"What now?" Loki asked, after. "Where do you want to go?"
"I don't know, yet," Sylvie said. It didn't feel real, somehow, that the TVA was gone. It felt more like, if she truly believed it was, even for a second, that would be the moment when it turned out not to be, after all. "Someplace quiet. Where I couldn't have gone before. No apocalypses."
"Ah. Allow me the honor of choosing."
Under ordinary circumstances, she definitely wouldn't have, never would have so much as considered it. But it was over now, and she was tired, and the person asking the question was the only person in the universe she could trust.
"All right," she said. "As long as it's somewhere quiet. Calm."
Loki thought about it for a minute, then typed something into the TemPad. A door appeared before them. He offered her his hand, and she took it. Together, they went through.
*
They ended up at an isolated cabin on Vanaheim--if you could call something that large and ostentatious a cabin, which Loki apparently could.
"Thor used to come here for the hunting," he said, once he'd let them in past the magical protections, which along with locking intruders out, apparently kept everything within in a sort of stasis. Even though no one had been here in a decade, it looked and felt as if it had just been prepared for them the day before or even this morning. It was even well-stocked, waiting to feast the next group of twenty or so that came here. "No one else ever uses it. We can stay as long as we like, and no one will ever know we were here in the first place."
Sylvie examined the head hanging on the nearest wall. It was covered in such long, dense fur that you could hardly tell if it had a nose, nevermind anything that might be eyes. It was also at least as tall as she was, and possibly taller than Loki. "Hunting, huh. I bet you enjoyed that."
"Not particularly. Still, I found reasons to tag along, every so often."
"Why, to be a pest?"
"That, and to make certain he knew that none of his prizes were taken as magnificently (nor were they nearly as large) as he imagined. I always felt someone had to keep his ego in check, you see."
Sylvie, who recalled almost nothing of Thor except for the vague, misty sense of having been considered something of a pest, didn't have anything to say about this that couldn't be said with a cutting look.
"Yes, my ego, I know," said Loki. "Moving along."
They moved along. Thankfully, though about half of the cabin was filled with more heads, the other half wasn't. She could guess whose space had been whose without any difficulty. There was nothing familiar there, no object Sylvie recognized. She wasn't even accustomed to the style of the obviously very expensive furniture. But there was something soothing about it at a bone-deep level, as if someone had come into her head and furnished this place exactly the way she would have, if she'd had the knowledge and the opportunity.
"If you don't like it, we can try somewhere else," Loki said. "There's a villa on Alfheim that might do quite well. Maybe even better than this. For one thing, there are quite a few fewer animal heads involved."
"No, thank you," Sylvie said. "This will do nicely."
And so it did.
*
They saw no one else until the day they walked down to the nearby village, ostensibly to buy some desserts, but really because Sylvie was curious about what it would be like to interact with people who wouldn't have their timeline erased or die in a catastrophe within minutes or hours of her having met them. It turned out to feel much the same as interacting with people who didn't know the landslide or the asteroid or the super tornado was on its way; in any case, it left her with the same sense of melancholy, whether or not it should have.
The walk back was mostly quiet, though Loki had spent the way there pointing out landmarks or plants he thought might interest her (at least some of the plants interested him greatly, judging by the way he'd gone on at length about their magical properties). It was one of the silences that made it difficult to decide whether it was companionable or awkward. She'd nearly decided on companionable by the time they arrived back at the cabin, where, just past the threshold, Loki suddenly said, "I don't know how to do this, either."
"Do what?" Sylvie asked, alarmed for a second by how serious he sounded, then remembering the thing they weren't talking about, the one that had become clearer and clearer the longer they spent together, rising expectation almost like a third person in the room. "Oh. That."
"Yes. That one thing. That we talked about before. Sort of talked about. Or whatever."
Later, Sylvie would recognize the feeling for the mischief it was. In the moment. she suppressed a grin, what must have been the first in a very long time, for she could remember few others (and those only vaguely), and said, "What, literally? You literally don't know how to do it? As in, you've never done it before?"
For this she was greeted with a withering look. Then the grin slipped out of her, along with something that was more snort than laugh, and Loki looked confused for a moment before he was smiling, too. Then he got serious again, leaned in toward her full of false earnestness. "No, it's just that I'm not too certain what you'd do if I were to try something. Supposing you stabbed me about it?"
"Supposing I stabbed you? What if you stabbed me?"
"Oh, yeah? What for?"
"All I know is you're the one with all the daggers. Swords are better for slashing than stabbing, usually."
"Oh, really? I've never heard anything about the different kinds of weapons. Growing up in the midst of Asgard and all," said Loki dryly--and then things did try to turn awkward. Sylvie only had to watch his thoughts cross over his face to know he thought mentioning it might have upset her.
It didn't, not in this context at least, but that didn't mean she wanted to talk about it.
"At this point, I'm really more likely to stab you if you don't," she said, and when that seemed to be taking a second to penetrate, grabbed Loki by his tie (in three days it hadn't seemed to occur to him to change into something more comfortable, as she had, though he seemed to have stayed clean enough the whole time), hauled him in, and kissed him. For a moment, he went very still. When the moment ended, he kissed her back, and his hands came to rest on her shoulders, then her sides, then her waist, the cake box he'd been holding seeming to have vanished somewhere along the way.
Touching Loki was not at all like touching herself. This Sylvie already knew, even if the only touching they'd done these last few days had been to hold hands, every so often. What she hadn't reckoned with was the way her body would respond to more than that. Arousal flared quickly, almost violently, making her let out a gasp that was only all right because he gasped, too, or at least made a similar sort of sound, deep and loud enough to hide hers within it.
Then she was pushing him into the wall, or he was pulling her there, or both, and the kiss was deepening, their bodies pressing together. It was good, but not particularly timeline-shattering, she decided. Then one of his hands shifted upward and a little under the flowing shirt she was wearing, and at the first brush of his skin and hers, she thought perhaps she'd been wrong about that. After that, she thought very little about anything, at least until they broke apart a little for breath.
"We can't do this here," she said, at least as much because she suspected she was in danger of doing something humiliating like trembling as anything else. "Not with that thing staring at us."
Loki glanced at the head on the wall. "Why shouldn't we? It doesn't have eyes. It barely has a face. It didn't even see even its own death coming (which is why killing it wasn't an achievement worthy of a feast, no matter how many of my brother's friends might think otherwise). Why should we stop just because it seems to be--all right, all right, I'm coming. No need to pull my arm off."
For in the midst of his complaining, Sylvie had grabbed his hand and begun dragged him away, toward the rooms that were his and also hers, the ones they'd spent the last few days in. In the first of these rooms there was a sort of couch facing a huge window, which looked out on the forest beneath and around the cabin, which itself sat at the top of a hill. Looking out on it in a certain light made you feel as if you were somewhere ephemeral, until the light changed and you knew for certain you must have been. It didn't look quite that good now, but it hardly mattered, since the object under her consideration was the couch rather than the view. The night before, they'd sat there together for hours, she trying and failing to forget herself long enough to truly fall into a book again, he showing off his magic or telling her stories whenever her attention wandered, their fingers entwined all the while. Now, though, she backed him up to it, until he relaxed and fell onto his back, and she followed him. She'd barely straddled him before they were kissing again, though whether it was his doing or more of hers, she was never able to remember.
This time, his hands were bolder, and so were hers, as she discovered what he had under his shirt (he shuddered when her hands slid up his stomach, which left her smug about how she had yet to tremble), arousal growing more with every touch. It had been a while for her, and because it had always been a while, she didn't realize close she was until, at the touch of her lips to his throat as her hands brushed against his nipples, Loki made another of those gasps, really more of a groan, and his hips jerked upward in a way that couldn't be mistaken for anything but what it was.
"I thought you said you weren't a virgin," Sylvie said.
Panting, he lay all the way back again, where he'd been straining up to meet her before. "I'm not," he said, flushed and with an expression goopy enough that if he'd been anyone else, she'd have been forced to stab him after all and find someone else to get off with. "My apologies. It's been...some time for me."
"Longer for me, I bet," Sylvie said. Plenty of people were up for fucking in the middle of an apocalypse; when they knew they were going to die, when they needed a distraction from it. Still, she never had until she'd needed to, until it felt like she would die if someone didn't touch her.
"Oh, are we competing?" Loki said. "Who's winning?"
"Me, obviously. Since I didn't go off before anything could happen," Sylvie said, and because she didn't need him--wanted, but didn't need, not like that, not like he was the first person she'd spotted here who didn't repulse her, the first person who would that she could tolerate for five or ten minutes before never seeing them again--she took his hand, winding their fingers together. Together, they reached beneath the waistband of her pants. When their fingers brushed against the wetness there, Sylvie gasped again, and very nearly came, and this time it barely seemed to matter, except that she knew it would be better if she could hold off at least a little longer.
Her hand withdrew, until it was his wrist she was holding onto. His fingers slipped between her lips, ran over her clit and the entrance to her cunt.
"How do you like it?" Loki murmured, goopy, still, and still she found she didn't mind.
"Shouldn't you know?"
He must have, because then his thumb began circling her clit, and one of his fingers slid inside, stroking her in just the right way, before it was followed by a second, which did the same. This want was better than the need had ever been, and so it wasn't nearly as long as she would have liked before she went over, clenching around his fingers with a suddenness that left her trembling, after all.
*
"So that happened," Sylvie said, as they next to each other on the couch, which was quite wide as well as long.
She wasn't quite rid of the instinct to at least run away, with or without any stabbing (or rather, slashing), until his hand, the one he hadn't just been using, found hers. "It certainly seems to have. Though I'm going to have to insist on a rematch, at some point soon."
"That's the part I don't know how to do," Sylvie admitted, so easily it was a little horrifying, just one of the reasons she'd never stuck around anyone longer than she had to to get what she needed. "I've never, you know--more than once with anyone."
"Ah," said Loki, more thoughtful than goopy, now, and very nearly as awkward-sounding about it as she'd have felt if it weren't for the afterglow. "If it makes you feel better, I've never been with anyone I really--I mean, not with--you're the first I actually like."
"Yeah. Same here," Sylvie said, which wasn't a horrifying admission, really, since it had to have been incredibly obvious from what he knew about her, not just her history but all the ways they mirrored one another even having come from completely different places.
Loki went on: "We'll just have to practice. As often as possible. Just to be certain we've got it down."
"If we have to, we have to," Sylvie agreed. "There's nothing for it. Although, we've only done it half a time so far, if you really think about it."
"I'd really rather not."