Chapter Text
Sylvie sheathes her sword, considers the tangle of Loki’s memories, and opens a time door onto the SHIELD Helicarrier, right in front of Loki’s clear cylindrical prison. He hasn’t noticed her yet, and for a long moment she just looks at him. He doesn’t move, only sits there, eyes burning in his too-pale face. He looks…different. More different than she expected, actually, considering the strict temporal difference between this Loki and her Loki can’t be more than a few months at most. This Loki is more intimidating in his Asgardian gear, and even sitting perfectly still on the bench at the back of the cell he radiates an aura of menace. He’s thinner, sharper, paler—everything about him is brittle, and she wonders morbidly what would happen if somebody stabbed him right now, if he’d even bleed or if he’d just shatter like crystal. Or ice, rather.
You don’t know what you want, she snapped at him on Lamentis, and she’s still pretty comfortable with that read on him, at least in that specific moment in time. This Loki thinks he knows what he wants, only his mind had to be turned inside out to get there.
With a wave of one hand, Sylvie shuts and locks every door in the place before stepping forward. Loki’s eyes flick to her immediately, and somehow his body becomes even more still. She’s honestly not sure whether it feels more like a predator sighting prey or vice versa.
“I don’t know you,” Loki says. His eyes narrow as she comes to a stop in front of the cell’s door. “You’re not with SHIELD.”
“We haven’t met yet, and I’m not ‘with’ anybody,” Sylvie agrees, making air quotes just to be obnoxious. She hasn’t killed the cameras, and she figures somebody’s going to try breaking down the doors very soon, but—well, she’s making this up as she goes. “Just here to see you, actually.”
Loki looks at her intently for another moment, like he can read her thoughts if he tries hard enough (not a chance), and then he leans back against the cell wall and smiles. It’s a predator's smile for sure, but it’s not quite right, and now she’s thinking of threat displays by wounded feral cats. “Then I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. I don’t know who you are, but you’re not SHIELD and you’re not one of Fury’s new pet heroes, so I don’t particularly care. Now if you don’t mind, I was thinking about taking a nap while I wait for things to get a little less boring around here,” and he actually laces his hands behind his head and closes his eyes.
“Oh, I don’t think so, asshole,” Sylvie says. “I didn’t come all this way just so you could make yourself feel a little better by ignoring me.” She tugs on another flicker of memory and teleports into the cell, right in front of Loki’s face, and grabs his head in both hands as he rears back in shock.
On Lamentis, when she tried to enchant him the first time, it felt less like he was blocking her and more like an absence—she couldn’t enchant him because the thing she expected to grab hold of wasn’t there. After Alioth, she realized of course it was there, it was just so scarred over that her metaphorical hands slid right off. This time, he tries to twist away, tries to fight the intrusion from within. But she knows what she’s looking for now, knows what to expect, and she forces her way in—and very nearly recoils, because what was scar tissue in the Void is still an open wound, raw and seeping.
His mind churns with rage and pain and grief and fear, all in such a dizzying tangle that she’s a little impressed he’s able to function at all. He barely knows which way is up, at this point, just that he’s still pushing forward because he has to, because there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice where he cannot find you and the scepter is singing to him, and they’re watching, always watching, and he can’t remember the last time he slept or ate but he can’t stop can’t stop or they’ll destroy him and he wants to make Thanos proud, doesn’t he? He wants—he wants Midgard, he does (why?), no matter that it’s a consolation prize compared to Asgard’s (Father’s) love and respect, if he has Midgard then—then—maybe he’ll be safe. Maybe he can make it safe, he’s here with the Tesseract so maybe he can use it himself and—no no no don’t think about that they’ll know—
He’s died so many times. He thinks it’s true but it doesn’t make sense and he can’t remember. He can’t remember anything. He remembers letting go, and he remembers Thor’s face twisted in hate as he throws Loki into the abyss. He doesn’t know what’s real except that he has to keep moving. They’re going to see, they’ll think Loki’s betraying them with this woman and the Other will reach across the distance and rip his mind inside out, and once they have used him as a mindless puppet to take what they want, then Thanos will take him back and keep him alive just for sport and no one will come for him then either. No one ever, ever comes for him.
“I came for you, idiot,” Sylvie says through gritted teeth. She flattens her palms against Loki’s temples, forces herself to ignore the tears building in his unseeing eyes, and walls off her consciousness from his panic and pain so she can actually fucking think.
First things first: he’s right, somebody is watching, and that has to go. The tether connecting him to the scepter is a faintly glowing, sickly blue, one end buried deep in his mind like a harpoon, and there’s probably a better way to deal with it but Sylvie just knows efficient, so she snaps the tether off at the root and cauterizes both ends, for lack of a better analogy. Loki makes a pained noise, but the tether isn’t reattaching, so she moves on to the next biggest problem, the oozing infection of the Mind Stone spread throughout the wound of his mind.
She can’t…heal him. She doesn’t know how. She’s never done anything like mind healing, never tried because it never would have kept her alive, and the physical healing she taught herself was only what kept her alive too—but in this case, the infection twisted his memories, and she’s had a lot of recent practice with drawing out real memories from fucked-up minds.
She can’t heal the wounds. But she can crack them open wider and draw out most of the infection, muttering apologies as Loki shudders under her hands. She scrapes away the rot, exposing it all to light and reality, and then she pulls back and lets go.
Loki collapses forward, barely seizing the edge of the bench in time to keep from falling on his face, and she grabs his shoulders to help. He’s shaking, gasping for breath, even paler than before with a shock of bright red blood trickling from his nose.
An alarm is wailing behind them. Sylvie should probably do something about that.
“What…” Loki gasps, one hand coming up to grip at his hair. “What did you do?”
Sylvie steps back out of his space, and he sways a little but doesn’t immediately fall over. “Gave you a choice.”
He stares at her. She knows he’s younger than she is, although she’s not positive by how much, but he’s never truly looked it until right now—young, and very lost, with something deep in his eyes that looks a little like awe. “You…but…it’s gone. He was in my head and he’s gone. And now I—I remember—”
She waits, eyebrows raised. The alarm keeps wailing.
“Who are you?” he says.
“Sylvie,” she says, “but that won’t mean anything to you. I’m just somebody who’s seen the end of the world a few too many times.” She tilts her head, studying him. “So? What now?”
“I…” He squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them, the lost look has faded a little. “I need to talk to Fury. And Thor. I have to—I don’t know what you did but it doesn’t matter, I have to stop this, will you help?”
Well, she wasn’t planning on it, but— “Okay, sure, what the hell.”
There’s still a battle, because there’s always a battle, only this time they’re already well off course from the Sacred Timeline. Thor, poorly concealing a hopeful smile, convinces Fury to listen, and Loki calls off the attack on the Helicarrier before it can begin. He refuses to touch the scepter again without an extremely good reason, so Sylvie frees Barton and the other enthralled SHIELD agents, which goes a long way in convincing Fury of her intentions. The portal still opens, though, because they don’t make it in time to stop Selvig. The portal stays small, bottlenecking the invading force above Stark Tower, and Loki looks stunned all over again when he tells them that Selvig built in a kill switch, which means he allowed Selvig to build a kill switch, even with his mind all fucked up (Sylvie’s words, not Loki’s). Fury finds that argument a lot less compelling than Sylvie does, but he also recognizes Loki’s massive change in behavior and the foolishness of being picky when aliens are pouring from a hole in the sky, so he packs Loki and Sylvie into a quinjet with the Avengers.
Sylvie carries the scepter. Loki won’t even look at the damn thing except in brief, nauseated glances. Thor, for all that Loki remembers him as being about as perceptive as a brick, mostly watches them with a worried expression from the other side of the quinjet. Loki glossed over all of the uglier details in his extremely brief explanation and brushed off Thor’s concern, but it’s obvious Thor is paying attention now.
That’s going to be a real fun conversation later and she is definitely not getting involved in it.
The quinjet banks toward Stark Tower, and light glints off the scepter’s blade. Loki flinches, his hands curling into fists on his knees. Without really thinking about it, Sylvie rests her hand on his and he flinches again before giving her that same startled, vulnerable look she remembers from Lamentis.
“I can’t get much closer,” Romanoff calls from the cockpit. “Too many of them in the air. Any of you that can fly—”
“Thought you’d never ask,” Stark says, clomping toward the back of the jet as it opens. He pauses in front of Sylvie and holds out an expectant hand. When she frowns, he says, “Okay, so is Thor taking the glowstick, or what? Because one of us is definitely getting there the fastest, and the whole point was to close the portal as soon as possible, right Buffy?”
“Loki can teleport there,” Thor says.
Next to Sylvie, Loki’s body manages to take on even more tension. “…ordinarily, yes. I don’t think it would be wise to try, just now.”
“Okay, so, gimme,” Stark says. “It’s only a tiny bit radioactive, it’s not like it’s dangerous for humans to just hold it.”
“You don’t know that,” Loki says darkly. “Don’t use it more than you have to, and when the portal is shut, give it back to the only person we know isn’t affected.” He jerks his chin at Sylvie.
Stark glances at Rogers, who nods and says, “You heard him. Let’s get this done.”
“Well okay then,” Stark says, and he takes off with the scepter.
“Brother,” Thor says, “is something wrong with your magic?”
“You should be glad I’m not going to spoil another glorious battle with tricks.”
“Nope, not doing this now,” Sylvie says. “Thor, go on, we’ll figure it out.”
Thor doesn’t move, just keeps looking at Loki, his blue eyes all earnest and sad. “I was wrong to disparage your skill as I did. I only ask now because—if your magic is that depleted, I’m worried. But I know well how fiercely you fight. Will you please let me watch your back again, as you have so often watched mine?”
Loki blinks up at him, struck speechless for the second time that day. Sylvie’s kind of impressed.
“If you’re jumping, do it now!” Romanoff yells, pulling the jet into a sharper turn. Chitauri blaster fire flashes by outside.
“…fine, if you can carry both of us,” Loki says finally.
Thor beams at him and sweeps them both up into a one-armed hug, then launches them all out the back of the quinjet toward the Chitauri swarm. It’s not a long flight, which is good because it’s also a deeply awkward way to fly, but Sylvie doesn’t mind all that much. (It’s been so long since she’s seen her own Thor. Would be look like this, if he’d had the chance?)
Thor tosses them at a two-rider Chitauri skiff that they easily commandeer by dispatching the Chitauri onboard, and then the fight really gets going. Mostly Sylvie shoots while Loki flies, which isn’t at all the same as fighting back to back in the Timekeepers’ chamber except for how it kind of is, the way they fall in synch like they’ve known each other for a long, long time.
Stark gets the portal closed early on, and Loki slumps in relief for a second before throwing himself back into battle with renewed fervor. From there, at least, they’re outnumbered but the Chitauri hordes aren’t endless, and it’s not that hard to work as a team with the Avengers, especially Thor. Sylvie doesn’t count how many Chitauri she kills aside from “definitely a lot,” and it does kind of make her feel better.
Through it all, the TVA’s goon squads never show up.
When it’s all over, they’re nearly sure they’ve caught all the last Chitauri stragglers, and SHIELD has more or less taken over the rest of the cleanup operation, Stark corrals them all into his penthouse for post-battle shawarma. Sylvie eats until she’s full, because she knows better than to pass up a chance at food, and then she just sits off to the side for a while, feeling the TemPad like a weight as she watches Thor and Loki cautiously talk to each other.
This is…good. She can’t know what will happen from here, but the change she’s made is a good one, at least for now, and it’s already affected more people than just Loki. She could probably live in this timeline, if she wanted. Go back to Asgard. Be with this Loki, who even comes complete with the family she barely remembers.
She could, if she could forget about the TVA, and her Loki, and the possibility of multiversal war—which she can’t, because half of it is too big to forget, and she doesn’t actually want to forget her Loki in the first place. She can’t face him but she can’t leave it like this either, which really only leaves one option.
(Kind of funny, really, that she wanted to free the multiverse and give everyone free will, but she has so little practice at thinking in terms of actions having real consequences that she’s found herself this paralyzed by her own choices. Except she isn’t anymore, is she? She knows what she has to do.)
She watches Thor and Loki for a little bit longer, trying to memorize them. Loki holds himself more stiffly than she’s used to, speaking to Thor without any of the expansive gestures she’s seen, but at least he’s talking and Thor is really listening, which seems like a good start toward mending their fucked-up family and keeping this timeline away from the incredibly shitty Sacred path. So, okay, if they can attempt to communicate like adults after a thousand-plus years of shared family baggage, she and Loki can probably make a stab at it too, without any literal stabbing. Probably.
Thor tentatively puts one hand on Loki’s shoulder, and Loki tenses further at first but then relaxes under his brother’s touch, and Sylvie tries to carve a picture of that into her memory as she quietly gets up and leaves the room. She wants to remember that. Whatever else she might have done, she gave these two big-hearted idiots the chance to be brothers again right now, the TVA and their Sacred Timeline be damned, and that’s not nothing.
Sylvie doesn’t get far down the hallway before stopping at the sound of hurried footsteps behind her. She turns, not too surprised to see Loki rushing after her, eyes wide and a little panicked.
He stops a few paces away and twists his fingers together. “You’re leaving.”
“Got my own shit to figure out,” Sylvie says.
“Oh,” he says. “I…yes, of course. I don’t want to waste more of your time.”
There’s the awkwardness and insecurity she knows. “Dummy,” she says, “literally the whole reason I came here was to help you. Wasn’t a waste of my time.”
Loki drops his gaze, his throat bobbing as he swallows. “You saved me. I still don’t know why you did it or how you knew there was something left to save, but you did it, and that’s a debt I don’t know how to repay.”
“That’s easy. I gave you a chance, that’s all. Don’t throw it away. Just…love your family while you’ve got ‘em, and start preparing for Thanos to move again.” She considers. “Also, you might want to start bugging Odin about Ragnarok. You probably still have a few years and he might take a while to convince, so…don’t waste that either.” For possibly the first time ever, she wishes she’d spent more time hiding out in Ragnarok so she could give him more details, but Hela’s rampage made it a pretty shit apocalypse for Sylvie’s purposes to begin with, so she never went back after trying it once (and more importantly, it hurt too much to see Asgard again knowing it wasn’t hers and she couldn’t stay, and even this Asgard was about to burn).
Maybe she can help save this Asgard too.
“You know what,” she says, “ask your dad about his murderous secret daughter. That should do it.”
“His what?”
“Yeah, look, she’s not gonna bring Ragnarok exactly, but close enough. And Thanos doesn’t really kick into high gear until after Asgard’s gone, which probably means something, so—tell Odin not to fuck that up.” She also suddenly wishes she’d spent more time at Xandar’s destruction, although she probably wouldn’t have much of anything useful to pass along regardless. When Thanos fell on Xandar, he did it fast and hard.
“…right,” Loki says, looking a bit like she’s just clubbed him over the head. “So—you’re from the future.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Right,” he says again. “Well.” He releases a long breath. “Good luck, then, on…whatever it is you’re doing next, although I suspect you won’t need it because you’ll make your own luck. And thank you. For everything.”
Her answering smile feels crooked but real. “My pleasure, you numpty,” she says, and then she steps through a time door back to the TVA.