Sylvie Laufeydottir

Sylvie keeps seeing her idiot brother.

She sees him as he was, not as the man Loki or Bucky might know, but as the boy she had grown up with. The glimpses she gets of him are always fleeting, a flash of his stupid gold armour (play armour, he's a child) through a crowd, or his eyes meeting hers from across the street, just for a moment before someone crosses in front of her and he's gone. He'll turn a corner ahead of her and when she follows, he's nowhere to be seen.

Twice now, he's stayed a bit longer. Staring from a distance too great for her to cross before he disappears and when he holds her gaze, she feels like he has something he's trying to tell her.

But Thor was always a bit too thick even for message delivery and maybe she's just gone insane.

Her dreams aren't much better, strange and dark, with details that become bogged down in a sense of ruination. In one, she vaguely remembers Loki sitting cross legged in a dark room with a handsome stag resting at his side. But the stag had started shedding his velvet and it hung in bloody strips from his rack, which Loki had been pulling off bit by bit, laying the bloody velvet at his feet. He had beckoned her closer and when Sylvie knelt, it was in the blood. Loki leaned in, his lips to her ear, and he had said something to her in the dream, but she doesn't remember his words, only that they had left her chest feeling tight, as if something was coming for them both.

Tonight she's sleeping in her own room, having started off alone, but at some point Loki had joined her. When she wakes with a start, a warning on her lips from a new, ominous dream she can't remember, it takes her a moment make sense of the shape in the bed beside her. Before long, his familiar sprawl becomes apparent, dark hair on a pale cheek, and Sylvie exhales shakily as she rests her forehead on his shoulder.

It's clear she isn't going to fall asleep easily, so after several moments, Sylvie rises and hooks a silky robe from where she'd left it on a nearby chair. Pulling it over her shoulders, she wanders to the window to look down on their yard, their home, and centre herself.

Thor is standing below. Her breath catches as their eyes meet, his large and sorrowful, and she's suddenly furious.

"What?" she barks, then slaps her palm against the glass. "What do you want?"

Sylvie hates that they're here.

Nothing about the festival itself is interesting to her, not the music, not the camping, none of it really. But the possibility of an island having simply appeared, now that is absolutely fascinating. So she goes, she demands Loki goes with her, to see what they might be able to discover about the island, about Darrow, about the impossibility of it all. Their intentions are good, even if she doesn't know what they would have possibly used any of the answers for.

All this time, all these months, and she still doesn't know if she wants to leave or make sure they stay.

Things begin to go wrong almost immediately. The festival itself is a joke, with little food being supplied, and almost nothing Sylvie might call music, even within the loose definition Darrow uses for the subject. The tents are barely more than tarps and she's intent on getting back to Darrow properly at the first chance they have.

Except they miss the ferry. And they miss the ferry because, for longer than she'd like to admit, Sylvie had been floating following a bloody bee sting. By the time she finally figures out how to get down -- a second sting, which is really more luck than anything -- the first ferry is gone.

And the second ferry is on fire.

The first time Sylvie sees someone in a cloak, they're preparing to swing a bat toward Loki's head, and while she's certain he can protect himself, she still grabs his arm and yanks him back, shouting, "Down!"