Chapter Text
Now
They were having a bit of a problem.
(Not what Sylvie would call it, necessarily. But then again, it wasn’t her problem, per se.)
The entire thing was gruesome and rather grotesque, no matter how many times she saw it.
The push and pull, the way his face and limbs would twist and contort—frankly, she didn’t know how he could stand it.
Loki, of course, claimed that it wasn’t a big deal.
Loki, of course, was full of shit.
So there he was, fully back with her again, panting and a little disoriented, as if a little uncertain where he was and what had happened to him. His eyes swept around wildly before they fixed on her face. She watched him reorient himself, her presence anchoring him in the here and now, his shoulders slumping a little in relief.
She was not sure what her own expression looked like in that moment, but there had to be an ample amount of concern there somewhere to prompt a flitting apologetic look that crossed his features.
Time-slipping was what Loki called it.
If Sylvie were to give it a name, she’d probably go for something more descriptive and foul. Then again, no one had asked for her input.
“We need to do something about this,” she commented all the same.
Loki gave her a look—a mix of panicked confusion and an exasperated no shit. Not the words he would normally say, though. It wasn’t his style. Maybe that was why she loved being crass around him—as a reminder that his uppity prince-ness meant nothing in the face of real tragedy and actual problems.
Still, she couldn’t help but heave a sigh, not entirely immune to sympathy towards something she wouldn’t wish on her worst enemy. (If nothing else, the whole thing looked plain stupid.)
It didn’t even surprise Sylvie that she would end up being stuck with him, again.
The universe, it seemed, had quite the sense of humour.
(That wasn’t how the story had started, however.)
Earlier
There was blood on the floor. Blood on the soles of his shoes, bright red and sticky.
The thought of it touching any part of him was making him sick. Transfixed, Loki stared at it for a long time, seemingly unable to tear his gaze away from it.
“No,” he heard a choked sound, only realizing belatedly that it had come from him.
What was this? When the hell was this? Couldn’t be the past. Or even the present, to Loki’s knowledge. So, the future?
The lights buzzed and flickered above him, casting an eerie dim glow over a long stretch of one of the many TVA corridors, impersonal and yet familiar in the you saw one of them, you saw all of them kind of way.
Loki didn’t care for the TVA. His eyes raked over the body at his feet, cataloguing everything that was wrong with them: the unnatural pallor of their skin, the stillness about them and the stark contrast of the red blood on the pale grey floor.
Another sound rose in the back of Loki’s throat, disbelieving and pitiful.
But then—
A pull, his body contorting and twisting in a way that was rapidly becoming uncomfortably familiar as every molecule that he was made of fought against it, expanding and shrinking and folding in on themselves at the same time.
He bumped into Mobius, sending both of them stumbling.
“Dammit,” Mobius swore under his breath.
Loki snapped his head up, his gaze swivelling around.
He was back at the R&A, somewhere deep in the bowels of the TVA. Not that it brought him any comfort. His eyes jumped instantly to the ceiling as though he could see through Gods only knew how many feet of metal and concrete.
“That!” Mobius was saying to a bespectacled man on the other side of the counter, his finger pointed emphatically at Loki. “That’s what’s been happening!”
The other man turned obediently. Ouroboros. O.B. He stared at Loki, eyes wide.
“Wow. Time slipping!”
“Wait, you saw that, right?” Mobius clarified.
“Yeah.”
“You know what that is?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you fix it?”
“No!”
“Mobius…” Loki began.
The blood.
Unbidden, his eyes dropped down, to the red droplets on his shoes.
Loki’s stomach rolled, threatening to spill its contents on the black-and-white tiles.
“Hang on a second.” Mobius waved him off dismissively as he leaned across the counter. “What do you mean, no?”
O.B. pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It’s impossible to time slip inside the TVA.”
Loki made a grab for the other man’s arm. “Mobius, listen. I saw something, just now—”
“But you just saw it happen,” Mobius pressed, ignoring Loki completely.
“Mobius.”
O.B.’s face scrunched in confusion. “Yeah.”
“Mobius!”
“What!”
But then the familiar feeling came again, sweeping over Loki. The pin-prickling sensation at the base of his neck, a nauseating lurch of his stomach… The R&A dissipated around him, his body careening forward and sideways.
His head connected with something. Something decidedly metal, the reverberation of the impact stunning him momentarily as stars exploded behind his eyes. His arms flew out to the sides in a most certainly futile attempt to help regain his balance, just as his knees buckled beneath him, leaving him half-hanging over the side of… whatever.
He was panting, his chest heaving. The force of the experience had rendered him dazed and catatonic, his head swimming and his ears ringing.
If it was up to him, he would happily just stay there for as long as he could. Not thinking. Not feeling. Barely being. After everything he had been through over the past few days—over the past few years, a small voice reminded him in the back of his mind; lest he forget the Mind Stone and Thanos and New York—he deserved as much. He deserved a damned break.
Although that wasn’t how things worked, of course.
Loki gritted his teeth and flexed his fingers against the side of whatever it was that he had collided so gracelessly with as he hauled himself back to his feet. His unsteady feet, at that.
And then—the voice.
“Loki?”
(Although that wasn’t how the story had started, either.)
(The story had started with a box of vinyl records.)
There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about Broxton, Oklahoma, in 1982.
Or any other year, before or after 1982, come to think about it.
Sylvie had checked.
They hadn’t even had a proper flu outbreak in all of the town’s history.
Which was to say that Broxton, Oklahoma, was a true antithesis to everything she had experienced in her life since she was a child. A place so plain and so boring that even a seasonal virus couldn’t be bothered with it.
That wasn’t why Sylvie had picked it, of course.
In truth, she hadn’t picked it at all.
If Sylvie were the sort of person to engage in philosophical musings about the nature of things or fate or other mystical bullshit that had no place in her very pragmatic life, she would say that Broxton had picked her.
The truth, however, was simpler than that.
She’d had to go somewhere after completing her mission—one could only sit on the floor next to the body of someone they had killed for so long.
So, she had opened a time door at random.
The end.
Admittedly, the whole thing was a smidge more complicated than that. The whole thing was that she hadn’t had a plan. Which was a travesty, truly—a Loki always had a plan; that was their whole… thing. And she could be in denial about that side of herself for as long as she pleased, but she had hardly ever been the exception to the rule.
But she had never devised a plan for the after.
Had never thought she would need one.
Had never wanted to jinx her mission by hoping too much for something that had felt unattainable for so long.
And that was the thing, really. Sylvie knew how to run, to hide, to survive. She knew how to sharpen her blade and how to kill. She knew how to make the most of very little.
But she hadn’t the slightest clue about how to live. She could not for the life of her seem to figure out how to move through her days without having to walk the fine line between making it through yet another apocalypse and staying hidden from the TVA, adrenaline pumping relentlessly through her blood and keeping her senses on edge.
No one had told her this. No one had told her that living was a skill and not a given.
Regardless. She had to do it now.
Broxton, Oklahoma, had seemed like a fine enough place to give that a try.
She had found an apartment.
A job had been a no-brainer, either. She needed to do something with herself, anyway. Anything to stop herself from going mad from how quiet the nights were, or how little she had to be on the lookout for. And there was, admittedly, something very soothing about having a routine, about doing the same thing every day and not having to think of much else. Perhaps, she would get tired of it, eventually (she knew she would), but for now, Sylvie couldn’t help but revel in it, unashamedly.
She had picked up some clothes from Goodwill, charmed by the idea of giving home and a second chance to something that no one else wanted. There was something symbolic about that.
She had gotten a stack of books from the same place, uncertain if she even wanted to read them but loving how they livened up her place, making it feel a little bit more like home. Like a place she didn’t have to leave.
The car had come next—a slightly terrifying step that had felt a little bit more real, a little bit more permanent. But one needed to get around somehow without drawing attention to themselves, Sylvie had reasoned with herself. It would be bloody absurd to use time doors to pick up groceries.
The truck was rickety and old and temperamental, and Sylvie loved it to pieces from the moment she had spotted it in some old guy’s driveway, a For Sale sign propped up against the windshield. From the peeling and faded paint to the creak of the driver’s door to the slight wiggle she needed to give the crank handle before she could roll down the driver’s side window.
She remembered the giddy feeling of inspecting it, amused by the skeptical look the old man had given her. (He had been right in his assumption that she’d had no idea what she was doing, but that was a different story.) He had only shrugged, in the end, while he counted the bills Sylvie had shoved into his hand.
Buying the truck had felt dangerous. It had felt like growing roots, like doing something she hadn’t quite agreed to but couldn’t walk away from. It had felt a little like being dragged underwater by a current, unable to gain control over where she was going or what she was going to do once she ran out of air. But maybe that was life. How would she even know? So she’d gone along with it.
It wasn’t the car that had cemented her place on this timeline, however.
It was a box of someone’s old vinyl records she had found at a yard sale. One that she had paid for with her second paycheck. Those records were the first frivolous purchase Sylvie had ever made. She hadn’t needed them. She hadn’t even owned a device to play them. (She still didn’t.) But she’d had a place to take them and a shelf to put them on, and it had felt, in that moment, like something had changed, irreversibly.
So, maybe that was what life was all about—sitting on the floor in your apartment and flipping through a stack of records, tracing the names of each album with your fingers. Maybe it was about cursing the alarm clock in the morning and trying to keep a sorry-looking plant on her kitchen window from dying. Maybe it was about habits and routines that were created out of her own whims and wishes, and not tragedies dictated by this end of world or that.
So what if she still startled when a car backfired outside, reaching for her sword and her TemPad, calling for her magic and ready to bolt at a moment’s notice?
So what if she slept on the couch in the living room most nights because the bed felt too comfortable and she couldn’t stand it?
Sylvie had never meant to make Broxton, Oklahoma, her home.
Yet there she was, months later, feeling more grounded than she’d felt in hundreds of years.
She didn’t think about the TVA.
And she didn’t think about Loki, the smooth-talking traitorous bastard.
(Because each time he did cross her mind, however briefly, she was reminded of what a fool she had been to believe his lies for even a second.
And she did not enjoy that.)
She hoped he had found what he had been looking for. Maybe even a throne. Not the one that He Who Remains had offered to him (to them) in his final moments, but surely there was no shortage of them in the vast multiverse.
She hoped he had made peace with everything that he was, even the parts that he resented.
(And most importantly, she hoped that he was as miserable as she had been in those first days and weeks after their falling-out, gutted in ways she had never felt in her entire, very long life.
Damn him.)
She hadn’t expected him to come back.
Or maybe she had, at first.
Some grand reappearance, bold and pompous and dramatic, accompanied undoubtedly by a string of big words and a proclamation of his superiority that meant so very little to Sylvie, or to the universe. She would have even let him have that moment, if it ever occurred.
But it never did.
There had been a time or two—or a couple dozen—in those first few weeks when she would spot a lanky figure in a crowd or hear a similar cadence of the voice rising above all other noise, and her stomach would give an achy tug of longing. One that would inadvertently leave her feeling embarrassed and pitifully pathetic, her cheeks aflame because she had always deemed herself above such foolishness.
But even that had stopped after a while, the memory of their easy camaraderie and everything else that could have been fading with time.
And just as well.
To get so attached to someone whom she had only known for a handful of days—what had she been thinking?
These days, she viewed Loki and their brief shared history as a lesson she had learned instead. A reminder to stay vigilant about her trust and who she was smart to extend it to.
Her own variants certainly were off that list from now on.
(They should never have been on it in the first place.)
Her car was the only one left in the parking lot, tucked against the bushes that bordered the outside sitting area, swallowed by the darkness outside of the halo cast by a giant glowing M.
The Golden Arches was what people called it. As if it was a landmark of a particular significance and not a place to grab a quick bite and move on to something more important. Admittedly, the fries were good, so maybe there was something to the reverie that she was starting to notice people reserved for fast food joints.
Sylvie noted that one of the bulbs inside the M was flickering in and out, like a string of Morse code tapped out by some invisible force, and made a mental note to mention it to whoever was the manager on duty tomorrow.
Tomorrow. The concept still left her in awe. It was astounding how one could live for so long and never experience the future. How her tomorrows had been marked by nothing but death, until now.
They were going to have shakes on a 2-for-1 special next week.
Her car needed to have its oil changed in July.
“Hey, can you close on Wednesday? I have an appointment.”
“I think they will be expanding the picnic area next year.”
If she allowed herself to think too hard about any of that, she would be breathing into a paper bag in their walk-in freezer a dozen times a day.
Sylvie patted the pockets of her coat, her hand slipping into the left one to pull out a set of keys. She twisted one just right, the door giving a low creak when she pulled it open, and she was greeted by a familiar scent of leather and gasoline, and what was meant to be a tropical fragrance from the air freshener she had hung on the rear-view mirror but that decidedly was not. She’d been to plenty of tropical places; none of them had smelled like over-sweetened coconut.
And then something bumped heavily into her car, the sound followed by a muffled “Ugh,” that morphed into a pained groan.
She hadn’t expected Loki to come back.
But if he were, she was certain he’d make a show of it, grandiose and obnoxious.
He wouldn’t be hanging over the side of the bed of her truck.
And yet—
“Loki?”