Ikol is having a fun time spoiling Lucky's appetite when a certain unLoki Loki arrives.
Hugs happen.
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None!
“See, it’s the wrist movement,” Loki said. He pulled his sleeve back and whipped his hand. From seemingly nothing, he withdrew a dog treat and brandished it with a flourish.
Lucky perhaps didn’t understand the intricacies of sleight of hand, but he did understand the simplicity of a treat. His tag wagged emphatically, and he bolted from his audience seat to claim what was surely his reward for being the best boy.
“I knew you would get it,” Loki told the golden retriever before leveling his hand and letting a sloppy, wet tongue coat his palm to get at the treat. Loki’s other hand smoothed the fur atop Lucky’s head. “Smart you. Just don’t tell Kate that I’m spoiling your dinner,” was finished with a wink. And, Lucky, for all his limitations when it came to returning the gesture, closed his one good eye in a best effort.
“Aaaw.”
" — that ridge over there. It'll give us the best — "
Sylvie had just blinked mid-sentence and suddenly, she was no longer in the middle of an overgrown, tropical area surrounded by predators. No, she was atop the Peaslee Theater. That was easy enough to figure out, given that most of the items up there were ones that the Lokis had gathered over the course of their time at Derleth.
She cut herself off, hands moving to her hips as she turned her body from side to side to look around. She couldn't recall a portal, but Derleth was a shit like that sometimes.
"What the — where the hell are the dinosaurs?"
The sudden presence of someone on the rooftop made both Loki and Lucky whip their focus up. Loki’s mind was already running the list of those who could do such a thing, but he stopped upon recognizing a familiar silhouette. A familiar stance. Then, finally, a familiar face.
Lucky was quicker off the mark. His nose was infallible, and he knew. He popped up onto his hind legs and set his paws on Sylvie’s side. Anything to get that leverage to deposit his greeting lick -- bonus if he got a face.
“Presumably buried. Definitely dead,” Loki offered. His face was held between expressions, as if he wasn’t sure how this would fall yet. Because he wasn’t sure. “In any case… not here.” She could easily not remember him, and they’d have to circle back around from the start. That required a carefully-crafted first impression.
Sylvie looked down at the dog, and while she was rather short, she was not short enough for him to quite reach her face. Not without bending a little, and she was too confused to do that. Instead, she reached out to rub his ears when it dawned on her that she no longer had her sword in her hand. She'd been using it to point at a ridge with Laura Moon. They needed their back to something so they couldn't be overrun from behind. Her hair had been half-pulled into a ponytail on top of her head, and now it was down. She wasn't wearing the pack she'd made either.
Loki's voice was familiar too, but when she spun around, she realized that he was changed too. He was taller somehow, as if something had grabbed his limbs and head and pulled just enough to burst the ends of his clothing. His hair was messier than normal, and she thought there was something different about his mouth. His teeth?
"What the hell happened, Loki? One minute, I was talking to Laura, the next I'm on top of the Peaslee."
There was a small held breath on Loki’s part as he waited for Sylvie to give him some kind of sign. And there it was. She knew him, and she knew where they were. His expression went from neutral to beaming inside a mere blink of the eye. His sister. His favorite.
“Sylvie!” He crossed the distance in a few strides and paused just in front of her to say, “Don’t stab me.” Then he threw his arms wide, and clenched her into a robust hug. Lucky, given his position and a clever duck under an arm, was equally wrapped up in the hug. He didn’t seem to mind.
“What happened is you vanished for weeks on end.”
She had not been prepared at all, and her arms dropped flat at her side as he squeezed her in a hug. Sylvie wouldn't say it, but it was nice. Hugs were really nice, especially for someone as touch starved as her. Her face was smushed against his shoulder. It took a few seconds, but she lifted her arms to return it, blindly reaching for whatever was around.
"I disappeared? With a notification and everything?"
He had to stoop into the embrace, but Loki held onto it for a few more seconds before letting Sylvie -- and Lucky -- gently go. There was a myriad of things to tell her. The giant bag of candy was gone, and that was surely going to be a sore point. He hadn’t really spoken with their respective other Loki sibling since she’d left. Possibly also a sore point. The list began to seem like a catch-up of less-than-ideal events, and so he mentally kicked it into the bin.
“Six weeks ago.” Loki stepped back and tilted his head as he looked at Sylvie. She hadn’t changed one bit. Most didn’t in Derleth, but perhaps it was just that he worried his memory of her would have shifted in the midst of everything. In the way you begin to forget someone’s voice if you hadn’t heard it in a while.
“No warning, just gone. Thor lost it.”
"Six weeks?"
She knew this happened to other people. She'd seen it. Rocket went and came back. A few other people had as well. She just never expected to be one of them. Maybe that was arrogance or naivete, but it just struck her as strange.
"It doesn't feel like six weeks. It feels like seconds. It feels like I never left at all."
Sylvie knew her mouth was hanging open, dumbly, as she tried to grasp that she'd lost six weeks to unseen Derleth creator. She didn't even have updated memories, like some people got.
Lucky stuffed his wet nose against her hand. That somehow reminded her of —
"Where's alligator Loki? Is he still here? Is he okay too? Or did he stretch out like you did? What happened?"
“Derlethian nonsense,” Loki replied with a shrug. “As always, as ever.”
Lucky was intent on gleaning some attention for himself, which meant he was springing between the two of them in turns. Loki squatted down and immediately was rewarded with a muzzle into his neck. Lucky wasn’t strong enough to fall a Frost Giant, but he certainly was putting forth a good effort.
“Gator is around, probably poolside. Ah -- that would be Strange’s addition to the campus. He’s gator-y, nothing wrong with that one. Lucky, calm down.” Lucky heeded the command by planting himself between Loki’s bent knees and leaning back so that his nose touched the underside of Loki’s chin. Loki relieved a sigh. “I resolved my ghosts. Derleth afforded me a little update as a reward. Nothing to worry about, I promise.”
"'Nothing to worry about?' Is that why you hugged me?" Sylvie remembered what she'd seen in Loki's memories, the small ghost of a child version of himself. Not at all unlike the one she'd met in the Void at the end of time. This one hadn't killed Thor, though.
She turned and looked around the theater's top. The gravely roof had been made as comfortable as it could with pillows and chairs. A few make-shift tables were around for eating off of, and there was the letter L they'd stolen from the town of Schmigadoon. Even if it didn't feel like it had been a long time, she was fond of it.
But resolving his ghosts meant… "Magic?"
“No, I hugged you because for some reason I find you endearing,” Loki returned, tone clearly straddling the fence of sarcasm and friendly chiding. He gave her a grin. “And I suspect you feel similar. We’re not so different, you know…”
He hadn’t been wearing it, but it only took a simple reach and a flick-of-the-wrist to produce his helm. One horn. The other was broken off. Just like Sylvie’s. With his other hand, he summoned an orb of crackling green magic.
“Less so when I’m back to rights. Magic and all.” He turned his hand around and the magic dissipated.
She knew that wasn't hers. It was too big to fit on her head. Yeah, she'd suspected that her and Loki were a lot alike, both trying to fight against what they were in various ways. He renounced magic; she renounced her name. Both of them sported broken horns. There was more to it than that, of course, but these surface level ones weren't to be tossed aside.
Sylvie laughed, cautiously as always, and reached out for his helm. She held it to her face. It was comically overlarge for her. "You know those cut-outs at fairs and road-side attractions? You stick your face in? This feels just like that."
Lucky made an attempt to stuff his own head into the helm as it passed hands, but Loki wrapped his arms around the dog and clamped him into a smaller hug.
“Oh, thank you. Reduced to a tourist trap photo spot.” His voice was exasperated, but gently so. But then he gave her a look and his tone took a more sincere bent. “Some suspected you would have been happier to not be here, but I’m not afraid to say that I missed you. I am glad you came back. Selfishly so, perhaps.”
Sylvie could feel her throat thickening with oncoming emotions. It was something she so rarely heard — or heard at all — that it had really choked her up. She smiled tightly, but her eyes were a little overbright. She'd never been good at hiding her emotions, so it wasn't hard to decipher how she was feeling.
"I'd — " Her mouth clamped up however briefly. "I'd have missed you too."
Lucky stomped his paw on her foot to get her attention, as if he wanted to be missed too. Truth be told, if it hadn't been an instant for her, she'd appreciate the animals a lot more than most of the people. That wasn't to say that there weren't some people she was missing.
"You'll have to fill me in on everything I miss then." She plopped down in one of the chairs, looking around for one giant bag of candy. (One she would not find.) "Starting with the dinosaurs."