the_variant | (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.

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"Your own father," she says, almost thoughtful. It's been so long since Sylvie has seen her father than she knows she can't rightly say what he might have done for her, but the memories she does have, of both Odin and Frig, they fill her with warmth. With light.

Her parents had loved her. Odin wouldn't have asked her to fight, not as a child anyway. But then he had been erased by the TVA and none of what he would or wouldn't have done mattered any longer.

"Lucky for you, I have no reason to kill you," she says, trying to push past those thoughts. "It isn't as if I have a mission here."

"Yeah, he wasn't... wasn't a great father," Luther says, shrugging again, feeling how awkward and clumsy his shoulders feel. He's relieved when they're both ready, it seems, to move past that, focusing on her words at this moment. He smiles, still a little on the wry side, glancing up at the sky, like the moon might know him here.

"I can say I'm really glad you don't have reason to kill me," he offers. "Is that what kind of-- your missions usually involve killing people? Five did that, for the Commission. Protect the timeline. I haven't really told anyone, but there's a good chance he killed JFK. If you know who that is."

"American president during the Cuban missile crisis," Sylvie answers. "At least in one timeline. I never spent much time in Dallas in the sixties, though, I was too obviously out of place."

The TVA had always found her in places like that, where her very appearance would cause a divergence in the timeline. Once she had learned to use apocalyptic scenarios, though, they'd lost her completely.

"I didn't work for anyone," she says. "My mission was one of vengeance."

She says it without the slightest hint of irony. If it sounds dramatic, then it's only fitting, given who she really is.

"Oh, good, you know him," Luther says, well aware it's a dumb thing to be pleased about and being pleased anyway. "Yeah, after we sort of accidentally blew up the moon and part of it hit Earth and we had to go back in time, we ended up in Dallas." He doesn't know if he can make himself say, in light of their conversation, how easily he'd fallen into working for Jack Ruby.

"I can't say we did much better there, but the moon stayed in one piece."

He doesn't want to admit, either, how much blame can be pinned on his mistakes. If only he'd listened, if only his siblings were louder in his head than his father....

"But vengeance, that's... understandable. From what you said. It's a pretty good mission."

"It was," she agrees. "Is."

Is it still her mission? She's been trying to get out of here and get back to the TVA, but she's well aware that what she'd done, the choices she'd made, they hadn't brought her any peace. There had been no relief at the end of it all, no sense of fulfillment. The vindication had never come and though she's been spending all her time in Darrow trying to get back to the TVA, a small voice inside her head says perhaps she's been trying to get back to Loki.

"No," she says a moment later. Her chin tilts up, moonlight catching her features, looking willful and prideful, but it's a mask. "I thought it was a good mission, but it made no difference in the end. The dead were still dead, the erased were still erased, and all I did was betray someone who... who cared for me."

Luther glances down at her, surprise etched clear on his features, remaining quiet as she speaks. His smile, much as he tries to hide it, is probably a little fond-- part of the reason he tries to hide it, actually. At this point, he's taken in enough about Sylvie to know he's not really supposed to like her, that it would be discouraged by Sylvie herself.

Too bad then, that she happens to be very likeable.

Too bad for who?

"Yeah, you've got a point there," he murmurs. "Dead, I get, but... erased?"

"Poof," she says, with a little explosion of green light from her fingertips, like a firework going off in the air in front of them. Not as good as Loki's tiny fireworks display, not that she'd ever admit to it.

"The Time Variance Authority," she says, the words coming out crisp and hard. "The protect the sacred timeline. Their words, of course, their mission, handed down to them by some god-like authority they never once questioned. When someone in one of the infinite timelines does something that caused a disturbance, they go to that timeline, arrest the variant causing the issue, and erase the rest of the timeline. Like it never existed at all, except for the variant they took from it."

It still hurts, thirteen hundred years later and although she works to keep any of that from her voice, she knows she isn't as good at hiding it as she'd like to be.

"Holy shit," Luther says, his hand coming to rest on her shoulder before he can think to stop it, a gentle squeeze before it drops down to his side. "That sounds pretty fucking awful. Like, the Commission, sure, they killed people, but erasing timelines?" It takes him a few minutes to fully grasp how this fits with her mission, what what he knows of her story. "Wait, so, that's what happened to you, then. Something was wrong-- they thought you were the thing that was wrong, so they took you and erased everything. And then they kept you to, to work for them."

He feels a little sick, though it's probably some of his own issues mixing in with what he's learning.

God, he wants to just give her a hug.

"I--" With no idea what to say, he casts the net wide. "Usually this is where I'd eat my feelings. We can do that, if you want, or-- let me take you somewhere?"

The hand on her shoulder causes her to tense a little, though she thinks it's a step forward that she doesn't immediately break his wrist for having presumed to touch her. It isn't even the touch she doesn't like, but the comfort, and maybe it's not even that she doesn't like it. Comfort isn't something she knows what to do with, having never really experienced.

No one has ever said they're sorry for all she lost.

She frowns faintly, not wanting to deal with any of what's going on inside her when it comes to that, then she shakes her head at his comment. "No," she says. "They didn't keep me. I escaped. I kept out of their reach for thirteen hundred years and yes, I think I'd like to eat my feelings very much."