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2021-06-22
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1/1
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Ten Steps Ahead of You

Summary:

LOKI SERIES EPISODE TWO SPOILERS!

Here’s the thing: for someone bearing the moniker Liesmith, Loki… rarely ever lies.

Or: a glimpse into the mind of quote, “history’s most reliable liar”.

Notes:

So apparently I'm writing a meta-fic for every episode now. Nice.

I'm not sure this is actually coherent in any way, because I had too many thoughts on the episode and not enough braincells or time to express them, but oh well. It is what it is.

Spoilers for episode two. Last warning.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

Midgard, he knows, has an interesting saying: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Loki quite agrees, but power does more than just corrupt: most importantly, it blinds.

If there is one thing Loki has learnt in all his thousand years, it is that whether they have lived beside him for all his life or studied its entirety in painstaking detail, one thing always remains true for those drunk on power: they only ever see in him that which they want to.

The envious second prince. The broken, controllable pawn. The power-hungry conqueror. The chaotic little trickster. 

Mobius, Loki learns quickly, sees in him the Trickster, the Liesmith, the God of Mischief, the little pussycat. Immensely useful, but too arrogant to truly be a threat. Clever, but vulnerable: malleable to his manipulations. Mobius sees in him the Trickster and the Liar, so the Trickster and the Liar are what he becomes.

Here’s the thing, though: for someone bearing the moniker Liesmith, Loki… rarely ever lies.

The skill of a liar, you see, especially that of one famed for it, lies more in obfuscating the truth than outright making up fictions. And sometimes, obfuscating the truth means blatantly uttering it all out in the open, knowing full well all that the famed Trickster says will at worst be dismissed as worthless chatter and at best be taken for a lie: exactly what it’s not.

Mother oft told him that if he told too many lies, nobody would believe him when he did tell the truth. Entirely missing the fact that Loki could use that to his advantage as well: selling a lie for the truth is an amateur's trick; the real talent of a liar lies in doing the exact opposite.  And if nothing else, Loki is a damn good liar.

This means that Loki can lay all his cards on stark display, and yet keep them hidden in plain sight.

So Loki all but tells them how he wishes to ally with the Variant he pretends to help them hunt down, admits to planning what is essentially the most Loki strategy in existence, and yet it is dismissed as little more than another lie: which is exactly what Loki wants them to think it is. So Loki tells him that it’s adorable that he thinks Mobius could manipulate him. Tells him he’s ten steps ahead of him. That he’s playing a game of his own all along, and it is all dismissed as nought but a mask of arrogance, put on to shield his insecurity.

Wonderful, isn't it, when your opponents think you're feigning power when in truth you're actually feigning weakness?

The trick of being a trickster is to expect the expected, you see, for half the fun of being a trickster is knowing everyone knows you're a trickster, and then, many of your tricks can come from exploiting the fact that you know that they know… the point is clear, he thinks. This too, he tells him, and the fact that it falls on deaf—nay, actively annoyed ears—is only all the more proof of the principle's veracity. Truth be told, it's all hilarious at this point.

Mobius thinks he has outsmarted him, but Loki has outsmarted his outsmarting by far.

Make no mistake: he does lie outrightly at times, but even when he does, it's never for the purpose of making his targets believe a falsehood. When he visits the Midgardian 1980s on his first mission, he does make up a story to stall for time, waiting to see if he can cause this branched timeline to redline. It’s a bit of fun, and he never really expects them to be sold on the story for long enough, but that is never the lie's purpose: for it's a feint. Mobius calls him out on his lie; of course he does, but that pathetic little lie cements within the agent the belief that because Loki allowed him to see through one lie he is capable of seeing through all of them. 

Which is a very, very dangerous idea to have of the God of Lies.

Mobius thinks he sees through him. Thinks that with his powers blocked and his lying tongue outmanoeuvred by Mobius's own genius, Loki is essentially harmless to him. And yet he knows Loki is, by nature, dangerous, and Loki's actions take care to frame himself as just suspicious enough for his façade to be believable but not enough to actively be more of a threat to them than he is worth—it wouldn't do Loki well if he pretended to be too cooperative, would it?

Mobius thinks he is fuelled by his insecurities, thinks he can stroke them to manipulate Loki into fighting against himself. That assumption actually takes Loki aback—seeing though his admittedly deliberately thin façade of arrogance to glance at his inner facade of insecurity is not something he would have expected of an Asgardian opponent, even if it only works to his advantage.

Mobius may truly be more clever than all of Asgard, Loki concedes. It is in no way a compliment to the agent's intelligence.

That he… has issues with self-esteem is… not incorrect given the lie he had always lived before he had fallen into the void, he’ll admit that, but as Mobius likes to say, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Complicated enough for his jabs to fail, yet not complicated enough for Loki to forgo noting exactly what perceived trait of his he should play up to keep up this charade.

“My ears are sharp too?”

Midgard’s English language is somewhat special in that it has an expression wherein a double positive makes for a negative. It is that expression he finds rather apt right now: yeah right.

Here’s another thing: it’s never just one thing he’s aiming for. 

Mobius thinks Loki wishes foremost for an audience with the Time-Keepers. Wishes to charm his way up to the top, hustle them up and seize control. He's not exactly... wrong, in a way: by the Norns does Loki wish to give them a piece of his mind, but Loki knows exactly how feasible said idea is in reality, and that is hardly the sole plan in Loki's mind besides. Not even close.

What makes Loki an excellent tactician is not his skill with elaborate strategies or his aptitude for predicting his opponents' moves, no: it's the fact that he makes not one plan but several, creating a vast network of possibilities and contingencies and what-ifs in his head for every given scenario. That it's never a matter of creating a fool-proof plan and carrying it out perfectly; instead, it is that of finding an opportunity and seizing it.

This, the TVA fails to realize, more than anything else, is what makes him so dangerous. 

It's only to be expected of them, if he is honest: they see only one Sacred timeline, only one grand cosmic order, only one course fate can take. Loki, on the other hand, sees the cosmos in terms not of destiny, but of possibilities. It's what makes him so great at improvising.

So Loki lets Mobius keep thinking an audience with the Time-Keepers is what he wants most: it is a perfect cover for every other possibility he has mapped out underneath. It makes Mobius think he shall work for the TVA in earnest—for his own gain, of course: Loki knows that Mobius knows that Loki is foremost a selfish creature—making him much, much easier to manipulate.

Enough for Mobius to actively stick his neck out for him before Judge Renslayer, as he had been counting on. Enough for him to forego authorization to visit Pompeii to test Loki's theory. Enough for him to convince Renslayer to approve a mission charted out entirely by yours truly.

And so Mobius, with full faith in his leash on Loki, leads him ever nearer to his triumph. 

Where there are wolf's ears, wolf's teeth are near, he has told them all. Told them all how their blindness makes them walk into one wolf's mouth after another. Told them not to underestimate him. And yet, if there is another thing Loki has learnt, it is that the more self-assured of their own superiority someone is, the less likely they are to pay his warnings any heed. And the TVA beats even Odin in its arrogance, a feat he had truly thought impossible once.

And that, at their core, is all they truly are: while they may possess vastly more power than even the likes of the Mad Titan, while they pretend that they control Fate itself, that they control him, the truth remains that they’re all no more than just an arrogant, self-important board of censorship who have been granted too much authority for anyone's good.

(And fools too, at that: for armed with nothing more than his own case-file, Loki easily managed to find in all the time it took for Mobius to get his lunch what the great Time Variance Authority could not in however long they’ve been hunting this other version of him.)

They truly are idiots, aren’t they. No wonder the narrative they’ve written for their so-called Sacred Timeline’s version of him is so terribly botched up.

 

 

Loki glances backwards, then forward again, heartbeat throbbing in his ears. Mobius orders him to stop, to wait. Despite the Variant's words, the open gateway invites him to follow her. His escape is within reach, and with barely a moment of consideration, the choice is obvious.

In Loki's defence, he'd given the TVA ample warnings all along.

 

Notes:

Yes, there's a JoJo reference in there. what about it.

This was supposed to be longer, actually, but if i added everything in it it'd probably not stop until it's like 10K. Darlings were killed in the editing process. (jk I don't kill them I just cryogenically freeze them and they'll probably pop up in future works of mine)

Ik the next episode drops tomorrow, but still, what did you think of EP 2?

Comments are my sole providers of serotonin.