Chapter Text
Sylvie was going to be late for work. Again. She couldn’t be late again—not with all the computational files to she had process. It was going to be a disaster. And the most frustrating part was, there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.
The bus she was due to catch was forty-six minutes late, making her wait in the cold rain. She’d stepped in a puddle in her hurry to catch it and her shoes were soaked through to her socks. And because she hadn’t thought she’d make the bus in time, she hadn’t eaten breakfast or had coffee.
The bus finally came, but it was poor relief. The air con was on full blast, it was miserable, crowded, and stopped at every stop. Someone right next to her was shouting into their phone repeatedly, ‘I said I can’t talk now, I’m on the bus!’ and just as she felt like she really had to scream, public bus or not, Sylvie’s boss texted her, ‘Where are you? You know output is down 400% this quarter. Some of us our trying to pull our weight here.’
This is a nightmare.
This is a nightmare.
This is a nightmare.
—
“This is a nightmare,” Sylvie said, taking the TVA file from Mobius and frowning at it. She cupped her hand around a mug of awful TVA coffee and swung around in her ergonomic office chair at her TVA desk. She didn’t use it much, usually being out on missions for the TVA, but it was a neat place to leave souvenir key rings and teetering piles of paperwork. The file detailed the latest incursion they were trying to prevent, and it was a knotty problem. Not really her style.
“Oh this isn’t a nightmare. Nightmares are another department,” Mobius said offhandedly, pouring himself another coffee. “Now you and Loki dancing around each other and refusing to talk since you got back to the TVA? That’s a nightmare. And you make me witness it, every day.”
“Wait what? What did you just say?” asked Sylvie.
“You and Loki are driving me crazy? Because you won’t talk to each other?”
Sylvie shook her head. “No, no. Nightmares being another department.”
Mobius gulped his coffee trying to reply. “Oh, ah, the nightmare department. It’s kind of one of the TVA penitentiaries—the worst one in fact. Staff get sent there for violating the rules, and we soften up variants in there sometimes. A variation on the memory loop prison.”
“If it’s worse than a memory loop prison, it must be terrifying indeed,” Loki says, wandering in and pouring himself some coffee from the jug Mobius has going. “What goes on in there?”
Sylvie avoided looking at Loki. Things hadn’t been the same between them since she pushed him through that Timedoor and killed He Who Remains—even though she found her way back to the TVA eventually, realising that the multiverse needed her. Pushing someone into another universe right after kissing them would put a bit of a dampener on any partnership, she supposed. She didn’t think he’d forgiven her.
“Nobody knows,” Mobius said offhandedly. “Those who come out don’t seem to have much memory of what happened in there. I knew a guy once. He never complained about work after, became one of our happiest most productive workers overnight.”
So there were still horrors that went on at the TVA. And neither of these morons had thought to put a stop to it?
Sylvie dropped the incursion file on top of the stack on her desk. There were loads of people who could deal with it. “You mean to say there’s a literal humanitarian crime going on under our noses?” she asked.
“Well—I wouldn’t describe it as that… but…”
“You’re telling me you’ve never investigated a horrifying sounding department that left your colleague traumatised?” she asked.
Mobius set his cup down. “I’m sorry Sylvie—we haven’t exactly had a lot of time what with everything that’s happened…”
She could scream. She could yell sense into them. She’d be well within her rights to—and she’s itching to.
But that’s not how she’s ever solved problems in the past. When she wanted something killed, blown up, or burnt to the ground… she had to do it herself.
“I can’t believe you two,” she muttered under her breath as she marched out of the door. Seemed like a good day to continue to burn the TVA down.
“Sylvie—where are you going?” Loki called.
“To take down the Nightmare Department! Obviously!” she called back.
“Sylvie—” She thought she heard them coming after her, and she walked faster, aiming for the lobby where Casey could direct her to the Nightmare Department. She wouldn’t let them stop her.
Endless corridors later, she found herself at the front desk of the Nightmare Department. Like everything else at the TVA, it was both unassuming and somehow deeply unsettling. Loki had called the place Kafka-esque, and if that was a word that meant too-low ceilings, the feeling of constantly being watched, and stupid rules that were just controlling in their pettiness, then it was a pretty good descriptor.
Sylvie dithered under the old receptionist’s withering glare.
“Well? Are you going in, or not?” asked the receptionist.
“Yes, yes I am,” Sylvie said with resolve. She would see what was there, and smash it up. Simple.
“Drink this,” the receptionist said in monotone, handing her a small bottle of what looked like green milk.
Sylvie sniffed it. It didn’t smell particularly nasty, but there was nothing delicious about it either. “Wha’ is this?”
“It enables you to enter the Nightmare Department.”
Fuck. She really needed to get in there, no matter what. But they really expected her to just trust them on this? “Do I have to?”
“Do you want to go in, or not?”
Sylvie rolled her eyes, and chugged the bottle, while maintaining eye contact with the receptionist the whole time. “There,” she said, banging down the bottle. “Now what.”
“A few rules.”
Sylvie rolled her eyes again.
“The only way to get out is if someone wakes you up. You can be woken up by being given an electric shock. You have a fifty percent chance of surviving this. Alternatively, you can have a particularly good experience or a particularly terrifying experience in your dream. These will also wake you up.”
“In the dream? What are you talking about?”
The receptionist continued in their monotone. “Everybody in there is asleep and dreaming. And so will you be, in a few minutes.”
Fog was clouding Sylvie’s brain. What was in that drink she’d just been given? “How do I wake them all up?”
“By any of the means I just told you. Weren’t you listening?”
“Then I’ll give everybody an incredible… good… experience in the dream,” she said, fighting back a yawn.
“I doubt it.” The receptionist pushed a button behind the desk, opening an elevator-like door at the end of the room to reveal a beautifully inviting bed.
Sylvie stumbled towards it, unable to think straight. Whatever was in that green milk properly knocked her out. She lay down, and was dimly aware of the receptionist attaching two metal probes to the sides of her head.
“Happy dreaming,” said the receptionist. “We will attempt to wake you up in five years.”
Unable to stop herself, Sylvie fell into a deep sleep, and began to dream.
That was how she found herself dreaming that she was standing at the bus stop, hungry, cold, wet from the pouring rain, and late for work.
Eventually she found herself in her office. It was a small, cold, grey room with no windows and too-bright fluorescent strip lights. A clock ticked loud and unbearably slowly on the wall. No one else worked in this room except her. She realised she had no idea what she was meant to be doing, yet the pressure of it oppressed her.
This is a nightmare.
---
Loki and Mobius arrived at the Nightmare Department five minutes later, having got lost on the way. The elevator doors to Sylvie’s sleeping pod were just closing. Loki ran to them and beat on them with his fists, but it was too late. Sylvie was trapped in a nightmare.
“But this is a mistake! You have to wake her up!” Mobius argued urgently with the receptionist.
“Not without a permit,” they said impassively. “And even then the electric shock required to wake her up has a fifty-fifty chance of killing her instead.”
“There must be some other way,” said Loki desperately.
“There is. You can go to sleep, join her in the dream, and try to give her a terrifying experience. Or a good one. I don’t know if you will be able to find her. Or whether you will be able to do it.”
Loki looked from the receptionist to Mobius with wide eyes. “This is a nightmare.”