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The pungent vapor of port with surprisingly fruity undertones hit Sylvie’s senses first, and her nostrils flared.
The Asgardian ballad was on the heels of the port, and Sylvie was jolted out of her slumber by music that stirred long-buried feelings deep in her soul; music of a time she could barely remember but which was so viscerally ingrained she couldn’t help but be transfixed instantly.
‘I can’t sleep in a place like this.’ - she had told him.
‘You can’t sleep on a train?’
‘No. I can’t sleep around untrustworthy people.’
‘Oh, right, that me?’
Sylvie had slept like a baby, through the chaos of the party that had kicked up on a train to the end of the world. She felt energetic, vital, and as she blinked away the muddied haze of sleep and focused her gaze on him, she felt something else - something which she couldn’t quite put words to yet.
The romantic narcissist had made himself the life of the party of course. Arrogant, evidently inebriated, he flaunted his charm and his physicality with devastating ease. He was the day to Sylvie’s night, the yin to her yang, flamboyant and poetic and luxurious where Sylvie met him with fierce cunning and strategy and sinewy flexibility. Side by side there was nothing that was missing. They were a complete whole. And anyone who disagreed knew not what it was to see and need and embrace and adore every facet of the dark and the light of the experience of being alive.
This intuitive realisation settled over Sylvie calmly in the second before her cerulean eyes locked with his. Together with the decision that she would never be beholden to or dependent on this impossibly intriguing man. And with the decision that she wanted, with every fibre of her being, to kiss his warm mouth, to run her hands through his silky mass of ebony curls, to tangle their strong, athletic limbs and unite the two diametric opposites to make the whole and not resurface until for a brief moment the universe sang with a unity of the strands of identity.
The raucous chorus had ended and Loki was now eagerly shushing the equally tipsy crowd. Sylvie felt a pang of alarm to see that he had evidently long lost the careful focus that had been maintaining the illusion of the guards’ uniform that had been their cover. Instead he stood in that hateful uniform of the omniscient fascists that Sylvie had spent her life running from. It would take a lot to freely admit it, but it made Sylvie burn with a profound sorrow to see Loki trussed up in their ugly, faceless shirt and trousers, not to mention branded like an animal with his jacket which could not help but remind him, and Sylvie, anyone and everyone, that he was no more than a ‘Variant’ - one among a herd of cattle to be categorized with letters and a number, before being disposed of. Sylvie knew all too well what it felt like to be taken like a lamb to the slaughterhouse of the timekeepers: that one fateful encounter and her impossible escape were scorched into her mind and her drive as though by a branding iron.
But all that pain and fury and loss seemed to dissipate like fluffy clouds in the summer sky as her eyes met Loki’s, and his singing the words of a long-lost and nearly forgotten home pierced her heart and soul.
‘On mountains darkened by the storms,’ he sang, full of heart, in the haunting language only they on this accursed moon understood.
‘I’m wandering alone.’
He leaned on the bar - their gazes had only met for a moment and now he lowered his modestly, and like a reflex Sylvie understood. He felt the same way. He couldn’t reconcile those feelings. Of course he did, of course he couldn’t. The connection between them seemed to run like the finest of threads, exquisitely sensitive to pulling from either end. Sylvie pulled the thread. She kept her eyes locked on Loki’s down-turned ones. He sensed the invisible action. His eyes rose to meet hers and stayed there.
‘Over glaciers I’m pushing on...’ Loki continued and pain reverberated between the two - the pain of the forever misunderstood sailors without a destination, who lived only by the code: ‘Mischief, thou art afoot. Take what course thou wilt!’.
Loki’s chin tilted upwards almost imperceptibly and Sylvie instinctively mirrored him.
‘The fair maiden is in the apple orchard...’ - his voice was softer now and suddenly the world seemed to shrink to just the two of them, and an intense heat, fire on fire, kindled between them. Loki seemed almost steadied by the influence of the alcohol, releasing his inhibitions, but Sylvie couldn’t help raise her eyebrows the smallest bit as she realised the potency of that fire.
‘And she’s singing…’ He was not as immune to the fire as Sylvie had suspected, rendered near breathless. Yet the ending to the verse was poignantly beautiful and clear:
‘When will you come home?’
Through the glass roof of the train to the end of the world, the sun of this unknown galaxy streamed onto Loki’s face, the purple vapors of the air lighting his ethereal features with a lilac glow and causing the tears in his sea-green eyes to shine ever so slightly. Sylvie’s tears were rendered invisible in the shadows of the alcove she was watching him from - but they were no less real.
This was not lust, Sylvie realized, again with one of those bizarrely calm flashes of intuition. Lust was angry and ran in a straight line - some dry and humorless part of Sylvie’s mind pulled up the image of the linear, unchanging path of destiny that the timekeepers declared as divine.
‘Love is hate.’
Lust was duplicitous and not to trust and everything that Sylvie and Loki had perceived themselves to be their entire lives. Everything that the timekeepers wanted them to be.
‘Nothing ever…’
‘Real.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Love is mischief.’
There would be time, Sylvie realized, as she slowly rose from her seat and made her way over to Loki, for argument and turmoil. There would be time, she realized, as he blathered on, in his hedonistic, utterly charming way about snacks and figgy ports, for conflict and courage. There would be time, she realized, as she moved closer to his scent of sweat and warmth and he to hers of leather and pine, for revelations and ultimatums. There would be time for the end of one world and the beginning of the next, for twists and turns and there would be time for chaos. Oh, there would always be time for chaos.
‘Love is a dagger.
It’s a weapon to be wielded far away or up close.
You can see yourself in it.
It’s beautiful until it makes you bleed.
But ultimately when you reach for it…
It isn’t real.’
And as the universe contracted down to Loki’s large, soft hand ever-so-gently tilting her chin up to his own, as his eyes held hers, in that split second Sylvie realized that this was love - for the first time in their lives, this was trust. Whatever either of them had thought up until now, love and trust were possible and they were real.
‘We write our own destiny now.’ Loki murmured as his lips collided with hers, her hands threaded through his curls and his through hers, they molded their bodies into one another and they reveled in the chaos they had made.