Near the edge of the world, there was an island. Not large enough for much to grow on, but a tree had tried for it anyway. Once, it had been just small enough that a princess hadn't quite dared to lean against it, lest it crack under her weight and be lost to the water. Now, it was huge, and gnarled, and must long ago have crowded out anything else that might have attempted to grow beside it. Now, Sylvie sat on one of its branches, and gazed on the waters below. They rushed toward the world's end, pushed there by a current that came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It plummeted off the edge and into...infinity, maybe, or maybe nothing at all.
At first, being there felt strange, like seeing something through a fishbowl that you only had the faintest memory of to begin with. Then the view solidified, changed just enough to feel surreal. Sylvie's nerves were on edge all the while, waiting for something to happen. A Time Door to open, some remnant of the TVA they'd overlooked, come to take her away again. Someone who belonged here, come to remind her that she didn't, and never could.
No one came, and no one came. Eventually it had been long enough to make her body begin to relax even if she wasn't certain she could, muscle memory that would always remember just how long it took to be sure she was safe in some unsafe place.
It was then that she said, "I used to wonder what would happen to me, if I were to fall in. Would I be able to make it back against the current? Or would I merely be swept away to some other realm?"
She'd been swept away after all, though. It had been a long time since the reality of it had hit her. Grief had ever been nothing more than a weakness, a crushing weight that pinned her down for as long as it took to cry her eyes out. She'd had no time for that, all these years. Now, for the first time in centuries, she felt it coming on again. She couldn't turn to see what was behind her, the golden spires that cast an equally golden glow on the waters below. She couldn't even look to the side, to see what sort of expression Loki was wearing. If it had been pity, she'd have been forced to push him in.
After a careful pause that might have been a century in and of itself, Loki said, "I've been known to have similar thoughts. For instance, I used to come here and fantasize about stabbing Thor and throwing him in."
The grief didn't so much disperse as change shape. Not less painful, exactly, nor even lighter, but easier to bear. Sylvie'd found that most things were, somehow, when she was with him. It made no sense, considering how the last thing she'd ever wanted to know, before all this, was what kinds of things she might have thought or done or turned into, if she'd been given the same chance he had.
"Fantasizing?" she asked, grinning but also, feeling somehow as if she were even closer to weeping than she had been before. "Don't you mean plotting?"
"Well, I never got quite that far. By which I mean I stabbed him any number of times, but we were always on dry land."
"Ah, more of your one-step 'plans.'"
"I'm nothing if not consistent," said Loki, who was grinning, too, when she looked over at him, as if he'd known that consistency had been going to be her next cutting observation.
They stayed there a long time. More than long enough for her to begin to wonder if and when he'd start pressing her to leave, or even turn around and take in the rest of his Asgard, which must have been so like and unlike the one that had been pruned behind her. But he only waited beside her, until she was finally ready.