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Looking out over the Northern Boundary isn’t like sitting on the Bifrost. It’s on the opposite end of the realm, nearly a six day’s ride from the palace, surrounded by absolutely nothing, and rather than the spectacular view of Yggdrasil, one can see only the dim lights of worlds beyond the great tree. Far away stars, and shadows, swirling shadows that beckon as surely as they warn.
Watching them is much like losing oneself in the licking flames of a fire, and while Sif watches the swirling darkness, she is not consciously seeing it. She’s lost herself somewhere along the way, lost track of her oaths, what they mean, and to whom she is most loyal. She’s not sure any longer what it is that she truly wants. It’s a terrifying realization, and she has never felt so lost; untethered as if she might drift away, not noticing until she’s too far away to reclaim her grip. The sharp twist of fear that she’s already floated too far off her path to find her way back.
So long as she defined herself by her oaths, and those she surrounded herself with, that she wonders what it is she truly wants for herself. A sharp, bitter laugh escapes into the waiting emptiness that hovers just beyond where her legs dangle over a crumbling precipice. Likely not her best choice of seat, but Sif is feeling reckless.
Acutely aware of what she cannot have, she has to force herself to accept that some dreams, no matter how carefully repressed, must be allowed to fade away entirely for her sake; the sake of her aching heart. Thinking on Thor, all she feels is loss, an unfair resentment, and enough disappointment to grow into anger. How dare he abandon Asgard in such a state?
Perhaps some of it is jealousy, she’s honest enough to recognize that, and she thanks the Norns that she so long ago learned how to compartmentalize. To know that some of the turmoil she suffers can be blamed on envy does not mean that she will ever indulge it. Thor has suffered enough at the hands of his brother for that particular emotion.
Her fingers dig into the dry soil at either side of her hips, feeling it pack under her fingernails, letting it ground her. Examining the truth of it all, a useless dream, a dangerous want, her breath hitches in her chest. The looks she gets, the naked sympathy of Asgard’s court that Lady Sif should be overlooked for a mortal, they sting in the worst kind of way, but not so much as the assurances that Thor will one day return, his mortal’s life is but the flicker of a candle in comparison to his. What does that matter? She will always know that he prefers another’s company to hers. She will always know that no matter what might happen after Jane Foster’s death, if she were to return from that state, Thor would choose her again, despite the pain such a choice might or might not cause him.
The Lady Sif is no one’s second choice. She can’t bear the thought of it, when all she’s ever wanted was to be seen, to be chosen, accepted and desired for who and what she is. All of it, the warrior and the woman.
Therein lies the greatest irony of all:
How can she ever demand such a thing of anyone? How dare she expect to be anyone’s first choice when he, whoever this imagined suitor might be, will always know that he is not her first choice? And that is not the whole of it. Thor himself was not her first choice. She’s a hypocrite and she knows it; she aches and wants, but it is not Thor’s face that she sees in the night, it is not his voice that she conjures for company.
It is not Thor that haunts her steps in Asgard’s halls.
Once, when she was young, fauna responded to her touch, grew or died upon her whim, but the more she trained to dagger and sword, the less she could grasp the seidr that dwelt within her. In desperation, her mother took Sif to see her own mother, the famed seeress, Sibyl. Sif can still remember the pungent scent of burning herbs, and the way her eyes watered in the enclosed space, irritated by the smoke.
“Worry not my child.” The elder’s lips had curled in amusement, placating her daughter as only a mother could, and Sif had stood by awkwardly. “No one thing is ever only one thing.”
Until now, in this moment, that was what Sif had remembered of the encounter, but sitting as she did, staring off into the darkness of worlds unknown, she could just as clearly see her grandmother’s gray eyes boring into hers, bony hands digging into her narrow shoulders. “Honor and happiness are not entirely compatible.”
And Sif screamed, fed her anger and frustration and despair into the cosmos; dropped her head into her hands with a shuddering sob.
Oaths and honor are the layers that have built her, buoyed her, but so many of them are now obsolete, chipping away from her like flaking varnish. The very first oath she’d ever made was to Queen Frigga, the promise that she would never give up fighting for what she wanted, but she had given up. She’d broken that oath on the day she looked into Loki’s eyes and saw a stranger, let him fall away from her even as she fought harder for a place among Asgard’s warriors.
To train with the Valkyrie had demanded oaths to Yggdrasil, to protecting the tree and the whole of the realms above all else, and she had until she let her oaths to Thor, as one of his personal guard, supersede that which should have been her first, most important promise.
Sif had since renewed that oath, strengthening it with a blood sacrifice, swearing to herself to never again be so careless.
Before she had sworn herself to Odin’s service, she had sworn herself to protect Asgard, always. Her King knew the meaning behind it, Sif had felt the heat of his gaze against the back of her bowed head as she’d promised to be under his command as long as it was for the good of the realm. Never had she purposely broken that oath, but she had placed her oaths to a prince above those to her King, and damaged both.
Her faith had been laid at the feet of a Prince who would abandon his realm in favor of others, leaving Asgard to fear for its future with an aging King and no heir to take his place.
She closed her eyes against the memories and was overtaken by a sense of vertigo, forcing her to open them again, but all she could see was the consuming dark, pinpricks of light too far away to offer her refuge. The shadows lurked, reminding her of a nightmare she had tried to forget, and though she felt like a foolish child for doing it, she yanked her legs back from the edge, pulling them against her chest. Her heart hammered against her ribs even as she would have chastised herself if the truth wasn’t so much worse.
There were no demons in those shadows, they were hiding within her, waiting. Sif shuddered, hugging herself tightly as a breeze whispered through the tree line behind her, and a painfully familiar voice, the phantom trickster that continued to haunt her, hummed, almost thoughtful in sound.
“Finally, you understand.”