There was no one there.
At first, they were certain there must be someone, no matter how empty and aching the place seemed from the moment they stepped foot in the foyer. But the more they looked, the more the aching seemed to grow within the echo of their steps in every new, empty room.
"No," Sylvie said, when they'd everywhere there was to look.. "No. There must be someone here. There has to be."
The way she said it made Loki want to hold her. To tell her it was all right, or would be; that he was here with her, no matter what else transpired. But not only did he have little enough practice at soothing to be incredibly aware of how awkward he'd be at it, but he recognized her tone: the sharpness over a vulnerability that would have her blade at his throat before she'd admit to the latter.
So, instead, he said, "I agree. We'll look again."
Again, they peered into every room. Entered each one, searched it, including for secret doors, hidden passageways. It was still a quick search, because other than the room with a desk and a chair in it (each drawer empty, nothing hidden in the chair other than stuffing that came out in handfuls after they cut open the seat), every room was completely bare. All there was was nothing and more nothing. There was no one, and not even the slightest clue when someone might have been here last, or where they might have gone, or even when they might have gone there.
"They saw us coming," said Sylvie, as they stared out the window by the desk, the one that looked out onto a sight Loki had never imagined, even knowing that this was the end of time: A pulsing line, huge beyond imagining, glowing among the stars, eclipsing them. His recent education suggested this was the Sacred Timeline itself, though a far earlier one might have said something else.
"I wonder if our ancestors ever saw this," he said, having forgotten, for the moment, that they hadn't been their ancestors at all. "Perhaps the Sacred Timeline and the World Tree are one and the same."
"What are you talking about?" Sylvie said. "We need to be figuring out where to go from here. Where should we go?"
There was panic in her voice now, underneath the sharpness. She was volatile, likely to do anything. Loki hadn't the faintest idea how to talk her down from her panic; was there anything anyone could have said to him, in a moment like this one? It seemed unlikely.
"I don't know," he said, because to say anything else would have ended with her thinking him a liar, rightfully. Would have ended with her trusting him less than she had the moment before, which even if it wasn't anything you could call total faith was still far better than how they'd started things. "We'll think of something."
"Will we," she said, flatly, so that it was impossible to tell whether it was the thing itself or the idea of them doing it together she found the most unlikely.
"Of course. Whoever was here fled from us. That means they fear us, which means we're on to something. We just have to follow the thread until we arrive at its end." The further Loki got, the more he believed it; sometimes the first person one was obliged to convince was oneself, after all.
One's other self, though, didn't look convinced. "We did follow it to the end. What else is there?"
Loki had no answer to this, nothing to add but a shrug. He turned back to the window, the thick glowing line, floating or just existing, up there. "Perhaps we're looking at this the wrong way," he said. "If we want to end the timeline, perhaps there's no one we need to, ah, dispose of. Perhaps there's another way."
With anyone else, he'd have had to circle around to his point slowly, lest he manage to show his hand before he had finished reeling the other in. Sylvie, though, got it, and immediately. It had been on his mind and so must have been on hers as well, because they were the same.
"Mobius's theory," she said, much more scornfully than she had the first time they'd talked about it, just a few hours ago. "Don't you know fiction when you're fed it?"
"We could try it," Loki said, attempting to sound as if he were joking; but it fell flat between them, not so much because he meant it as because he wasn't at all sure how to pretend he didn't, with her.
She looked at him, hard, business-like. Not what he was usually looking for in a partner, but somehow neither surprising nor offputting. "I suppose we could."
Perhaps it might have gotten awkward then, if there had been a discussion of who ought to stand where, who ought to approach whom. Instead, Sylvie moved, fast as Loki had ever himself moved, or maybe even faster. One moment she was standing next to him, apart from him; in the next moment, she was facing him, coming up to press a kiss against his mouth. Loki couldn't help but gasp into it, more surprise than anything else, every nerve-ending seemingly frozen for a moment, unsure if it was pleasure or pain that was coming for him. The kiss continued, and every part of him seemed to decide it must have been that first thing, after all. He was hit with a wave of want, dizzying in its intensity.
Placing his hand on her waist, he pulled her closer, kissed her back with an enthusiasm he'd have tamped down on with anyone else. He kissed her until he ached all over, and wasn't even entirely sure what he wanted, as obvious as it ought to have been.
Then she pulled back, glanced back out the window. There, in the blackness of space and time, that glowing line had begun to grow new branches. Little ones, as yet, nothing more than buds poking their heads out of the bark of some unimaginably ancient plant--but they made up a thousand changes where there ought to have been none.
"It's working." Sylvie turned back to him, face alight with some manic fire.
It made Loki want her even more than he had before. He leaned over to kiss her, but never made it; she put her hands on his chest, shoved him onto his back atop the desk, followed him there so that she was straddling him. She loosened his tie, tossed it aside, started in on the buttons of his shirt, ran her hands over his bared chest.
Then she started unbuckling his belt, and Loki said, "Sylvie. Wait a moment."
She stopped. Looking at him, manic expression fading into something a good deal more scornful. "What, you don't want it now?" she demanded.
For a moment, he hadn't been sure if he really did. Had been struck with the certainty that she wasn't doing this even a little because she wanted him; that all he was, in this position, was a means to her end. If he'd asked himself an hour ago if he could live with that, he'd have said of course he could. Here and now, faced with it, he'd suddenly known he couldn't; found himself for the first time in his life seeing something he wanted that would hurt him badly, and not simply taking it anyway.
In her eyes, there'd been that flash of something before the scorn had come out. Had it been hurt for her, too? Loki thought it had been. No, he knew it. Hurt she'd never admit to, because admitting to it would give him the power to reach in and twist it into an even greater hurt.
"I do," he said, leaning up to kiss her, which, miraculously, she allowed. "I just thought perhaps we might slow it down a little."
Sylvie rolled her eyes. "Why, so you don't go off too soon?"
Loki had no idea whether he had or hadn't been going to, but was suddenly intensely aware of how hard he was, an ache that knew exactly what it wanted. "Not at all. By all means, dispense with the foreplay."
"I will, thanks," Sylvie said, but before continuing with his belt, she kissed him again, long and deep, her hands resting on his chest.
He took the opportunity to run his hands over her body, as well--though she still had her armor on, and he'd no idea how to get it off her. It was...frustrating. Was going to be maddening, not too long from now.
"This thing is hellish to get off," she said. "Maybe you can help with that."
"Happy to, madam," Loki said.
It took him a moment to collect himself enough to remember how to work magic, any magic. A moment later, Sylvie's clothes were stacked nearly in the remains of the chair. As for Sylvie herself, she was enticingly bare on top of him. He reached for her breasts, ignoring her eyeroll as he did, rubbed her nipples with his palms until they hardened; he stroked down her sides, until his hands were on her waist again. He left them there for a minute in favor of more kissing; for as badly as he ached to be inside of her, he found he was also perfectly content in their current position.
At least, he was until Sylvie said, in a more strained voice than before, "Would you get on with it already?"
Loki trailed a hand down to her thigh again, then elsewhere. She'd stopped kissing him, her breathing harsh against the side of his face. He found her lower lips, slipped a finger between them. She was wet already, incredibly slick in counterpoint to his own aching hardness; when he brushed against her clit, she cried out, a gasp better than anyone else's scream had ever been.
For perhaps a minute, she let him play with her, finger circling around--but the moment his reached to circle the entrance to her cunt instead, she began working on his trousers again. She pulled his straining prick out, pulled away from his touch, then guided herself down onto him. Her slickness was even more intoxicating when it was around that part of him, her inner walls squeezing around him with intent as she came down and he came up to kiss again.
After a few moments of that rhythmic almost-stillness, she began to ride him, not slowly or carefully, but starting out the way she apparently intended to go on. A rough, almost brutal slapping sound filled the otherwise empty room, an echo chamber filling with the sound of their fucking. For a minute, it was all Loki could do not to come too early, after all. Then he reached between her legs again, not circling her clit but pressing his thumb against it, letting her motions provide the rhythm. Her angle changed slightly as she leaned into his touch, and then she was gasping harder than she had been before, a cry not unlike Loki's own, that they began to voice in the same moment.
The closer they got, the more there seemed to be a static in that room, an electricity building in the air, some weird counterpoint to the broken golden lines that ran through every obsidian wall of this place. Loki had always been wary of lightning, but there, in that place, he was for the first time in his life its direct cause, and felt its power.
Sylvie's cry grew in intensity a moment before Loki's; her inner walls began to clench around him again, her eyes squeezed closed and her mouth hanging open in a look that would have had Loki coming by itself. He held on for a bare few moments after her orgasm began, then gave his own high cry as his prick jerked within her.
As they came, there came as well a cracking sound, deep and low, which seemed to originate from everywhere and from nowhere, all at once.
Afterward, she collapsed against his chest. He caught one of her hands and held it, and for a good few minutes all he could think about was her warm firm weight on top of him. It was all he might have thought of for a while, if she hadn't stiffened and sat up. She slid off the desk, and padded back over to the window.
Loki could see what she was looking at from where he lay. Still, he got up and followed her, pulling his pants up as he went, and clothing her in her armor once again, as well.
Together, they looked out on their handiwork. These weren't just buds poking their heads out now. These were full new branches, hundreds of them, a thousand. And it didn't stop there; many of the off-shoots seemed to have new branches of their own budding out. It was glorious. It was, in its own way, terrifying.
"Well. We did that," Sylvie said.
"Yes," Loki agreed.
He'd have reached for her hand again, then, but he didn't have to; she reached for his, first, and that was even better.