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“Loki, I wouldn't have put you up to this if I'd known… I thought you enjoyed the attention. I mean you always seemed so…” Mobius trailed off, afraid of saying the wrong words and sounding judgemental. He stroked Loki’s arm gently, her skin smooth and cold as marble. Loki averted her gaze, chewing on her bottom lip.
“It's true. I've played the game of seduction so many times before, and each time I've thoroughly enjoyed it. Making people go weak at the knees, lose their inhibitions with a well-timed comment and a well-placed hand,” said Loki, her blue eyes wide and glittering with tears. “But it's not something I've ever done in my female form. I've always respected this form, I… was always reluctant to expose it to the eyes of lesser beings such as our dearest target.”
“What did he say to you?” asked Mobius, clenching his jaw and drawing nearer protectively.
“Nothing untoward. And no, before you ask, he did not touch me,” answered Loki, grasping his free hand and lacing their fingers together. “It was just the inherent disrespect. He did not look at me like I was a goddess. He looked at me like I was a common whore.”
Mobius sighed, exasperated.
“It's well-documented behaviour for most males in the multiverse. I'm so sorry, Loki,” said Mobius, bringing her hand up to his lips and pressing a kiss to her knuckles. “They're blinded by selfish short-sightedness. I mean, how could anyone look at you and not see a goddess!”
He gestured at her elegant frame clad in a beautiful black silk dress, towering above him in stilettos.
“If looks could kill,” he mused, which earned him a devilish smirk.
Loki fell silent, her eyes darting from the night sky to the ink-black trees in the garden, alighting on street-lamps and the wall behind her which shielded them from the party-goers they'd just escaped. Eventually, she spoke again.
“It's so disappointing,” she said, “to be the god of time, with unmatched magical abilities, not to mention several PhDs, and still be completely unable to change our worlds for the better. All of that well-documented behaviour will simply continue. I hate to think of all the feminine beings in the multiverse suffering at the hands of selfish, short-sighted assholes who would desecrate without hesitation all of existence's most beautiful creation. Women, Mobius. I'm not always at home in my masculine form and as a child, I yearned to wear flowing gowns, practice medicine and magic with the witches, fight battles in a troubled sky with the Valkyrie, or even to simply lie in bed as a woman. My father never allowed me that freedom. The few times I changed form without his knowledge took me on thrilling, wild adventures. Now, I have the freedom to change form whenever I choose—and I can't wait to change back, to avoid being stared at by every drunken fool. We restored free-will, we saved all of time from non-existence, but is it possible to save civilization from its own cruelty?”
While she recovered her composure after her impassioned speech, it was Mobius' turn to rummage through his mind, staring into space. A bio-luminiscent water-lily in a nearby bog caught his eye, reminding him this was their first time in this particular universe, and he knew the disappointing answer to Loki’s question.
“It’s a multiverse, Loki. You know what that means,” he said, leaning against the wall beside her. “For every universe out there that’s suffering, there’s one that’s flourishing. For every patriarchy, a matriarchy, and for every power-hungry civilization, a peaceful one.”
Loki had been prepared for this remark.
“That’s little consolation for the poor, hungry, terrified little girls who will never leave their home planets, let alone their universe,” she answered almost immediately. She fell silent after that but Mobius knew there was more forthcoming and so he was silent too.
“This moral dilemma is why gods never concern themselves with the wishes of mortals,” she continued. “They only ever deign to stoop so low when one prays hard enough that it flatters them. But that’s not the kind of god I want to be, Mobius. If I cannot intervene and I cannot remain aloof, then what am I to do?”
She looked so beautiful when she was vulnerable, beseeching him, pleading for his help. It was such an honour to be needed and deemed worthy of being listened to by someone like Loki—a god, but so much more.
“You know,” he began, “while I do think that gods shouldn’t intervene—I mean you look at all the floods and volcanic eruptions, you realize it’s probably better if gods don’t care. But while I do think they shouldn’t intervene, you are so much more than a god, Loki.” He leaned in closer, catching a whiff of her spiced vanilla perfume, looking up at her attentive face through his eyelashes. “You’ve got a human heart, the body of a warrior, and a resilience that’s honestly historically unheard of. With all that, who needs to stop time or conjure shadow people?”
Loki smiled, letting the words sink in as she nodded absently.
“You’re right, I don’t need to intervene as a god. I do possess everything you said, but you forgot one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got you.”
She was intoxicatingly close now and the words punched the air out of Mobius’s lungs. He was breathless, blushing, burning.
“You saved the multiverse with me once,” she spoke, her lips mere inches from his own, their warm breaths mingling in the cold air. “Will you now change it with me, Mobius?”
Mobius would have said anything in that moment, anything he thought might be satisfactory enough for Loki to close the gap between them, but he loved her enough to know how much his response mattered.
“Saving the multiverse, changing it, living out the rest of our days in it in pure domestic bliss, I don’t care,” he said, his voice soft and lilting. “You’ll always have me.”
Loki must have found his response more than satisfactory for tears sprung out of her eyes before she closed the gap and kissed him tenderly.
Mobius kissed her back, dizzied by the intensity of his affection, steadying himself with a firm grip on Loki’s slender waist, her skin warm beneath the soft silk.
When they finally parted for the sole reason of catching their breaths, Loki’s face was adorably flushed, her dexterous fingers still clutching at his hair, and her body pressed against his.
“I love you, Mobius,” she said in a rush between heaving breaths.
“I love you too, Loki,” he replied. “And for what it’s worth, I think you’re a stunning, drop-dead gorgeous woman.”
Loki chuckled, burying her face in his shoulder.
“Thank you. I don’t want to change back anymore, not for a while.”