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i.
“Well, really,” Sif sighs, as a half-dozen little hovering bots chatter and hum and quiver around her, scanning her measurements and body shape and very possibly her internal organs, if that blue one is to be believed. “None of you are going to do anything?”
“The last time I tried to pour your mead at a feast, you almost broke my wrist,” Fandral points out cheerfully, sprawled across an ottoman nearby.
“I know what it means when you try to pour someone’s mead,” Sif tells him, severe, and then rolls her eyes as two of the bots nudge at her back, trying to get her to turn. “This is a little different.”
“You are not in any immediate danger,” Thor suggests, where he’s drinking the local alcohol from an elaborate goblet; it is smoking and purple, but he seems unperturbed. Thor is generally unperturbed, which is one of the things Sif likes about him, but is really only frustrating right now.
“The next time one of you is forcibly engaged to alien royalty, I will not step in to help either,” Sif tells them, trying to tell herself that her mouth is currently set in a sneer, not a pout.
“You’re fulfilling one of their prophecies,” Loki says, and briefly Sif wonders if she is the only one in this chamber who hasn’t lost her mind. “And actually, it is remarkable how few alien princesses wish to marry us. It’s a shame, really.”
“Hear, hear,” Fandral says, as though marriage is not the least appealing concept in the universe to him.
“I am not marrying anybody,” Sif says carefully, unsure if the bots have aural recording devices but not wanting to cause more injured feelings than strictly necessary; soft of her, perhaps, but she doesn’t want a speech on the more… canine qualities of this particular race to be available to her “betrothed” after she has gone. And she will go: Sif is as fond of a pretty gown as anyone, at least in the right circumstances, but at this point in her life she is intending neither marriage nor a partner who possesses actual fangs.
“Well, no,” Fandral agrees. “But the weather is nice, the mountains are purple, the food is excellent, and everyone gets on their knees when you walk past. As calamities go… this one is considerably less calamitous than the ones we usually face.”
Sif briefly catches Hogun’s eye; he gazes to Valhalla for a moment and then gives her the smallest of shrugs, a reaction to their friends that is both comforting and unhelpful. At least Hogun agrees that this is all far more ridiculous than is really necessary, though it’s also true that no rampaging armies are after them. It does make a nice change.
“One more day,” Sif allows, as the bots shift away from her and leave the chamber with little fizzing whirrs. “And then we are all leaving.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t-” Loki begins, but subsides into silence when Sif glares at him. “We are all leaving.”
“We cannot stay for the wedding feast?” Volstagg asks, a trace of hope in his voice.
“No,” Sif says, firm, and he sighs. Well, her warriors have their good points, and their bad points, and perhaps they need to learn that just because she will never ask for help, it does not mean that she might occasionally need it; still, at least they listen.
“You would make an excellent queen, Sif,” Thor says quietly, suddenly serious, and she is not entirely sure what to make of that, how she is supposed to respond.
“Not here,” she replies instead, and he tips his head to accede, and smiles.
ii.
Hogun is the least talkative of all of them.
This is no bad thing: Fandral and Volstagg talk enough for all of them, if truth be told, and Loki speaks more than enough for Asgard when he thinks he can win an argument. In constrast, Hogun prefers to let his weapons do the talking for him on the battlefield, and his expressions do the same in times of peace. It took Sif time to learn this; to discover that Hogun did not hate the rest of them and decline to speak to them as a result, but that he simply communicated in a different way.
At first, they all thought this was perhaps a trait of the Vanir, that Vanaheim was just a place of silence and grunts and eye rolls and the different shapes a smile could form, but when the Moguls began to draw back from his homeworld and Hogun felt ready to take his comrades to visit, they found a world more like Asgard than they had anticipated. Feasting, noise, jesting, speeches, and singing – oh, the singing.
“You should have taught us the one about the maiden, the squire and the wildebeest,” Fandral said, as they feasted with Hogun’s people and the alcohol had been flowing for so many hours that the barrels were tumbling from the hall and out into the star-flecked night.
“That one is actually banned on three different continents,” Hogun replied on a wry grin. He was quieter than his people, still, the difference highlighted even more on his own world, but he was happy, Sif could tell.
“I am not surprised,” Loki said, pale cheeks a little flushed in the heat of hundreds of Vanir crammed into their hall for a celebration. “The rhyming is… creative.”
Part of proving herself as strong and brave as any Asgardian man was learning their drinking songs and not flinching at any of them, not even the explicit ones that only appear after perhaps four days of celebrating a victory. Sif finds most of them hilarious, actually, and she will never be the one to crack of embarrassment first. They bring home drinking songs from all over the realms, where possible; smashing through poor translations when the original language is too nuanced and not quite crude enough for their purposes.
The realms are full of all kinds of people, all kinds of warriors, all kinds of legends, yet the songs they sing in their cups remain oddly similar wherever you go.
“We shall perform it for my next birthday,” Thor determined, slamming his tankard to the table.
Sif exchanged a look with Volstagg to see if he wanted to tell Thor what a terrible idea that was, young prince or not, and discovered that neither of them were going to bring it up now. With any luck, by the morning, Thor would have no recollection of most of this night, let alone the lyrics of the forty-seven verses of Vanaheim’s most banned song.
“We have a great deal of wonderful culture,” Hogun provided quietly, once Thor was finding out where to get more mead from and Fandral had been pulled into the lap of a grinning Vanir woman whose hair fell in the sort of curls Sif’s hair could never manage and only ever translated as tangles. “The Moguls prevented our technological development, but they did not hinder our artists, our poets, our craftsmen.”
Sif considered this, at the pride glittering in Hogun’s eye. He had spoken little of Vanaheim during his first years in Asgard, as though the memories stung too much to vocalise them. Now, clawing its way to freedom, his love for his homeworld was quiet but nonetheless easy to read for people who knew him well enough.
“Would you like Thor to get his hands on most of your culture?” Sif asked, instead, and was greeted with the smile that Hogun reserves only for those he cares about most.
“No,” he allowed, “no, perhaps I would not.”
iii.
Outside of its cities, Asgard is home to lush forests, tall mountains and glittering lakes larger than entire planets, though it must be admitted that Sif spends little time amongst nature unless someone – usually their prince – has accepted some sort of quest that involves vast amounts of physical labour and swatting small angry blood-sucking flies. Those parts tend not to be repeated when the quests become stories and the stories become sagas and the sagas become legends, but they are nonetheless true, and Sif has the scarring to prove it.
She much prefers ocean planets, where they can stay aboard ships for the length of their exploring, but no one ever consults her on the best planets to visit for ill-advised quests.
Today, they aren’t on an ill-advised quest, but Thor has definitely got a bet he’s intent on not losing, and so here they are, looking for the eggs of a bird native to only this particular continent on this particular world. Who the eggs are for and what they’re going to do with them once they have them is information Thor has not seen fit to furnish the rest of them with, but Sif doesn’t mind. This is not the first time this has happened, and in any case, the twin suns are shining, the forest they are in is full of tall, beautiful trees, and the path is littered with pale leaves that crunch satisfyingly underfoot. Sif hasn’t stabbed anything for three days, and sooner or later will become frustrated with this, but for now she is happy to walk along behind Thor and Fandral and Volstagg attempting to sing a song they cannot remember half of the verses to, while Loki looks long-suffering and Hogun pretends he is not with the rest of them.
Fandral trails off into a squawk mid-verse, as a looping vine from a nearby tree snags around his ankle and hoists him into the air.
“I see the foliage has the right opinion on your singing, Fandral,” Loki remarks dryly, as they all cluster together to watch Fandral flailing around above their heads.
“Get me down!” Fandral shouts, legs kicking, “it’s trying to eat me!”
There are several vines wrapped around him now, leaves twitching.
“Are there carnivorous plants on this planet?” Sif asks Loki, who is the one who spends the most time in the library and therefore the one who is expected to have the background knowledge.
Loki lifts and drops a shoulder. “Perhaps,” he says. “I just thought the illustrations in the book were particularly animated.”
“We may need to amend the records,” Volstagg remarks.
“SOMEBODY GET ME DOWN!” Fandral shouts, where his face is flushing red and his hair is dishevelled.
His sword is still at his waist, so Sif has no idea why he wants the rest of them to get involved: he should be able to cut himself loose.
Hogun tilts his head to one side. “I am not certain the tree is trying to eat him,” he says quietly.
“What else would it be trying to do?” Thor asks, and then sneezes as they are all covered in a shower of golden pollen. “…oh.”
Sif cups her hands around her mouth. “It is not trying to eat you, Fandral, it is trying to mate with you!”
Oddly, this does not stop Fandral thrashing.
“Cut it down!” he shouts down to them.
They all look at each other. “We do not usually kill people who are trying to mate with Fandral,” Volstagg says, slowly.
“It might set a terrible precedent,” Sif agrees.
“Use Mjolnir!” Fandral shrieks.
Thor tilts his head thoughtfully. “That seems an unnecessary show of force,” he says.
“None of you helped me when I was forcibly betrothed,” Sif remarks.
“You rescued yourself and got to keep the gown,” Loki points out, which, yes, she did. She’s saving it for a victory feast of some description, though perhaps not one in honour of saving Fandral from amorous plantlife.
Fandral’s angry kicking has slowed and it only takes one nick from his sword for the vines to withdraw hurriedly, depositing him on the forest floor once more. Thor offers him a hand to his feet, but Fandral ignores it.
“It can really only add to your standing with women,” Loki says, smirk slipping into sly. “Fandral the Dashing, so handsome that even trees cannot resist.”
“No,” Fandral says, and scowls.
“No harm was done,” Hogun points out.
Fandral continues to look mutinous as they continue their journey, failing at hiding their laughter from him. He sticks to the centre of the path from then on.
iv.
The universe is full of great and terrible and beautiful things, and even with a lifespan longer than that of people in most of the worlds she has visited, Sif knows she does not have a hope of seeing more than a handful of the incredible things the cosmos has to offer. Sometimes, the thought saddens her; sometimes, it is a relief.
It is Heimdall who holds the nine realms and beyond in his strong, sure hands, who sees all that there is to see, all that there will ever be to see. Her older brother, who sometimes turns his head and she can still see fondness in his eyes, the boy she barely remembers, the man he has become. Sometimes, all that she sees in his eyes are the stars, the planets, the shape of his knowledge and his care.
Of all the beautiful kingdoms and cities and natural wonders that Sif has visited and explored, she is still enamoured of the Bifrost, of the rainbow bridge that links Asgard to the rest of the universe. Their strength, their beauty, their purpose, the way that they glitter and all that they promise: sometimes her breath still catches, and while she sometimes thinks that the others would laugh if they knew, she also sees the way Thor views the realm that will one day be his when he thinks he will not be watched, and perhaps they would not.
Heimdall has, over the years, taught Sif to recognise a thousand different constellations of stars, and what they are called on different worlds throughout the galaxies, what different peoples have decided they represent. Heimdall allies himself with Asgard and with his people, but his knowledge stretches far beyond theirs; he is maybe the only one who truly knows that Asgardians are not right all the time.
The Bifrost must be guarded, must be operated, must be cared for, and Sif once asked Heimdall if he ever grew lonely out here, leagues away from the city, with only the stars and the silence and his whirring golden portal for company. In a way she already knew the answer before he spoke, but it was a relief to hear it: Heimdall can never be lonely, with the universe wrapped around him like any cloak, seeing and feeling and knowing everything, more than he could ever explain, more than Sif could ever fathom. It is a relief, knowing that he is always there, ready to pull her or her friends out of trouble the minute they call for it. She has staggered into this golden chamber injured, burning, exhausted, laughing, drunk, crying, carrying a wounded comrade, and Heimdall has always been there, steady and honest and ready to aid her however she requires.
Tonight, they feast in Asgard, and the sky is as full of glittering candles as there are stars, and Sif sips the mead she brought herself and will perhaps later sip the mead she has brought for her brother, her intent meaning perhaps more than the actions do. Sif might be missed later, but when she left Volstagg had a child on each knee and was happily regaling the table with the time Fandral was attacked by an amorous tree, and Fandral was throwing whatever cutlery was closest to him in Volstagg’s direction, so it is possible that no one noticed her slipping out after all.
“What do you see?” she asks, an old game from when she was a child and Heimdall was already more than a man, more than a brother, eyes that shone with the light of the universe.
He looks away from his vigil to where Sif sits a small distance from him, her hair tumbling from its bright silver pins, drink softening the sharpness of her smile, and something fond flits in his expression.
“I see a thousand forests burning,” he says, and Sif closes her eyes to the stars she can see through the roof, and instead loses herself in the cadence of Heimdall’s voice, in the way he views the worlds. “And I see a coronation of a young princess who was expected to die at birth. She wears a crown made of leaves, each one like a tiny purple crystal, that shine throughout the chamber so brightly that the coronation guests all wear dark glasses to protect their vision.”
Sif fell asleep as a child to many of these stories, back when she was young and scared and Loki had cut off all her golden hair as a prank or perhaps something darker, and when it grew back it was black and she wasn’t the same little girl she had been.
“I see three new stars bursting into life,” Heimdall continues quietly, and Sif lets herself slump a little more, cast adrift in wonders she will never quite understand no matter how diligently Heimdall describes them to her. “I see a marriage finally taking place that was arranged before the births of either of the participants, and it will end a decade-long civil war. And on another world the first of their people steps out of a craft that was supposed to break up in the atmosphere and takes their first walk on the planet’s closest moon. She reaches up, fingers spread, as though she can touch the stars.”
“Will she ever?” Sif asks, half-lost in the narrative.
“At this moment, she believes she can,” Heimdall replies, and here, now, with her brother and her mead and her world safe for another few minutes or perhaps months, with the universe she’ll never see drifting through her fingers like the silk of her dress, Sif smiles. Perhaps the belief is enough.