Luke walked through the corridors of Asgard without slowing.
Alarms rang through the palace, steel clashed in the distance, Dark Elves cutting through guards on every level, but anything that came near Luke didn't survive long enough to matter.
One rushed him from the side and turned to dust mid-stride. Another dropped from above and vanished before landing. He didn't look at them. He didn't react. He just kept walking.
He reached the prison.
Loki stood inside his cell, posture relaxed, like he had been watching everything unfold with nothing to do but comment on it. His eyes sharpened the moment he saw Luke.
"Well," Loki said, a smirk forming, "look who we have here. The majestic and powerful Luke." He picked up a conjured cup and tossed it at him. It struck the barrier and fell uselessly. "So, what did you come here to gloat about?"
"Does my face look like I'm here to gloat, Loki?" Luke said.
Loki paused and actually looked at him.
The smirk faded slightly.
"So you can make a face like that," he said, quieter.
"Yeah," Luke replied. "Although looking at your face made me smile a little."
Loki exhaled through his nose, annoyed but holding it in.
Footsteps approached.
Frigga stepped into the corridor, composed despite the chaos outside. Her eyes moved from Luke to Loki and back again, reading both in a single glance.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"A friend of your son," Luke said, still looking at Loki.
Frigga turned to Loki.
"I don't—"
"Not this one," Luke cut in. "The other one. Although Loki and I are also acquainted."
Loki's jaw tightened.
"Hmph."
"No need to sulk, Loki," Luke said. "You were wrong. There's nothing shameful about me beating you up. It happens to better people."
Loki straightened slightly, irritation slipping through before he masked it again.
"So did you come here to rub that in and see the position I'm in?" Loki asked.
"Truth be told," Luke said, "I'm here mostly because I lost my way."
Loki opened his mouth to respond to that when his eyes snapped to something behind Luke and his composure cracked completely.
"Mother!"
Frigga had turned at the sound of boots, and there was Malekith and Algrim moving through the corridor toward her, Algrim's axe already raised, the strike already committed.
Luke waved his hand.
Both of them left the ground and hit the far wall hard enough to crack it, sliding into a cell and staying there, the axe spinning harmlessly across the floor.
Silence settled back over the corridor.
Luke looked at Loki, whose hands were pressed against the barrier of his cell, every mask he wore completely gone for the three seconds it had taken all of that to happen.
"Loki," Luke said quietly. "You love your mother very much. Anyone can see that." He paused. "Just be honest about it sometimes. You never know when you might lose them."
Loki said nothing.
***
Luke left the prison corridor, his mind already moving forward.
Loki watched him go.
Two gems remaining that he didn't have a clear path to. Time and Soul. Soul was still impossible for reasons that hadn't changed.
The TVA.
They had the technology to navigate the timestream, to move through it with precision, which meant going back and pulling the gems from points in time before any of this happened was a viable option if he could get access to their equipment.
"When I have all of them and undo this," Luke said quietly to himself as he walked through the castle corridors, soldiers and dark elves turning to dust around him without him looking at any of them, "I'm going to make sure that armored idiot never has the ability to bother me or anyone I care about ever again."
He disappeared from Asgard.
Behind him, the dark elf situation resolved itself quickly. Odin had arrived.
And in front of Odin, Malekith and even Algrim the Strongest dark elf were something considerably less than threatening. There was a reason Thanos had never made a move on the nine realms while Odin still sat on the throne.
The Mad Titan feared very few things and Odin was on that list, which was why he had waited, patiently, for years, until Odin was gone before making his play.
That patience said everything about what Odin actually was.
In the TVA, the monitors ran without pause.
Analysts moved through their stations in a practiced rhythm, marking branches, tagging variants, sending pruning orders with the detached efficiency the organization was built on.
The Sacred Timeline stretched across their displays, clean and controlled, deviations identified and erased before they could grow.
Then one screen flagged.
The analyst handling it frowned and marked it for review, expecting a minor divergence. Before the request processed, another alert appeared. Then more followed, each tied to the same universe, the same point of origin.
The system attempted to stabilize the readings.
It didn't.
The branches weren't forming in any predictable pattern. They multiplied faster than standard pruning protocols could track, splitting, overlapping, rising beyond acceptable variance. The numbers attached to them didn't align with any category in the TVA's records.
"Run a deeper scan," one analyst said.
"It's already running," another replied, not looking away from the screen. "It's not correcting."
The case escalated.
It moved past standard review and into command.
Senior analysts gathered, watching the same data repeat across multiple displays. The projections updated constantly, but none of them resolved into a manageable outcome. Every model pointed to the same conclusion.
Intervention wouldn't hold.
Pruning wouldn't contain it.
Resetting would fail.
"This doesn't fit any classification," someone said quietly.
"It doesn't need one," another replied.
The readings weren't just irregular, they pointed to something the TVA couldn't enforce control over. Not because it was hidden, not because it was misidentified, but because stopping it wasn't within their reach.
"Do we send hunters?" one of them asked.
"No," came the answer.
The Sacred Timeline remained in place, but its control had limits, and this was one of them.
*****
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