Chapter Text
With a snap of her fingers, time froze just before the doors out the platform leading towards the Temporal Loom were to close. Mobius froze behind her. Before her was Loki, eyes glassy as he was about to say those awful words. I know what I want. I know what kind of god I need to be. Sylvie had heard it thousands of times now over endless centuries of repeats, of learning. In much of the same time that Loki had spent centuries learning physics to try to patch the Loom, Sylvie had done some learning of her own.
Timeslipping. It came to her by accident. When reality began to unravel around her shortly after she walked through the time portal into that workshop and Loki said it was a matter of who, not what. If Loki could control his timeslipping, maybe she could do the same. She, of course, had much less practice. Zero to begin.
She’d only gained the ability just moments before the whole thing went crashing down. An errant touch at the bar - a mere brushing of hands over drinks - and Sylvie had accidentally attained the ability for herself. It didn’t seem that Loki meant to share this gift or knew he could. He wouldn’t have seen it as a gift. The both of them were so preoccupied with the debate of free will and other antics that it barely registered as a concern until that first time Sylvie watched him try to go and do it all on his own, sparking her own journey of a thousand attempts to save the blasted fool from himself.
Once he had told her, ‘we’re stronger than we realize,’ when another of their variants sacrificed himself. Stronger than we realize, yes. Stronger together.
It wasn’t that Sylvie didn’t appreciate the notion, the selflessness. She’d told him she wanted a life and no doubt this was his way of letting her live one. He probably had some silly idea that she would go back to working at the restaurant in Broxton, collecting old records and trying the new seasonal flavors of Kablooie. Sure, it was better than floating from apocalypse to apocalypse, and it was a life, but it was alone. And Sylvie had been alone for far too long already.
She snapped her fingers again, just enough to unfreeze him while keeping everything else in place.
Loki’s face twinged. “When did–hang on. How long have you known how to do that?”
Sylvie shrugged incredulously. “I don’t know, idiot. How long did it take you to become an expert in quantum physics?” A wry sort of half-smirk, half-surprise took him, and he seemed to search for his words. Luckily, this wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation, so Sylvie knew exactly how to catch him off guard. “Not as fast as Tony Stark, eh?”
“That was Thermonuclear Astrophysics and, well…” Loki softly bit his bottom lip, avoiding her gaze. “I suppose you’re about to tell me there’s another way? That there’s some other way to make the loom work?”
Sylvie watched him carefully, his every movement, just in case he might be planning to make a dive for it. Hopefully now that he understood that she could play this game, too, he wouldn’t try it, but he is… well, him. It wouldn’t have surprised her if this part alone took another century to resolve.
“You’ve got quite the nerve, thinking you can go it alone,” Sylvie said, nodding back to the frozen branches of time around the loom. “I’m the one who killed He Who Remains. I started this. I forced you into this mess. If anyone should go out there, it’s me.”
“There’s no life out there, Sylvie,” Loki said, grimly, as if he still meant to talk her out of it. “We can save the TVA and the branches but…you saw what happened. Stepping away for even a few hours would be risky.”
“Are you saying you want to be alone for all time and eternity?” Sylvie asked. “Is that what makes a Loki, a Loki? Ending up fuck all alone?”
“Sylvie, you should have a lif–”
“You should, too.”
There was a moment of shared silence. What Sylvie wanted to say was that she wanted a life with him. Ideally, they’d be on the timeline somewhere. No apocalypses. No running. Just a boring, mundane life. Laundry and taxes, that sort of thing. She wanted to figure it out with him – at very least, she wanted the opportunity to try.
“Let me go with you, Loki,” Sylvie said, her voice coming out in more of a delicate pleading than she’d hoped. “C’mon. What else do you want me to do? Sell jet skis with Mobius?”
Sylvie extended a hand out to him. He hesitated a moment before clasping his fingers through hers. She stepped closer and the two adjusted for comfort, standing side by side and facing ahead.
Loki tried to speak but Sylvie stopped him, placing a finger over his lips. It was one of the more polite ways she could’ve shut him up but not the most creative. She didn’t need to have lived it a thousand times before to know what he might’ve lived to say then, that she didn’t have to do this, that she could still have her life. Without him it would’ve been meaningless, but she’d never let him hear it in quite those words. The man was boastful enough as is, and there was no reason to feed the fire, especially not when they were already staring down the rest of always alone together. Alone together she could deal with.
What she couldn’t handle was the thought of him out there alone, after doing all of this to save his friends and save the billions of lives scattered across the branches. She needed him to be okay.
“I did warn you, it is harder to stay,” Loki said softly. “You’ll grow tired of me. Just wait.”
Sylvie snapped her fingers once again to unfreeze time. She’d made her choice willingly, freely.
The two of them walked forward together, hand in hand, and ascended together to grasp the branches that came to them along the way.