Singularity. Act I. The Proximity Protocol / TVA Loki

I. Ego Death In Woods

Restless Little Heart - The Favors
Necessary Evils - The Favors
The Little Mess You Made - The Favors

Woods Queen's Hospital in London wasn't a place where one looked for hope. Most people learned how to function with its chronic absence. Thankfully, I didn't have to learn it from scratch. I adored packing hope into tiny plastic cups, dividing it into milligrams, and handing out synthetic sleep, pharmacological peace, and artificial happiness in the form of variously colored pills and capsules.

The scent of fresh coffee in a blue ceramic mug mingled with the stale aroma of old furniture and an exceptionally stifling air that the hours-long storm outside couldn't quite chase away. London wasn't simply rainy - today, the city was losing a battle against a disturbingly orange sky, raining late-August lightning.

The second-floor hospital office was my safe haven. It was the only place in the world where I could hide behind my wooden desk as if it were a shield, and watch, analyze, listen, and judge - but mostly fix, or at least pretend I knew how to fix, the scattered puzzles and shattered vases that were human minds.

Through the rattle of melancholic rain against the windowpanes broke the vibration of my phone. I adjusted my glasses in a swift, automatic motion and read the notification:

"Disturbing rainfall - the Thames is rising at unprecedented speeds - Fire brigade intervening." I sighed. After the recent weeks of global news involving alien invasions and the heroic feats of the Avengers, weather anomalies were somewhat... refreshing.

Easier to comprehend than magic, aliens, and gods.

Sometimes I caught myself thinking that maybe my patients weren't always truly sick. Considering all the incredible stories out there, maybe they just knew more. Saw more. But perhaps my head simply wasn't big enough to accommodate those possibilities. Patterns, guidelines, doses, diagnoses. Here, I was in control.

Still, some patients gave me the feeling that what I was doing made sense - the only sense I felt in my life.

So I sat behind my safe desk, resting my chin on my intertwined hands. Opposite me, in a worn-out green armchair, sat little Arthur. He was six, wearing oversized corduroy trousers and had huge, blue eyes that constantly overflowed with an abyss of sadness. They were the only things that spoke when he was silent. He hadn't uttered a single word for two years, ever since his father made sure the boy's world shrank to the size of permanent terror before social services could intervene.

Arthur's small hands, smeared with colorful crayons, frantically dragged a pencil across a piece of paper, leaving a bit of yellow wax on the wooden surface. I smiled faintly. He had drawn a yellow sun with huge, long rays around it, and beneath it, two disproportionate hands, open as if reaching for a hug. Arthur lifted his glassy blue eyes to me and slid the paper in my direction.

"Is this for me?" I asked gently, trying to keep my voice as soft as a blanket. He drew different versions of that same sun for me every time it rained. And every time, tears I couldn't let him see pricked at my eyes. "Thank you, Arthur. We'll hang it on the wall so the rain won't be allowed in."

I smiled, feeling that familiar pang in my chest. I didn't have children of my own; my life had taken a very different turn than I could have expected, but sometimes... I wondered if I would have been a much better parent than Arthur's father.
I took the paper as carefully as if it were made of the thinnest glass. The boy gave me a timid smile. He said nothing when a nurse, who had been waiting outside, entered the office to take him back to his ward.

The door closed with a soft click. I exhaled, letting out a massive weight that had settled near my heart. Unfortunately, aside from being a safe, comfortable harbor for my own soul, my office was filled with a hurricane of various problems I rarely could do anything about.
Not really. Not at their core anymore.
But I was familiar with this. I had been preparing for this job my entire adult life. I knew what I had left behind, and I never looked over my shoulder.