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Everything was a rush, a blur.
Loki winces and exhales, pulse pounding, ears ringing.
Minutemen lay around his feet; unmoving, sprawled in unnatural positions.
Everything is deathly quiet, deathly still.
Except it’s not.
A few paces away from him Sylvie stares off into space, breathing frantically and surveying the damage around her. She drops her weapon and it clatters to the ground, rolling to lie still near the decapitated head of one of the timekeepers. Or the fake timekeepers. If the timekeepers were ever real in the first place. He’s still not sure on that point.
Sylvie glances around with the same pained look on her face as him; the same guilt. Maybe they were really destined for destruction, destined to bring ruin and misery everywhere they go. It’s what he had told himself. It’s what Mobius had told him.
Mobius.
The way he looked at Loki so softly and told him that he could be whatever he wanted to be, the smile on his face when he realized that he had a life beyond the confines of the TVA, a life where he could be free. And then…
Loki chokes up, trying to wipe the memory from his head. He looks back to Sylvie.
They have different faces but the same eyes; the same mirrored reflection of wrath and pain. It’s consuming her again, just as it’s consumed him again and again in the past; a kind of building hatred made to mask suffering and a constant, desperate need for validation and love. He can’t watch it happen again, not when there’s a chance to stop it.
“What makes a Loki a Loki?”
Sylvie flinches, as if being jolted awake. She turns to him sharply.
“What?”
Loki doesn’t look at her, he’s staring down at one of the minutemen.
“What makes a Loki a Loki?”
Sylvie looks at him as if he’s got three heads.
“You’re asking me now?”
Loki finally turns to her.
“I’m being serious.”
He widens his arms, gesturing to the silenced chaos around him. “I know we haven’t followed the same path in life; you’ve been on the run for all of yours and I’ve been off making my own stupid, selfish, mistakes.”
He walks towards her, stepping over the bodies around him.
“But at our core, we’re both Lokis.” he laughs a little; it feels weird to say that out loud. He was only used to other versions of himself that were produced from his own magic; mindless copies incapable of individual thought, much less leading their own lives. Sylvie is something new, something hopeful.
“What’s your point?” Sylvie narrows her eyes suspiciously, stepping back a couple of paces.
“A friend of mine once told me that I had the ability to be anything I wanted to be.” Loki hums, respecting her personal space and instead going to stroll about the room, absentmindedly kicking the timekeeper's head into the wall. It makes a hollow thunking noise.
“You’re not me, but you are me. We had the potential to become something different and we did.”
The timekeeper's head rolls back towards him and he punts it into the wall again. Goal.
“I don’t know if either of us turned out necessarily ‘good’...” he pauses, trying to get a read on Sylvie’s face. She stares at him blankly, her lips pursed. He sighs and continues.
“..but we became something beyond what any amount of destiny or fake stupid timekeeper space lizards could dictate.”
“And look at the kind of mess we create.” Sylvie interjects quietly, shifting her gaze to the floor. Her stance, her refusal to be vulnerable--everything about her feels familiar, almost in a dreamlike way. Loki looks at her and sees what Mobius was talking about, sees the heart he’s yet to see in himself. It’s terrible and painful and tears at the very fibre of his being, but it means he’s not alone, not destined to fail as he once thought.
“But we don’t have to confine ourselves to mischief.” He smiles half-heartedly, searching for a sign that Sylvie is understanding what he's saying. “We could be so much more.”
A moment of stillness. A quiet layered on top of the already noiseless atmosphere of the room.
Sylvie finally raises her head, and Loki steps back in shock when he sees her eyes are filled with tears. Upon seeing his expression she tries to blink them back, which only results in more tears. Loki almost jumps in surprise when he touches his face to find tears already streaming down his cheeks. It feels strange to be this open around another person; even more so when he remembers it’s himself.
Sylvie moves toward him cautiously as if approaching a wild animal. She stops a few feet away, and for a moment Loki wonders if she’s just going to kill him right then and there. Loki stiffens, preparing himself for the worst.
Instead she cracks a lopsided smile.
“I’d forgotten what it felt like to have friends.”
Loki breathes a sigh of relief and smiles wider.
“I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to consider myself worthy of friends.” He laughs, wiping away his tears. “Look at us, getting all weepy over ourselves.”
They both laugh, forgetting for a moment the horrific nature of their current circumstances. The feeling of having hope in yourself, having faith that you can move beyond your mistakes and history is so new and overwhelming for Loki; for a moment he thinks time might be standing still.
To look at a mirror image of himself and to not feel disgust and shame; it’s more than he ever thought possible.
Without hesitation, he pulls Sylvie into a hug.
She freezes. Her whole body stiffens and she stops breathing for a moment. Loki shuts his eyes and hopes that her next move won’t be to stick a knife in his back. So much for self-acceptance.
But then Sylvie loosens up and hugs him back, holding him like a long-lost brother she’d been reunited with after eons apart. She shuts her eyes as well, and her breathing resumes.
“I forgive you” she whispers, so lightly that anyone but Loki himself may have missed it.
Loki pauses, letting the words echo in his mind.
“I forgive you too.” He mutters, clinging tighter to Sylvie, to the person he once thought he’d despise to his final breath. For the first time in his entire life he feels whole, feels like he can finally take a breath and stop fighting.
They stand still for a long time.