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Sylvie breathed easier when she saw Loki again.
It must have been hours of separation, but it felt like an eternity. She was glad to see him there, intact and alive. There was no guarantee what the TVA would do if he stepped a foot out a line, and she didn’t want either of them to find out. She hoped they wouldn't once her plan was set in motion.
They were so close to ending this that she could almost taste it. The exhilaration of fighting as one, the anger giving way to satisfaction, the thrill of tearing this place apart piece by piece. It was in arms reach.
And he would be at her side.
“You okay?” she whispered.
Loki looked at her, but his eyes turned in another direction the very next moment. He closed his eyes and gave her a slow nod, and she knew. Something was wrong.
She wished she could tell him she had a plan, that this wasn’t the end and they were going to be okay. But there was no way of telling him without putting her and Hunter B-15’s plan in jeopardy. She had to leave him in the dark to protect them both.
But Loki had been right: maybe they weren’t always destined to lose, but to survive, and they had. They would again today, and tomorrow, and every day after that. Because they were survivors, and that was what they did.
“I’ve got them from here,” Ravonna said from behind them.
The guards let them go and stepped away. Sylvie stared as the elevator doors opened. Despite herself, her heart skipped a beat.
She had thought of every scenario in which she would breach the TVA and end up here, to step into the elevator, and make the Timekeepers pay for what they’d done. She never thought she’d be stepping in like this, drenched in rainwater, a collar around her neck, and seemingly nowhere to run. It was surreal and perfect and everything she never imagined it would be.
It doesn’t lessen the ache in her chest.
She thought of everything it had taken to get here. In another life, she might be in Asgard right now, feeling the warmth of the day upon her skin and seeing the Bifröst in the distance, all the possibilities of mischief dancing before her eyes. It would have been simple — a different life, but wholly her own.
But it wasn’t. It had been tainted and stolen. And she never even knew why.
A hand shoved her forward. A sharp gasp escaped her in surprise. Loki protested as she stumbled, striking forward to pull her back, but Ravonna set him in place with a tap of her finger.
Sylvie glared at her. Ravonna glared back. “Move, the both of you,” she commanded.
Sylvie felt Loki’s eyes on her, and she turned her attention on him. His jaw was clenched, his indignation loud and clear, so stark in his eyes that it made her breath lodge in her throat, but there was something different in him. Something broken and serrated, a knife wielded and turned upon oneself. It confirmed her suspicions from before: something was wrong, and whatever it was had been bad. She got a taste of that same outrage in him the moment she considered what they could have done to him to shear him through so violently.
She considered some ways she could make them pay for that, too.
Sylvie and Loki stepped into the elevator side by side. Ravonna took the helm in front of them. The elevator doors shut.
She felt the tension within the elevator press into her like a knife’s edge. She raised her head, defiant, but emotion burned in her throat. “Do you remember me?”
“I do,” Ravonna replied, matter-of-factly. She paused, waiting for a snap or a retort that Sylvie doesn’t give her the satisfaction of receiving. “What do you want to say to me, Variant?”
Sylvie hated that she seized this opportunity as quickly as she did, but it dangled before her like a shining prize. She couldn’t let it slip between her fingers. Not after everything she had gone through.
She swallowed and braced herself for the answer. “What was my nexus event?” she asked. “Why did you bring me in?”
“What does it matter?”
Maybe Ravonna was right. Maybe it doesn’t matter at all because what was done was done and there was no going back, no erasing what had already happened. But Sylvie would never forgive herself if she didn’t insist.
“It was enough to take my life from me, lead to all of this.” She cocked her head. “Must have been important. So, what was it?”
She had spent years agonizing over what she did wrong and what she could have done differently to save herself from this fate. Years upon years of regret and resentment had been built upon it, both for the TVA and for herself. And finally, once and for all, she wanted to know the truth.
Ravonna’s lips tugged up. It made Sylvie’s stomach clench. “I don’t remember,” she said.
Sylvie didn’t expect this answer, but what she expected even less was the tightness in her chest and the burn in her eyes. Something in her gave way. The words felt like a punch to her gut. It felt like a fist through every ounce of loss, fear, and loneliness she endured over the years. It felt like she’d been in free fall all this time, and the ground had finally caught up with her, and there was nothing left to be salvaged of her bones and body and mind but brokenness.
All for something so easily forgotten.
All for nothing.
All at once, her rage fell away, replaced instead with a gut-wrenching sorrow. It was the feeling that had been drowned out by her anger and vengeance, a feeling she had kept buried. But now, the curtain of her fury had been pulled away, showing the truth of what lay beneath.
I don’t remember.
It made Sylvie’s body go numb, refined to nothing but distant tingles of feeling in her limbs. It was so drastic she thought she might collapse. But she didn’t — she held herself up somehow, as she always had.
Her chest felt tight, pulled taut with the weight of those devastating words. Her vision blurred with tears, and it took everything in her to keep them at bay. Her throat was raw, as if she’d been screaming this entire time. And maybe she had. Maybe she always had, in some way, and she never realized it.
I don’t remember, I don’t remember.
She laughed, but she barely recognized the sound. She barely even recognized her own body. She was nothing but a fragment in this moment, a shell of someone she’d once been, split open to the bone.
I don’t remember.
She shook her head. “All those years alone, hiding, running…” She resented the crack in her voice, but a bitter laugh escaped her just the same. “And you don’t even remember.”
I remember, she wanted to say. I remember how you pulled me from the only home I’d ever known, from a people and a family that loved me, and thrust me into a cruel life. I remember what it was to be a child in a universe too big and horrific. I remember the terror of that helplessness. And I remember every monstrous thing I was forced to do to survive.
I remember everything.
Sylvie wanted to scream.
This woman had lived in luxury while Sylvie had lost and fought and lost again. She had enjoyed comfort and full bellies and connection that Sylvie had barely gotten a glimpse of. She had blindly followed the orders of apparent supremes and robbed a child of everything she had, no questions asked, and she didn’t even remember why .
Sylvie was breaking, one terrible, agonizing crack at a time.
Fingertips grazed her forearm. She gasped and turned toward the sensation to see Loki. She had nearly forgotten he was there at all, and she suddenly couldn’t understand why. Once she sees him, she couldn’t stop seeing him, couldn’t tear her eyes from seeing the knowing expression on his face or the glaze in his eyes or the fact that he was here with her, stretching out a hand to let her know that simple truth.
Then the tears fell.
And Sylvie let herself break.
An entire existence of holding herself together by the seams fell apart in the matter of moments. It felt like the weight of the universe falling from her shoulders. It felt like she could finally breathe again.
The tears flowed in a steady stream, but she couldn't bring herself to care anymore.
It was so easy to let herself go before him that she could barely fathom it. The trust it required had always been beyond her, too vulnerable, too open, but he painted it in new colors. It wasn’t scary with him; the comfort of this shared confidence felt like an embrace from the cosmos she thought herself so rejected by.
But this was far from rejection — it was a welcoming, a beckoning of a bond that she didn’t know she needed until it was hers.
Loki’s eyes shone with tears, as if he were feeling every inch of this transformation with her, and the perceptiveness of the moment left her reeling. His hand trailed down her leather-clad arm, a touch so delicate that a shiver crawled up her spine. She had never known this magnitude of gentleness, and if she had, it had been too long to remember. But he was here nonetheless, remembering enough for the both of them. Reminding her that such things never have to be so far away again.
His fingertips grazed against her palm and a nervous jolt struck through her. They intertwined their fingers. Sylvie let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding, but it rings like a sigh. Like relief.
Like finding something she’d been searching for for a long, long time.
She doesn’t know what he was thinking, but she doesn’t need to know. She could see the words for herself. He was telling her something.
You’re not alone, he was saying.
And it was true.
Sylvie had been alone since the TVA showed up on Asgard and ripped her life from underneath her. She had been alone through the years of scavenging for shelter and food, through fighting off scoundrels and running from the TVA officers that always, always, managed to find her. She had been alone all those terrible nights, in the cold, in the blistering heat, in whatever terrible place she found herself in, mourning her home and the family she’d never see again. She had been alone in everything, set aside like a blight in the universe, never to know true connection.
But not anymore.
Now, she never had to be alone again.
Neither of them did.
And just like that, Sylvie allowed herself to fall together once more, broken and fractured but not less herself for it. Her strength remained as steady as the stubborn beat of her heart that they couldn’t sniff out. They could take everything they could from her, but they couldn’t take who she was.
Sylvie was more than what they’d done to her. She was more than this heartbreak. And she’d come back to take what was hers.
The elevator doors opened, exposing a world of blue fog, so thick she can barely see past it until she does. The Timekeepers loomed at the far end of the throne room, seated high in glory while countless others suffered under their reign. The rage within her came crawling back to the surface, fracturing through her like a strike of lighting, but it felt different in her bones now. There was clarity in it.
She knew what she needed to do.
And nothing was going to stop her.
When neither she nor Loki moved, Ravonna peered back at them. “Get a move on,” she hissed beneath her breath.
Loki clenched his jaw and squeezed her hand, a final reassurance, before he let go. Sylvie followed suit begrudgingly. They stepped out from between Ravonna and into the throne room.
They faced the Timekeepers.
Sylvie channeled that familiar rage and the sorrow, too. She was here for vengeance, she realized, but she was here for justice, too. Not just for herself, but for every other person they had harmed and would harm if she didn’t stop this here and now.
She was going to make them pay for every Variant they killed and took as their own against their will. She was going to make them pay for Loki and whatever terrible thing they’d put him through. But most of all, she was going to make them pay for harming the girl on Asgard that they stripped down to nothing and the woman they’d carved her out to be, the woman that remembered for the Variants that couldn’t and the woman that remembered for the girl long lost, their sins of the past and present colliding as one rising tide of vengeance that had come to take them all.
She was going to make them pay until there was nothing left of them but ash and smoke. Until they were erased from time and space as easily as they erased her.
There would be nothing left.
Sylvie looked toward Loki. He glanced at her, and her heart jumped in her chest. He must read the expression on her face because he gave her a small nod. She nodded back. And then, there was that same understanding expression on his face that spoke a thousand words.
Together, then. Until the end. For all time.
Always.