Sylvie learned what the mark on her right arm was on the same day she first saw it. It had never been there in her other form, the Asgardian one, but the first time her mother helped her change into her first, blue one, there it was. A mess of golden, squiggly lines crawling this way and that, beginning in a burst at her wrist and leading nearly all the way to her elbow.
They were cracks, she thought at first, proof something about her was broken. Ten years old and still reeling from everything she'd found out in the last month or so (not to mention quite overheated in that form, for it was late fall in Asgard and there wasn't a speck of snow to be seen), she started to cry. It wasn't the usual sort of crying, neither anger nor frustration but something else. Babies cried like this, like their world was ending, but babies didn't have the understanding she did, or was starting to.
When the the hiccups had finished, and still holding Sylvie in her arms, Frigga coaxed the reason out of her, then said, "Oh, darling, you've misunderstood. These marks aren't cracks. Look closer. Isn't there a pattern to them? A reasoning, of sorts? Perhaps they're meant to be branches. Like the ones on Yggdrasil. Wouldn't that be lovely?"
"The World Tree," Sylvie agreed, sniffing. She wiped her eyes on her other wrist and looked again, buoyed by the hundreds of other times she'd been told she'd misunderstood something, then discovered things were better than she'd thought at first. "But what's it for?"
"Well, that's one of the things that's so exciting," Frigga said, and went on to say that all Jotuns had such a mark on one of their forearms. Each unique, save for one other; for if you ever found a person whose mark matched yours, then that person was meant for you, had been made for you by the universe.
"That sounds boring," said Sylvie, who was more than a little awed by this, but determined not to show it.
Frigga laughed, the way she could laugh, not like she was making fun of you, but like she was delighted by you, and everything you were. "Oh, really? Why is that, my love?"
At ten, Sylvie didn't know how to explain that her mark might match a boy if she what she wanted was a girl, or might match a girl if what she wanted was a boy; that other people were so often just one thing, in so many different ways, whereas what she wanted or needed sometimes seemed to change by the moment. Instead she said the thing she did know how to say, because she'd already learned that people who weren't Thor would throw contests, because she was a girl or because she was a princess or because she simply hadn't stabbed them well enough yet; even Thor underestimated her sometimes, at least until she was threating to win decisively enough for it to be embarrassing for him: "It seems too easy. Where's the fun in it?"
Frigga laughed, a sound like bells, a joy that almost seemed to shine visibly in the air. "I'm certain you'll find some. There are years enough ahead of you yet. But now, let's change you back before you melt right before your poor mother's eyes."
*
Sylvie didn't see her mark again for more years than Frigga could possibly have meant when she'd said that.
In the end, it wasn't fun, but it also wasn't easy. In all the time she'd spent running, there'd never been a compelling reason to change her shape. It wouldn't help hide her, wouldn't help kill them, and so she'd put it aside to focus on her plan.
Now, though, there was not only the time to learn something un-useful, but it turned out to be necessary if she was going to spend any time in the place she kept thinking of. So she tried to remember what her mother had done to change her, what she'd said about how to do it. She tried one thing, then another, keeping track of which methods did nothing and which did anything at all and which did more than that, until she found a way that worked. At the end of it, she looked down at the backs of her own blue hands, then turned her wrist over to see what the mark had become. It hadn't changed, in all this time, but she must have, for she saw not the World Tree, but cracks once more. Not fissures in herself, but fissures matching the one that flowed across the sky--not only at the end of time, but in every time and every place, everywhere she'd been since.
Perhaps her mother had been wrong, Sylvie thought. Perhaps her mark wasn't a sign of a person meant for her. Perhaps it was a sign of what she'd been meant to do, in the end. A future written for her from the moment she'd escaped the TVA or the moment she'd been pruned...or even before that, in whatever she'd done that had made them come for her in the first place. But she hated that idea more than anything else, and so she decided it was at worst a chiding, a complaint of the Sacred Timeline written against her skin, just one more lie to be ignored.
That settled, she gathered her things--in the months since He Who Remains, she'd accumulated more objects than in the thousand years prior, certain of losing them neither to the TVA nor to the next apocalypse--and went somewhere she'd never gone before. She'd never been not because there wasn't an apocalypse there (they had been, once, just as there had eventually been one on Asgard, another avoided place), but because she hadn't been able to stand the thought of going there only to witness destruction.
The plains of Jotunheim gleamed white and sparkly under the sun. Sylvie walked until she reached the distant hill. There was a cave there, a holy place, usually visited only during the depths of winter. It was spring now, and snowing, as it only snowed there in the warmer months, the winter being so cold nothing at all would come down for months, even as the ground grew harder and sharper with every day that passed.
Within the cave there was a pool, somehow bright despite the sun being angled away from the entrance. On the walls surrounding it were drawings, blue-outlined figures hunting and fucking and worshipping and birthing. There was a feeling in the air there, a calmness Sylvie did not recall ever having felt before. It wasn't the quiet before an end, but a calm that seemed as if it might go on forever.
How long she sat there, gazing into the water, at the drawings reflected in it, she didn't know. But eventually there came into the calm another figure, when Sylvie hadn't expected to see anyone.
She rose to her feet, drew her weapon. Then saw who it was, and stared.
"Sylvie?" Loki asked. He looked the same. It took another moment for Sylvie to remember she didn't. "Is that you?"
"What are you doing here?"
"I don't know, what are you doing here?" Loki asked, so quickly it must have been an instinct, like a child's. "I mean, you, I--are you all right?"
"What do you care?" Sylvie said, harshly as she could, more harshly even than she'd meant to. Perhaps because, in the moment he asked, all she could hear was what he'd said before, how that was supposedly the only thing he wanted. "It's been months. You ought to have your throne by now, if you'd put your mind to it. I'm not interested in helping you with it, if that's what you're after."
It wasn't why he'd come. She knew that. But maybe it would throw him long enough for him to show his hand. Long enough for her to figure out how he meant to get back at her. If he'd done to her what she'd done to him, she'd have seen it as a betrayal, would never have forgiven it, would have made him regret ever crossing her. It was why he was here, the only possible reason for him to be here. What did it matter if the look on his face was the same one from before, the same one he'd put on when he'd begged her? All that proved was that it was a face he was skilled with.
"Sylvie," he said. He held his hands away from his sides, palms faced towards her so she could see he wasn't holding anything. "I don't want--I'm not going to. I mean, if you don't want--"
"Oh, would you just spit it out?"
"I've spent this whole time trying to find you," Loki said. "I wanted to check on you. That's all."
"Well, consider me checked on," Sylvie said, and turned away. It wasn't a tactical error. In fact, it was an advantage, for she could still see him, reflected in the pool's surface, but he surely couldn't see any version of her face from where he stood.
He kept standing there, more awkwardly than before.
"You haven't left yet," Sylvie said after a minute, and would realize only later that she hadn't told him to, even if she'd felt it at him very strongly.
"Neither have you," Loki said, and came carefully--oh, so carefully she had to grit her teeth to prevent herself stabbing him when he came within reach--to stand beside her. He looked down at the pool, then up at the walls, the drawings there. "This is certainly...what is this?"
"A temple," Sylvie said. Something like alarm passed over his face. She knew exactly what it meant, and hated that she knew what it meant. "No, not the one we were left in. A different one. Not a place anyone built, but a place people used to live, before anyone had built anything. This is one of the First Homes."
"Ah," Loki said.
He didn't say anything else. Neither did she. Eventually, Sylvie noticed how blue he was getting--not all over, like she was, but more around the lips. He wasn't shivering, but every few seconds he seemed to jerk in some abortive shudder.
"If you're going to stay any longer, you're going to have to change into your Jotun form," she said, and wasn't aware that she'd been all right with the idea of him staying until she said it.
"--I suppose so," said Loki, who if he'd thought about it also might simply have conjured himself a coat over the thin TVA uniform he was still wearing for some reason. But perhaps the cold had got to his brain, because in the next moment magic glimmered around him, and the moment after that, he looked like she did, a red-eyed Jotun in the dark.
"Better?" Sylvie asked viciously, all but certain it wasn't, that it couldn't be; she'd met enough Lokis to know what most of the ones who weren't her bristled at, the one thing they were most afraid of.
"...Warmer, at least." Loki's hands, which had been tucked under his armpits for the last minute or two, emerged again, just as empty as they'd been when he walked in. They were bare, too, covered with nothing but blue skin and--
All the breath went out of Sylvie in a shudder more explosive than any of his had been.
"What is it?" Loki asked with clear alarm, turning toward her with wide eyes. "Sylvie? What?"
Instead of answering, she reached for his left hand, for the first time since--since. Not to hold it, but to turn it over; to see more clearly the cracks, the golden lines that wound around his wrist, and up, nearly all the way to his elbow. They seemed a perfect match even before she held her arm out to compare them, and found that they really did match.
Loki's voiced seemed to be coming from somewhere quite far away now. "Sylvie? What's going on? Are you all right?"
"They're the same," said Sylvie, who had used to daydream about finding her soulmate, when she'd got over the idea of it being too easy and thought, instead, of what a comfort it would be, to have someone; who had dared to daydream, just the once, that instead of having her soulmate by her side, she might instead meet whatever came next with Loki there. She'd dreamed it, and it had been stupid to dream it. She'd crushed the dream because she had to, because between vengeance and Loki she'd have chosen vengeance a thousand times, and so it was no good pretending otherwise when it had become clear the choice was there.
"What is?" Then, when her hand moved (she didn't know how, frozen there, shock too great to make herself move) to trace a finger down the lines of his arm, in the same place where she'd once touched him on Lamentis: "What, this mark? Does it have some sort of meaning?"
"It doesn't mean anything. It's just--another fiction. A trick. You're trying to--"
But cast about as she might, Sylvie couldn't manage to think what Loki had to be trying to do. What he must be trying to do. She couldn't manage to think at all. All there was was feeling, instead, some great and terrible thing welling up inside her, as unstoppable a tsunami, or a volcano. It came out of her in a horrifying form, sudden ugly sobs she hadn't known were living inside her, all this time. She couldn't stop them, hadn't even a prayer of it, and the only thought inside her was that she had to get away, to somewhere where no one would see her, hear her, take advantage of this unexpected festering wound--
But before she could run, Loki was there, closer than he'd been before. And instead of reeling away from him, the way she ought to have, Sylvie pressed in, clutching at him, not because his mark matched hers but because of everything else he'd been, everything she'd thought he might be before they'd diverged. And instead of pushing her away, perhaps with a knife through her ribs, Loki wrapped his arms around her, and started talking. She didn't catch most of what he said as the storm passed through her, but judging by what he was saying by the time she caught up to him, it was probably all stupid.
"Shhhhh. Shhhhh. It's all right," he said, among other idiotic fictions, and what Sylvie kept coming back to when she could think again was that he was here. She hadn't thought it was a possibility for him to be here, not in any way she wanted. She hadn't known she could wish for it. Not after how they'd ended things. How she'd ended things.
She broke from him, soon as she was able. Turned toward the walls, so her face wouldn't show in the water. "It isn't, though," she said, wiping her face.
He didn't try to argue. "Feeling any better?"
Oddly, she sort of did. Not that she was ever going to admit it. "Nothing's all right," she said again. Maybe nothing had ever been going to be. Not for her. Not since her nexus event, whatever it had been. "You really don't know anything about the marks?"
"I'd never even seen mine before today. I have a hunch it might be important, though."
"It isn't really," Sylvie said, and wasn't sure then or later if she'd meant that. "It--are you all right?"
She hadn't meant to ask it. Hadn't known she'd ever wondered it, somewhere underneath the certainty that he had to hate her now, that whatever had been there wasn't there anymore, that she'd hate him first so any blow that came from his direction would hurt less.
"It's been...trying. A lot has happened. I'll tell you about it later, if you want." His hand found hers, there in the dark. Fingers entwining. Lines touching, maybe, one set of branches brushing against another. "I'm doing a lot better now, though."