of Mischief could survive almost anything. But somewhere in the multiverse wasn't what Odin had asked for. He'd asked for his son.
Instead, he'd gotten pulled into the machinery of the TVA, been handed a front-row seat to the destabilization of the Sacred Timeline, fought the man who'd won a multiversal war, and come out the other side with no Loki, no TemPad, and no obvious next move.
He thought about what he'd actually accomplished. The list was short. He'd kept Sylvie alive through most of it. He'd kept the Tesseract out of Loki's hands, which had not been the mission but was probably worth something. He'd found out who was actually running the TVA, for whatever that was worth, because it hadn't gone the way anyone expected.
He'd also learned that there was at least one person in this universe whose power scale exceeded everything Tyson had accumulated. Who could stop Mjölnir in one hand and hold it there. Who could absorb a lightning bolt and extinguish it like a candle. Who was, for reasons Tyson still didn't understand, immune to the one ability he'd always considered his trump card.
He'd been defeated by Annihilus. Sure, he'd won in the end, but that wasn't a real win.
He'd been defeated by He Who Remains. A fucking normie who definitely wasn't a normie in any sense of the word.
Tyson paced the length of the theater. Was this another change his presence had brought about? The question gnawed at him. His presence had altered the timeline before, but this felt different. Deliberate. He Who Remains had scattered them like chess pieces across a board Tyson couldn't see.
He needed to find someone. Anyone. One of the variants, preferably, but Mobius or B-15 would do. Hell, even Renslayer was better than having no idea what was happening.
Tyson went to where Loki had left the Tesseract. The cube glowed with blue energy as he carefully wrapped it in the adamantium weave of his clothing. That would keep him from losing it.
He made his way into the hallway, the Tesseract sitting against the back of his ribs, and moved deeper into the facility. He passed the intake area where he'd first arrived and been saddled with that ridiculous jumpsuit. Months ago, by his count. He'd stopped trying to measure it precisely somewhere around the time Sylvie had kissed him in the bunker, because the Void didn't have days and the TVA didn't have clocks and his internal sense of duration had become unreliable. The memory felt distant now, separated by timeless months and apocalypses, and the hallway that had once seemed like a strange new environment now felt almost familiar. More familiar than home, and in a way that bothered him. He'd spent more continuous time in the TVA's bronze corridors than he'd spent in any single location since arriving in this universe.
Wait, was that true?
He'd spent months at Xavier's Institute, at Midtown, House of M, Project PEGASUS, and yes, now the TVA.
Somewhere along the way, the TVA had become a kind of normal, and the world he'd come from, New York, House of M, his friends and life had become the thing that felt distant.
All he knew was that the person who'd walked into this intake area in a collar felt like a younger version of himself. Tyson had walked through that door as someone who hadn't yet fought Annihilus, hadn't been pruned, hadn't held Sylvie's hand in an elevator, hadn't stood before He Who Remains, and had every weapon in his arsenal rendered irrelevant.
The room hadn't changed. He had.
The library entrance appeared ahead. Tyson slowed.
Something through the open archway caught his attention.
He stopped.
A massive statue dominated the central atrium, visible from every floor of the library. But it wasn't the three Time Keepers that had been there when he last visited. Instead, a towering figure stood with arms raised. The face was unmistakable. He Who Remains.
Tyson stepped closer, craning his neck to take in the full scope of it. The giant figure of He Who Remains battled smaller versions of himself, each one rendered in exquisite detail, swarming around him. The proportions were deliberate. He Who Remains stood three times the height of his attackers, a titan among men.
Tyson's chest tightened. This wasn't just art. It was a warning. A prophecy. A declaration of war.
Footsteps pounded against the floor behind him. Tyson spun, hand moving toward Mjölnir, before he recognized the figure sprinting toward him from the opposite corridor.
Mobius.
The agent's usually composed face was flushed, his hair disheveled. He skidded to a halt a few feet away, breathing hard. Relief moved through Tyson. At least he wasn't alone. But the relief died as quickly as it came. This mirrored the ending of the Loki series. The statue. The empty TVA. The confrontation in the library. Except in the series, it had been a statue of Kang. And Loki had been the one standing here, not him. Mobius hadn't recognized Loki at the end. Different timeline, different variant, different everything.
Mobius reached him, and Tyson braced for confusion. For the agent to demand who he was, why he was here, what he wanted.
Instead, Mobius grabbed his shoulder.
"Tyson! What did you do?"
Tyson blinked dumbly. "You recognize me."
"Of course I recognize you." Mobius's grip tightened. "What happened?"
Mobius remembered. This wasn't the ending of the series. This was something else entirely.
"I found out who was behind all this," Tyson said carefully. "We fought. I lost?" The uncertainty in his own voice made it sound like a question. Because he had lost, hadn't he?
"That's not all that happened." Mobius released his shoulder. "We know who runs the TVA. He Who Remains. We were explained everything."
"Explained?" Tyson gestured at the statue. "By who?"
"Miss Minutes. She appeared on every screen in the TVA about an hour ago. Gave us the whole speech. The multiversal war wasn't a lie, Tyson. It happened. He Who Remains won. He created the Sacred Timeline to prevent it from happening again."
Miss Minutes had briefed the entire TVA. That hadn't happened in the series he remembered. None of this had happened in the series. At least, not on-screen.
"And now?" Tyson asked, though he already knew the answer. The statue made it abundantly clear.
Mobius pointed at the monument. "Because of what you and Sylvie did, the multiversal war has kicked off again."
Tyson glanced around the library. Still no sign of Loki, Sylvie, Kid Loki, or Throg. Just him and Mobius beneath the monument to multiversal war.
That was the part that sat uneasily.
In the story he remembered, Mobius hadn't recognized Loki at the end because this version of the TVA, the one that replaced He Who Remains' statues with Kang's, was a different branch. A timeline where Mobius's memories had been rerouted, his history with Loki erased and replaced. That Mobius had looked at someone he'd worked alongside and seen a stranger.
This Mobius had recognized Tyson immediately. Grabbed his shoulder. Said of course I recognize you with the tone of someone who'd never considered the alternative.
The TVA didn't have branches, it was beyond time, just like the void, just like the citadel. But, like the show, things had changed. However, unlike the show, something had preserved Mobius's memory. Or Tyson's presence altered so much that the story's structure no longer applied.
He looked at the statue again. He Who Remains, not Kang. His variants clawing their way toward the central figure. Each one a conqueror. Each one a threat. The TVA's foundational mythology had been rewritten to reflect the man. That was a different kind of divergence, not a timeline branch but a root-level change to what the TVA was.
He Who Remains had done this deliberately. Tyson was certain of that. Scattering them, sending them through different time doors to different destinations, wasn't chaos. It was control. Keep them separated.
"We didn't kill him," Tyson said. "He sent us away." He stopped and worked through the sequence of events. "He said the threshold was crossed. But I'm not sure it was. He said no matter what, his variants would appear."
"Where's Sylvie?" Mobius asked. "Where's Loki?"
"I don't know. He Who Remains sent us through different time doors. I ended up here. Alone."
Mobius went quiet, looking at the statue. The deliberateness of it seemed to register on his face. "He sent you all somewhere different," he said slowly, less a question than something he was working out as he spoke. "And you ended up here." He glanced around the empty library. "With the statue. With me." His eyes came back to Tyson. "He didn't send you somewhere random, did he?"
Tyson looked at the monument to multiversal war. At He Who Remains standing in bronze above his smaller selves, arms raised.
"No," Tyson said. "I don't think he did."
He thought about what Mobius had said, and what he'd seen in the Citadel. The Sacred Timeline was under attack? If he understood what he'd seen, the Sacred Timeline was merged with his timeline and its many intertwined branches. He didn't think it was under attack so much as it was mutable. Maybe his being a Nexus Being had made it this way. But he'd only been in this world for two years. The entire timeline had looked like that when he'd first seen it. What had he actually done to change anything? He'd gotten his ass kicked by He Who Remains. He hadn't changed anything that stuck. Annihilus and that branch he'd created had been pruned by the TVA. Sylvie, Loki, and the others were gone.
What the hell had he done to cause this?
Tyson started to answer. "The Sacred Timeline—"
"Don't listen to anything he says!"
Tyson spun. Ravonna Renslayer strode across the library floor, a squad of Minutemen flanking her. Her face was flushed. She pointed at Tyson like he was a disease that needed to be eradicated.
"This is all his fault. Mobius, we need to stop that Variant. Pruning isn't enough. He came back from the Void at the End of Time. The only way to stop him is to kill him."
Mobius stepped between them, hands raised. "Ravonna, wait. We need to understand what happened."
"Understand?" Renslayer's laugh was harsh. "Look around you, Mobius. Look at what he's done. Variants are appearing everywhere. He Who Remains is fighting a war across realities because of him."
The Minutemen spread out, forming a semicircle. Their time sticks hummed with energy. Tyson's hand moved to Mjölnir, the hammer's weight reassuring against his palm.
"I didn't kill He Who Remains," Tyson said.
"You crossed the threshold. You and that other Variant. You went past the point of no return." Renslayer's voice went cold and flat. "Miss Minutes told us everything. He Who Remains gave you a choice. You could have taken his place. Maintained the timeline."
"He was a dictator. He pruned entire realities. Killed trillions."
"He kept us safe." Renslayer gestured at the statue. "Now look what's coming. His variants."
Mobius glanced between them. "Ravonna, killing him won't fix this."
"It will send a message." Renslayer nodded to the Minutemen. "Take him."
The squad moved as one. Tyson yanked Mjölnir free, with no magic in the TVA, it was just a hammer. But when you had a hammer, everything looked like a nail. The first Minuteman lunged with his time stick. Tyson sidestepped, bringing Mjölnir around in a tight arc. The hammer connected with the agent's chest, sending him flying backward into a bookshelf. Volumes tumbled to the floor in a cascade of paper and leather.
The impact felt satisfying in a way that carried an ugly edge. These agents went down when he hit them. Their bodies obeyed the physics that his strength imposed. Less than an hour ago by his internal clock, he'd swung this same hammer at a man who'd caught it in one palm and held it there while smiling. The Minutemen weren't that man. Nothing about this fight was difficult, and the ease of it only made the Citadel's humiliation sharper by comparison.
Two more came at him from opposite sides. Tyson spun, swinging Mjölnir in a wide circle, forcing them back. He pressed forward, driving them toward the statue. One Minuteman tried to flank him. Tyson caught the movement in his peripheral vision, twisted, and threw Mjölnir. The hammer struck the agent square in the face, then returned to his hand under his magnetism.
"Stop this!" Mobius shouted.
Renslayer ignored him. "All units, converge on the library. We have a hostile Variant."
Footsteps pounded through the corridors. More Minutemen. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Tyson couldn't fight them all. Not here. Not like this.
A Minuteman tackled him from behind. Tyson rolled with the impact, using the agent's momentum to throw him over his shoulder. The man crashed into another Minuteman, and they both went down in a tangle of limbs. Tyson surged to his feet, Mjölnir already swinging. He caught another agent in the ribs, heard bone crack, then pivoted to block a time stick aimed at his head.
The stick connected with Mjölnir's haft. Energy crackled between them, sparks flying. Tyson shoved forward, overpowering the Minuteman, then brought his knee up into the man's gut. The agent doubled over. Tyson slammed Mjölnir down on his back, driving him to the floor.
Renslayer stood behind her remaining Minutemen, TemPad in hand, calling for reinforcements, coordinating the attack. Tyson needed that TemPad.
He charged. Lightning erupted from Mjölnir, forcing the Minutemen to scatter. Tyson didn't slow. He barreled through their line, shoulder-checking one agent, then another. Renslayer's eyes widened. She raised her time stick, but Tyson was faster. He grabbed her wrist, twisted, and the stick clattered to the floor.
"You're making a mistake," Renslayer hissed.
Tyson wrenched the TemPad from her other hand. "So are you."
He swept her legs out from under her. Renslayer hit the ground hard, the impact driving the air from her lungs. Tyson pressed his boot against her chest, pinning her.
"You can't escape, Nexus Being." Renslayer's voice was strained, but her conviction hadn't wavered. "They'll come for you. All of them." She gestured at the statue, at the variants clawing their way toward He Who Remains. "Every version of him across the multiverse. They'll hunt you down. They'll make you pay for what you've done."
Tyson looked up at the monument. At the variants of He Who Remains locked in eternal combat. Each one a conqueror. Each one convinced they deserved to rule. Each one willing to destroy everything to claim their throne.
More Minutemen poured into the library. Dozens of them. Time sticks raised. Weapons drawn. Mobius stood off to the side, face torn between duty and doubt.
Tyson raised his hand. The magnetic field erupted from his palm, invisible but absolute. Every piece of armor in the library seized. Minutemen froze, their bodies locked in place by their own equipment. The metal plates constricted against their chests, their limbs, tight enough to restrict movement but not crush. Not yet.
Renslayer gasped beneath his boot, her armor pressing against her ribs. Tyson kept his hand raised, fingers curled into a fist.
"You think you have a problem now," he said.
He reached deeper. Past the agents. Past their weapons and armor. Into the TVA itself.
Walls, support beams, and structural reinforcements responded. The entire framework of the facility hummed under his control. Tyson pulled, just slightly, and the library groaned. Metal screamed against metal. The floor trembled beneath them. Bookcases swayed. The massive statue of He Who Remains shuddered, dust raining from its joints.
The Minutemen's eyes went wide. Some tried to speak, but their armor constricted tighter, forcing the words back down their throats. Mobius stumbled, catching himself against a desk. Renslayer had gone pale.
Tyson twisted his wrist. The groaning intensified. The ceiling buckled. Cracks spider-webbed across the bronze walls. The sound was deafening, like the TVA itself was screaming. Every agent in the library could feel it. The building was alive under Tyson's control, and it was suffering.
"Come for me or my timeline again," Tyson said, his voice cutting through the cacophony. "The hell with your multiversal war. It'll be the end of the TVA itself. At my hands."
He held them there. Let them feel the weight of their own armor crushing against their bodies. Let them hear the structure around them threatening to collapse. Let them understand exactly what he was capable of.
Mobius's voice cut through the noise. "Tyson, they get it. They get it."
Tyson looked at him. Mobius stood in the gap between the scattered Minutemen and the spot where Renslayer was pinned, not quite on either side of the line, which was probably the most accurate description of where Mobius had been this entire time.
But he'd said they get it. Not stand down, Variant. Not release them or I'll find another way to stop you. He'd said it like someone who had made a small, quiet choice about which direction to stand in. It had cost him something. Tyson could see it in the set of his jaw, in the careful way he wasn't looking at Renslayer. This was Mobius telling his own people that the man with his boot on their commander's chest had made his point, and they should let him walk out. This was Mobius spending credibility he might not be able to rebuild.
Tyson held them there one more second. Let the Minutemen understand the release was conditional, not complete. Let Renslayer hear it from the floor.
Then he opened his fist.
The groaning stopped. The pressure on the Minutemen's armor released. They gasped, sucking in air, hands going to their chests. Some collapsed to their knees. Others leaned against the walls, trembling. The building settled with a final shuddering sigh, like it had been holding its breath and could finally exhale.
Renslayer coughed beneath his boot. Tyson stepped back, releasing her. She rolled onto her side, one hand pressed to her ribs.
"You're insane," she wheezed.
"I'm done." Tyson looked down at her, then at the Minutemen scattered across the library. "I'm done with the TVA. I'm done with He Who Remains. I'm done with all of it."
He held up the TemPad he'd taken from her.
"You want to fight a multiversal war?" Tyson gestured at the statue. "Go ahead. But you leave my timeline alone. You leave my people alone. Or I come back here, and I don't stop at making the walls groan."
"Where are you going?" Mobius asked.
"Home." Tyson went to punch the coordinates into the TemPad… but strangely, it was already set.
His timeline. His reality. Stark tower, where he'd left through Loki's Tesseract-created portal.
"The variants…" Mobius said, trailing off.
The word landed differently than it would have a few months ago. Variants. Sylvie had been a variant her entire life, hunted and pruned and running. Kid Loki, who'd killed his Thor and been king of a bowling alley. Old Loki, who'd survived Thanos through trickery and spent centuries alone because he'd removed himself from existence, and who had died projecting an entire Asgard to buy them time against Alioth. Throg, still trapped in a jar somewhere, probably.
They'd fought alongside him.
And now they were scattered, and he was leaving, and the honest truth was that he didn't know how to find any of them. He didn't even know where to start looking for Sylvie, and she was the one whose absence hurt the most.
Tyson looked at him. There was something there beyond the argument, something that had been building since Mobius had grabbed his shoulder and said of course I recognize you. The agent's face was the face of a man who had made peace with a particular version of his life and was now being asked to make peace with a different one. The TVA was the only world Mobius had ever reliably inhabited. No family on the timeline. No before. Just the work, the jet ski magazines, and the belief that the work mattered.
That belief was currently standing underneath a thirty-foot statue of the man who had built the prison and called it a purpose.
"Mobius." Tyson's voice came down half a register. "What do you actually want me to do?"
Mobius was quiet for a moment. The scattered Minutemen were still catching their breath, leaning against walls, some sitting on the floor. Renslayer was on her side with one hand pressed to her ribs, not going anywhere soon.
"I want you to help me figure out what comes next," Mobius said. "That's what I want. But I know that's not a fair ask. He Who Remains' variants are already moving."
Tyson paused, finger hovering over the activation button. "That's not my problem."
"No." Mobius's voice was even. "It's not. I know it's not." A moment of quiet, and in it, Tyson could still hear the building settling. "I'm not asking you to fix it. I just want you to know that it will become everyone's problem." He stepped closer, lowering his voice. "You think your timeline is safe? You think those Variants won't find you? They're conquerors, Tyson. Every single one of them. And you just made yourself a target."
"Let them come." Tyson activated the TemPad, and an orange time door shimmered into existence behind him. "And stay away from my timeline… For all time, always."
— Rogue Redemption —
"Brother, what have you—" Thor said.
Tyson stepped backward into the time door and landed on the ground floor of Stark Tower. The scene he returned to was one of confusion. SHIELD agents stood with weapons half-raised, expressions caught between shock and training. Tony Stark was still unarmed, covering his face after being punched. Thor stood with Mjölnir raised, aimed at either the spot where Loki had disappeared or the agents who'd attacked Stark. For a moment, no one moved.
The transition was wrong. Not the portal. The portal worked fine. It was the landing. One second, he was in the TVA, making threats under a thirty-foot statue of a man who'd beaten him easily, and the next, he was standing in Stark Tower watching Tony Stark hold his bleeding nose like the most important thing that had happened today was getting punched in the face.
It was still today.
That was the part that didn't compute. For everyone in this room, it was still the same afternoon. The same battle. The same dust settling from the same alien invasion. They hadn't slept since this started, and neither had Tyson, except he'd also lived through months of something they couldn't conceive of, and his body was running on a clock that didn't match theirs. He felt jetlagged across time itself. Still expecting time sticks and orange portals, not the SHIELD-issue firearms turning in his direction.
Readjust. You're home. Act like it.
But he wasn't sure he was home. This should still be the timeline he'd left. The faces were right, and the moment was right.
The smell hit him first. Concrete dust, ozone from the Chitauri weapons, the chemical bite of extinguisher foam drifting in from the ruined floors above. Battle of New York smells. He'd spent who knew how long breathing the sterile recycled air of the TVA that the damaged atmosphere of Stark Tower felt like stepping into a different century. Which it was. He remembered fighting He Who Remains less than an hour ago by his internal clock. The memory of that hit still throbbed along his jaw even though his regeneration had erased the evidence. But the room in front of him was frozen in the same second he'd left it. Tony's nose was still bleeding. Thor's arm was still raised.
The Battle of New York was still today, for everyone but him.
Months. He'd lived months since they'd last seen him. He'd fought Annihilus, been pruned to the Void, found and lost allies, shared a bunker with a woman who smelled like frost and hemlock, confronted the man at the end of time, and been beaten. He'd done all of that, and these people had no idea.
He couldn't explain any of it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. So he compressed months into a breath and stepped into a conversation that, for everyone else in the room, had never been interrupted.
"I know what you're going to ask," Tyson said. "It's a long story."
"A long story?" Tony laughed, then winced as the movement aggravated his nose. "You disappeared in a flash of blue light with Reindeer Games and came back through an orange doorway. Ten seconds tops, but I'd say that qualifies."
Ten seconds. Tony said it like it was funny, and from his perspective, it probably was. A magic trick. A disappearing act with a punchline entrance. But for Tyson, the gap between Tony's ten seconds and his own months was a chasm that no amount of explanation could bridge. He'd fought a cosmic entity. He'd been pruned to a wasteland at the end of time. He'd enchanted a living tempest. He'd stood in a Citadel beyond the reach of the Sacred Timeline and been beaten by a man who shouldn't have beaten him.
And Tony Stark thought he'd been gone for ten seconds.
The loneliness of it was unexpected. Not the solitary kind; he was surrounded by people. The kind that came from carrying an experience no one around you could share. He'd felt something similar after arriving in this universe, when his metaknowledge separated him from everyone around him. But this was different. This was lived experience, not knowledge. He'd been there. And no one in this room would ever understand what that meant.
The SHIELD agents recovered from their stupor. Weapons came fully up.
"Stand down," Tyson said.
The agents hesitated, looking toward their superiors for confirmation.
"Where is the Tesseract?" Thor demanded.
Tyson reached behind his back and pulled it free of the adamantium weave. "Safe."
"Define safe," Tony said.
"Not in Loki's possession," Tyson clarified. "And not going back to SHIELD either."
This produced an immediate reaction. The agents tensed visibly. One of them, Alexander Pierce, stepped forward. "The Tesseract is SHIELD property."
"Actually," Tony said, "it's Asgardian, if we're being technical."
The tension in the room shifted as Captain America and Natasha Romanoff burst through the doors, weapons ready. They froze at the scene before them.
"We got reports of—" Steve began, then stopped. "What in the world?"
The SHIELD agents held their standoff. Pierce said, "Agent Mirage. We need the Tesseract."
Tyson raised his hand and closed his fist. Every SHIELD weapon crumpled in their handlers' grips. "It's been a really long day," he said. "The next person who points a gun at me is going to eat it."
Pierce stepped forward, diplomatic composure stretched thin over something colder underneath. "Agent Mirage, the World Security Council has decided that the Tesseract will be remanded into SHIELD's custody."
"The Tesseract is too dangerous to keep on Earth," Tyson said. "In case you missed the whole invasion. And I know you didn't, because you sent a nuke to destroy my city."
The room went quiet. Tony's eyebrows climbed. Steve's expression hardened. Natasha stayed impassive, though her attention sharpened noticeably, moving between Pierce and Tyson.
Pierce held his composure, though something shifted at the corner of his jaw. "That's an order."
"Oh, right, I guess you're the boss or something?" Tyson shrugged. "Well, in that case, I quit."
Pierce's facade cracked. "You can't quit!"
"Why not? You don't pay me anyway. Never have." Another shrug. "I'm going on vacation for a few months. You have an issue, call my secretary."
Pierce moved closer, invading Tyson's space. He leaned in until his voice was barely audible. "Hydra needs the Tesseract."
Tyson didn't move. He held Pierce's look and let the words land the way they were meant to, as leverage, as a door opening to a different kind of conversation, one where the room full of confused SHIELD agents became irrelevant background noise. The man had spent the last four minutes performing the role of SHIELD authority, measured and formal, representing the World Security Council.
And then, in a whisper, he'd discarded the entire performance and handed Tyson the thing underneath it.
Hydra. Said plainly, with the confidence of someone who expected the name to produce cooperation rather than consequence. Which meant Pierce knew Tyson was part of the organization.
It was exactly the setup Tyson had been building toward before Project PEGASUS.
He looked at the man, at the careful practiced face of someone who had been lying to a room full of people for years and had learned to find it comfortable. He understood, in that moment, why Hydra had gotten as far as it had. Pierce didn't look like a villain.
Tyson held Pierce's look. At his waist, Nexus materialized, the soulsword against his hip. He rested his hand on the hilt without drawing it from where it sat. A thin layer of adamantium wrapped around the blade, forming a sheath. He didn't need it out. He needed the amplification of his psionic abilities that it gave him. He opened the channel. Not the broad, blunt instrument he'd used to broadcast his psionic message across Manhattan, but forming a precise, surgical edge with his illusion power, as sharp as the weapon's monomolecular blade. He aimed it at the man standing six inches from his face.
Pierce's pupils dilated a fraction. His breathing didn't change, but something behind his expression loosened, the way a locked door looks the same from the outside even after the bolt slides free.
Tyson whispered back, matching Pierce's volume exactly. "The Tesseract is too dangerous to keep. It must return to Asgard."
Pierce blinked. He stood there for a beat, processing the thought Tyson had planted as though it had always been his own, turning it over the way a man examines a conclusion he's surprised he didn't reach sooner.
Tyson felt discomfort the moment he did it. The feeling of reaching into the space behind someone's eyes and rearranging the furniture. This was deciding what a person believed and making it true. He didn't like doing it. He'd done it anyway. Each time, he'd filed the discomfort in the same drawer and moved on. Dr. Connors, Vanko, Maki, Sitwell, and so on. Each time, the drawer got slightly heavier.
Somewhere, Sylvie was dealing with the consequences of the Citadel. Alone, probably. The woman who'd spent her entire life being controlled by the TVA, making choices that were never really hers, and Tyson was standing here doing to Pierce what the TVA had done to her. Taking someone's will and replacing it with his own. He wondered what she'd think if she could see him now. It was awfully similar to what she did with her enchantment magic. Whether the comparison would occur to her, or whether she'd simply be practical about it, the way she was practical about most things that involved survival.
He wondered if she was surviving.
He filed the thought. More materials into the drawer.
Pierce blinked once, twice. His expression shifted, confusion giving way to conviction as the suggestion took root. He straightened, turning to address the room.
Pierce didn't know what had just happened to him. That was the worst part. He was standing straighter, his expression cleared, his conviction apparently genuine, fully persuaded by a position he'd been holding the opposite of seconds ago. He'd whispered Hydra needs the Tesseract, and now he was about to tell a room full of agents that the Tesseract should leave SHIELD's custody, and he would mean every word of it.
Tyson thought about the drawer. About what it was accumulating. About the kind of person who used that ability often enough that the discomfort stopped registering. The kind of person, like Kilgrave, whom Tyson had killed and left in a bathroom.
He filed it. He'd think about it later. Maybe.
"Mirage is right," Pierce announced, the words landing strangely on every agent in the room. "The Tesseract is too dangerous for us to keep."
The agents exchanged looks. Tony didn't narrow his eyes exactly, but the tilt of his head said he'd registered the gap between what he'd witnessed and what should have produced it.
"Did he just..." Steve began.
"Change his mind completely?" Natasha said. "Yes. Mirage can be influential."
Thor stepped forward. "The Tesseract belongs in Asgard's vault, where it can be properly protected."
Pierce, still under Tyson's influence, nodded along. The SHIELD agents looked to him for guidance and found none.
Natasha had moved during the exchange. She was closer to the door now, positioned at a slight angle that gave her sightlines to both Pierce and Tyson, which meant she'd been watching both of them and had drawn at least one conclusion from what she'd seen. Her expression hadn't changed, but the quality of her attention had. Tyson noted it, and noted that she noted him noting it, and they had a brief wordless conversation consisting entirely of eye contact that arrived at a mutual agreement to table the subject.
Steve was looking at Pierce the way Steve looked at things that bothered him. He'd seen Pierce's position change with no visible cause, and Steve Rogers, whatever else he was, trusted his gut about character.
Tyson met his look briefly. Steve said nothing. But his jaw was set in the way that meant the question wasn't forgotten, just delayed.
Tony had watched all of it with his head tilted slightly, the expression of a man having a genuinely terrible day. He couldn't help laughing despite the pain in his face. "I don't know what's happening, but I think we should discuss it over a meal. Do you guys like shawarma?"