to thine own self

They went through the Time Door, him first and her after. He landed on his ass on the ugly linoleum, giving her a moment's triumph at how well her distraction had worked. But it was only for the one moment, because the next was when she recognized the ugly linoleum and realized where they were. She'd managed to go a thousand years between visits, yet now she'd been here three times within just a few days. For the third time, she found it was both smaller and duller than memory had made it.

"Sylvie, what--" Loki started, brushing himself off as he got up.

"Not here," Sylvie said. That was one thing she could be sure of. Wherever else He Who Remains had eyes and ears, he'd have them at the TVA for certain.

She looked down at the thing on her wrist, the gold-veined piece of rock that had answered to her will just an ordinary TemPad would have answered to her touch. Thought it through, rapid-fire until she saw through to what she needed to know. All she'd wanted before was for it to open a door to somewhere that wasn't the End of Time. Perhaps it had opened to the last place He Who Remains had been, or perhaps this was its default, the place it went when its bearer had neglected to set a destination. Either way, all she should have to do now, instead of typing coordinates into a little keyboard, was to want something else. Something more specific.

"Come on," she said to him, visualizing it in her mind, in as much detail as she could: A clear, too-bright day under an alien sun.

Another Time Door opened before them. This time, she didn't have to shove Loki through. He followed her willingly across the threshold, his fingers brushing hers along the way. It was all she could do not to respond, either by taking his hand in her own again, or by tearing her hand violently away.

"I don't understand," he said, when they were standing in the middle of a busy marketplace on Cilean, where in less than five hours a sinkhole would open, devouring everything for a thousand miles within twelve hours, and lead to the implosion of the planet itself within forty-eight. "What are we doing?"

"Not here," Sylvie decided. She'd been here ten or twelve times, over the centuries. Would He Who Remains know that? Would he expect them to come here? How much did he know about her, really? How much of what she'd done, how much about where she'd been? Did he know everything, starting from the moment she'd been taken out of her own timeline, or had he only started paying attention once she'd begun to plan? Was it possible he'd seen only glimmers, whenever her life intersected with whatever his true purpose was? Was it worth risking it? There were enough questions to make a person paranoid, even without having spent a lifetime cultivating that particular quality.

Another door opened. Loki kept his hand to himself as they went through this one. Sylvie didn't mind. Really, it was a relief.

This time, they came out on the great golden plain of Takgo, a small planet which had been hit with an asteroid fifty years before, knocking it into an uneven orbit which had sent it marginally closer to its sun every year since. They stood upon a tall hilltop, the better to see for miles. For a moment, there with him, Sylvie was tempted to talk about how, sixteen hours from now, a sunspot that would have been harmless a few rotations ago would set half the planet alight. The smoke of it would leave the half across the ocean in darkness long enough for all life to be snuffed out at least a century before it would have happened otherwise.

"No," she decided instead, before they'd been there for more than a handful of moments. If He Who Remains knew anything about her that wasn't on the surface, then surely he knew what were for her the true horrors: the apocalypses that annihilated not a city or even a country, but an entire world. All life gone, blotted out; no one, in most cases, to remember who had lived there before, or that anyone ever had.

Yet now that she was trying to think of somewhere else to go, she wasn't coming up with anything. All that came to mind was asteroid after sinkhole after supernova. All the worst devastations, to match the one inside her.

"What are we looking for?" Loki asked, after what might have been one moment, or a whole string of moments. He was peering at her, seeing who knew what in her face.

"A place we can talk," she said. "Someplace safe. Safer, anyway. Private. Somewhere I wouldn't go."

Loki took this in. "--I think I know a place."

"It still has to be an apocalypse. We don't want to be interrupted by Minutemen."

"As I said: I know a place."

*

It was strange, neither recognizing her destination, nor having researched it exhaustively beforehand.

Sylvie snatched the rock thing back from where they'd been holding it together. Gripped it tightly in her hand, hers only, before affixing it to her wrist once more. "So, where are we?"

"The last place he would expect," Loki said.

Sylvie took this in. At first, she thought he simply meant a backwater. Their surroundings certainly resembled one: Before them was a rough-built cabin, while around them there seemed to be nothing but tightly-packed forest. High peaks of stone could be seen beyond the trees.

"All of this succumbs to the flames tomorrow evening," said Loki.

The way he said it; there was something in the way he said it. Sylvie looked harder, strained to listen. Now, she heard the rumbling, millions upon millions of gallons of water plummeting off an endless edge, what couldn't have been more than a mile from where they stood. Beyond the mountain peaks she thought she saw a glint of something, light glancing off the golden spires she was suddenly certain were there.

"You idiot," she said, rounding on him as something within her did an unpleasant twist. "What makes you think he won't be able to find us on Asgard?"

"What makes you think he would?" Loki countered, sweeping onward as if he were somehow unaware of how close she was to drawing her sword again. "There's no way I'd ever choose to return here. Not after what happened before I fell. Most certainly not when my brother meant to drag me here in chains ahead of my nexus event. And you--if you've ever been back, it was a long time ago, wasn't it? It would have been before you discovered you couldn't, that your Asgard was gone forever. You won't have come back since. Not even knowing about Ragnarok. This is the last place on the timeline either of us would choose to go."

Sylvie stared at him. Part of her wanted to carve his guts out, for saying it or for being right. Another part of her wanted to deny it, lest he see through to all the times she'd thought of it, yearned for it, got her TemPad out and fiddled with it for a while before putting it away again. How many such moments had there been? Hundreds? Thousands? Too many, and every one felt as if it must have been on display.

"So where on Asgard are we, then?" she demanded, instead.

"Oh, merely a hunting cabin. Thor used to come here for various pursuits. I must admit I've never been inside."

With the initial horror fading, Sulvie had to admit it sounded like a decent enough hiding place. There was nothing saying she had to admit it to him, though. "Lead the way, then."

Loki turned back to the cabin, did a sort of waving glow-y thing with his hand. In response, the door cracked open on its own. Sylvie felt another of those little shards of hate digging into her, all the sharper for not having felt it since Lamentis. A trick like that would have made things so much easier, especially back before she'd learned enchantment or much in the way of swordplay. Back when stealth was the only weapon she'd had, along with her wits. A few hours before, smoothing the shard down might have been easy; now, still riding on the adrenaline of their fight, which had been over for half an hour at most, she allowed it to grow sharper, encouraged it to.

In front of the doorway, Loki turned to look at her, that pleased look falling from his face. "Sylvie," he said. "What exactly are we doing? You still haven't explained."

"We're here so you can explain," she snarled. "You want to talk about it? We're here now. What's your plan?"

"--My plan?"

"Your plan, yeah. The one you couldn't come out and say in front of him. What is it?"

"Oh. That plan." With Loki's startled expression came a hot rock, plummeting to the bottom of Sylvie's stomach. "I don't...have one, exactly. I meant what I said. That we should think about it. That we should talk about it. Before we do anything."

Sylvie stared at him. Took a breath, then another. Not because she was trying to calm herself, but because for those few moments there was nothing. No thought. No feeling. Nothing but the gaping, yawning void she'd leapt into because she had, for some reason, decided he was worth trusting even in the thick of it. Her blade to his throat, the tears on his cheeks, the words he'd said. There'd been so many options. In that moment, she might have slit his throat, might have stabbed him in the gut and twisted, might even have sent him through the Time Door alone; but part of her had wanted to believe there was more to it, and that whatever it was would be more to her liking than the throne he claimed to no longer want. She'd wanted to believe it, and because she'd wanted to believe it, she'd let the chance slip through her hands, perhaps the only chance she'd ever get.

For those few moments, there was nothing. Then it all came rushing back to her in a rage and frustration that made his fuck-up on Lamentis seem about as significant as a gnat bite. In that moment, she could have killed him, and the only other thing she was nearly sure of was that he would have let her.

She could have killed him. She almost even wanted to. The urge to do it was there, in her. But in the midst of it there was something else, too--the only other thing she could feel, the only other thing there was. And all she knew was that it was going to be the one thing or the other, and maybe had always been going to be, from the moment this day had started.

"Sylvie, I'm--" Loki began, but she never found out what he'd been going to say next, whatever justification or apology it would have been.

She never found out what it would have been, because even as his eyes widened she was stalking toward him, and even as he stammered out her name she was reaching for him, and then she was shoving him through another door, this time the solid wood thing in front of them, the one that was cracked open just enough to see that no lights were on inside. His back hit it with a thud, but she had him by the tie before he could go sprawling again, and then she was kissing him, with all the bite she hadn't kissed him with back in the castle at the end of time.

Then she shoved him again, and this time he stumbled back a step, another, but didn't fall. "Sylvie, what--"

To answer would have been to admit she didn't have the first idea, and that that was going to be something to be terrified of, if she stopped for long enough to be afraid of anything. "Shut up," she said, and kissed him again, just as rough and demanding as before. 

For a moment, he seemed frozen against her, hard tension in every line of his body, as if he was expecting the sword across the throat or the knife in the gut he hadn't gotten before, when he'd let her cut him as easily as he'd let her kiss him. Then he softened, and his lips did, too, as if they were trying to make her soften, too.

She pulled away. "Not like that," she said, and kissed him again. This time, his lips met hers with the same demand, the same urgency; this time, she shoved him and he pulled her further into that dark space, until they met resistance from his end. 

The lights came on, which he must have made happen because she certainly hadn't, and a glance down showed that what had stopped them was a large and very hideous plush chair. It would do, Sylvie said, and pushed him again. He didn't have to pull her with him this time. She was already on her way down to meet him.

She straddled him, tugging his shirt out, working his belt loose. He helped her pull his trousers down, and then her own. His prick was erect already, stiff and flushed. Sylvie didn't take any time to admire it, thought only fleetingly about how it might have been hers in another life. Then she kissed him again, as harshly as before, and somewhere in the midst of it she took him inside of her and began to move. Not offering herself, not giving, but taking, instead, reveling in the way he felt inside her, the burn and stretch of it even as wet as she was. He didn't protest, one hand on her back and the other at her waist, fleeting kisses pressed to her mouth and throat and shoulder whenever some part of her was within his reach, either not thinking or not caring that she could barely feel any of the ones that weren't on skin.

Her orgasm came the way it always did: quickly, a cresting pleasure at the end of the need. Once it came, it was gone within moments, leaving her feeling lost, empty even though he was still there, in her. She kept moving, a slow rocking now rather than the break-neck pursuit of before. Maybe that was what Loki had needed, or maybe he hadn't had a reason to develop the same urgent habits, because the longer it went on, the harsher his breathing got, and the sloppier his attempt at kisses.

In the middle of it, Sylvie thought of getting off him, leaving him to his own devices. It was apparently the harshest punishment she was willing to mete out, when it came to him. Instead, though, she kept going, until he stopped trying to kiss her at all, and then came inside her, mouth open and face scrunched into something that surely would have been agony in any other context.

*

Afterward, their clothes put back into place, Sylvie, at least, felt calmer. Calm enough not to immediately move on to murdering him without thinking it through, anyway.

Or at least she was, until a horrifying possibility occurred to her.

"This wasn't your plan, was it?" she demanded.

"What?" Loki said, looking so startled it probably hadn't been, unless he'd been pretending to be a worse actor than he was up until now. "Uh, no. This was...more of a happy accident."

That bit was safely ignored, Sylvie decided. "Good. All right. You wanted to talk. So, let's talk."

"All right," Loki said, looking at her with a softer expression than she'd yet seen on him, somehow even worse than the goopy one he'd had on for a few minutes after. God, she already hated it. She hoped he didn't think they were--whatever he might think they were, just because they'd fucked just now.

"So what you were getting at before was that you don't even know what you want to talk or think about," she said, and if fucking him had done nothing else, it had at least made her able to think clearly enough to get to the heart of it. "You just didn't have the stomach to watch me kill him."

"No, I--"

"You're running scared of a fairytale. And even if it's not one, even if everything he told us was true, you know we can't let him live. You know we can't let it keep going on."

I can't, she'd meant to say, but we was what had come out.

If Loki noticed, he didn't say anything.

"I don't want to. Either of those things," he said, looking like he was having some trouble catching up to this return of subject, which made Sylvie feel the slightest bit better at how fuzzy her head was trying to be about it. "I just--all right." He sat down on the hideous chair opposite the one they'd just fucked on. Leaned forward in it, looking at her intently, with thought instead of despair or desire behind it. It was enough to make her relieved and wary in the same moment. "Look. Safe to say I have more experience manipulating people than you have. No, really, it's true. You use enchantment to get into people's minds. If their minds are strong, maybe you construct a fantasy to fool them--but it's still the result of magic."

He paused, she hoped not waiting for her to praise him for whatever insight he hadn't gotten around to saying yet. "Yeah, and?"

"Well, I've done quite a lot of the other sort of manipulation. The kind you don't need magic for. There's the straight-up web of lies, of course: often complicated to keep track of, but incredibly rewarding when you can manage it. But you have to weave in elements of truth for most things. A taste of honesty, to make the listener think you must be telling the truth about everything else. Now, take it from a liar--He Who Remains was telling the truth about what will happen to the timeline if we kill him."

"I told you--" Sylvie burst out, and it turned out the rage wasn't buried that far beneath after all as she reached for her sword again. If he couldn't see reason about this, she might not actually have a choice about it after all, and the rage would protect her from whatever else she felt about it until later.

"I know," Loki said, not rising from his seat or reacting in any way except by raising his hands, soothing his voice, placating and somehow both more and less maddening for it. "He was trying to manipulate us, and therefore he was lying. But what was he lying about? If he was telling the truth about what would have happened had you killed him then and there, yet also (let's assume) telling the truth about putting us in charge of the TVA?"

"I don't know," Sylvie said, but even as she said it she found she did, her mind traveling down the very same pathway his must have, one that just happened to be dustier and more overgrown, given she'd had better things to do with her thoughts before now. "--He's lying about our choices. About how many we have."

"He's trying to make us believe we have no options but the two presented to us. But how can that be true, if even the creator of the TVA doesn't know what happens now? (I also happen to believe this claim, by the way; the most successful lies are so often the smallest kernels, hidden by greater truths.)"

All the tension Sylvie had still been trying to hold on to, in regards to Loki; it was melting away now, no matter how hard she tried to keep ahold of it. "So we need to figure out what our third choice is. And our tenth, our hundredth. We need to stack them on top of each other, until we come upon the best one."

"Exactly," said Loki, and as much as he'd been radiating calm before, she could see the tension ebbing out of him, too. For the first time she wondered if they'd felt the same thing in their fight. If they'd both had their heart in their throats then, and ever since.

"Any ideas?" Sylvie asked, because she had--nothing. The last hundred years had been working toward killing the Time-Keepers. She didn't have anything left, here at the end. She would eventually. If she waited, and kept running, and kept thinking. Right now, though, she was suddenly so exhausted that all she'd have wanted was a good long sleep, if it hadn't been so much more important to figure this out.

"Not as yet," said Loki, which came off as a weaselly way of saying no. "But it was a good idea to come here. We'll get some rest, eat something, maybe...rest some more."

"Fuck some more, you mean," Sylvie said, rolling her eyes.

Loki smiled, a wicked expression Sylvie would have liked better if it hadn't been for the irritating softness beneath. "If you like."

"I wouldn't."

For the first time, she looked around the room, growing more horrified the more of it she saw. There weren't as many heads as one might have expected in a hunting cabin, but the decor was otherwise an offense to every one of her senses. Everything was mismatched, which wasn't a problem; everything was loud, somehow, which was. That was even without getting into the windows, which were much too large and without curtains, so that anyone who approached the cabin at night while they had the lights on would be able to see everything that happened within its walls.

"We can't stay here," she said.

"Perhaps if it were less hideous?" Loki waved a hand, and everything rippled into different shapes and colors, ones that soothed instead of clanging inside Sylvie's head.

"The windows," she said, and explained the problem, whereupon Loki waved his hand again, and a translucent sheen appeared over the glass before disappearing again.

"One-way glass," he said. "We'll be able to see out; no one outside will be able to see anything but a darkened room filled with musty old objects."

"--Thank you."

"It's no trouble, of course."

*

Not long afterward, they went to bed.

Just inside the bedroom, which had likely been as hideous as the front room before, but seemed to be all right now that he'd taken a stab at it, Loki paused for a moment. Significantly.

"Oh, why don't you just--" Sylvie started, but before she could say 'get a spine, already,' Loki's mouth was on hers, a kiss as soft as a sigh. It was closer to what they'd done at the end of time than to what they'd done in that chair, but carefuller than either: more of a question than the statement of the first or the raging scream of the second.

She could have taken over, pushed him down and ridden him as roughly as she had before. But she'd shown him her one trick, and now she supposed she could let him show her whatever meager skills he possessed. All the better to inform him his prowess wasn't quite what he no doubt imagined it to be.

She'd thought he'd guide her toward the bed, first thing. Instead, he pressed her against the wall, not harshly but firmly enough. So he wanted to do it right here, instead. It was a thought that would have been disdainful, if it hadn't been for the wave of lust that followed it, an excitement that was as surprising as it was sudden. She'd just had him; there was no reason the idea of having him a second time should make her so slick between her legs, cause her to ache with how much she wanted him.

When he started working on her trousers, not a minute later, it wasn't anywhere near too soon. Sylvie helped, until she was bare below the waist, her trousers pooled on the floor next to her. Then, she'd have helped get his trousers down, too, except that instead of reaching for them, he dropped to his knees, and Sylvie understood that this, too, was going to be something other than what she'd expected.

Her first thought was to tell him to get up--she'd been on the receiving end of this act before, which not only hadn't resulted in the promised ecstasy, but had always made her feel idiotic besides--but then she pictured him pressing his face between her legs, and was met by another gush of wetness, an unfurling desire, and knew what she actually wanted was to try again, just to see what it would be like with him.

"Get on with it, then," she said harshly, and suspected it came out breathier than she'd meant it to.

"If you insist," Loki said, and there was that wicked smile again, and this time the softness had been banished, or was at least so far beneath the surface that it could no longer be seen.

He lifted her leg, draped it over his shoulder. Sylvie couldn't recall ever having felt so exposed, even the times she'd been on her back for this. His mouth came to her, nuzzling first, a touch that sent another jolt of desire through her, more immediate than before. 

Then his lips parted, and he stroked her with his tongue, up and down and in circles around her clit and then over the entrance of her cunt. It was a strange sensation, one Sylvie had never quite been able to like, either because the others she'd let try it had been bad at it, or because she simply didn't. It was better with him, but still not quite good--the strangeness of it was overwhelming her desire, the way it had the other times. This time, it felt as if it was something she might be able to like, if it went on for a while. Maybe. She wasn't sure. She couldn't decide.

Loki stopped, pulled away just long enough to look sideways up at her and say, "Not like that, then?"

How he'd known, when she hadn't said anything, done anything, she didn't know. Because they were the same, maybe; because she must have stiffened minutely, or been quiet when he'd known to expect sound.

"Not like that," Sylvie said, though she thought, maybe, some other time... "But I don't--"

Know how she did like it, she could have said, but she wasn't sure how to say it; was certain that if she did say it, they'd be stopping this here and now, because what she'd been doing up until now had been fine. Had been enough to take the edge off, when she needed that; had been enough to keep her going, all the times she'd felt like she'd die if she went much longer without someone touching her. She didn't need Loki for this, and so she didn't have to let herself be vulnerable for an activity she'd never had to be vulnerable about before.

Loki nodded, and resumed. No licking, this time. Instead, he took her clit between his lips, and sucked, a little. Sylvie wasn't entirely sure about that, either, though it was at least was better than the licking--but then his hand trailed up the inside of her thigh, and that was distracting enough to make her not mind it, and then his finger slid into her, stroking her in just the right place, and it was--

Not only better, but actually decent, after the first few moments of getting used to the duality of it, his lips around her clit and his finger in her. Decent, and then better than decent as he slipped in another finger, which was enough to let her feel stretched, to get a little of that burn she always wanted. It was enough for something to start growing, something she nearly didn't recognize because it did so so slowly, when usually the build came quickly after weeks of edginess, weeks of being less together than usual and only realizing very late what the reason for it was.

She'd have had a defense against the other thing, but against this? Between his fingers and his mouth and the rising suspicion that she would have been able to keep up her guard against literally anyone else, she found she had no defense against this. It was so much easier when she was fucking no one she knew, no one she could afford to care about, since they'd be gone as soon as their apocalypse rose up to take them; impossible now, when she was fucking him, her other self, the first and only other she'd liked even a little, or ever even fleetingly wished she could trust.

She twisted her fingers in his hair, a belated attempt to take control. It felt like an awkward angle, but there was room for her to move with him, and so she did, riding his mouth and feeling it growing and growing, a pleasure that had always seemed to stop somewhere before, but which crested higher and higher now, manic and dizzying.

She came, and the pleasure didn't recede immediately, the way it always had before. Instead it went on, coaxed out of her by his mouth more than his fingers, now. She clenched around his fingers until her inner muscles ached from it, and her voice had grown hoarse from whatever sound she was making, the one she'd lost the battle not to let out.

"All right," she said, letting go of his hair. "That's enough."

His head emerged from between her legs, and he was--his face and hand were covered in her, shining with her wetness. His cheeks were flushed, a wild look in his eyes, as if they were sharing the same manic energy. And he was hard, a bulging in the front of his trousers that might have seemed obscene if Sylvie hadn't looked at it and known the ache he must be feeling.

"Is that all you've got?" she asked, unable to bear, somehow, the idea of meeting him in earnest. "Pathetic, really."

She felt it should have been easier to provoke him than it was; it had been before, but all he did was grin, evilly again, and said, "My apologies. I'll try to do better next time."

As if there would be a next time--

But there was still this time to go, still that shared ghost of an ache. Sylvie couldn't imagine she'd be able to sleep, if it didn't get taken care of. So she pulled him toward her, tasted herself on his lips as she reached into his trousers. Perhaps she'd do the same for him, she thought. She hadn't done that before, at least not for a man; but if it could give her the same power she'd seen on his face, why shouldn't she?

But she'd barely stroked him three times before he came, a decision made without her. His wetness coated her hand as he made a sound, a long, drawn-out gasp into her ear as his own wetness coated her hand.

With anyone else, this was when Sylvie would have withdrawn, would have gotten her clothes back on and gone her own way. Would have been through a Time Door within minutes if not moments, away from any of the expected post-coital vulnerability that made her skin crawl.

Instead, she kept kissing him as she took her hand out of his trousers and wiped it clean (also on his trousers). Instead, she kept kissing him as they walked toward the bed, an awkward, four-legged creature. Kept kissing him as they finished undressing, still awkward since they were trying to do multiple things at once. Kept on as the need started to grow again, that continuing ache she'd always taken care of herself, after she'd gone through this door or that one.

This time, after a while, she guided his hand to where she wanted it, rode his fingers until he was hard, then rode his prick again, resulting in a burn more tired than before, which seemed to take an age to swell into a conclusion.

It was only after this that Sylvie felt something she never had before, in the presence of another person or otherwise. There was the usual glow that came from a fuck that had been better than most; more than that, there was a sense not so much of emptiness, but of being done. Of being sated. Of knowing that she couldn't come again if she wanted to, and that Loki in particular would end up embarrassed if they were to try; of knowing that she didn't want to anyway, because it was, for once, enough.

*

When they woke again, there was a reddish glow on the walls.

"What's that?" Loki asked, his voice thick with a sleep Sylvie didn't recall ever having had the luxury of. She couldn't remember ever having slept other than lightly. Must not have done it since she'd been a princess, safely tucked away in a bed meant for one.

"It's time to go," Sylvie said. She went to the window, more for a look at it than to be sure. There wasn't much to see, for a moment, other than the glow of far-away flames, wreathing the tops of the trees; then, suddenly, there was, a giant wreathed in flames that grew and grew to fill what was left of the horizon.

"ASGARD--" Surtur said.

Despite herself, Sylvie felt goose pimples rise on her arms, the answer to a prophecy that must have been with her ever since that long-ago childhood, though she couldn't remember the when or how she'd learned of it, when or how its importance had been drilled into her. Ragnarok...

She'd have felt foolish about it, except that when she turned to see Loki, he was standing just behind her, face pale as bone.

"We're going," Sylvie said again, and turned away from the window to dress, quickly as she could. Loki followed suit, and as soon as they were both clothed, she reached for the rock-thing on her wrist and called up a Time Door.

Together, they stepped through it.

Sylvie was looking at Loki when the Time Door closed behind them, and so she saw the surprise, smattered across his face. He didn't bother to try to hide it after that, either, squinting and looking around him, then turning in a circle, as if he thought his eyes might have deceived him initially. "--We're back. Why are we back?"

"Because we didn't get pruned in our sleep the first time, and that means it's safe here," Sylvie said, though some of his unease was hers, too; the end of Asgard wasn't precisely where she'd have chosen to come back to until someone had a better idea. But for the moment, it was what they had. "Or safe enough, at least. We'll have enough time to figure it out without having to find a new place to figure it out at every day or two."

"But are we certain we won't meet ourselves, coming or going or..."

"I never have before," Sylvie said. "We didn't run into me on Lamentis, did we?"

"True," said Loki. 

*

They went back inside the cabin. No fucking on the way in this time, which was good by Sylvie. The whole thing was...once had been bad enough, but three times? She'd never stuck around anywhere long enough to fuck anyone three times. She'd almost never even gone back to fuck the same person again, with her the only one knowing they'd done it before.

Loki redecorated again, in a slightly different style this time, but one no less soothing than before. He looked around, seeming satisfied with his work, then looked at her queryingly.

"What?"

"Would you like breakfast?" he asked, with the air of someone who was startled to realize how long ago his last meal had been. "I'm famished, myself."

"I could eat," said Sylvie, who hadn't had regular meals in time out of mind; she ate when it was safe enough, or when food was available casually enough that it was unlikely to present a danger. She'd last had a few bites on the train, less than filling pastries that had ultimately been worse than nothing. Now, in this safe place, her stomach rumbled at the mention of food.

"Excellent."

Loki waved a hand and conjured a low table between two large, plush chairs. He waved again, and a spread appeared upon it, a bounty of cheeses and dates and nuts. There were apples, and choice cuts of mutton, boar, and goat. There were apples and berries and honeycakes. It was a breakfast fit for a prince, or a princess. The sight of it alone was a devastation; the smells drifting up from it took Sylvie back the way nothing had in centuries. She might have been eight years old again, vibrating not with fear, but with the delight of having been invited to break her fast in her mother's garden, an invitation extended to no one else, at least on that day.

"--We can have something else," Loki ventured, the expectation that had been on his face having faded into something more like horror. "I'm sorry. I really thought you'd like it."

No doubt her defenses had fallen, in that first moment. Nothing for it now but not to make it worse, Sylvie supposed. "It'll do," she said curtly, and sat down and shoved a honeycake into her mouth, the better to not have any further conversation on the subject of her feelings. "...Thank you."

The cake melted on her tongue, a heavenly taste she must have carried with her all these years. Rote hunger turned into a ravenous void, and there was more than enough here to sate it.

*

When she'd finished eating--long before he had, despite putting away at least three times as much as him, another place where they differed; Sylvie still found herself marking their difference wherever she found them, hoarding them away lest she ever risk forgetting they weren't the same--Sylvie leaned back in her chair and said, "So. Our plan. We need one."

"--Yes," said Loki, his fork hovering halfway to his mouth.

"It's got to have more than one step."

"I'd supposed it might," said Loki drily.

Even if the fucking had been a bad idea, resting and refueling had been good ones, leaving Sylvie's mind clearer than it had been, so that she knew exactly what she wanted to say now. "We're going to have two objectives. The first is to kill He Who Remains--every version of him, if we're still assuming he was telling the truth, before."

"Seems reasonable," said Loki sweetly. Enough so that Sylvie would probably have needed to stab him, if he'd been any other Loki; but she knew enough about this one to figure that whatever he had up his sleeve, or thought he did, it was likely to be ineffectual at best.

"The other is that the TVA ends. No timeline gets pruned, ever again." Some were certainly in the process of being pruned now . For a moment, Sylvie felt it, something new beneath the age-old despair; a self-loathing that went to the core, because if she hadn't listened to Loki, she might have stopped it already, and never mind what might or might not have happened in consequence.

"I agree," said Loki, so simply she must have walked right where he'd wanted her. "But how do we do that, though?"

Well, there was little enough purpose to worrying about the direction Loki wanted or expected her to go; she'd be getting to the same place either way, no matter what he thought he had tucked away to upend her with.

"First, we have to find a way to get to the other universes where he is. I'm fairly certain this thing--" she gestured at the TemPad-rock thing on her wrist, "--must be able to do it. It's his, after all. No way an egomaniac like that would cut himself off entirely from whatever other timelines there are."

"He likes games too much for that," said Loki, with the knowing air of someone who also liked to play games, and was playing one right now.

Sylvie considered stabbing him, but was full enough that it seemed like too much bother. "Yeah. So all we'll have to do is figure out how many of him there are, where they're all at, and then take them out."

"Oh, is that all?"

The way he said it was both enough to remind Sylvie what a monumental task that would be--one that could easily take another thousand years, if they were as thorough about it as they'd need to be--and bring her completely to her limit. "Oh, would you just spit it out?"

"I have an idea," he said.

"Really? I hadn't suspected."

Now it was Loki who looked annoyed, though he rebounded quickly.  "I know how we could learn just how many of him there are, and wipe them all out just--like--that."

He leaned toward her, and snapped his fingers.

*

After discovering that this was less than illuminating, and that he'd need to do more work to make her impressed by whatever the details of his plan were, Loki explained. The more he explained, the more excited he got, judging by how many gestures he was making by the end.

"And that's how we'll do it," he finished. "Simple. Easy. Done."

"I have a few problems with that," Sylvie said, and when he made a face: "Yes, I know you want me to say you're brilliant, but assuming you're brilliant is what gets us killed. Not just us. All Lokis, really."

"You could have at least said you had questions ," complained Loki. "Well, what are your problems, then?"

"One," Sylvie said, ticking it off on a finger as she slung her legs over the arm of the chair she was seated on. "Magic doesn't work in the TVA. That's got to be on purpose. If He Who Remains can nullify magic wherever he wants, what's to say these rocks of yours would do us any good?"

"Infinity Stones," Loki corrected. "And that's the beauty of it: the Time Stone would allow us to look through all times--to find him in every time and place where he was on the timeline instead of barricaded in a stronghold. We could even find him before he created the TVA, if we wanted."

Well, that was promising, if it was true. Didn't make the other bits any less of a concern. "Two: How do you expect us to get ahold of them? Considering they're on the timeline, not only would we have the Minutemen on us, but both they and He Who Remains would have figured out what we were up to by the time we'd taken the second one. Maybe by the time we're taken the first. Wouldn't matter, really, how long we waited in-between each one; time doesn't matter to the TVA. Not like that, anyway. Waiting them out wouldn't be an option."

Loki grinned at her. "Would you believe I've seen the entire collection in one place, recently? Completely unguarded. All we'd have to do is walk in and take them."

"We'll come back to that, then," said Sylvie, as if it were unimportant, though her pulse was beginning to race now, at the first hint saying this was something they might actually be able to do. "Three: do you really expect me to trust you on this? When it could have been your objective from the very beginning?"

Loki's grin faded, not into surprise, but into a pained expression that somehow wasn't. "Sylvie."

"I'm not like you. If you think you've softened me up, you haven't. I don't trust just because I had my sword at your throat, or had you on your knees. For all I know, this could have been your intention all along. Seems like your kind of thing, ultimate power and all."

"That seems to conflict with your previous opinion that I'm incapable of planning."

"Could have been an act," Sylvie shot back, seeing the way it hit him. Seeing the hurt, and being fairly certain it was real, yet at the same time wondering if, underneath it all, it could be something else. "We've known each other for, what, a few days? A week at the most? I don't really know you. You don't really know me. Either of us could have any kind of motivation, under the surface."

"No. No, I really don't think so," Loki said. "You're very--straightforward, for a Loki. And I...you know, I'm not even sure anymore? But I meant what I said, before." He became, suddenly, very intense. Leaned forward in his chair again, eyes darkening, long dark hair falling around his face. "I promise you: Once we've gathered the stones, once I've placed them in the hollows upon the Gauntlet I'll make for you to wear, they'll be yours to wield. Yours alone. And if not, if I should go back on my word, you have my permission to kill me."

"Oh yes, because I need your permission for that," Sylvie scoffed, the better to mask the way she was responding to him. She wasn't sure which was more frightening: believing him, or just wanting to, desperately. "You know that I would. If I had to."

She was fairly certain, by now, that if she did have to kill him, it would end up killing her as well, whether quickly or by inches. But she'd have died a thousand deaths rather than admit it.

"All right," Loki said. "It's a deal."

They looked at each other for a long moment, as something thickened in the air between them.

"Would you like me on my knees again?" he asked, casually.

"If you like," she said, matching his tone even though she didn't mean it any more than he did.

*

Afterward, Sylvie said, "All right. Time for details. Where have you seen these rocks of yours, all collected together?"

He told her. It was less than impressive, as reveals went.

"You can't think we're going back there," she said. "What if he's waiting for us?"

"But he won't be," Loki argued. "That's the beauty of the thing. He'll be expecting us to hide, the way you've always hidden. He won't expect us to go there, anymore than anyone at the TVA expected you to launch an attack on the supposed Time Keepers. It's the reversal of expectations that makes it such a brilliant plan. The same goes for your original plan as well, by the way."

Sylvie rolled her eyes, because the last thing she needed was to be praised for a plan that hadn't worked--that never would have worked, it had turned out--by someone who more than likely still had his own plan up his sleeve.

"Anyway, it'll be easy. They're not under lock and key. They're regarded as no more dangerous than paperweights, as if being useless at the TVA means they must be useless, period. No one will think anything of us looking at them, or even taking them."

Sylvie hoped he was right, but even if he wasn't, it wasn't as if they had a multitude of options.

*

"It's hideous," Sylvie said, regarding her reflection in the mirror Loki had conjured into the middle of the room. For the last few moments she'd been wearing a tan-colored suit, no different from Loki's except in the tailoring, and in the fact that, being completely new, he hadn't had to wave his hand to make it clean again.

"Now you know how I've felt," said Loki, with a grin not much different than the one he'd had when he'd waved the suit onto her in the first place. "At least you don't have to wear a jacket with 'Variant' stenciled onto the back."

"Pity. I've always wondered how it feels to be a massive tool."

Loki's hand went to his heart. "Ah, madam, you wound me."

"Shut up and let's go," Sylvie said, rolling her eyes.

Then, because she was the one who had the TemPad, she called up the coordinates; not ones written on a little screen, but ones she could see regardless, as if some strange approximation of them were written in the air before her. The first set--the ones for where they'd landed, the first time she'd tried to use this thing--seemed a bit weird, as if they hadn't been at the TVA so much as somewhere that was meant to resemble it. She changed them, manipulating them until they were much closer to the coordinates she'd used to get near the elevator. 

"Ready?" she asked, when she sensed she had them as close as she was likely to get without a good deal more practice with her new toy. It was the same question she always asked herself, less because she thought the answer might be no as because the asking had become her signal to be ready, regardless of whether she had been before.

"I suppose. Unless you'd rather stay here and continue our recent, ah, education."

"I wouldn't. But I haven't got as much to learn in that area as you," said Sylvie sweetly.

"Another stab wound, straight to the heart," Loki said, not looking half as devastated about it as he might have. It was becoming clearer and clearer that orgasms turned him into even more of a moron. Sylvie had no more than thought it when he turned serious: "By all means, then. Let's go."

There was something in Sylvie that wanted to keep up the argument. There was nothing in her that was actually sure what the argument was, though, so she rolled her eyes again, and opened the Time Door.

Through it they went, landing in a hallway just as hideous as the first. This time, they were both on their feet. This time, Sylvie felt abruptly vulnerable, walking into enemy territory without her armor. Walking into it without enchantment, knowingly this time.

The last times she'd been in these halls, she'd had murder in her mind. It was still what was in her mind, but it was for much later. It was a future step, the final step. First, what they had to commit was not a killing, but a theft. Not like stealing a pie left to cool on a windowsill, or roughly her-sized clothes that had been hung out to dry. This was something between that and stealing a TemPad, she figured--taking something that mattered from the TVA, but without them knowing why it mattered, or even that it did.

"Which way?" she hissed at Loki, taking her anxieties and aiming them outward, just as she always had, as long as she could remember. Except then, it'd all been stabbing people, or setting them on fire, or prodding them with the business end of a sizzling baton. Now it was more like glaring at her companion in a way that suggested how quickly and awfully she'd kill him, if he tried to betray her.

"This way," he said, and turned around and went down the hallway.

Sylvie followed.

*

"How long were you here for?" she asked, what must have been half an hour and six left turns later.

Ahead of her, walking less confidently than he had been a few hallways ago, Loki said, "A few weeks? Maybe a month? Probably not years--though I doubt I'd know the difference if I had been. Time is strange here."

"Shouldn't you know where we're going, then? If you were here that bloody long."

"It could have been as little as a few days. I really don't know. At any rate, it doesn't matter if it takes a while for us to get our bearings; there are enough analysts and Minutemen that we won't warrant a second glance unless we stumble upon someone who knows us. And even if we do, it's twice as likely to be an ally than an enemy."

That was sort of true, since Mobius and B-15 were twice as many people as Renslayer. But there was a problem with that line of thinking, and Sylvie wasn't about to let him keep walking ahead of her thinking there wasn't.

"That's only if we aren't in a section of the TVA Renslayer frequents that the others don't," she said. "Which we don't know. Because we don't know where we are."

"If you'd let me think in peace for a moment--"

"You've had plenty of moments. They don't seem to have done us much good yet."

"They might, if you'd just--"

"Just what? Follow you around like a lost puppy?"

"Maybe stop crying like one, for starters," Loki said, whirling around. "You're starting to give me some sympathy for Thor. I hope you know how distressing that is for me."

"Oh, how awful," Sylvie said, because it was better than saying that at least he'd gotten to know Thor. "Look, I'm just saying that the longer this takes, the more likely something else happens to screw everything up. Things tend to get in the way of plans, if you give them the opening."

"Do they?" Loki asked, somewhat wryly, as if he thought they'd experienced much the same kind of stumbling blocks.

"Believe it or not, it happens even more often with plans that have more than one step," said Sylvie sweetly, all the better to underline the fact that whatever their experiences had been, hers had been worse, and she'd been better at handling them.

"Yes, very funny," said Loki, though he'd have been better off not saying anything at all, really.

They came to a halt, mostly because they'd come to another fork. The hallway continued forward, but also to the left and right.

"Well?" she asked, when she saw him hesitating.

His uncertain expression became something else. Smugger, self-satisfied. "After you, madam," he said. "If you think you can do better."

"I can, thanks," Sylvie said, and swept forward.

*

Where he'd turned left each time he was unsure, Sylvie kept straight wherever possible. If they were in a building, there had to be an end to it, which wouldn't be found by going in circles. If they were in something there was no end to, they'd find that out quicker this way, as well.

Eventually, there was no more forward. There was a corridor to the left, and another to the right. Sylvie chose right, then went straight at the next two intersections--and then, finally, they came to something. Not another door to another room full of beds or dust-covered gadgets, but a wide-spanning window, which looked out onto a view she'd never anticipated.

"You didn't tell me the TVA was a city," she said, one part wonder to two parts accusation. She hadn't spent much time anywhere this advanced; by the time civilizations had advanced to this, they usually had the weather under control, along with strong defenses against whatever might come from the skies. And when they didn't, well. That was bad. That meant there was something worse than usual, going on beneath the surface. Something that tended to make her skin itch, made her need to get away from there as quickly as possible. She felt it now, too, so strongly it might even have been independent of her prior feelings about the TVA. Maybe it meant it was on the cusp of something, the way the other such cities she'd visited always had been. And end, and a reckoning; something they'd deserve, where so few of the others ever had.

Perhaps she could learn to like that feeling, after all.

Loki said something.

"What?" Sylvie asked, having been, for a moment, too gone in her thoughts to hear him the first time.

"The view's different," Loki said.

"What's wrong with it?" Sylvie asked. "Other than nothing being on fire, nobody screaming..."

She hadn't meant to make him smile at her, however briefly, but found she didn't mind it, either.

"The angle's wrong," he said, pointing at something, which turned out to be an incredibly huge and even more hideous statue of the supposed Time-Keepers. "We ought to be on the other side of that."

"All right. Give me a second," Sylvie said, and took in the view some more, and thought.

She'd always thought of the TVA as a single gigantic structure, suspended somewhere beyond space and time, where it couldn't be gotten at without a thousand years of planning and patience. It had turned out to be more or less that, except that it was actually a city full of structures meant for murderers. It made them seem bigger, somehow. Vaster. And yet, at the same time, easier to comprehend, and to navigate.

"Have you seen the outside of this building?" she asked.

"I truly don't remember," said Loki. "It was an...overwhelming moment."

Sylvie might have sneered at him about his lack of foresight, but found she was too invested in the answer to the problem, now that they had some actual information. "All those other buildings have doors aimed at the city center. Chances are this one does, too. If we keep along this hallway, we ought to come across something."

*

Shortly thereafter, they came across another door. And not an unobtrusive one, either; it was much larger than any of the other doors they had passed, with a glass window at the top. There was a sign next to it saying PARKING. When they were close enough to the door to look through the window, the next room looked precisely like what anyone would have expected: a parking garage even more poorly lit than the hallway, filled with vehicles.

"What are you doing?" Loki asked, as Sylvie's hand went for the door handle. "Taking a car isn't part of our plan."

" Good plans are flexible."

"Aren't we meant to be undercover? I wouldn't call anything with an engine stealthy," complained Loki.

"Stealth is only an aspect of not getting caught," Sylvie said. "Getting in and out quickly also helps. Besides--did you see any other pedestrians, when we were looking out at the city?"

The question was aimed at him, but also meant for herself. She hadn't been looking for that, but she'd long ago learned to see more in the moment that she consciously thought about, so that she could look back and pick up on dangers and other details that hadn't occurred to her initially.

"It doesn't necessarily mean not driving would make us stand out," argued Loki, who must also have thought back to it, and come to the same conclusion. "Just because you don't want to do even more walking..."

"If you lived in a city with this many flying cars, no way you'd walk anyway you didn't have to. No one would. It'd get us noticed," Sylvie said, rock-solid sure of it now that she'd had the chance to think it out loud. "Besides, I'm not the one who's never walked more than a mile in my life."

"All right, fine," said Loki, and followed her through yet another door.

*

"I do know how to drive, you know," Loki said twenty minutes later, once they'd navigated the parking bay a few times, and found a likely vehicle. He'd been drawn to the big, flashy ones; Sylvie'd wanted something dull and unobtrusive; they'd settled on a small, pink thing shaped like a stink beetle, not because either of them particularly cared for it, but because it was so dust-covered that its owner must have been too embarrassed to come back for it, and would hopefully be unlikely claim ownership if they happened to see them go by.

"I doubt that," Sylvie said. "Princes mostly rode around on horses, when I was in Asgard."

"For all you know, Asgard looks just like this by now."

It was obvious that he was sulking. This suggestion still threw her, though. She hadn't seen more than the golden spires, after all, in the repeating night they'd spent there together. Even if it probably wasn't true, the fact remained that it could be.

Something must have shown on her face, making her wish for one sharp moment that she hadn't tossed her hooded cloak away so readily, days ago. Loki said, more softly, "Horses, yes. Magic, once I grew more skilled. Not that it'd be an option now, even if other magics were usable here; that sort is meant to use the natural paths woven into the cosmos. Somehow, I doubt the TVA is a natural part of the cosmos."

Part of Sylvie hungered to hear more about this, regardless of how much of a digression it was. To learn more about the sorts of things she could have done, if she'd been there to be taught them; that she might be able to do at some future date, if she had someone to teach her, or the time and materials to teach herself. The rest of her saw the plan, the hard bright line of it, stretching out before them. The way they needed to focus, to think about this and only this, until it was done.

"My point is, I've got more experience driving than you, if you even have any," she said, and reached for the key. Astonishingly, there'd been a key hanging from the ignition of every vehicle they'd peeked in at. More proof, if anyone had wanted it, that the TVA really wasn't a part of the cosmos as they knew it. She twisted the key and the engine rumbled to life, louder, somehow, than she'd expected.

"Somehow, I expected a flying car would be quieter," Loki said, an observation which left Sylvie with the dual desires to kiss him for being on the same wavelength, or stab him for trying to have the same thought as her.

Instead of either of those, she settled for reaching for one of the levers between her seat and Loki's. When she pulled it, the car shuddered, and let out a horrendous screech.

"Excellent work," said Loki, and if there'd been room to manage it gracefully, Sylvie absolutely would have stabbed him with her sword. "I'm so glad we decided you should drive."

"Shut up," Sylvie said, and pulled the other lever, and pressed down with her foot on one of the pedals by the floor. She'd driven enough different sorts of vehicles to have a sense of what was what, usually; and this time, instead of screeching, the car lurched forward, still juddering quite a lot, if not quite so murderously as before.

"This doesn't appear to be a very reliable flying car," said Loki, as Sylvie wound them down one aisle and then the other, following the arrows painted on the floor. There was room enough to fly the car, if she'd wanted to; there were also signs all over the walls, DO NOT ENGAGE FLIGHT THRUSTERS BEFORE THE GREEN LINE, and she figured there was most likely a reason for that.

"It'll do," she said, and kept an eye out for the green line in question. She finally saw it when they came around the last turn, and found themselves headed toward a large, garage door-style exit. When they passed the red line painted on the floor, the door began to creak open. When they passed the yellow line a little ways beyond it, the door began to creak open slightly faster. They were nearly to the green line when Sylvie shrugged inwardly and yanked the lever that had made such a racket before. As soon as she did, there was another jolt, both more and less alarming this time, and their wheels left the concrete.

They soared out of the dark parking garage into a brighter sky.

"Perhaps it's not all that terrible of a flying car," Loki shouted in admission, though he didn't need to--the rumbling had quieted considerably from the moment they were no longer touching the ground.

"Just a terrible car," Sylvie agreed, rather glad she hadn't had to drive it on the ground for more than a few minutes. She'd have had to stab something if she had, and considering the nearest something had been Loki, that could have been bad. When the time came for her to stab him, she wanted to mean it.

They circled the open space of the city center; once, twice, three times, Sylvie trying to adjust to the controls first of all, then trying to recall which building they'd come out of, to get her bearings. It would have been harder to say if it hadn't been for the garage door fifty feet above the ground.

"Which building do we want?" she asked, once she had it down.

"Um," said Loki, and the urge to actually stab him right here and now suddenly returned. "Look, I was never actually out of the building I started in. I don't think they wanted to chance me escaping."

"Because you're so lethal."

"Yes. That. Hold on a moment, let me try to reverse engineer the angle I saw the statue from."

Sylvie rolled her eyes, but swung the car closer to both the ground and the statue on the next circuit around. 

They'd gone past every angle of the statue twice before she lost her patience about it.

"Are you going to come to a conclusion or what?" she demanded.

"Perhaps if you drove a little less like you're trying to kill both of us--"

Sylvie rolled her eyes. She was enjoying all the swooping and diving, which meant he'd have been enjoying it, too, if he hadn't spent too much time working for the universe's most boring people.

She swooped them around again, a spin fast enough to make you dizzy. When she brought them out of it again, she glanced over at him and caught him smiling, just a bit. Who knew whether it was the thing itself or the chiding about it he was enjoying. Probably both. If it hadn't been likely that someone, eventually, might notice their little pink car flying about with no apparent destination, she'd have gone around fast enough the next time to have his head spinning. Instead, she slowed to something closer to a crawl for the next circuit.

"Better?" she asked, dripping sweetness, all the better to make him wonder what she might have up her own sleeve.

"Very," he said. "It's that building. I think."

The one he was indicating didn't look a lot different from every other building, from the outside. It was a little larger than the rest, with a few less windows. It looked pleasanter than being in the middle of an apocalypse, but only if you'd never been at the mercy of the people who worked there.

Instead of voicing any of this, Sylvie said, "All right. Help me find where we're meant to park."

*

In the end, they couldn't find anything like a parking lot. No sign of another of those garage doors, either. They might have kept looking, but impatience, briefly vanquished by the joy of being behind the wheel of something that flew, reared its head. In the end, Sylvie set the car down on the shaded side of the building, where there seemed to be no other traffic. Then they walked around to the front door, which was unlocked just as all the other doors had been.

They met no one on the way into the building, and for a while met no one inside of it, either.

"Was it this deserted when you were working for them before?"

"It was nearly this quiet most of the time while I was infiltrating them for my own gain, yes," said Loki peevishly. "They must congregate elsewhere when they're not working, I suppose."

Sylvie might have said what she thought about this particular euphemism for the murdering of entire worlds and sections of the timeline, except that was when they finally spotted someone. Loki, instead of tensing next to her, as he had all the other times they'd spotted someone, perked up.

"I told you we were in the right place," he said, though she hadn't disputed it (much). "Casey! Hey there, Casey!"

The person they'd spotted looked over at them. His posture immediately went from casual office worker droning his way from one murder to the next, to something a good deal more alarmed.

He turned and started to walk alarmedly away from them. He didn't get more than five feet before they were on him, Sylvie's hand on the hilt of her sword.

"It's so good to see you again, my friend," said Loki.

"Surprised you have another friend," commented Sylvie, who really wasn't, mostly because Loki was hardly what you'd call a good actor. It couldn't have been more obvious that he wasn't saying anything he meant.

It became even more obvious when Loki wrapped his arm around Casey's shoulder and said, conspiratorially, "How have you been?"

"Fine," said Casey. "You guys aren't supposed to be here."

"Oh, but you're mistaken. We're right where we're meant to be."

Trapped, Casey looked from one of them to the other. Now was when Sylvie would ordinarily have enchanted him to find out what she wanted to know. She'd have done it before now, even, would have had it as her first move no matter what the situation was. But enchantment wouldn't work here, and she found to her surprise that she didn't mind watching Loki work, even if it was too slow. Sleazy smoothness was a good look on him. More importantly, it was working, judging by the way Casey had begun to sweat in the most aggressively room-temperature atmosphere she'd ever encountered.

"What do you guys want?" he asked.

"We'd like to see your desk again, if you don't mind," said Loki. We've found ourselves in need of some paperweights, you see."

*

"I can't let you take anything," said Casey, about five minutes later.

"Try and stop us," Sylvie said, and considered stabbing Loki after all when he put a hand on her arm as if to soothe her.

"Whyever not?" Loki asked. "They're just rocks. And I really do need something to hold down my jet ski magazine. See?"

He waved a magazine, which indeed had a jet ski on it, as proof. Hard to say whether Casey would have noticed he'd filched it off someone's desk as they'd walked in; people did tend to be inobservant when they were being threatened, just as they did when they were being enchanted.

The office they were standing in was just as depressing and oppressive as Sylvie'd expected. It was empty, which she hadn't. Mobius's work, maybe. Either that or it was dinnertime, the whole of the TVA just as complacent as Sylvie had hoped but not dared to expect they would be, back when she'd been formulating her original plan.

"I got written up for letting you take that cube thing before," Casey said. "And my cart got pruned, and I almost did. I'm not supposed to let it happen again."

His hand twitched toward the baton that was not terribly well hidden on a cart halfway across the room. Sylvie's hand went to her sword again; Loki's smooth, easygoing sleaze evaporated and was replaced by something quite a bit sharper that Sylvie liked a great deal more.

"Need help?" she asked, not because she did--Loki clearly knew which drawer of which desk his rocks were in, considering he'd been staring at it since they walked in; they could grab them and run at any moment, and be gone with or without the baton seconds before Casey got to it--but because she wanted to see what it'd look like when it was aimed at her.

It turned out to be just as sharp, but with a sort of softness beneath it--not one that believed what was above it, but that added to it, somehow. It was a look that said he was doing this for her, but that didn't mean he couldn't enjoy it.

Then he glanced down, and somehow, she knew just what he wanted, and further, that it was exactly what she wanted to do as well. Why make a break for it when a threat would do? She drew her sword, finally, and pointed it at Casey's throat.

"Do you recall the threat I made before?" Loki asked, silky and smooth and dangerous. Sylvie could have had him right there, if they hadn't been occupied with all this.

"You said you'd gut me like a fish. Which, I still don't know what that is, by the way."

"I'll make sure to bring you one the next time, so you can have a demonstration," Loki said.

And that amount of showing off was, abruptly, quite enough. It had somehow gone from hot to nauseating in the length of two sentences. Sylvie groaned and said, "Will you get on with it?"

The look Loki gave her in response had a lot less adoration in it, and a lot more of the annoyance most recently seen in the car. It must have been the same expression that was on her face; it really did feel like looking into a mirror.

He turned to Casey and said, "We're taking the paperweights. You're going to stand back and less us, or else Sylvie here is going to slit your throat."

"Not gut him like a fish?"

"No, you prefer throats," said Loki, and if they'd been anywhere else, and not in the middle of this, Sylvie might have felt the briefest flash of guilt for the red line he'd had on his throat for a few hours, after their altercation at the end of time--not anything she'd intended, even at her hottest, but his neck had been there and her sword had been there, and if she'd put a little more pressure into it it wouldn't have been Casey's throat she'd cut open after all.

"That's true," she said. "How good of you to keep up with my preferences."

"Anything for you," said Loki cheerily, so that there was no telling if he'd caught the ghost of the moment she definitely hadn't just had.

"Okay, okay." Casey backed away from them with his hands up--not even in the general direction of the baton, which just went to confirm that this guy really didn't work in the field in any capacity. "Take them. But I'm going to have to report this, just so you know."

"You do that," said Loki, and opened the drawer he'd been looking at this whole time, and reached in--and then paused, and looked at Sylvie, and took his hand back out.

Sheathing her sword, Sylvie stepped to the drawer and looked in. The rocks Loki was so concerned with looked like just that: rocks. Nothing special about them, other than being colorful like gemstones, which really only mattered if you were a raven looking to decorate a nest, or a prince who'd never had more important things than treasure to concern yourself with.

"One of each color," Loki said.

And so Sylvie scooped up one of each, until she was holding six of them. They didn't feel like anything in her hands, even more than they hadn't looked like anything. "Anything else we need? Some magic twigs, maybe?"

"That should do it."

"All right, then." Sylvie put the rocks in her pocket, then opened the Time Door in a motion that was by now as natural to her as working the lesser sort of TemPad ever had been. "Don't try to follow us, by the way."

"I wouldn't want to," Casey said. "You guys are mean."

"Comes with the territory," Loki said, so breezily that he had to be feeling what Sylvie was: the euphoria of a job well and easily done.

They stepped through the door together.

Behind them, Casey called, "You still owe me a carton of milk!"

*

"--Where are we now?" Loki shouted. He had to if he wanted her to hear him over the wind, which blew so wildly around them that it would have been impossible to hear anything lower than a scream.

"Jotunheim," Sylvie shouted back.

The look Loki gave her was full of enough betrayal to have made her feel guilty if she hadn't been vindicated instead. She'd been all but sure this would throw him. It was in the way she'd been the one to bring up their adoption in the first place, back on the train. It was in the way he hadn't brought it up since. He'd claimed he knew how she felt, that he'd been where she'd been, once upon a time; well, when it came to this, she was the one who knew where he was about it. He didn't want to so much as think about it, nevermind confront it openly. That gave her an advantage, one she was going to need if these stones of his were even a fraction as powerful as he'd claimed. She'd pretend to be working with him, because he was (probably) pretending to be working with her. She wouldn't betray him first, in case he was expecting it, in case she was wrong. But throwing him off would let her see whatever he was planning to try that much easier. It would give her more room to react.

Heart singing with triumph, she beckoned him through the mouth of the nearby cave. Inside, the sound of the blowing winds cut off sharply, so that even though they could still hear them, it was a distant sound which wouldn't keep them from hearing each other, nor make them as likely to feel as if they were about to lose an extremity.

There, sweetly as she could, she said, "Everything all right?"

"Fine. I'm--it's fine. I, just. Are you certain this is a safe place for us to be? The only apocalypse event I know of here is...relevant enough to us that I fear we might be seen here."

There was something in the way he said it that made it sound like this was something he expected her to know about. It was enough to make her bristle, just as he'd bristled at the knowledge of where she'd brought them. "I'm not versed in the events of your life, thanks. It's never exactly been relevant to me. Anyway, it's safe. A meteor strikes here, a few hours from now. They're advanced enough to see it coming; there's no intelligent life anywhere within its strike radius, by now. We'll have as much privacy as we need to figure out these stones of yours."

Speaking of which, she reached for them, sliding her hand into her pocket, wondering if she'd find them different, here in a place where magic was possible. What she found was that they were warm, almost seeming to pulse at her touch; then as soon as she'd grasped them, they became so hot to the touch that she gasped and dropped them to the ground. They hit the frozen dirt floor with a clatter, spinning out in six different directions.

As she leapt after them, Sylvie glanced at Loki, to see how he'd reacted to the scattering of his treasures. There was some of the tension she'd expected, as if he were holding himself back from leaping after them himself, but there wasn't as much of it as there should have been. It was enough to breed a new sort of suspicion.

"So, what?" Sylvie said, straightening up instead of chasing after them. Hand hovering by the hilt of her sword, she placed herself between Loki and everywhere the stones had landed. "They're spelled so only a magician can hold them? Is that it?"

She said that word with just as much disdain as the last time she'd had cause to say it. But instead of making a spectacle, the one any other Loki would have, he just said, "Are you all right?"

"Fine," said Sylvie, bristling again, though she couldn't have said what it was about his supposed concern that was so grating, now. "What was that? Tell me."

Thoughtfully, Loki said, "The stones I've had in my possession previously have always been a part of something else. The sceptre, the Tesseract. Objects of power in their own right. I always thought they were meant to channel the power of the stones, but it may be that they were also or primarily intended to corral their power. To prevent them from immolating their bearer, among other things."

"Wonderful," Sylvie said, wondering now just what would have happened if she'd tried to hold onto them, instead of letting go. "So, what do we do about it?"

Now Loki did go after the stones--walking slowly toward each one, projecting his movements. It was somehow even more insulting than sneaking his way up to each one would have been. "I'll have to make something to set them in. Something that will allow us to channel their power, while shielding us from any backlash. It might take a while. I doubt I'll be finished before your meteor strikes."

It couldn't have been more obvious that he was trying to talk his way off of Jotunheim, now. Well, Sylvie had her advantage, and she wasn't about to give it up. "So we'll come back again, then. Earlier next time, if you're about to say something about needing an extended period of concentration."

"I was, oddly enough," he said drily, not seeming half as devastated by this catch as Sylvie would have liked.

"Suppose you'll just have to make the best of it."

"I suppose I will."

*

Loki got to work, all six stones spread out around him on the floor. He hadn't so much as winced, picked them up. It was enough to make an already-suspicious person even moreso. It was enough to make a person edgy, even if he had yet to show a sign of disappearing them or himself.

There was nothing for Sylvie to do but think, and what she found herself thinking about, mostly, was him, and how she couldn't find where her trust had gone. She'd been willing, when they'd walked into the castle at the End of Time. She'd wanted it, just as much as he still seemed to. Then, right when she'd needed him with her the most, he'd turned. Ever since, she'd been waiting to see where this was going. What he really wanted. Not a throne, supposedly; she thought she might even believe that, after he'd done nothing at all to stop her killing him. But if the stones were what he said they were, and if he could get them to work...he could do anything. Who knew what he might want then?

She couldn't take the chance. She'd have to kill him first. There was no point trying to trust when that option was still on the table, she finally decided.

After a long while, there came a green glimmer, as careful, somehow, as his stooping had been, when he'd been going after the stones. Now Loki sat on a little padded stool, and the stones themselves sat on a fancy little table in front of him. He'd called up a flame to float in the air above the desk, which cast a light in all directions. If Sylvie had felt like looking up, she could have seen the black daggers that hung from the ceiling, stalactites or icicles or a mixture. She'd been in this cave once when the meteor had hit, and remembered the way the daggers had flown at her, jolted from their places by the impact. She'd only just made it through the Time Door before they would have sliced through her--

"Listen, Sylvie," Loki said, looking at her straight-on, where before he'd avoided meeting her gaze. His hands were held over the stones palm-down, as if he were capable of being cold here, they a fire meant to warm him.

He hesitated. Sylvie meant to wait him out, but lost patience seconds in. "What is it? Spit it out."

"When I mentioned an apocalypse I knew of on Jotunheim, before," he said, as if he'd actually done anything more than allude to something that couldn't possibly have anything to do with what they were doing now. "It's something that happened before I--when I was still on the timeline."

"Oh, good, more of your life story," said Sylvie, who had always successfully managed to dodge learning anything of the sort, even when surrounded by Lokis. It had been one thing to hear him speak vaguely of their mother. That at least was something she remembered, even if only in bits. That at least had been something she'd asked about. She hadn't asked about this. Why should she care about things that might have happened to her, if she'd stayed on the timeline long enough to experience them? The only thing that would do was make her hate him, as much for having gotten to experience the bad as for having gotten to experience the good. "I really don't care, in case you haven't noticed."

"Yes, you do. You care because I'd care, in your place," said Loki, very carefully. He was looking back at the stones now, but it was clear his mind wasn't anywhere near them. "You care about what happened to me because I care about what happened to you."

"I'm not you," she reminded him, but there wasn't the bite in it there had been in that moment when she'd been undecided about what to do with her advantage. If she'd kicked him through the Time Door alone, she wouldn't have had to listen to any of this, or admit even if only to herself how much truth there was in it. "But go ahead, if you're so insistent."

"This happened a year or two before my timeline was reset. Before I fell into the--before everything else that's happened. And the reason that the rest of it happened was that I tried to destroy Jotunheim. Not because they were a threat. Not even because they deserved it. I just--I don't know."

Well, that explained why he'd been startled in that particular way, though not why Sylvie should care. Asgard at least was a memory, however faint. Jotunheim, though, was little more than an idea, outside of this one safe haven. Before she could say as much, he went on:

"It's not that I didn't know what I was doing. It's not that I thought it was all right. It's not even that I really thought Odin would welcome it. But I was--upset. Devastated, really. I'd only just learned the truth of my origins. Not nearly as kindly as it sounds as though you did, by the way. I got lost in it. Let myself get lost in it, because rage was easier than facing it in any other way. I couldn't have been dissuaded from my course, no matter who'd tried to reason with me, or what they'd had to say."

"Interesting," said Sylvie. "Not to mention super subtle. Bravo."

"I hadn't heard subtlety was part of your repertoire. Why should it be part of mine? I'm just trying to say that I really meant it when I said I understood."

"What you said was you've been where I am," Sylvie corrected, reaching for the rage in question and not really finding it, and not nearly as pissed off as she ought to have been at its disappearance. "Can't see how that's true, considering I lost my family, my home, and my entire world, and all that happened to you is that you didn't find out you were adopted until late."

At that moment, she felt a desire to sit next to him, who knew why. In the next moment, a second chair glimmered into existence, a low-backed stool set up at just the right angle to give her a solid footrest. Sylvie considered whether to ignore it and stay standing, deciding it'd be pointless if the gesture was well-meant, even more pointless if it wasn't.

"Do you remember them telling you?" Loki asked. "Do you recall how it felt to learn that not only were you actually from a race of monsters, but even the monsters found you so lacking that they cast you away like so much rubbish?"

Sylvie did, actually. The memory was a sharp blade, cutting through the centuries, easily the clearest memories she had from that sliver of childhood on the timeline. Loki'd come up with the right word for it. It had been a devastation, one that would easily have ranked as the greatest in her life if it hadn't been for the day a Hunter and her Minutemen had swept into the palace and carried her away.

There was no chance she was admitting to that, no matter what Loki thought he knew, no matter how well he'd guessed. She stayed staring at the rocks instead, the stones Loki had thought were the key to everything. The ones that, if they were, had been curiously unguarded, even though the TVA ought to have known what they could do if they ever made it back to the timeline. Maybe they were paperweights, after all. Maybe this whole thing had been a ruse, leading up to this--an attempt to talk her down from her mission, to get beneath her defenses, whatever.

She reached for one of the stones, the blue one. Wrapped her fingers around it, tucking it into her palm. Ignored the heat of it, the burn that should have had her casting it away again a fraction of a moment after she'd touched it. She held it tightly as the heat spread, as it traveled up her wrists and her arms and all the rest of her, until it was in the middle of her chest and the pit of her stomach, a bright light flaring up somewhere behind her eyes. By the time she dropped it back, no more able to keep holding onto it than a toddler could keep a little fist wrapped around a live coal, she knew one thing about it: It was magic for sure, neither like the magic she knew nor the kind he did, and it was stronger than anything she'd ever touched before. 

"Sylvie?" said Loki sharply, in a way that gave the impression it wasn't the first time he'd called her name. When she looked up at him, he said, "Are you all right?"

"Fine." She looked at the stone, where it lay among the others. She breathed in and out, in and out. Then, finally, she said, without knowing she meant to say it until the words had already escaped: "This is where I figured it out, you know."

"What?"

It was gratifying to be telling him something he hadn't guessed first. Or maybe it just would be, when she was in a place to feel it. Right now, she didn't seem to be feeling anything, not even relief at having more or less ruled out one possible lie. "About apocalypses. My first few years as a variant were all on the run. I'd barely arrive in a place before a team of Minutemen were on me. Even after I learned to fight, even after the first few of them I killed--nothing ever seemed to stop them coming. Nothing ever even seemed to make them hesitate. I barely understood why they were after me. That spiel they'd given me down at the TVA hadn't been what you'd call enlightening, even if I could have remembered all the details. I had nothing but a stolen TemPad that could never get me far enough away."

"So you came...here. To Jotunheim. Why?"

He was looking at her openly again. There was nothing in his face to suggest he'd guessed this, either. No reason to give away more secrets, but Sylvie kept on anyway. "Not just to Jotunheim, but here. I don't remember, anymore, if I'd learned about the asteroid when I was on Asgard, or if I'd heard a chance mention of it in some other place. Wherever I heard it, I eventually decided I was finished. I'd go where monsters went to die. If I were lucky, it'd be the meteor that killed me, before the Minutemen could do it."

"You were already hanging from the edge. What difference if you let go?" Loki said, irrelevantly and somewhat distantly, before his focus sharpened, and he finally got to something without her having to spoon-feed it to him: "They never came."

"I botched the timing. Got there hours too early. I was upset about it. Thinking it would for sure be the Minutemen, after all. Only, they didn't come, and they didn't come. I was there long enough to eventually start wondering why. It took a lot more trips to other places to be sure it was apocalypses in general that were the answer. After that, I was free--well, freer. Safer. In a manner of speaking."

"I'm glad."

"I didn't tell you so you'd be glad," Sylvie said, though she was at a loss for why she had told him, then, why she'd have bared this much of herself when there was no tactical advantage to it. "Are you planning to stop stalling anytime soon?"

"Of course." Loki smiled at her--strained and yet fond, somehow--and got back to work.

*

They repeated the day several times, just as they had in Asgard. The timing was easy enough. What Sylvie hadn't got into was how well she knew the shadows on these walls, the shape and size of them that meant they'd be safe for a while, on down to the ones that meant danger. To get out before you couldn't anymore. 

How many times had she stood on the brink of something unimaginably vast, watched something unbelievably terribly come, only to sidestep it in the very last moment? She wasn't about to tell him about that, either, or about how her mind kept going back to those last moments on Lamentus. 

"The intended vessel was always a gauntlet," Loki said, early on. After he'd made Sylvie her stool, but before the circles had appeared under his eyes, before the gravel had wound its way into his voice. "Something a single person might wield, alone."

"I'm fine with that--so long as I'm the one wielding it."

"I suspect that might be the case."

"And now you're about to tell me why I can't do that, and why it doesn't have anything to do with your wanting ultimate power."

Loki rolled his eyes. It was a relief, somehow, every time she got evidence that he wasn't just walking on eggshells around her. "I've had far more magical training than you have, for far longer. I'm more powerful in every arena but the one. And of the two of us, I'm the one with prior experience of Infinity Stones. If I'm in it with you, our chances of surviving this are much greater."

"What about our chances of success?" Sylvie asked, because this was sounding like the kind of thing they could go around and around on, never getting anywhere until something stupid happened to one of the stones and they were all out of luck. Again.

"If the chances of our survival go up, I'd hazard a guess we're more likely to achieve something, as well."

"By all means, then. Let's discuss it."

So they did. They went through a list of options, everything they could think of. A six-pronged staff with a stone for each of the prongs and two hand grips. A double-headed suit of armor, the stones embedded in the chest. Every option sounded unwieldy at minimum, completely stupid at worst. In the end, they decided it would be better to stick with the basics. Their gauntlet was like nothing the timeline must ever have seen, for it was really two gauntlets, merged together at the back. Their hands would go into it together; they'd remain connected as long as they were using it. As for the stones, they were set into the palms, three to each side to make it equal.

When the last stone had gone in, Sylvie picked the whole thing up. She found herself surprised, somehow, at how heavy it wasn't.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Not even remotely. We need to be at our best for this. Our strongest. That means we have to get some rest."

For the first time, Sylvie notices how tired she was, and how hungry. This had been one of those times when she'd been so focused for so long she forgot about her body's needs until they became too great, or were brought to her attention in some other fashion. For the first time, too, she noticed how pale Loki was, the way he was almost swaying from side to side. She'd have made a point of being superior about how she was clearly the less used up of the two of them, if she hadn't been so sure he'd point out that she hadn't been depleting herself magically to get this done.

"All right," she said, instead. "So we'll start the day over, get some sleep."

"Here? Really?" Loki complained. "I really must draw the line."

"Whether or not you like it here, it's safe. We know no one else is going to show up."

"We also know no one will show up on Asgard," Loki said. "Though, wait. Hela is there, and that seems--unwise, now that you mention it. I suppose I could try to sleep here."

Another reason they were different; another point to how they weren't the same. Sylvie had slept better here than anywhere else she'd ever been. She'd slept so well here, she rarely dared to come back, lest she find something had ruined it. So far nothing had, though.

"All right," she said.

*

They stepped through the Time Door, him first and her after. The first thing Loki did was provide them with furniture, again. This time, instead of a flat surface to work on and places for them to sit, it was another long, low table, which was a moment later covered in platters of food, roast fowl and roast venison and honeyed figs among so many other things, a feast's worth of food for a feast's worth of appetite. It was less devastating this time than it had been before. Sylvie wasted no time helping him devour it. This time there was mead to wash it down, the one taste that wasn't a sense memory from so long ago; but the smell was somehow even more familiar than the other tastes, and made something seem to ache from very far away.

Once they'd finished stuffing themselves silly, Loki waved the table and contents away. Sylvie couldn't decide whether she was more glad than not that it was gone. Then he waved a bed into existence, and there was something new to think about.

"I suppose you think we're sharing, then," she said, standing up and stretching.

"I'd hoped," Loki said, standing up too. "Should I have been more subtle? I hear it's not my specialty."

"Just because we fucked before doesn't mean we--what?"

Loki was looking at her again, earnestly as he had at the End of Time, but somehow much more softly. The fear was gone from it, anyway. "Sylvie," he said, and hesitated, giving every appearance, at first, that he was going to stutter his way through not saying much of anything. The difference this time was that no one was going to come up behind him and--

Sylvie hadn't known how painful that memory was going to be until she felt the blade of it, sinking into her. Even worse, somehow, than his betrayal had been. Unlike her anger, this still had fangs.

"Shut up and kiss me, if you're going to," she said, but then instead of waiting, she pulled him in by his tie, and kissed him. 

It wasn't a combative kiss, though she thought she might have wanted it to be. It wasn't terribly careful, either. It was closer to their first kiss, the one she'd meant as a distraction, and hadn't known she'd meant as something else. This one, though, went on for more than just the first few seconds. It went on until he lay his hands on her waist, light but again not so cautious as before.

"Sylvie," he said again, when they were barely parted, so that she could feel her name against her skin as he said it. There was no reason his breath should have made her ache for him more than should have been possible when they'd already slept together, when she'd scratched that itch multiple times within the last few days. There was no reason it should have, except that it did, desire lighting through her in a wave so strong there was nothing for it but to act.

The wall was closer than the bed, and so she shoved him against it and kissed him again. Desperately, like no kiss she'd had before; as if it mattered that it was him, and not just some random person she'd chosen, touching her.

"I'm not planning to call out your name," she managed, the next time they came up for air. "Just so we're clear."

"We can't all be perfect," Loki said, and kissed her again.

They might have fucked against the wall, like they had before, or better yet might have made their way over to the bed. But Loki didn't seem inclined to dislodge her even though to get their trousers down, and Sylvie found she wasn't particularly inclined to part from him, either. Not even just an inch or two, not even in the service of having his prick inside her. Instead, she waited as long as she could bear to, so he wouldn't think she was as eager as he was, his prick already stiff against her hip. Then, she took his hand--for the first time since he'd turned on her, she took his hand, and guided it into the front of her hideous TVA khakis.

He didn't seem to need more of a suggestion after that, his fingers slipping between her lower lips as if he'd always intended to be headed there. Sylvie couldn't help the sound she made then, the first she couldn't hold back, not his name but a low moan.

Loki didn't tease, didn't go slow the way people sometimes did because they didn't know her, didn't know what she liked. His thumb found her clit as he slipped a finger inside of her. He stoked her one way and then the other, soon found a rhythm that had her gasping. It was humiliating, or would have been if there'd been anything like judgement in his eyes about it. But while there was triumph there, most of what she could see was softer, almost aching, so that Sylvie could bear it at least long enough to slip her hand down the front of his hideous TVA trousers, and take him into her hand.

The prick that might have been hers in another life was no more familiar than any other; but the sound Loki made when she began to stroke it was, an echo of her own cry in a lower register. It was that cry, so like her own, or the brush of his breath against her neck as he made it, that brought Sylvie closer to the edge than she'd expected to be already. She fought off her orgasm, began to stroke him harder, figuring that if she liked directness then he, also--

He groaned again, sending another gush of wetness through the center of her. Soon he was outright panting, his hips moving with her hand, his fingers not quite faltering between her legs.

"Sylvie," he said again, and came in his own gush of wetness, spurts of white streaking her hand and the front of both their trousers.

For a moment, he sagged into the wall, his fingers stilled in their work. But it was only for a moment, and then he was stroking her again, and kissing her again--not a soft kiss or an angry one, but something else, something greater that had her responding in kind, with no thought to the embarrassment of it, this time. She was beyond that, lost in this new sort of want or need, until she forgot, for just a moment, where she was, and where her blade was in relation to her, and where the exits were, and the reasons why the person she was doing this with wasn't a person who could be trusted.

She came back to herself to see Loki with his prick still hanging out, looking at the shining wetness on his hand. When he saw her looking at him, he wiped it hastily off on his pantsleg. There was probably a snide remark, somewhere in her, about how if he wanted a taste, all he'd had to do was ask; but there was also the acknowledgement that if he were to get on his knees in response, she would let him, and this would have become more of a thing than it already was.

"So," Loki said, tucking himself in. "That was..."

"Yeah," said Sylvie, who had nothing to tuck, and plenty to wrinkle her nose at. "Don't suppose you'd like to clean us off. Only if it's not beneath you, of course."

She'd no more than said it before he waved his hand and the damp spots were gone on her trousers and his. The only remaining sign of what they'd done was the wetness between her legs and the delicious way she ached there.

"Thanks," she said, though she'd meant to sneer something at him, to try to get back something of the edge she was reasonably certain she'd had over him since they'd met.

"My pleasure, of course." He turned toward the bed, offering her his arm. "Shall we?"

It wasn't his hand he was offering, and so Sylvie took it. She'd have tried to stifle the gigantic yawn that escaped her on the way there, but it would have taken up more energy than she had left.

*

In the morning, they restarted the day once more.

"So we, what? Just put it on?" Sylvie asked, looking down at the gauntlet, which looked even stupider with twelve hours' sleep behind her than it had when she'd been awake for three straight days.

"Yes," Loki said. "More or less. We'll put it on, then attempt to activate the stones through our will--something like what we did in the Void, only we won't be trying to enchant anything. We'll just be...gathering their power. Calling it to us. The storm clouds on our horizon, ahead of the rain."

Why couldn't they try to enchant them, Sylvie wondered, but didn't say; it couldn't have been more obvious that the stones were nothing like Alioth had been. Or at least, if there was a mind there, she hadn't found any evidence of it yet. "Right. So let's do it."

"I know you don't want to hear this, but you should let me lead, at least at first," Loki went on. "I'll hand over the reins as soon as we're certain it's working the way we mean it to; before that point, I'm more likely to survive the backlash than you are."

The way he said it was so serious, so sincere, that it was hard to think he might still be plotting beneath it. There was a ring to it that gave Sylvie the idea that it was true, even if it wasn't the whole truth, or was meant to distract her from some other, real intention.

"Don't worry," she said drily. "I'm perfectly all right with shielding myself with your body. Or whatever the magical equivalent is."

She stuck her right hand into her half of the gauntlet. It was a strange feeling, not quite anything and not quite electric. There was a sense of possibility, buzzing against her fingertips and the palm of her hand, something that might have been something or might have been nothing at all.

Then Loki stuck his hand into his side, and everything changed.

*

A flash of something that might have been light, or might have been something so far beyond her experience that light was just the closest her mind could get to it.

They weren't on Jotunheim anymore. Or, they were, but she could now see so far beyond it that it didn't matter where her body was. What did matter was...everything else. She could see from one side of the universe to the other. And she could see into every other universe, as well. He Who Remains hadn't been lying when he said there were others; what he'd left out was how many others there were, thousands upon thousands of separate timelines, some hewing very close to the Sacred Timeline but for one small change, others so different they must have diverged unimaginably long ago. In each of the thousands of timelines, there were tens of thousands of worlds, filled with trillions of lives, and for a span of time Sylvie saw each one of them paraded before her.

After a time, there came a voice, the only thing that could have distracted her from the rest, the only thing that could have pierced through.

"Sylvie," Loki said. "Open your eyes."

She hadn't realized she had them closed. She opened them and found that they were still on Jotunheim, after all--and that she could see the cave just as clearly as she could see anything else, in any universe. She could see into the ground and into the walls, down to their every atom, and even further in than that, everything that moved, down and down and down until she got to pieces so small that no one else would ever manage to see them, even if they did someday theorize their existence. No one but her, and Loki, and when she turned to him she found she could see into him, too. Not only the veins and organs and bones that made him, parts that became smaller and smaller the closer she looked, but even deeper and farther than that: into his thoughts and mind and soul. There, she saw he'd meant it, everything he'd said at the End of Time, everything he'd said since--

And because they were there together, and because they were the same, she saw him seeing into her, as well. How close she'd come to running him through. That she'd have done it if she'd had to, or thought she had to. How she still would, if he made her, if he brought her to it.

She saw him see her horror, even more clearly than she felt it as she looked into him and knew something else, sudden as the tip of a pruning baton, sharp as a dagger's edge: he had far greater control over the stones than she did. It hardly mattered, after all, that half of them were in her hand, that his three were tethered to her. He'd had so much more training than she had, was not years but centuries of study ahead of her. Enchantment might be beyond him for the moment, but wresting control away from him was beyond her by an order of magnitude.

In the same moment she saw he truly hadn't been tempted by the offer of a throne, she saw that he was tempted by this: the ultimate power on the timeline, the newfound ability to arrange everything the way he desired it.

"No," she said, and came so close to drawing her blade; and saw that if she did, she would succeed. That he was more stunned by the stones than she had been, that he wouldn't react in time.

An hour ago, she'd have done it, or so she told herself. Even a few minutes ago. Now, her hand went to the hilt of her sword, but hesitated to draw it. There was no reason she shouldn't, every reason she should. She didn't trust him. She couldn't. She could see the part of him that would be willing to betray her, if he could have the rest to himself; the part of him that would take his power and be lesser for it, but still consider it a worthwhile exchange.

One breath, one moment. There was still time to catch him off-guard.

Another breath, another moment. Now there wasn't.

Sylvie stood there, heart in her throat, waiting for the moment he'd decide. It wasn't trust so much as wishful thinking. She'd thought she'd excised it from herself days ago, but she hadn't, and now he was going to turn, that way she'd thought he was turning at the End of Time, but truly this time.

Loki blinked at her. Catching up, or still deciding. It was hard even from the inside to know which it was.

"It's all right," he said, finally, and Sylvie could see him deciding even as he spoke, dark threads falling away as new ones rose to take their place: all the possible paths she hadn't seen or understood before because even now she was too wrapped up in her own singular thread. "I'm not going to--it's your turn to be in the spotlight, I think."

He didn't move, didn't so much as wave a hand. Yet Sylvie felt it anyway: all the power that had been in him, coming into her. It didn't come in a wave, a tsunami that would have killed her where she stood; he was slowing it, directing it, making certain it wouldn't harm her. And it would have, if he hadn't been there, would have lit her up from the inside and devoured her before she'd so much as grasped the slightest bit of any of this.

She closed her eyes again, turning away from him in a way she never could have if she hadn't seen everything he was, everything he'd been, every way he'd changed since meeting her. She turned, and saw everything there was to see, everywhere.

"I doubt even Heimdall sees so far," Loki said, a presence at her side, a voice in her ear.

Who? Sylvie might have asked, only she didn't have to. She knew everything Loki knew, knew everything there was to know. Heimdall, the Guardian of the Bifrost. Heimdall, the Gatekeeper. Knowing him, thinking of him, she found him in a thousand lives, in ten thousand. In some timelines he'd died at the same time and place Loki had. In others, he stood guard over Asgard still. Sometimes he stood his watch aboard a ship filled with refugees, hungry and filthy and bereft. Sometimes he ruled, from Asgard's throne or another, benevolent or terrible and always, always seeing too much. And now, as they looked at him, he looked back, startled, from every timeline in which he lived.

Sylvie drew back, unsettled.

"He is frightening, isn't he?" Loki said, another irrelevant murmur. "The number of years I spent to find a way to conceal myself from his sight--"

But what Sylvie was thinking was that if she'd found every version of him based on a whisper, she could find another. She didn't have to say it to Loki, not when they were like this; she found she could more or less push it toward him, feel him take it in, feel him understand.

It wouldn't have been difficult finding anyone. It was still easier finding He Who Remains than it would have been to find most people. There were scars on the timelines, places that had been stitched or soldered together after unimaginable traumas. Nearly every one could be traced back to him. Kang was his real name, it turned out. A scientist, on so many worlds; mad, so much of the time; perfectly sane at other times, and somehow it was always when he was perfectly sane that he'd created the TVA. And not just a single TVA, but hundreds of them, each attached to its own Sacred Timeline, which had been having its branches pruned since time immemorial.

"What now?" she asked, once she'd gathered all the Kangs together, had each frozen in the moment before he'd disappeared into a thousand Ends of Time. "How do we do this?"

"It's a matter of will," Loki said, and she opened her eyes again to look at him, to see him and hear him better, to take in the most important thing he'd ever say to her. "Think about what you want to happen to him--to every him, everywhere. Think it so clearly you can see it. And then--"

He raised his hand, the other one, and snapped his fingers.

So, Sylvie thought about it.

She wanted Kang to die, first of all. That was the entire point of the thing. But it wasn't the only point, couldn't be all there was. Even without Kang, most or all of the TVAs would keep on. As soon as she had the thought, she saw all the ways it would continue its work, sometimes with robotic Time Keepers as its false heads, sometimes under a new ruler, someone who decided to keep it going because they believed in what they were doing, or because they just wanted power that badly, and nevermind how many people and worlds they had to wipe out to get it. Ravonna was at the head, often; Mobius, sometimes; and once, just the once, it was two even more familiar faces that took on that work, Loki having convinced this her or Sylvie having convinced this him that this was the lesser of evils. Sylvie barely recognized the version of herself that could have agreed to this; she recognized it to the core of her, the longer she looked, seeing the threads that had taken her other self to that place. That might have taken her there, in another life.

But. The TVA. It was out of time, untouchable by magic, even this magic--except that it also wasn't. The foundation had been within the timeline, once; the stones she wielded were the greatest powers to be found within it, always. All she had to do was find that foundation, and once she was in, she could follow it forward, until she had the entire TVA as it was now within the palm of her hand.

But there was more, even beyond that. Other threads she could follow, back and back. If she went back far enough, if she changed it back then , she could do even more than she'd intended to. Could not only have her revenge, but could fix it. Could have a life to go back to, could restore her own timeline and every other timeline back to what it should have been before the Minutemen had come--

Even there, in the throes of it, Sylvie felt the pain, saw the light flaring up from within, ready to devour her after all. It wasn't that she didn't care, but that if she kept going, kept looking, kept gathering her intentions together, she could fix everything, she could fix it all. There was no reason to stop until it was perfect, no reason to settle for less than everything--

"Sylvie," Loki said from somewhere very far away, and as she heard it she knew he'd said it a hundred times before, trying to get her to hear him.

"What?" she asked. "Can't you see I'm busy?"

"You have to stop," he said. "There's a limit to how much we can do."

As he said it, she felt the truth of it: both that he believed it and that it was true. That she wouldn't survive doing even this much; that if she kept going, she wouldn't even survive long enough to enact the changes she already held in her mind.

"Does it matter?" she asked, and it was again the simple truth. She'd never thought of her future after this, never really expected to have one. To bring the TVA down most likely meant she would go down with it, but it wasn't as if she had a life to leave behind. It wasn't as if she had family, friends. It wasn't as if it would matter.

"It would to me," Loki said, and the hell of being here, seeing him like this--it meant that she could see that this was true, too. And more, she could see how much he meant it, how it went right down to the core of him. She'd never have believed it if he'd said it, it would have been too incredible ( I don't want a throne ), but there was no way for her suspicions to throw up denials, here and now, all the vastness of the universe cradled in the palms of their hands. There was nothing but to face it, and, in facing it, to also see what it would do to him, if he lived and she didn't. 

Because she could do that. For all that she hadn't a fraction of his training or power, she knew she could choose. To go this alone, or to bring him with her, wherever she went.

Even now, she could see him trying to think, trying to come up with reasons she shouldn't. Things she hadn't yet seen, or experienced; worlds upon worlds opened to her, the way they never had been before. If she just...stopped. If she did what they'd come in intending to do, and then she stopped.

"There's not much time," he said, and that was when Sylvie saw the last thing, that one last small detail she'd failed to notice, when her head was filled with everything else in every multiverse:

Between her hand and Loki's, there was still a thread. The power he'd weaved through to her, funneled into her slowly lest she be immolated by it. That power was hers, but he held the reins. He could revoke her power at any moment. 

Would he? she wondered, far beyond talking, nevermind asking. Even as she wondered, the answer came to her mind, a hot knife through butter: 

He would. He wouldn't. He would. He wouldn't. It was the battle he was hiding from her, as she'd hidden from him the battle between stabbing him in the gut or sending him alone or going with him, as she'd tried to hide even from herself what he was beginning to mean to her. But now she knew it, and he did, too, and there was no hiding anything, because here they were--

Sylvie didn't know what she was going to do until she looked back at everything she wanted to do and everything she could live and do, and then looked back at him, and everything he was feeling, just as bared as she was, and just as raw.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. Have it your stupid way."

From her hands dropped the things that were too much for her to bear. Remaining were only those things she was nearly capable of holding: Kang, in every branch of the multiverse, and the TVA. And, in the very last moment, the decision that no meteor would hit the Jotunheim where they were, no matter how many times it had before.

Sylvie held it all bright and clear within her mind, and snapped her fingers.

*

Everything was very small and dull there, in the first few moments after. It took minutes to adjust to being back in the world rather than overseeing every world. Eventually, though, Sylvie looked around, and found that the gauntlet had been hurled against the far wall, so hard several of the stones were visibly loose in their respective cavities. Next to her sat Loki, looking as stunned as she felt.

When she looked down at herself to take stock, she found that her right hand had turned a deep, dark blue. So had her right arm, when she rolled up her sleeve to check it. It was crisscrossed with a strange branching, raised black lines that seemed to crackle to the touch, though they didn't hurt. When she looked back at Loki he was the mirror of her, with his own blue left hand, crackling with black lightning.

"Good thing we stopped when we did," she said, wondering what would have happened, precisely, if she'd kept going.

"Yes," said Loki, looking at her with a face full of worry she now knew wasn't even remotely feigned. "Are you all right?"

Sylvie opened her mouth to say that of course she was fine. Then she thought about it. Felt the weight of it. She'd done what she'd set out to do. The Time-Keeper was dead, the real one. He was gone from every timeline in which he'd ever existed. As for the TVA, it was gone, too, every molecule of it: every time charge, every pruning baton, every TemPad but hers. Its city had been wiped from reality, from the tallest building to the littlest, pinkest flying car. Its people had landed wherever in the timeline was closest to where they'd been, with nothing but a mind full of once-forgotten memories to go on. They were gone, and she was still here, and Loki was still with her.

"I'm free, I suppose," she said, and wished she knew how to feel about it. She sniffed, and realized to her horror that she was in real danger of crying in front of him. "You don't have any idea how this feels, so don't go trying to be subtle about it."

"I would never," he said, with a kindness Sylvie could now recognize, and didn't actually hate any less. "Tucking away my absurdly brilliant platitudes and comparisons right...now."

Why that should have made the floodgates open, there was no saying, but it did. Sylvie hadn't wept like this in a long time. She'd cried, some, after she'd first escaped the TVA. She'd found out in short order that it wasn't safe. Loud and dramatic enough to get her made a target of, while making her slow and blind and stupid, as well. Crying could get you killed, so by the time she'd discovered there actually were relatively safe places, she'd been well out of the habit.

Somewhere in the midst of it, her hand found his. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed that much until she was gripping onto him, tightly as she'd ever gripped onto anything. Tighter than she'd have dared to grip anything else, lest it be wrenched away. She stayed there for a long time, in the first place she'd ever felt safe, with the first person she'd ever, somehow, felt safe with.

Finally, she seemed to be done with it. She wiped off her face, noting with a bizarre mix of relief and annoyance that he hadn't got out of it with dry eyes, either. Then she said, "Where do you want to go next?"

He looked at her, and smiled. "After you, madam."