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Sylvie’s not sure how she managed to stop her sword from slicing Loki’s head clean off.
If he’d transported into her path even a split second later, she might not have been able to stop it, and she doesn’t want to think about what she would have done then. As it is, the reflexes she honed on a thousand dying worlds kick in just in time to bring her to a jarring halt, her blade pressed to his collar.
Why her reflexes are so keyed into not killing Loki, she doesn’t want to think about. She can’t think about his hand gripping hers as death rushed toward them on Lamentis, or about the words he never got to say to her in the Timekeepers’ chambers, or about his solid warmth beside her as he promised he had changed, or about the rush of power when they combined their magics. She can’t think about how he chose not to kill her just now when he had the chance. She needs him to be betraying her, because if he isn’t, then her whole way of seeing the world doesn’t fit anymore. She has built her quest, her whole life, on the presupposition that it’s her against the world and no one else cares and the only thing out there for her is revenge.
Loki not being someone who will turn on her is not a worldview shift she can handle, not when she’s so close.
They lock eyes for a long moment, breathing hard from their fight, and she hears a clatter as he deliberately drops his sword. In her peripheral vision, she can see his hands spread open, leaving him defenceless.
“Sylvie,” he says, “just stop.”
She should kill him, like she promised what feels like an age ago, and then kill He Who Remains. But she doesn’t. She stops.
“I’ve been where you are. I know how you’re feeling - don’t ask me how I know. I don’t want to hurt you.” --and it’s true, he’s been pulling his punches this whole time.
“I don’t want a throne. I just want you to be okay.”
Sylvie can’t look away, can’t pretend those words away, even as much as she wishes to. She can’t be sure whether or not He Who Remains is lying, but she knows, inexorably, that Loki is telling the truth.
He wants her to be okay and nobody else has ever wanted that for her before in her memory and this is breaking her reality but suddenly she doesn’t especially care.
Without so much as a shred of a plan, she lowers her sword, lets it fall to the ground. Then she moves forward, stepping into his space, and kisses him.
It’s not the best kiss she’s ever participated in, technically speaking. But this is the first time it’s been anything more significant than a passing means of distracting herself, and she tries to pour all the things into it that she can’t say - she wants him to be okay, too; he has become essential to her; she wants it to be safe for her to care about him and is desperately afraid that it’s not.
The world is shifting under her feet and she breaks the kiss, trying to figure out what to do. Before she can decide, Loki’s arms come up and slide around her, pulling her against his chest, and she lets him because oh, she didn’t quite realize till now how much she needed to be held. She gives in and buries her face in his shoulder, and feels as much as hears him speak.
“I want you to be okay, Sylvie,” he repeats, “and if that man is telling the truth and another war between realities happens, that is no longer even remotely guaranteed. Please, we can figure this out, we can find some way - just give me a chance. Just wait.”
Part of her, the part that’s been in the driver’s seat for most of her not-insignificant lifetime, wants to scream at him that she’s waited long enough, how can he expect her to not take the opportunity that’s been handed to her? But another part, quieter and perhaps more rational, knows that if she doesn’t stop, either she or Loki is going to end up dead. And she doesn’t especially want to die, and she doesn’t want him dead, either.
So talking it is.
“All right then,” she says, gathering the remaining scraps of her dignity around herself, “let’s talk. Not in front of him.” In one swift motion, she reaches around Loki and swipes the TemPad from He Who Remains’ desk. “And I’m not leaving this with him.”
“Fair enough.”
***
The office isn’t the only room on this level, and there’s a smallish side room of uncertain function adjoining it, which Sylvie spots and leads them towards. He Who Remains watches them go with an expression of indulgent curiosity on his face.
Loki is just trying to keep himself upright and walking straight, at this point. In a very short space of time, he’s just had his whole understanding of reality tipped upside down, turned inside out, and sewn into a crooked sock puppet, and he’s laid his heart more thoroughly bare than he ever thought he could. He’s pretty sure he could be forgiven for sprawling out on the floor and sleeping for a few hundred years, but there’s too much going on for a nap to be anywhere on the horizon, so he’s got to keep it together. Because Sylvie needs him.
He loves her. He’s not quite sure when he figured that out, but he thinks it might have been when they fought, when she snarled at him to kill her. He had the chance, and maybe all of existence would have been safer for it, but he couldn’t even bear the thought. Saving reality wasn’t worth Sylvie dying in the dark at the end of the world, thinking that no one cared about her.
(Also, she just kissed him. Sylvie kissed him. He would rather like to carry on along those lines, or at least talk about it, but unfortunately now isn’t the time.)
She sits on the floor at the far end of the room, and he sits across from her. He wants to sit next to her and hold her, or take her hands in his, both to comfort her and to ground himself, but he’s not sure how amenable she would be and they don’t have time to negotiate that right now. So across from each other it is, and they stay silent for a long moment, unsure of where to begin.
Finally, Sylvie says, “I don’t see what there is to talk about. Either we take over being dictators of the timeline, or we kill that vámr in there, set people free to make their own choices, and risk them potentially starting a horrific war. If we can believe him, which I’m still not sold on.”
“What does he have to gain by lying? The way he’s set it up, he either loses absolute power or dies. If he were going to lie, wouldn’t he try and set himself up with something better?”
Sylvie seems to consider this for a moment, then abruptly shakes her head, curling in on herself a little. “No. I can’t - I don’t know if he’s right or wrong or lying. I just can’t let him win.”
“If we kill him and he’s right,” Loki says gently, “the whole cycle he described will repeat itself, and he’ll win anyway.”
Sylvie’s face shutters into an awful blankness, and she stares at the gold-veined floor, fingers twisting together. Her expression summons up a kind of twisting hurt deep in Loki’s chest. He reaches out for her and wraps his hands around hers, rubbing his thumbs over her knuckles in what he hopes is a calming fashion.
“So we find a different option,” he says, trying to sound comforting and confident and not like he’s coming up with this idea on the spot. “If he’s given us two options and he wins either way, then we find a third way. You’re clever; I’m clever; we can figure this out.”
There’s hope in her eyes when she looks up at him. It’s not a lot, and it’s mostly the wary kind of hope you see on someone who’s been let down far too many times and is bracing themselves for another round. But he’ll take what he can get.
“How?”
Loki’s brain is whirling now, and he knows this feeling as an old friend. This is his kind of battle, not the kind with weapons, but the kind with words and ideas and wits. This is standing before the ruler of a world not his own and spinning peace out of an uneasy tension on Odin’s behalf. This is spreading his hands wide with a mirror-perfected smile and calming the diplomat that Thor has blunderingly insulted. This is how he survived the tortured of the Other to be given an army.
This is what he was born to do - to take his silver tongue and quick mind and hands full of magic and find a way to save the universe, and with luck, save the woman in front of him, too.
And he’s acquired enough wisdom in his life to know he can’t do it single-handedly.
“We have to go back to the TVA,” he says, threads of a plan starting to weave together. “Talk to Mobius and B-15. They have the knowledge and resources to help, and I think we’re going to need it.”
Sylvie looks skeptical. “What good can they do? He Who Remains brought us here; we’re the ones who have to deal with this.”
“No, no, that’s what he wants us to do. He wants us isolated - he wants us trying to make this call on our own. So we do what he doesn’t expect. We find allies. Then we finish this.”
Slowly, reluctantly, she nods. She gets to her feet, and he stands up with her, keeping hold of one of her hands while she fiddles with the strange TemPad with the other. In seconds, a glowing doorway opens in front of them. They exchange one final look, and a nod, and step through.
***
The TemPad has spit them out in some kind of office, rather better appointed than most in the TVA. Sylvie only has to glance around briefly to realize it’s Renslayer’s domain - mostly because the judge is frozen in the middle of some kind of face-off with Mobius, who has acquired a pruning spear somewhere but doesn’t seem terribly inclined to use it as anything more than a pointy stick.
“Oh, good, you’re both here,” Loki says, by all appearances completely unfazed. “We need to talk to you.”
“To her, too?” Sylvie asks disbelievingly, because this wasn’t the plan. The plan, at least as she understood it, was to team up with Mobius and B-15, who have at least allied with her before even if she doesn’t fully trust them. Not to involve the woman who snatched her life away.
“Yes.” Loki squeezes her hand as he says it, like he knows this isn’t going over well and is trying to calm her. “I’m afraid so. Judge Renslayer, if you wouldn’t mind standing down? We don’t have a lot of time, and I’d rather not waste it with having to knock you out and tie you up.”