Sylvie & Thor: Multiverse of Grief

[enchantricks]

SYLVIE & THOR

MULTIVERSE OF GRIEF

Comments

The Road So Far

[enchantricks]

Thread So Far On Bakerstreet

The Road Ahead

[enchantricks]

The moment dissipates, and Sylvie is grateful for it. She struggles with displays of emotions at the best of times - this is difficult for her. Add to it the burden of grief, of trauma... she's is as starved for touch as she is utterly and completely averse to it. The fact that she not only allowed this but sought it, if only for a moment, speaks volumes.

And perhaps, for just a moment, she chased the shadow of a long dead boy with golden hair and endless optimism for a future he was robbed of just because Sylvie existed.

Do you think I could be a Valkyrie?

I think you could be anything you want, sister. You would be the fiercest of them all!

She remembers precious little of him. Can't even tell if the man she sees now is who her own brother would have grown into, or if their faces would have been different. And she feels protective, suddenly, of what little she remembers. Of what little she was allowed to have with her own family.

"I need you to remember, every day of this mad undertaking, two things: For one, I am not your sister, and I will reject the notion of being just a Loki with every breath I have. And two, I have survived on my own for longer than you've been a well-intentioned fool, so leave the planning to me."

It's harsh, and mostly that's because she's trying to recover from the raw emotions, trying to protect herself. She does what she always does, and shields herself with barbed wire wrapped around her tongue. Pushes others away because she's nothing if not full of jagged edges that she regularly cuts herself on.

It's also not quite true that she's existed for longer than he has - it's just that she's existed outside of time. Tracking her age in a linear fashion has long stopped being a concern for her, and it hardly matters for either Asgardians or Frost Giants, truth be told.

"Are we clear on that?"

[odinsson]

He can almost literally see her reconstructing those walls for her own safety, bricking up that vulnerability as if it never happened, and it’s actually a little bit of a relief for him, too. The conversational pivot is an anchor, something to hang onto: these two clear-cut rules.

“Yes, of course,” Thor says automatically. “I mean, it always worked that way, Loki is the planner between the two of us, I’m more about execution—”

Which, he realises, sounds like the exact opposite of don’t treat her as a Loki. And so, with a ripple of apologetic surprise across his face, he tries in vain to backpedal. “Not that I mean you’re the planner because you’re Loki. I know you’re not him. We’re clear on that. You’re Sylvie, and we’ve never met before now.”

And she is, of course, different from Loki. Even beyond the basic biological differences, she carries herself differently, tilts her head differently. But sometimes Thor blinks and she does angle her shoulders exactly like Loki would have, and it’s like catching a ghostly afterimage of his brother —

— this is going to be difficult.

He bites down on his lip. Considers what to say, to try to explain. If there’s any use in reaching out and voicing that small numb thought which he hasn’t allowed himself to think since Asgard fell: I always wanted a sister.

“My last surprise sister went very, very poorly,” he says. “I don’t want a repeat. But I still hope we are able to— get along, you and I, and be well. If we are to fight by each others’ side, we must be able to trust each other.”

Trust. Also a sore point, and something he hadn’t been able to entertain with Loki for so very, very long.

[enchantricks]

Loki is the planner between the two of us - and that has her lips press together in a tight line, brows going up. With her hands on her hips, staring up at him expectantly to backtrack, to pivot that line away from its implication, it's easy to see why even Loki folded to her.

And staring up at him as she fumbles, she feels that echo of a thought in herself:

I always wanted my brother back, too.

"Have you learned nothing from your own Loki? Trust is dangerous." She searches his eyes for the truth of that. "Like a dagger slid between your ribs. Only you don't have to worry I'd stab you in the back. I'd carve your heart out while staring you down, Thor."

It sounds like a threat, but there's a sadness in the way she says it. Remembers kissing Loki, and shoving him through the door back to the TVA. Denying him the opportunity to be there for her, to catch her when she fell.

[odinsson]

“Oh, he taught me not to trust him. He taught me that over, and over, and over.” There’s an equal weary sadness in Thor’s voice as he admits this: hints at all the many times he’d been betrayed and pranked and fooled and embarrassed, in ways both minor and major, petty and devastating. It had taken too long for him to stop hoping. He had felt dense for it; betrayed, for the way his heart was too large and he perpetually extended a hand of friendship to Loki, only to have it bitten to the bone.

Have you truly learned a lesson if you do the same thing again?

“But then, in the end, I took the lesson and I no longer trusted him,” he says. “The last time he tried to betray me, I was ready for it. The irony is, I truly believe we were on better terms after that point. He tried to be better, after that.”

Thor fidgets in his heavy ceremonial armour. And amongst all the heavy emotions of this particular day, an Asgardian funeral with this very peculiar funeral-crasher, a thought does occur to him:

“So, yes, I did learn it was dangerous to trust my brother. But wasn’t rule one that you are not a Loki?”