Sinbound: Variants

Part 28

I grab my variant by the face, hands flat on either side of her cheeks. I shake her head slightly, trying to use magic to give some consciousness back into her body.

"Fleur, you son of a bitch, fucking look at me!" I yell at her over the thundering storm. I can't see Loki or Mobius since they're behind me, but I'm sure they're looking at me like I'm batshit crazy. I shake her again, my hands glowing with purple around her face. "Come on... come on!" I yell at her. Her eyes flutter, and I just punch her right in the nose. It starts to bleed, and her transition starts. Her eyes, as the slowly open, are red. Her blood glows and she glares at me furiously. I smile down at her, knowing I'm stronger than her.

"What have you done?"

"What you were too pussy to do." I say, punching her again. I'm lifted off of her by Loki, flinging me to the side.

"What the hell, Ayca?" He growls at me, setting me down on the ground.

"Alive, but just barely." I say to him, my voice raspy. "That's the trick. It's too easy for her to fight back if she has any strength at all. If I-"

"This is madness!" He yells at me, looking down at Fleur. Her bloody face is being washed by the storm.

"She has a point, actually." Mobius chimes in. 

"What?" Loki and I echo at the same time.

"No really, if the variant can't use her magic to cancel out Ayca's, then she should be able to take it back from her. I think this is your chance, Ayca!"

"My one chance, Loki." I say, turning my attention from Mobius to Loki. His hair sticks to his face and neck from being completely soaked, and his face is smothered with rain but I can tell he's crying. "Let me have my one chance. To save myself, by myself."

He says nothing, only nods and lets me go. I can tell he's nervous as I turn to Fleur, walking slowly towards her. I kneel down, placing one hand on her cheek. My hand starts to glow purple, the color of my magic. Her skin starts to do the same, and soon it lights up completely. A purple cloud of magic surrounds us, the wind and rain from the storm whipping around in a circle around us.

My breath gets shaky and my body feels weak, but I keep going. Her hand flies to mine that's pressed hard onto her skin, and she grips my wrist. She struggles under me, but I don't dare let go. I just look into her eyes with the most calm facial expression. I catch my breath, feeling a sudden surge of power rush through my veins. It's happening. This is it.

Suddenly, I see an illusion of my mother appears. She's looking at me with wise eyes and a gentle smile. I look up at her, waiting for her to say something. She says nothing, and instead nods once with a knowing smile as she disappears into the rain and magic whipping around me. 

Next, I see my father. The one who lied to me and kept my mother out of my life, the one that kept the truth from me all these years. I frown at him, but he tries to smile at me anyway. I realize now that I have to let him go, too. I smile back at him, and he disappears.

Lastly, I see Thanos. My face falls as I watch the last moments of life in his eyes. This one is hard to even look at, since it wasn't just me he tortured. That magic from that realm I may have been cursed with, and may run through me, but it isn't me. I defeated him, so it's time to let him go. He vanishes into the circling storm that's now threatening to get too close. 

I watch as I'm slowly engulfed in rain and wind as the magic closes in on me. Finally, I'm in the middle of my own magical storm I've created. I feel a bolt of electricity hit me, then nothing. It settles as quickly as it started. I look down and, as I expected, Fleur is gone. I breathe in slowly, feeling the entirety of my magic. My eyelids flutter closed and I stand, letting my wings spread out as far as the go and the horns stand tall on my head. I rub my fingertips together as they turn ashy, my blood rushing a purple-black color. My blood is thick and desperate with power.

I turn to face Loki, who is standing there amazed. Mobius looks like a proud fanboy who just saw his favorite superhero do their iconic move in real life. I watch as Loki's gaze goes from me to a peculiar mark on the ground, so I look down and see a giant rune, my rune, sinking through the wet dirt. It falls deep into the ground, then is filled slowly by the rain. I turn back to Loki, running to him. 

I crash into him, feeling his arms wrap as much as they can around my waist. "You're you again." He says to me. 

"Yes, yes I am."

"I love you." He says, pressing accent onto the word 'love'.

"I will love you forever, Loki." I say, kissing him desperately. 

Then, after forgetting completely that poor Mobius is standing there awkwardly watching us suck face in the pouring rain, I turn to him and apologize.

"If you're happy, that's all that matters." He says, gesturing to us. "I have a mess to clean up back at the TVA, though, so, I gotta go."

"It's been real, agent Mobius. Thank you." I say to him, trying to helplessly wipe the rain from my face. 

"You... you've been a real friend." Loki goes in for a hug, denying a simple hand shake from the man in the brown suit. He stays a moment, the releases. As Mobius opens up that damn golden doorway, I stop and ask for one last favor.

"Mobius?" I call out to him. He turns his head over his shoulder, smiling at me. "Any way you could get Loki's memory back from before the timeline was reset and Fleur was here?"

Mobius thinks about this for a moment. He looks down at his tempad, then back up at me. "You're the magician, Ayca." He smiles even wider, then disappears through the portal.

"Why do you want me to remember?" Loki asks me, holding me close to his body by pulling me in with his hands around my hips. My heart flutters and I feel a warmth in my stomach. We'll come back to that later.

"Because we went through a lot together, and I'd hate to be the only one who remembers. I have no idea how to do it, though."

He smiles wickedly at me, cocking his head and leaning down to kiss me. "Well, with all this power you've acquired I'm sure it will come easily." When he kisses me, I try to feel his energy. I try to read his emotions, then read his mind. It's clouded, but it feels like he's let his guard down for me. I've never really read someone's mind before, but how hard can it really be?

I keep him kissing me, since it makes it easier to search his mind while we touch. Then finally, I reach something. It's a memory so faint I can barely see it. It's blurry and out of focus, but I see myself. I see a bunch of myself, on top of the compound roof. Of course this is the memory he would come to first, the most traumatic one for him. 

From there, the rest of his memories from the time with Fleur come rushing in. The time I burned the copy of my mother's journal after she freaked out and unlocked Bucky's arm, to the time we would talk to her and I tried offering marshmallows, even to the time where I tried using the time stone to erase her completely.

He jolts his head back, looking at me with wide eyes. "You're so brave." He says instantly. I smile at him lightly.

"I'm actually just stupidly lucky." I chuckle, letting my body return to it's more human appearance. The last thing to change is my hair color back to it's rich, honey blond. Loki runs his fingers through it hopelessly, struggling since it's so wet from the storm. "Smooth." 

"Let's get out of this storm. Let it wash this all away, yes?" He kisses me, and while his lips are pressed against mine, we teleport back to Tony's tower in New York.