Chapter Text
The whole thing is bloody ridiculous, if you ask her.
And it isn’t like it even means anything.
Sure, she had spent the better part of a year trying to find Loki after sending him away from the Citadel. And sure, he had actually been happy to see her, which is something she hadn’t even fathomed happening.
She hadn’t meant to send him away — not like this, at the very least. Had expected to find him safe with Mobius; stewing with anger, certainly, but safe and okay and right where she left him.
She hadn’t expected to spend the better part of a year in a kind of limbo. Searching timeline after timeline, and universe after universe. Unsure of just where the two of them stood with each other, or even if he was alive or wanted to see her, even if he was. He had said that he understood where she had been, but how was that possible when she wasn’t even sure exactly where she was or where she was going, or how she was even going to begin to get there?
Anyway, she had eventually found him — or he had found her. They weren’t exactly clear on the specifics, yet, though she was sure that that was an argument for another day.
But he had ran up to her, as if he couldn’t even stop himself, and she had thought for a moment that he might even sweep her up in his arms, like she had known that he’d wanted to do in the Void that day. But, like that day, he stopped short, his arms trembling in midair as if with the strain of holding himself back from what he really wanted to do.
“Are you okay?” he had asked, and Sylvie had felt something twist in her chest at hearing his words from the Citadel repeated back at her.
And she wasn’t. Not nearly okay, even if seeing him here now made it a little better, at least. Knowing that he didn’t hate her, even if she wasn’t sure what exactly they were to each other.
“I think I could be,” she answered with a little bit of a dismissive shrug, and he nodded.
Good enough.
And since then, they’ve both been trying.
Trying at what, she’s not entirely sure, however.
“What did the muffin do to offend you?” Loki asks, as he sits down across from her at the small cafeteria table. It says something about her own frame of mind that she didn’t even notice him coming.
She shrugs and glances down at the baked good in question, which has been partially dismembered where it sits on its tiny plate. She’d started cutting in half, but she’s not entirely sure where the entire thing went wrong. Slicing and hacking away at chunks of it, until now it resembles a pile of blueberry flavored crumbs more than anything that she started with.
Sylvie looks up from the mess in front of her to meet Loki’s eyes, and he’s grinning at her impishly, but she can’t miss the hint of worry behind his carefree expression.
And that’s really the problem.
She’s been distracted lately. She can admit that, at least. Off her game in ways that leave her entirely rattled. Gods, she would be dead by now, if she had been like this while running from the TVA for all of those centuries.
It’s enough to drive her entirely mad, the way that the two of them are so cautious around each other in ways that they never were before. Dancing around whatever this relationship is, or could be.
“I think that I’ve been a bit frustrated,” she offers Loki now, though, along with a self-deprecating little smile.
Although that isn’t really quite accurate, she knows.
He brings her tea — milk and three sugars, just how she likes it — when they’re working through their case files late into the night. He worries about her — makes sure that she’s eating enough, and sometimes checks on her if she’s later than usual in making it to breakfast. Comes to her defense when one of the hunters or Renslayer disagrees with her, though she knows that that one is more to keep the peace than anything else.
She’s never had a friend before, but she thinks this might be what it’s like to have one. Even if the entire thing is maddening.
Because even if he is her friend, he’s still Loki.
And she can’t seem to separate this man who held her so gently in the Citadel from this earnest-eyed Loki that she has now.
They’re still in the middle of a multiversal war, of course, so it isn’t like they have the luxury of time or space to try to work it all out. And, honestly, she’s pretty fucking grateful that that is not the case. Because really, the fact that they’re being sent off into battle at every twist and turn of the timelines is the only thing that keeps Sylvie from crawling out of her skin at the mundanity of it all.
“You absolute clown,” she fumes at Loki and his eyes widen in shock. It serves him right; his little tricks are going to get them both killed one of these days. She can admit that his magic is often impressive, but it’s sometimes so unnecessary. The way that he has to be so showy about it all, when a simple sword through the neck would do.
However, she is caught off guard when his face morphs into a wide smile — open and delighted.
“You insulted me,” he says, in clear wonder.
“Because you’re an asshole who is going to get both of us killed.”
He shakes his head. “You haven’t insulted me since the Citadel.”
And he’s… entirely right, when she thinks about it. The two of them have been tiptoeing around each other since they found each other again, but it feels good now to let off some steam. Even — especially — if she’s still furious at him.
“Don’t tell me that you’re into humiliation, too,” she just says, and she has to hide her smile when he chuffs out a small disbelieving laugh.
It’s all entirely strange to Sylvie, the idea that she has friends now.
Loki, apparently, despite the way that she knows that she hurt him, and Mobius, too, who still insists that she’s his favorite, even though he and Loki clearly became close in the time that they were trying to find her.
“I need your Loki perspective on this,” Mobius says, as he approaches her holding out a file folder and a TemPad.
“It sounds like you need Loki, then,” Sylvie fires back, but Mobius just grins at her with his infuriatingly unflappable demeanor.
“I said that I need your Loki perspective, not Loki’s.”
It drives her nuts, sometimes, how the two of them seem to be almost indivisible in Mobius’s eyes, if not the entire rest of the TVA. The way that the others always seem to assume that the two of them will always be together, or to know where the other one is, or even to serve as a substitute in the other’s place.
She gives Mobius a withering look, and he relents almost instantly. Just the way that she knew that he would.
“You two are both so prickly. I would have thought that getting you back together in the same timeline would have improved things, but this wouldn’t be the first time that I was wrong.”
And that’s enough to pique Sylvie’s curiosity; she can’t help prying a little, even though she absolutely knows exactly where curiosity has gotten her before. “How was he? Loki, I mean.” She pauses and considers exactly what she wants to ask as Mobius stares at her with his typical ‘I’m analyzing you’ expression that she finds so infuriating, before trying again. “Has he been okay while I was gone?”
Mobius just looks at her for a long moment, his expression entirely unreadable, before he finally answers her question. “I obviously didn’t see Loki before he finally found us — found the right timeline, I mean,” Mobius says thoughtfully. “But I can tell you what he was like when he got here. He was desperate to find you. To know that you were alright.”
Sylvie’s eyebrows pinch with a pained expression. “I wasn’t sure that he’d even want to see me ever again,” she admits, at length.
Mobius smiles, not unkindly. “And you two say that you aren’t the same.”
“You keep saying things like that…”
“Because it’s true! You two are both so afraid of getting hurt, and yet you both just want the other one to be happy. It would almost be funny, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve actually grown to like the two of you, and I actually want to see you happy.” Mobius chuckles.
Sylvie hasn’t quite gotten used to Mobius understanding her and Loki better than they understand themselves, but it does make sense. The way that he’d spent centuries hunting her, and analyzing every Loki variant that he came across.
“He was really worried about me?” Sylvie asks, though she knows that the question is small and stupid. Of course he was worried about her — why else would he have gone to all of the trouble to find her, and to make her feel comfortable now that she’s here?
Still, she feels a rush of relief when Mobius nods without the slightest bit of hesitation. “He cares for you. Just as you care for him,” he adds after only a moment, and he seems entirely confident in his estimation.
“I do care about him,” Sylvie allows, finally. “I just don't know how to make him believe it, too.”
Mobius’s face is lined with sympathy and he puts his hand carefully on her shoulder; he gives her a moment to pull away before squeezing gently in a kind of camaraderie.
“You two kids will figure it out. Call me a romantic, but I also know you.”
The luxury of sleep is something that Sylvie can’t quite get used to, either.
She’s taken the chance many times over the centuries, of course. Times when she was injured or ill, or when she’d just been running on fumes for long enough that she couldn’t put it off for any longer. She kept a mental list of safe places — safe apocalypses, though that oxymoron always made her chuckle with really no humor at all — where she could spend a solid eight hours in one place and in relative safety. Abandoned and evacuated houses, long and drawn out catastrophes where most people were gone long before the event that heralded the end.
Of course, she couldn’t be going to the same places all of the time, and so those locations were only for necessities. More often, she caught sleep in short cat naps — everywhere and anywhere — where the slightest noise or movement could wake her from her slumber.
It makes it hard now, though. Mobius had shown her to her room, complete with a bed and a lock on the door. However, she still finds it hard to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.
It doesn’t help that the TVA doesn’t seem to operate on any sort of schedule. The glaring fluorescent lights are always on, and the constant buzz never seems to cease. It makes it easier for Sylvie to not sleep, however.
She tends to stick to her own room until it feels like the four walls are closing in on her, and then wanders the hallways of the TVA — the library and the archives and the cafeteria, and the cavernous hallways that seem to go on forever in the lower levels — until she gets twitchy enough that she has to escape that, too.
On the worst nights, she grabs the TemPad that she’s pretty sure that everyone knows that she carries, but that no one has tried to take away from her, and she runs.
(It’s always thoughts of Loki that bring her back. She imagines him waking up and finding her gone again, and then she opens up a time door back to the TVA and slinks back in. Grabs a cup of coffee from the cafeteria with a yawn, as if she had just woken from a particularly restful slumber.)
On this night, Sylvie only makes it as far as the archives before she spots a familiar figure slumped in one of the chairs. His elbows are propped up on the table, and his head is buried in his hands, fingers twining through his tangled curls.
She considers leaving him be — continuing on with her nightly pacing — but after a moment, his head raises slowly from his hands and his eyes find hers, as if they’re drawn to her magnetically.
And Sylvie is struck by just how tired Loki looks. Eyes hooded and face pinched and lined. Without even meaning to, she finds herself taking a cautious step in his direction, and he lifts one hand to give her a small wave in greeting.
Well, there’s no running away, now.
She pulls out the chair across from him and settles down into the worn leather. “You’re up late,” she says, and the corners of his mouth curl up into a small smile.
“I could say the same to you.”
Sylvie can’t help grinning at that. “I’ve already slept, I’ll have you know.”
Loki’s eyes widen in surprise. “It’s only…” He looks around them, as if checking for a clock. They both know that it doesn’t even matter, though. Time has no meaning here. “Well, I don’t actually know what time it is, but I know that you should still be asleep.”
“Didn’t have much of a chance to sleep while I was running from the TVA. I can’t seem to stay asleep for more than a few hours.”
“So, what do you do when the rest of us are sleeping, then?” He looks flummoxed at the very idea.
“This, for the most part,” Sylvie says with a little shrug. She does not mention her little field trips outside of the TVA — all that would do is make Loki even more anxious.
“Every night?”
“Most nights, yeah.” His eyes are soft and curious, and it makes Sylvie self-conscious, though she isn’t even really sure why. “What? Why are you up, then?”
And instantly, Loki just looks exhausted. She’s used to never getting more than a handful of hours of sleep at a time, but she suddenly wonders just how much he has been sleeping.
“Bad dream,” he finally answers, after a moment’s pause. “I had to get out of my room. Be anywhere else."
Sylvie feels her own defenses drop instantly with sympathy. She’s had way too many nights where she’s woken up somewhere, covered in sweat and not even knowing where she is, herself.
“Do you want to… talk about it?” she asks cautiously, and she’s almost relieved when he just shakes his head.
“No. I really want to do nothing of the sort.”
She looks down at the chipped tabletop for a long moment; Loki is fidgeting with his fingers in an anxious — almost jumpy — manner. Twisting one hand around the other. When she brings her eyes back up to Loki’s face, he’s still watching her with an intensity that makes Sylvie want to avert her eyes back to the table.
“You know,” Loki says at length, his tone carefully measured, “if you can’t sleep, you can come and find me, right?”
His face is so serious and earnest that Sylvie can’t help letting out a little snort to break the tension. “Come find you? Like in your bed?” She raises her eyebrows at him, making her meaning clear.
He sighs and slumps forward a little at that, but Sylvie can’t miss the hint of mischief in his eyes. More than that, though, his amused and exasperated scowl is something that Sylvie can deal with. “I was trying to have a nice moment here, and you have to go and twist it into something. You really are me.”
“As if you’ve never helpfully suggested that an orgasm or two might help someone get to sleep,” Sylvie says with a grin. “We are the same.”
“Maybe I have, and maybe it would work. But that is not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
Loki raises his eyebrows at her. “I simply meant that if you are having trouble sleeping, and I am having trouble sleeping, then there’s no reason for us both to suffer separately.”
“So, what? I just go knock on your door? What if you’re asleep?” Sylvie asks, quite reasonably, she thinks. “I don’t want to wake you up if you are asleep.”
His face drops a little, almost imperceptibly. “I don’t think that that will be an issue.”
It takes Sylvie a few weeks to work up the nerve to do it.
She has her own routine, of course. Her circuit throughout the TVA, which sometimes brings her into Loki’s orbit, now that he knows how often that she’s awake and restless when she should be sleeping. But also, she does worry about waking him up if he is asleep, especially when she really looks at him and sees just how tired he clearly is. Dark circles under his eyes and face lined with stress and worry.
And she doesn’t mind these solitary hours, really. Not after so many years of being on her own. The quiet helps her to center her mind — ground herself — especially now that she’s surrounded by other people all of the bloody time.
No, she doesn’t really consider going to Loki until the next time that that itchy, restless feeling hits her. The urge to run.
She has quite a few places that she can go, of course, especially now that she isn’t limited exclusively to apocalypses. Nice places and nice times, even, though those rarely hold her attention as well as the ones where she can really have some fun. Quick adrenaline and endorphin bursts, for just a few hours at a time, before slinking back to the TVA before anyone even notices that she’s gone.
Anyway, tonight she finds herself circling past Loki’s door three or four times as she considers where exactly she could go, and she tries to ignore the niggling idea at the corners of her mind that maybe she’s already exactly where she should be.
She makes one last pass through the hallway where his little flat is located — just for good measure, she tells herself — when suddenly his door pops open, making Sylvie leap backwards just a bit. Gods, she’s gotten so jumpy.
“Were you going to knock?” Loki just asks mildy, raising one eyebrow at her. “Or were you just planning on pacing a trench in the floor all night?”
And well, that isn’t so far from the truth, honestly. “I thought you were asleep,” Sylvie sputters, indignant.
Loki just stares at her, completely nonplussed. Waiting her out until she feels herself crack under the weight of his gaze.
“Oh, fine,” she huffs. “I get this way, sometimes. Restless. Itching for a fight, I think. Or maybe a—” She cuts herself off deliberately there, though she knows that she’s perfectly clear, anyway.
Loki’s eyebrows creep into his hairline, and she can’t help the way that her eyes dart past him and into his room, where she can see his bed. Covers mussed and rumpled, as if he had been tossing and turning, himself.
“I have the perfect thing,” he just says.
For all of her wandering, Sylvie has always stayed far away from the quarters where the hunters and the minutemen live and train. She’s been hunted by — and killed plenty of them, herself — too many of their kind to feel comfortable prowling around them just for fun.
However, that’s exactly where Loki leads her now, past the barracks-like quarters and towards what is unmistakably a training room, complete with sparring mats and dummies and decoys, and even weapons. He ignores the practice pruning sticks, however, in favour of conjuring her a broadsword, which he tosses to her without even a word of explanation.
“Are we going to fight?” she asks doubtfully, but Loki just conjures himself a pair of daggers in response. “You’re not going to make my sword disappear in the middle of it, are you? That would be the very Loki-like thing to do.”
Loki just huffs at her. “What would be the fun in that?”
“I’ve fought you before. You fight dirty,” she answers, before freezing as she remembers exactly the last time that they pulled weapons on each other. How she had been the one to do the Loki-like thing, even if it wasn’t for exactly the reasons that one would have expected.
Even if she had considered her lips against his to be as much of a goodbye as a distraction.
If he catches on to her thoughts, he gives no indication now, but merely assumes a fighting stance. Poised and proper, exactly how he was taught, and how Sylvie never was.
“You like it when I fight dirty,” he merely says, a second before he attacks.
It’s not surprise to either of them that Sylvie is stronger than him, and faster too, and she wants it much more. Even when it’s just for play like this. Still, though, sparring with Loki feels undeniably right. The way that they can anticipate each other’s attacks and feints, as if they’ve been sparring together their entire lives. He doesn’t hold back, either — trusts that she can hold her own against him, and let’s himself go, fully.
She has the advantage with her broadsword, though Loki proves his own skill with his own daggers. He starts using his magic after a few minutes, too, and Sylvie can’t help grinning through a split lip as she throws Loki across the room with a flash of green light.
She disarms him twice before they both toss down their weapons in favour of their fists, and that is exhilarating, too. The feeling of her hands connecting with Loki’s face as they grapple with each other on the mats. And here — here — she can feel that Loki is holding back, so she uses that to her advantage, as well. He’s bigger than she is and should be able to overpower her, but she quickly finds herself straddling his torso while he gasps for breath beneath her.
“No tricks, magician?” Sylvie taunts as she gets in one last hit — more of a playful swat than anything else, at this point.
“Maybe next time.” His voice is breathless, and something in Sylvie delights at the obvious evidence of just how much she’s affected him.
A drip of sweat makes its way down from Loki’s hairline, and Sylvie’s eyes track it as it makes its way down his neck before disappearing underneath him. She isn’t even surprised when she’s struck by the sudden urge to chase it with her tongue — fighting and fucking have always been undeniably entwined in her psyche, and Loki is no exception, clearly.
And he definitely does not miss her momentary distraction — or the way that her tongue sneaks out to trace over her bottom lip before she can check herself — but he doesn’t comment. Just raises his eyebrows at her as he looks up at her from where she’s still straddling his stomach.
“Yeah. Right,” Sylvie says awkwardly, just a moment too late. She swings her leg over his torso to stand up, before offering him her hand so that she can pull him up, too.
She drops him off at his doorway before continuing on to hers, and Sylvie is actually surprised to realize how light she feels. Like some sort of weight has been lifted off of her chest. The urge to run is gone now, too — blissfully drowned under the pleasant ache of overused muscles and bruises that are already beginning to heal.
“Knock on my door next time,” Loki says before letting himself into his own flat.
“I might.”
“Good.”
She also manages to sneak in another few hours of sleep after a shower and a hasty orgasm, delivered by her own fingers.
It’s a good feeling.