the_variant | (no subject)

(no subject)

While Sylvie has given up trying to find a source of power for the TemPad, she hasn't given up trying to get out of this place. Everyone tells her it's impossible, but she has to believe they just aren't smart enough to manage it, that they've become complacent, comfortable, and don't bother trying. She isn't going to stop, though. She can't stop. The rest of these people don't understand just how important it is that she get back to the TVA.

Her current plan, besides anything she might be able to manage with Walter's help, is to find a thin spot in Darrow. They have to exist. If she can find one, she'll be able to leave, slip between worlds, find herself a proper source of power for the TemPad she has tucked in her jacket, and make the bloody thing work again so she can have some hope of undoing what she's done in the first place.

Although, no multiversal war has come to Darrow just yet, which she has to assume is a good thing.

Still, she's trying. Dressed in a pair of stretchy black jeans, black boots, and a deep green shirt beneath her black jacket, Sylvie has traced a source of power to downtown Darrow and realized a little too late that she's sensing some other powered person in this place rather than something that can actually help her get out of here.

Too late because she's inside a dance club. Too late because she's already in the crowd, the music pumping, bass pounding, drunken idiots stumbling around, feeling each other up in dark corners and on the dance floor. Some big guy is nearly humping some poor girl who looks like she's barely able to stand and Sylvie steps hard on his foot and puts herself between them, then shuffles the girl back off toward her friends. This isn't why she's here. She isn't some do-gooder hero like Loki tries to believe himself to be. She needs to get out.

The big guy looks confused, but simply turns to find someone else to dance with. Which is when he sidles up next to Sylvie. He's smaller than the other man, his hair is dark, pushed back from his face, which is pale, with sharp angles, hollowed cheekbones, and for just a second Sylvie's heart skips in her chest.

But then the features resolve. Become someone else. Attractive enough, but not the man she was hoping for in that moment. Her gaze flicks over him, unimpressed, and then she pushes past.

"Hey, wait," he says, grabbing her wrist. "That was really cool of you, helping that girl."

"Let go of me," Sylvie says, wrenching her wrist from his grasp. He backs off a few steps, holding his hands up, then disappears into the crowd. And that's when someone grabs her from behind. Big hands on her hips, a warm body pressed against her back. It's all under the guise of dancing, but Sylvie's not an idiot, and she can feel every bit of the intention in the move. Without thinking, she throws an elbow back and it slams hard into a man's nose. Then she turns and a green blast of energy flies from her hand to his chest, plowing him back through the crowd on the dance floor.

A few people protest, but even then, almost no one has even noticed what's happened.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I thought there was a source of power here," Sylvie answers, though the slight curl of her lip indicates she didn't find anything. "But I think it was only... ugh, that guy."

There's an enormous ginger at the bar, downing some sort of whiskey drink. He's wearing a denim jacket over a white t-shirt and looks a little rough around the edges, but there's something about him. Something that makes the hair on the back of Sylvie's neck stand on end.

He's a god, sure as anything, but she doesn't want to stick around and find out what kind.

Bucky follows her gaze to a large man at the bar, and raises a brow at the sight of him. Usually, he doesn't worry about fighting someone, given his enhanced abilities and mechanical arm, but there's something about that guy that tells him that maybe it wouldn't be such an uneven match.

"Let's get out of here," he calls out to her over the music, looking at her and jerking his chin toward the exit as he turns to head toward it, working his way gracefully through the crowd. Whether she'll follow or not, Bucky isn't sure, but he's leaving and he wouldn't terribly mind the company. It's not as if him and Sylvie are friends or anything, but she certainly isn't normal. These days, he seems to find himself drawn to people who aren't.

He doesn't have to pretend quite as much around them.

For a moment Sylvie considers staying just to be contrary, a tendency she developed long ago, mostly so that she could annoy Thor whenever he was being a complete imbecile, which was often, but in the end she follows him through the crowd.

The air outside is blessedly cool in comparison to the club and Sylvie inhales deeply, then looks over at Bucky.

"Did you just abandon your date?" she asks, an eyebrow raised. She almost sounds impressed.

Honestly, he's a little surprised that she comes with him, but he knows that if he says that, it'll be a whole thing, so he just smirks slightly as he watches her head tip back.

"I told her I was leaving," he says as he reaches out to tug off his leather gloves, first his right hand and then the prosthetic, and tucks them into the pocket of his dark denim jacket, the same one he showed up with.

"I used to like going dancing," he admits, huffing out a breath before gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb and shaking his head a bit. "I don't know what the hell that is, but it isn't dancing."

"An excuse for fully clothed and terribly public dry humping," she answers, glancing back over her shoulder. "How unfulfilling."

She had meant what she'd said to Loki, there had been people for her here and there over the years. Most of the time, Sylvie only had sex when she had an excess of energy that needed to be released somehow and having an orgasm had seemed like the less destructive option. She had often treated physical intimacy as a transaction, something to serve its purpose before she moved on with her plan.

With Loki, maybe she'd have thought different. Now she doesn't know.

"What sort of dancing would you do, then?" she asks, looking at Bucky again.

Bucky certainly never considered himself a prude, but he wonders if maybe he is by today’s standards. Or maybe not, because he doesn’t care what any consenting adults do with each other. It’s just that he can’t imagine letting loose like that in public. He can’t really imagine letting loose at all anymore.

“Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t danced in about eighty years now,” Bucky tells her, putting a bit of emphasis on the word to hint that it isn’t the only thing he hasn’t done. He certainly wasn’t going on dates as the Winter Soldier, and afterward he just always felt so awkward, like he has no idea how any of it works now. Or if he even deserves to feel pleasure and intimacy like that at all, after all he’s done.

“But if we’re talking strictly dancing,” Bucky tells her, smirking a little as he does. “I was all about swing dancing. Or maybe a little Rumba, if I was feeling frisky.”

"What a shame," Sylvie says, her gaze flicking down the length of Bucky before she looks ahead again. "Although it isn't as if I haven't gone eighty years before."

Maybe longer, now that she's thinking about it, but time means something different for those like her. She looks to be in her thirties by Midgard years, but Sylvie has been alive for closer to fifteen hundred. She's been on the run for most of that, longer than a millennium, and there wasn't always time for a quickie in there.

"Rumba," she echoes, looking amused. "I suppose dancing -- real dancing, that is -- was never high on my list of skills to develop."

“It is, isn’t it?” Bucky asks with a barely there chuckle, as if he’s just now realizing this for himself. He was so awash in guilt and shame for so long that his libido seemed to remain dormant, and by the time that it started to wake up, he was in this whole new world and had no idea how to navigate such things.

Sylvie’s comment makes Bucky realize that as old as he is, she’s older. Whatever terrible things he’s done, she’s done worse. He’s killed so many people, and she’s probably killed more. For some twisted reason, he finds this comforting. It’s not as if he’s glad that she’s experienced such awful things, but it makes him feel less alone, and like he doesn’t have to pretend.

“Well, there’s no time like the present,” Bucky says suddenly, twisting to face her and holding out his hand. The music from the club is spilling out onto the street, making his chest rattle from the bass, and while it’s not exactly the right music for a Foxtrot, he can make it work. “Come on, I won’t bite.”

"I'm not worried about myself," she answers, giving Bucky's offered hand a skeptical look, her eyebrow raised. It reminds her, painfully, of the night on the train, when she'd fallen asleep in that booth and woken up to Loki singing and dancing with the people at the bar.

She's furious with herself for still thinking of him so often, for wanting him to be here. For wanting it to be his stupid hand being offered to her now and that anger pushes all other thought aside as she reaches out to take Bucky's hand.

Better him than dwelling on some other variant who will never find his way here to her.

"So you're going to teach me how to dance?" she asks. "A fifteen hundred year old Asgardian god? You are rather confident, aren't you?"

She raises an eyebrow and he mirrors the expression, keeping his hand extended. Obviously, he isn't going to press the issue, but he gets the feeling that she's going to take it. When she does, he isn't smug about it. He just turns in towards her to rest his prosthetic hand high on her hip, at the bottom of her ribs, because he isn't stupid either.

"What else do you have going on?" Bucky asks honestly, because they're stuck here in this strange little city, and they have to fill the time somehow. As she keeps speaking, Bucky lifts his chin and meets her gaze with vague surprise on his face.

"Asgardian god?" He tilts his head curiously, eyes narrowed the slightest bit. "Like Thor?"

"Ugh, yes, like my idiot brother," Sylvie answers, the words out before she can think better of them. It reveals too much, speaking of Thor as her brother, even though he is, though no version anyone else might know. Her Thor, stupid and sweet and too strong for his own good, is gone, erased with the rest of their reality, their home, and their parents.

But the words are out now and Sylvie rests her hand on Bucky's shoulder, looking at him dead on, almost a challenge. He's taller than she is, though not so tall as Loki. Thicker than Loki, too, which is a good thing. She needs to not be reminded of that idiot right now.

She may have just called Thor an idiot, but her tone had been impossibly fond, another mistake. But at the time the TVA had erased her world, he had been the world to her, even when she was torturing him, teasing him, she had loved him like no one else.

Well, that's interesting. Sylvie has just told him a lot with very few words, and the look she gives him tells him that she knows it. Bucky, while cautious in a way that he thinks will always linger, has no desire to exploit any of her weaknesses.

"Thor is a good man. I fought with him. Well, near him," Bucky amends with a small shrug, smiling a little. Still, he knew enough to admire the man, and enough to get chills when Steve called his hammer. "I heard his brother was a real piece of work. Didn't know he had a sister, though."

Bucky curls one hand loosely around Sylvie's waist and lifts her hand with his prosthetic, straightening up a bit as he does his best to recall the steps. Things like foxtrots and lindy hops are kind of buried under weaponry and combat skills, but he's happy to drag them back up. "Okay, follow my feet."

"Your version probably didn't," she answers. "Or... perhaps he did, there was Hela in some variations of Asgard, so it depends on which timeline you knew Thor in."

The metal of his hand is cool within hers and Sylvie glances down at Bucky's feet, then up again, content enough for now to simply follow the steps. It's utterly foolish, dancing in the street with some man whose presence she's just barely tolerating, but it's distracting, too. And she needs a distraction these days.

"My Thor has been gone for a very long time," she tells him as she follows the steps. "Erased, along with the rest of my reality."

"Uh, the one where he was an Avenger," Bucky tells her with a crooked smile. "Though I don't know if that narrows it down."

It's a bizarre conversation in an even more bizarre situation, but that's sort of who they are now. So far beyond normal, so why pretend?

"I'm sorry," he tells her sincerely, because he knows a little how she feels. His reality wasn't erased, no, but he was taken from it so suddenly, and had it taken from him as scientists played around with his brain.

Bucky lifts their joined hands and slowly turns Sylvie around underneath them before pulling her back in with a hand on her hip. "I know there's no good thing to say."

An Avenger. It does, actually, narrow it down a fair bit and Sylvie finds herself wondering if Bucky knows Loki. The Loki she knows, the one who's wormed his way under her skin in the infuriating way he has.

If he does, it's probably best she doesn't tell him who she really is. From what she knows, her Loki wasn't exactly well-loved.

"Well, thrust Thor to focus on saving Midgard after letting Asgard fall to pieces," she says in a dry tone, turning under Bucky's arm and scowling at him halfheartedly for the move. "There's nothing to say, really. Terrible things have happened and my way of dealing was revenge. Everyone has their own."

The comment feels very pointed, and Bucky doesn't know enough about the situation to have anything to say in return, so he doesn't. Instead, he just smirks at her and twirls her again, just to tease her.

"I don't know what my way is," Bucky admits as his hand returns to her hip, perhaps just a tiny bit lower than he initially dared, but still respectful. "I wasn't in control of myself for a very long time. Then I spent time making amends for things I did under that control. Now-- I'm not sure."

It's a big admission, and Bucky swallows hard and averts his gaze a bit, jaw working as he draws her in a bit closer. He hasn't been this close to a woman who wasn't trying to kill him in decades, but he knows that isn't off of the table with Sylvie, either. Perhaps that is part of the allure. They're both damaged, both unable to let their guards down and somehow, in that regard, they are safe with one another. Safe in that they both know that they aren't safe and probably never will be, not after the lives they've led.

It's that mutual understanding that makes Bucky's hand tighten a little around her hip as he looks down at her face, brow quirked curiously. "What do you do when revenge isn't an option?"

"Plan," she answers. "For revenge."

Thirteen hundred years and that's all she's ever done. Right up until she met Loki, from the moment she had escaped the TVA, Sylvie had planned for her revenge and it had been the only thing that occupied her thoughts. It had been the thing she lived for.

"After that, I'm not sure," she admits, which isn't something she likes to say. "I thought I'd gotten my revenge. I killed the man responsible for erasing my entire reality and it... it did nothing."

Except break the sacred timeline. She feels like she ought to carry some sort of guilt over that, but she doesn't. The sacred timeline was a joke, just as everything with the TVA had been a joke.

"So, your advice is to plan for a revenge that I can't carry out, and won't make me feel better anyway," Bucky says flatly, chuckling a bit as he turns them in a circle. They're doing the dance at a glacial pace, but it isn't like they're being graded on it.

"Sounds like maybe we both need to find new ways to pass the time," he tells her, breathing in as his arm slides more securely around Sylvie's waist, tugging her in more closely and looking down at her face, just inches from his.

"This is where I'd flip you back over my arm," he tells her, smirking a little as he wrinkles his nose. "But I figure that isn't something that I should try to do without warning."

"It's all I've done for thirteen hundred years, so you'll forgive me if my ideas for having a normal life beyond revenge are a bit slow to develop," Sylvie answers in a snappish tone, though her head tilts and she lifts her gaze, meeting Bucky's.

He could be entertaining for a night. Probably not much more than that, Sylvie has no interest in getting too attached to anything or anyone when she's determined to get out of this place, but a night? She can certainly find value in that.

"You could try," she answers sweetly. "If you want me to punch you in the dick."

“And I thought I was old,” Bucky says with a click of his tongue. He feels exhausted after a century of life. He can’t even imagine a millennium of one.

She doesn’t pull away, despite her tone, and Bucky wonders if maybe he’s imagining the way that she’s looking at him, like she’s sizing him up. Like maybe she’s considering something.

It makes Bucky’s mouth go a little dry, because he isn’t sure that he’d mind being, well, considered. Even if it’s been so long that he isn’t even sure that he’d know what to do with her.

“Duly noted. No flips,” Bucky tells her, chuckling a little as he looks down at her face, one hand spanning the curve of her hip. He lets go and brings Slyvie’s other hand down between them, keeping it cradled in the cool metal of his prosthetic as he makes a show of leaning over to kiss the back of her hand.

“I’ll just thank you for the dance then,” he says as he straightens up and lets her go. “Because somehow I’ve managed not to get punched since I got here. It’s kind of a record for me and I’d hate to break it. Especially with my dick.”

"Asgardians age well," she answers, even though she technically isn't Asgardian, not the way most would mean. Odin and Frig didn't create her. Laufey did, this tiny Frost Giant he'd had no interest in raising and had abandoned in the midst of a war.

But Frost Giants live long, too, and age well. And so long as she's careful when it comes to the cold, she looks more Asgardian than she ever does Frost Giant.

"So is that what passed for seduction eighty years ago?" she asks when he kisses her hand. Bucky steps away, but Sylvie follows, stepping forward, back into his space. Her index finger taps his chest. "People didn't just tell one another they had a need? They danced and kissed the back of a woman's hand? How did anyone possibly get laid during that time?"

For a moment, Bucky is stunned. He’s usually quick on his feet, but that’s in battle. This is something else, something he hasn’t had any part of in almost a century.

“Uh, not usually, no,” Bucky says with a huff of laughter, grinning as he reaches up to cover Sylvie’s hand with his own. He’s met his fair share of bold women, and he’s been propositioned more than once since he’s regained control over himself, but he never took anyone up on it.

Until now, perhaps? Bucky Barnes, flustered at the prospect of sex. Steve would be laughing his ass off if he were here.

But he isn’t.

“People were more repressed back in my dancing days,” Bucky tells her as he lifts her hand back to his shoulder and moves in closer to her. “Getting laid took a lot of time and effort, usually.”

He rests his prosthetic hand on her hip again, tipping his head and biting his lip as he looks at her face. He used to be so good at this. Maybe he can be again.

“Do you have a need?” He asks in a low voice, feeling a little overwhelmed but in a good way, he thinks. This whole sex thing has been hanging over his head and maybe this would be the best way to take care of it. Sylvie wouldn’t expect anything from him after, and he wouldn’t have to be quite so careful.

“Because I’m more than willing to take you to the picture show and buy you dinner. Lend you my coat if you get cold and whisper in your ear,” Bucky assures her, laughing a little as his hand spans the width of her lower back. “But I gotta say, I think I like your way better.”

"Save the romance for someone else, I've got a postman waiting for me," Sylvie answers, knowing he won't understand the joke and telling herself she doesn't care. Loki would have understood, but perhaps that's why she's here, head tilted, gaze drawn to his mouth when he bites his lower lip. Bucky is nothing like Loki; shorter by some, broad where Loki is slim, hair short where Loki's is long, rough stubble on his jaw where Loki had always been perfectly smooth.

All of that makes it easier to lay one palm flat on his chest, the other on his lower abdomen, and shove him backward until he's pressed to the wall of a building. There, Sylvie lifts herself onto her toes, nudges her nose against his, and grins.

"I have a need," she says in a low voice and purposely does not think of Loki. The man in front of her is beautiful and willing and she can't hurt him, all of which is everything she's looking for.

That’s another clue to the mystery of Sylvie, one that Bucky files away as not urgent. She had someone, maybe. Bucky has no interest in trying to find out more, but he’s glad to know that maybe she wasn’t completely alone, all that time.

Bucky never had anyone who mattered, not like that. He’s been with women and also some men, and he thinks that maybe he might have been a little in love with Steve in ways that stayed unexamined until it was too late, but that’s it.

He had a lot of fun in his youth, whenever and wherever he can, and then went almost a century with no real fun at all.

Maybe that’s why his breath hitches when she pushes him back against the wall, because it’s been so long since anyone touched him like this at all. For a split second he tenses on instinct, because when people are this close to him, it usually isn’t for any good reason, but he relaxes as she presses up onto her toes, lips parting as her face comes to close to his.

He doesn’t trust Sylvie, not really, but that’s okay because he assumes that it’s mutual. Trust doesn’t come easily to either of them, but this doesn’t have to be about anything other than what it is. Satisfying a need.

“I can take care of it,” Bucky assures her in a gravelly voice, because he might be a bit rusty, but he was good at this. Good at dancing, good at fighting, good at fucking. When it comes to moving his body, he knows what to do.

He slides his good hand down the length of Sylvie’s slim back, down to just above the curve of her backside, and tugs her in against him, staring at her as their mouths brush.

This is what he was hoping for when he accepted the date tonight. He wanted a release, something that would temporarily ease the pain of being alive and aware, and maybe it didn’t go down like he thought it would, but this is better.

His mouth meets hers and suddenly he feels so hungry, nearly overwhelmed with desire now that he’s had the smallest taste of pleasure after so very long. He kisses her harder and wraps his good arm around her waist, tugging her in closer as he licks into her mouth.

Yeah, this is better.

The flutter of guilt disgusts her.

One kiss. It was only one kiss and a kiss she's determined to think didn't mean anything regardless. She can't love someone, she isn't capable of it, not since the TVA took her heart and erased it along with everyone she had once cared for. So what she felt for Loki, what she still feels, it isn't love. What had he so stupidly said? Love is a dagger. How could she possibly love someone prone to such ridiculous metaphors on the very subject?

But that guilt flares up in her and Sylvie shoves it down, shoves it deep, refuses to feel it. She had promised Loki nothing and he isn't even here. She shoves him from her mind, too, and reaches up, one hand on Bucky's chest, the other on his face, her lips parting as she welcomes the deepening of the kiss.

His tongue is in her mouth and she moans, opening for it, for him, fingers curling in the front of his shirt. This is far better than dancing, far better than pining or whatever other foolish things she's been doing. Her vengeance had been pointless, which means her entire existence is, too, and she can't stomach the thought, so she gets lost in this. In the heat of Bucky's body pressed against hers.

"My place," she says when the kiss breaks. "I don't trust yours."