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“Do you miss it here?”
Sif poses the question to her supposedly empty chambers late one night, her voice piercing, almost deafening in the silence.
She’s all but alone now; Thor is somewhere on Midgard, Hogun is returned to Vanaheim, Volstagg is helping his wife with their newest child, and Fandral is off visiting his father who’s health recently took a turn and yet, in spite of that, she feels a distinct prickle at the back of her neck. It’s a very familiar prickle, indeed, one that has always accompanied a very certain someone. Logically she knows he is dead, but she remembers all the stories and legends she’s heard over the years about all the ways one can make a loved one return and, perhaps foolishly, something in her hopes.
To be fair, she’s also a bit inebriated, but nowhere near enough to consider herself drunk, just intoxicated enough to conjure up old ghosts and so, she supposes that that must be what this is.
“I believe I asked you a question, Loki.”
“How—”
“I’ve always known when you were near, it seems not even death can stop that feeling.”
“Y— you think I’m…dead?” His voice washes over her and she fights to keep from instinctively relaxing her stance and simply letting herself feel everything that comes with hearing that voice again. He sounds almost completely astonished. It would be unnerving, if the whole situation weren’t so pathetic already, but she finds that she cannot help but let out a deeply bitter, biting laugh.
“I know you to be dead. So, do you miss it?”
He’s silent for a while before he responds, thinking, considering, in that way of his.
“I miss some things.” He says softly, then he is silent a while longer and if she didn't still feel that strange awareness, she might’ve thought he’d left, but then he speaks again, even quieter this time. “I miss you.”
Seconds later, the feeling is gone and when she turns around, there is no one there.
And so that is how it begins.
- - -
“I’m sorry.”
He says it to her late one night as she stands out on the balcony connected to her room. This is the third time in the past fortnight she’s felt his presence at her right shoulder, the same space he’d always occupied in life, but this is the first time he’s started the conversation.
“You?” She says it with a bark of laughter, albeit less bitter than the first time she’d felt his presence. “Apologizing? Now I know I must be imagining things. Or, oh! Perhaps I’m dreaming.”
“Sif.”
His voice sounds so desperate, so alive and yet she cannot face him but for the simple fact that she knows he is not; she saw the body herself a few weeks— or was it months?— ago when a small retinue sent him across the sea and off to Valhalla. Seeing him again would only reopen the wound she’d just barely gotten closed and so, she does not turn around.
“I must be. Surely this is a dream, a hallucination, a figment of my addled mind. I’m not sure what to call it or you, all I know is that it’s not real. It— you can’t be.”
“Only last week you said I must be one of the dead returned to haunt you.” The raw openness present when he’d said her name is all but gone now, his voice taking on that analytical tone he’d loved so much marked with a familiar twinge of amused faux-irritation. It’s familiar, comforting, and it seems that the projection her mind has crafted has retained her late lover’s ability to make her smile no matter the circumstances. “You’ll have to make up your mind about me sometime if we’re to keep meeting like this.”
“Well of the two of us, which one was more likely to be found in the library reading all the information he could absorb?” It’s a rhetorical question, but she hears him huff out a laugh in reply. “I cannot say for sure what you are, simply that you are and, of course, that you are is not really here.”
“Ah well, thank you, that clears things up for me.”
“Oh hush, you.”
“As you wish, my Lady.” She can hear the genuine smile in his voice and can picture him giving a mocking courtly bow before he moves closer to her side as for once he, or her approximation of him, obeys her order; content to watch the stars with her in blessed silence.
Well, almost blessed silence, it seems he simply has to get away with one more brief interruption.
“I am sorry though.”
He never says for what.
When she finally leaves the balcony to prepare herself for bed, he is gone. True, he was never actually there to begin with, but regardless, Sif feels an almost unbearable weight settle on her chest that she didn’t expect.
He said he was sorry.
And though he never specified what the apology was for, it feels deeply significant. That night she is plagued with dreams and memories of him, of them, and when she wakes the next morning, it is with tears in her eyes.
- - -
He does not visit her every single night, indeed, it would not be possible with all the missions the Allfather has sent her out on recently but despite that, whenever she finds herself back on Asgard in her chambers, she seems to feel him there with her. Even if she cannot not see him in her periphery, the weight of his magic suffuses itself throughout her rooms in a way that makes her feel comfortable and safe. She’d always associated his magic with safety before, but now, with all the increasingly dangerous quests she’s been given, coming home feels like a luxury and the lingering magic that remains is yet another thing that allows her to feel even more settled and at peace on those rare occasions when she is home for more than a mere afternoon.
Often when she is in Asgard overnight waiting for him underneath the brilliant sky has become a part of her evening routine. For even if he doesn’t appear, it is never time wasted; indeed, the night sky as seen from Asgard is one of her favorite views in all the realms. The stars are vibrant here, galaxies reaching across the inky black in a watercolor of oranges and purples and yellows and greens that makes her heart ache.
In truth, looking up at the stars now reminds her of nights from long ago when she would sneak out to the Queen’s gardens and meet her best friend at the gate, bright-eyed and excited to share the things he’d learned in Asgard’s libraries. Sif can remember a hundred nights like those when she and Loki had lain out on a blanket looking up in wonder as he told her stories from Nidavellir to Vanaheim to Midgard that sought to find meaning and purpose in the sky above, memorializing the stories of gods and men in their fiery hearts and hoping to be a part of those stories themselves one day. These memories are some of the fondest from her childhood, standing beside those of the first time she wielded a sword and was allowed onto the training grounds and it pierces her heart to think of them now when all those who had been with her during that time are nearly gone.
He only seems to interrupt her vigil to her on nights like these, when the stars are bright and the realms relatively silent. Sometimes they spend hours speaking of the past, of a thousand quests and festivals and feasts and intimate moments, on others, they stand in silence not quite side by side, but close enough that she could reach out and touch him if she thought she would feel more than just air.
It is strange and beautiful and it always leaves her heart feeling like the mess of space spread out above her in a way she cannot quite explain.
- - -
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
It is an innocent question posed by Fandral at what’s shaping up to be another interminably long, boring feast and for a moment she feels her whole body go tense.
“I…” The noise in the room around her seems to quiet to a whisper and she could swear she feels the Allfather’s eye settle on her, “I am not quite sure. Why do you ask?”
“As you know my father recently went to his reward and my mother swears she still can see him around the house. I received a letter from her today in which she speaks of hearing his laugh on the wind and finding certain things she’d thought long lost in the most obvious of places. She credits it to his coming back and haunting her.”
“And you’re asking me because…”
“Of all our friends, you are the only one still living who I can picture having considered a question such as that.”
“The only one still living?”
“Well it’s a topic I’m sure Loki could’ve expounded upon at considerable length but as he is not here, I suppose I am settling for you.”
He says it in a jesting tone, but Sif can hear the undercurrent of sadness threaded through his words. Of the Warriors Three, Fandral seemed to be the only one that actually cared to look past the façade the second prince put up and tried to build a friendship with him and so it is something of a comfort to her that, in the absence of Frigga and Thor, it seems she might have someone that she can turn to in sympathy when the pain in her heart grows too overwhelming.
“He would’ve gone on and on, wouldn’t he?” She says with a smile.
“Of that, I have no doubt.”
They laugh together for a moment, but in the silence that follows, Sif finds herself considering her friend’s question, particularly as it is one that has quite recently been haunting her.
“I think…I am not sure if I believe in them as our friends in the other realms do. That is to say, I don’t believe that the ones we love return to us as spirits wishing either good or ill, but I do think that we can call them back to our hearts, thereby creating a memory of them that is so real that they seem…almost present outside of our bodies.”
“As if we are the ones haunting ourselves, you mean?”
“Indeed as if…” She stutters a moment, surprised at the honesty she finds herself revealing through her words, “as if, we take the impression of their love that was left behind and use it as a cast from which we create their physical forms.”
“You speak as one with experience might.”
“I do.” She gives him a weary smile, or perhaps more accurately, a weary grimace. “Let us simply say it is not only your mother who has been seeing ghosts of late.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
For a while, Fandral says nothing more, and Sif thinks they’re going to leave the topic where it lies until he pins her with a look of sympathy and deep sadness she’s rarely seen from him before and his words cut her to the quick. “I know we never spoke of it; not while he was alive, not when he fell from the Bifrost, not when he was hauled back in chains, and not when he died again, but…I must confess, I knew how much you loved him.” He looks meaningfully at the seat directly to the left of the one reserved for the Allmother’s helm, where a brilliant green cloak lies draped over a chair. “I knew you mourned for him in a way none of the rest of us did and so I am sorry you have had to go through it all over again, and just when it seemed there could’ve been a path forward towards his redemption.”
“I…” She searches for a moment for some kind of answer, for something that encompasses what her friend’s words, what his acceptance means to her, but the meager ones she finds come up short and fall from her lips leaving something wanting in their wake. “Thank you.”
“If ever you need anything Sif, ever, all you need to do is ask.”
She nods and, with as much grace as possible, leaves the feasting hall in a rush, blinking back tears and completely missing the frown that mars the Allfather’s face and the way his eye follows her out.
When she returns to her chambers, he is there. Of course he is.
She isn’t sure how she knows, but she just does in that uncanny way she’s always been able to feel his presence. Granted, she isn’t sure what exactly to expect from him, particularly after the ordeal she’d faced at dinner, and then his words stall her in her tracks.
“I think I must be the most selfish man in all the realms.”
He is closer on this particular night and if she concentrates, Sif would swear she can feel the warmth of his presence— ironic, given his heritage— at her back.
“Why?” She offers teasingly, “For giving up your chance at Valhalla just to see little old me?”
The wistfulness in his voice is gone as something more pained yet almost…sheepish takes its place, as though it was him with the secret rather than her speaking to a ghost.
“Something like that.”
“Hmm.”
And they leave it there, the weight of his statement disappearing a few moments later as he prattles on, moving from topic to topic with a kind of internal logic that Sif is certain almost no one else could follow. After a few minutes spent listening to him speak, she abandons her view of the stars to prepare for bed, never turning to face him wholly, content to catch glimpses of his form in her periphery listening to the smile in his voice as he speaks. As she finally settles into bed and the lights of her room dim, Sif feels the mattress dip as he takes his place next to her, lulling her to sleep with tales she’d long forgotten.
Just before she truly slips off into her dreams, Sif would swear before the Allfather himself that she feels cold lips pressing tenderly against her forehead, filling her with so much warmth she forgets to worry about her sanity.
The very next morning, the Allfather sends her on a months-long quest and, though she does not yet know it, it will be the last time she sees him and her brother and the Warriors Three alive and the last time she sees Asgard whole.
Sif does not know any of this, and yet upon rising from bended knee, she feels something deep within her fracture.
She can see what looks like a tear shining in the Allfather’s brilliant blue eye.
Later she will realize that somehow, he knew too.
- - -
Lady War spends weeks upon weeks upon months floating alone in a spacecraft and, although logically, Sif knows she should feel utterly drowned in loneliness, totally overwhelmed by the solitude after so many years in the busy halls of Gladsheim, she feels an unexpected peace. It is a peace marred with sorrow as she cannot help but miss her friends and her family and those who have moved on to Valhalla, but for the first time in her life, everything is unbelievably quiet and finally, something that has been restless within her settles.
Of course, it helps that she isn’t quite as alone as she pretends.
Some nights she thinks she hears his voice reading aloud the poems he collected for her from the furthest reaches of the nine as she drifts off into sleep and sometimes when she wakes in the wee hours of the morning before ship’s lights turn on, she would swear she feels a featherlight touch tracing her spine as soft, low words of love fall and settle around her. She only ever feels his presence on the ship— it seems that at least this conjuration has the consideration to allow her total focus when she lands on some far-flung galactic system to carry out the Allfather’s designs— but this version of him seems to have appeared as a way to calm her, to quiet her mind in the midst of seemingly universe-wide chaos.
She tries not to think too long on what that says about her mental state, and mostly succeeds. After all, there is a not insignificant part of her that thinks it’s worth it, for she always seems to be more well rested, to smile more, to feel happier after a night spent dreaming of him.
- - -
“I must be mad.”
Months have turned to long years spent gazing into the abyss, into the spaces between the stars where he fell only a few short years ago. As always, she knows he’s there behind her, knows that he’ll respond, and she feels a moment of concern about her mind being shredded, ripped into tatters by the loneliness, by the distance, by the heartbreak, before she speaks again.
“Do you think me mad, my love?”
She has long since stopped trying to conceal her affection for him in these moments; after all if he is a figment of her imagination, he would know anyway, and if he is some kind of ghost, she has come to realize that that means it is impossible that he is visiting from Valhalla, which means that after she crosses into those hallowed halls, they’ll never see each other again. Because she cannot, will not stomach that thought, particularly when she thinks of his end, she continues to engage him; with words she’d been too cowardly to speak, arguments she’d been too afraid would break them apart, retorts she’d crafted with the thought of drawing out his elusive smile in the hope that he will keep coming back, and he does. No matter who or what this entity wearing her late lover’s face may be, she finds she is deeply grateful for his presence and she savors every word.
“No darling,” His voice feels like an embrace, like his fingers tangled in her hair, like a kiss, and fleetingly she wishes she could reach out and touch him without fearing her hands would pass through him, “not ever.”
She never imagined, after everything, that their time together would be spent with him dead and her half-alive on the edge of space.
- - -
Some days later, a nightmare jolts her into semi-consciousness.
Nightmares are not unusual, not for one who’s seen as much as she has, but they unsettle her nonetheless as they always have.
It takes her a moment to find her bearings again and when she does, she’s not totally convinced she hasn’t woken to a dream within a dream rather than into true consciousness. Instead of a pillow beneath her head, it is his chest, rhythmically rising and falling encased in the soft silk of an absurd sleeping tunic that she’d spent eons teasing him about, and strong and steady in her ears is a heartbeat slower and calmer than her own. A second later her breath catches when she realizes that her mind has somehow recreated the exact coolness and lithe strength of his fingers gently weaving through her hair.
“Nightmare?” His voice rumbles through her and her heart breaks. He knows her so well. How has he always seemed to know her like this?
“Yes.”
“Do you wish to speak about it?”
“I barely remember it anymore, only that Asgard was in flames and you did not survive it.” He tenses and she sighs, her voice weary with grief and pure exhaustion, “You lay dying in my arms and because I could not save you, I screamed until the very foundations of Gladsheim shook and crumbled. I did not start Ragnarok,” She says sleepily but with a sureness that has been rare these days, “but for you, I ended it.”
“Sif.”
He sounds so soft, so vulnerable just then and, perhaps because of that, or perhaps because this is certainly another blissful dream, she finds her most closely held secret, the one thing she’d guarded jealously, even throughout all their strange meetings slipping from her lips without prompting.
“I loved you, you know?” She says it into his chest, refusing to meet his eyes and see this for what it truly is: a mirage, a lovely but ultimately impermanent dream. “Even when I hated you, even when I saw you bringing the Mad Titan’s wrath upon Midgard, even when you were locked away in that terrible cell, I couldn’t bring myself to stop. I loved you still.”
“You did?”
Disbelief colors his tone and if she didn't know any better, she’d think she was revealing some new information, some long-held secret to him. But that, of course, isn't possible. The real Loki is dead and this is some pale imitation her memory has crafted in the haze of a beautiful dream. This Loki is merely parroting the way she would want this conversation to go if he were still here.
“I did.”
She hesitates, almost afraid of the confession until she remembers that this isn’t really him, only her own mind, and so what’s the harm in telling herself something she already knows? Maybe saying it out loud will finally be the thing that frees her from all of this seemingly endless grief, this seemingly endless love with nowhere to go.
“I still do. I…I thought it would go away like you said, but it hasn’t. I still love you, just as completely as I did before.” She yawns, nuzzling up into the crook of his neck, smelling old parchment and ink and the sharp, evergreen scent of magic. “Sometimes I think I’ll never stop.” Her breath evens out and deepens. “I don’t know if I ever want to.”
She feels as well as hears him gasp then, remaining perfectly still for a few moments, as if he’s contemplating saying something, but merely returns to his task of soothing her hair down her back, the arm braced around her waist tightening just enough to make her feel safe. As he hums an old folk tune, the dream slips away from her even as she tries to catch hold of it, but it is too late. She falls back— or does she let go?— into a sleep that is completely devoid of dreams, dark but still warm, empty but not lonely, peaceful. Utterly peaceful. How strange, she’d never thought of falling as peaceful before.
When she wakes in the morning she is alone. That does not surprise her, for how could it be otherwise? But what is surprising is how much lighter she feels.
- - -
Alarms blare, echoing down the halls of the Statesman as his people— yes his people— are rushed into escape pods.
“I have to go.”
“Loki, they’ll be onboard any second—”
“I know.” His voice breaks and something in Thor cracks too; it's the most emotion, the most desperation he’s seen out of his brother in years. “But there is something I have to do first. Please, I need only a minute.”
“I—” Thor has half a mind to refuse him, but the look on his brother’s face is so shockingly sincere, so open and raw, that he cannot find it in himself to do it, and so he nods. “Fine, don’t be long.”
He disappears then and, true to his word, reappears down the hall less than a minute later looking disheveled and utterly wrecked for a moment before he composes himself.
“Are you alright? Where did you go?”
“If we make it through this I’ll tell you, I swear. I won’t even lie. Perhaps it’ll even be a funny story one day.”
- - -
Something feels different, she thinks as she stares into the swirl of a galaxy she never thought she’d see, for the first time, this feels like anticipation rather than hopelessness. The anticipation doesn’t last much longer as she senses his presence again, closer, far closer than it’s ever been before.
“I haven’t much time.”
His breath ghosts over her ear and she feels her hair move. In her shock, finally, finally she turns to face him, stifling a gasp as she almost bumps into him. Loki sounds frantic and looks a bit of a mess, but his eyes are piercing, brimming with affection and love and a hint of genuine terror and his words…well, his words simply aren’t making any sense.
“I haven’t much time and I seriously doubt I’ll make it through this, and so I have to tell you that I— I love you too.” He laughs, a little desperate, a little brokenhearted, as he trips over the words in his rush to get them out. “Always have, always will. I’m sorry I didn't say it before. You deserve to hear it every single day.”
And just as she’s trying to figure out what he means by that, his cool, lightly calloused hands cradle her face and he kisses her and it feels so real that her heart swells as she leans into him, tangling her fingers in his hair and responding with abandon until the lack of air makes her a bit dizzy. When she pulls back, his forehead is still leaning against hers and he is breathless too.
“I love you too, Sif. Remember that always, I love you.”
Loki kisses her one last time, tears running down his cheeks and onto hers, and disappears, leaving her with one last “Love you.”
A couple of minutes later as she stands frozen in shock, she feels it; the pull and twist and snap of a rope stretched to its limit before breaking. Heimdall. She does not know how she knows it, but her brother is gone. An overwhelming grief threatens to drown her when, seconds later, she feels it again: pull, twist, snap.
Fleetingly she wonders if Thor has died too but even as the words form in her mind, she knows them to be false, knows that her shieldbrother still lives, so what could that feeling be? Perhaps the Warriors Three have been lost in one fell swoop? But that theory simply feels wrong as well.
For the rest of the evening, she wanders about her ship as a ghost, knowing that something has happened, that the universe has fundamentally changed, and that two souls have been lost forever, but still unable to parcel out who. Indeed as she falls asleep, tears in her eyes, the wisp of a thought wends its way through her mind, but she brushes it aside almost immediately, no matter how right it feels; it cannot be possible that for all this time Loki has been alive and visiting rather than simply haunting her. No, he had been long dead before today, he could not have been killed once more. Besides, she has already mourned him countless times already, she will not do it again. She resolves to put Loki out of her mind from now on, to do her best not to conjure him up in her bouts of loneliness.
When she wakes the next morning, she dresses herself in a few of the garments of black she’s brought with her and prays that her brother’s soul has been delivered safe to Valhalla. A feeling of calm washes over her as a voice that sounds suspiciously like Heimdall’s whispers in her mind and tells her to set a course straight for Midgard, now! Sif complies, the voice filling her with an urgency that is quite unsettling. As she starts her journey, she redoubles her efforts to banish Loki from her thoughts, though he remains in the recesses of her mind throughout the day, she otherwise succeeds as he does not appear to her that day, or the next, or the next.
Her journey continues on like that, mundane and uneventful until one afternoon, a pit of unease opens in her stomach, her only warning before seconds later she crumbles into dust.
- - -
When Sif is brought back from wherever the dusted went, it is once again to her empty ship and she works the old engine overtime in order to make it to Midgard. As she journeys there, she finds a universe changed.
Unfortunately, she barely has time to think about or even truly process those changes as her life quickly becomes a flurry of activity. Within hours of her landing they are defeating Thanos, then Thor, who it feels like she has spoken to for all of five minutes, decides to leave Midgard and the remaining Aesir must work to rebuild their society, facing a thousand daily challenges, large and small, as they work to decide who and what their people will become now.
What remains of Asgard settles down on the coast of a Midgardian country called Norway and the survivors have banded together in a way she hasn’t seen for a great many millennia though strangely, she feels more of an outsider here than she ever did back home. Even at the height of her outspoken lobbying to be a warrior, when it looked like she would never be accepted as a shieldmaiden, she still felt like one of the Aesir but now…it is strange. She knows not what, only that something within her has utterly and fundamentally changed.
Perhaps it is that she now has a young ward to look after in the form of her nephew. The boy, Axl, is good-natured and sweet, as fiercely honest and forthright as her half-brother ever was and, though she’d had no inkling of him previously, Sif immediately loves him as though he were her own. It seems that after years of wandering, she has finally been given a reason to stop and settle down for a while. She has little in the way of natural parental instincts and, by the way her fellow citizens stare when she and Axl walk about the little town, it’s obvious, but Sif refuses to let it bother her. Her dear nephew sticks to her like glue and together they are their own little family, and so against truly all odds, her life feels rather complete.
And yet, that kiss, that heart-wrenching, beautiful, long-awaited kiss, still haunts her dreams, waking her in the middle of the night, driving her to spend hours staring at the sky from her window. He never appears. The only thing these dreams seem to achieve is to consistently make her snappish and irritable over breakfast with her last living relation and, because she refuses to let a long dead relationship damage the one that is now the most important in her life, Sif resolves to bury the memories and move on.
Historically, the shieldmaiden has not made a habit of lying to herself nor of persuading herself to an answer that she does not have full faith in, but this case is the exception. She knows this is not the answer that is factual and logical and reasonable, but it is the one that she needs to sleep at night, the one she needs to focus on the present rather than dwelling in the past. What I spoke of with Fandral in the Great Hall must be true, she tells herself, my grief took tangible form and, in a fit of loneliness and desperation, I conjured Loki up so that I could hear him say the words I’d longed to hear for hundreds of years.
Even as she repeats it to herself, doubt gnaws at her, but eventually the doubt disappears, banished, forced from her mind. That is the answer, it must be.
It must be.
It is.
- - -
Time passes, and Sif finds herself becoming more accustomed to Midgard, though she is more reserved now than she had been on Asgard of old. Where the old version of her held a place of honor on the War Council, sat at the high table during feasts and festivals, and knew most of the court by name, this new version of Sif concerns herself only with what she holds dearest; she cares for her nephew, leads training with the warriors, tends to her surprisingly productive garden, and helps other parents in New Asgard by running their children ragged, coming up with quests and challenges and tournaments like the ones she’d played at as a child. This is easier for her, it is too hard to accept the invitation to join the ruling council or to jest with those she spars with when it still feels like there is a shard of iron lodged in her chest, one that twists every time she interacts with anyone but Axl.
All of her friends, everyone she’d loved and grown up with, anyone and anything that reminds her of home is dead or purposefully gone and it is too much. These days, even hearing the name of one of the fallen is enough to dull her other senses and set off a ringing in her ears that makes everything around her go blurry and out of focus. The only way she’s found to make the ringing stop, to make her vision return, to make her pulse slow, is to walk along the shoreline. Initially an avoidance tactic, it becomes a near-daily habit, to greet the dawn by the seaside, gazing up into the sky as the stars fade. The rational part of her mind claims it is for the scenery, that the rhythmic rushing of the tide calms and centers her, but a voice in the back of her mind whispers that she is waiting on someone who will never return.
Axl grows and she continues to train him and foster him the best she can, and though she does tacitly fear that she is raising him to be rather more like herself; daring and bold and occasionally hot-tempered, rather than her more calm and reasoned and patient brother, she tries as best she can to put that thought far from her mind. In the absence of his parents, she knows with a sort of otherworldly certainty that this is what Heimdall would’ve wanted and usually, that puts any of her anxieties to rest.
- - -
Thor returns to New Asgard on a brilliant, warm afternoon just before the summer solstice.
The spacecraft he has been traveling in whizzes through the atmosphere, cutting a long tail into the earth and stopping just inches away from the main feasting hall. The Aesir flock to their prince and his unusual crew, swarming them like bees as they cheer and cry and offer hugs and places to stay, bright and joyful and warm in a way that Sif cannot quite muster at the moment.
When their eyes meet, she offers him a solemn nod and at least he seems to understand as he returns the gesture. That is not to say she isn’t happy to see him, of course she is, he is her best friend, her brother-in-arms, her prince, but he also left and not just for a few days or weeks, he was gone for years. The logical part of her knows that Thor likely left for the same reasons that she withdrew from New Asgard, but she is War, ever one to hold a grudge, and that makes it near impossible for her to leave her feelings of anger and betrayal to the side in the face of all this joy.
As Sif turns away from the ever-growing crowd, the weight of the past few years press upon her, and she struggles to take a deep breath. It has been over a decade since Thor’s failed coronation, since their lives resembled anything close to normalcy, a mere blip in the course of their long lifetimes and yet, it feels as though time has been stretched into millennia. Behind her someone calls for ale while another person rings the bell that signifies a feast is in the works and she starts the walk back to her cottage by the sea, swallowing thickly as she runs into Axl, encouraging him to join his friends at the feast, gently reminding him of his curfew and hoping that her smile did not seem weak and her voice did not waiver.
- - -
He finds her a few hours later standing on the coastline, eyes fixed somewhere above the horizon as the sun begins its descent. For a long time, neither of them say anything, the silence more awkward than anything else, and Sif cannot help but compare it to the peaceful, comforting presence she’d felt with Loki by her side. How had she drifted so far from the person she had been before his fall?
“You know,” He says, and his tone, though light, carries a note of sorrow just below the surface, “the people are saying you’re heartbroken. That after I left you became an antisocial recluse who has turned her back on all but the children of Asgard.”
“If I seem heartbroken,” She spits back, hearing his implication on New Asgard’s behalf and thoroughly scoffing at it, “perhaps it is because my home was blown to bits, my friends and family slaughtered, my love— everything I loved ripped away from me while I was a million miles away!” The harshness of her tone ebbs away as grief rushes in with a shuddering breath. “There were no bodies, by the time I got here, the funeral rites were long finished, and after the battle, everyone wanted to rebuild. If I seem heartbroken, perhaps it is because I mourned alone.”
“I promise you, you did not.”
“And how was I supposed to know that?” Her eyes are finally torn away from the sky, cutting over to him as her anger returns, sharp and blazing. “You left and stayed away. If I hadn’t found Axl I… you left!”
“I know, I—”
“And I understand why, but by the Norns, Thor, you couldn’t have kept in touch!? I lost my parents, my friends, my brother! If anyone was going to understand what that was like, I thought…” Again the tide of her anger ebbs, begins to feel more like grief, her sharpness blunting as she takes a moment to look into his earnest eyes.
“I am sorry, Sif.”
“I know.”
The silence that settles over them then is more comfortable than that of before, warmer, not quite friendly, but getting there.
“Do you know what else the people say?”
“You should know by now I care little for what our people see fit to comment upon.”
The words cut harsher than she intended, but this was the first time someone had been so bold so as to confront her with the whispers she knew had run wild over the past few years.
“I do know that, but this commentary is not that.” He smiles and laughs a little, “They say that Axl is a wonderful boy, that he is a credit to your skills as a parent, that you have raised him to be as brave and dedicated to this place as you were to our home, that your brother, surely has smiled down upon you both and blessed you from Valhalla’s halls.”
A spark of joy shoots through her and she cannot help but smile. In her many, many years, she has learned to live without the collective validation of the Aesir— hoping for it often only leads to disappointment and spiraling as she had tried time and again to pull herself in a thousand directions trying to please everyone— but hearing them admit they were wrong in this brings her a swell of pride that she refuses to tamp down.
“Did you get to meet him?”
“Briefly. I should like to see how his training is coming along soon though.”
“You’re staying?”
“I’ve been away too long.”
“I am glad to hear that.” And she truly is, Asgard— New Asgard— has been less vibrant without its prince. Indeed, it will never be what it was, but Sif can feel in her bones that the years to come will be brighter than the ones before. “Your mother and father would be too.”
He hums in agreement and smiles sadly as they fall back into silence at the thought of the late King and Queen.
“How are you, Sif?”
Ah yes, how to answer that?
“I am…I am never quite alone. I'm sure as you can imagine, it is hard to ever truly be when raising a child, especially when Axl was younger, but the people are not quite wrong.” She is loath to admit it, but this is her best friend and she is not in the habit of lying to him. “Not that I’m antisocial, but rather…I like to keep to myself and, when I am by myself, I feel lonely in a way I never have been before.”
“How?” His brows furrow quizzically, “Were you not more alone in the years you spent gallivanting across the galaxy while I spent my time between Midgard and hunting Surtur?”
“No, I wasn’t I had—” She bites her lip, stifling what were about to be far too honest words.
“You had what? I thought you were sent out by yourself while performing quests for the crown?” His words contain a good deal of amusement hinting at some joke that she doesn’t quite follow.
“I…”
The way Sif sees it, she has two options here: she can continue to lie, concealing the double-bladed truth of her heart from one of her oldest and dearest friends, risking his frustration and his friendship as she attempts to come up with a believable answer to his question, or, for the first time in her life, she can be honest about this particular topic. Finally, she can try to let loose these feelings that have been trapped in her heart since she was very, very young. Steeling herself, Sif takes a deep breath, tracking the movement of a flock of birds soaring over and into the open water, swallows her pride and privacy, and speaks.
“You know, after this, you might think me completely foolish if not utterly mad.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
She glances at him, caught by an earnestness in his eyes that seems to be a combination of the old carefree and light Thor, and this new one who carries the weight of his losses like a cloak of Ivaldi-forged steel. This version of her friend seems to perhaps have a wise word to accompany his ears and it is that realization that encourages her to speak of those days spent wandering in space, often physically alone, but never lonely.
“I…I wasn’t actually alone. Not really anyway. I had— well, I suppose it would make more sense to say that my mind had or…or perhaps my heart had…” She shakes her head, trying to organize her chaotic thoughts for a moment, but this is her first time speaking of this to anyone in decades and it is near impossible. “I know not what caused it, but something in me crafted some illusion to keep me company. Not all that often, just every once and a while.”
“Of what?” She tilts her head and feels a blush rise, from the sound of his voice alone, she knows that that mischievous glimmer is back in his eyes. “Or perhaps should I say of who?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t.” He smiles, curious and genuine and finally, Sif feels she is set at ease. After all, this is her last friend in all the realms, if she cannot tell him this, who can she tell? “I swear it on my honor as a warrior.”
She rolls her eyes and sighs, this is a conversation that’s been quite a long time coming and, thinking about it; the whole story of her and Loki’s doomed relationship and Thor’s reaction to it, scares her just a little bit. Luckily, despite her brief respite, she is still Lady War and fear is just another part of her domain, and it is a part she is intimately familiar with, one that she knows precisely how to meet and push through and defeat. And so, she does.
“Your brother.” She says it with a soft, resigned laugh to temper the awkwardness, though it barely works, “I’d swear he was haunting me.”
She expects the surprise that splashes across Thor’s face, but not the way it drops mere seconds later into a look so despairing that Sif can’t quite comprehend it.
“I…Sif, I don’t think he was.”
“Excuse me?”
“He wasn’t haunting you, he… how did no one tell you?” He says, seemingly to himself. For a moment he considers something, a shadow crossing over his usually sunny face as he seems to steel himself before continuing, “When was the last time you saw him?”
“I— I don’t remember the exact date but it was one day, maybe two before I was turned to dust. I mean, I could’ve sworn I heard him but…tell me what?” The look of despair on her friend’s face turns then to sharp pain and Sif feels her heart drop. “Thor, what is it? He was long dead by the time of the dusting, was he not? What am I missing?”
“No.” Thor’s voice comes out as a whisper, but to her, sounds like the echoing blast of a cannon.
“What?” The question slips from her lips and she can hear her pounding heart echoing in her ears, drowning out the world around her. It’s a struggle to focus on what exactly he’s saying.
“Sif, my brother died the same day as yours at the hands of the Mad Titan.”
“No.”
Yet as she says that she remembers that feeling of that second pull-twist-snap that she could never quite figure out and knows his words to be true.
She’d be tempted to say that her heart breaks but that’s not quite right, after all, her heart has been broken many times before this…this is different.
“No!”
She gasps and it feels more like her soul has been cleaved from her body, torn asunder, and she has no anchor. Somewhere she hears an anguished wail echo across the water and vaguely she registers her knees giving out as she collapses onto the sand and rock of the beach. Somehow she realizes that that scream, that terrible, horrible, gut-wrenching, half-alive sounding thing is coming from her.
He was real. He was always real and suddenly every word, every jest, every confession is colored with a new light.
He was real.
He was real and he was there and he loved me.
Even in the end.
Especially in the end.
Her heart was already shattered and so now her soul breaks.
- - -
He hears it, feels it, the moment she learns of his true death, even as his spirit rests in Valhalla.
He can’t quite quantify it other than to say that it has always been like this with Sif, from the moment they made vows to each other, two children, barely a few centuries old, swearing to protect each other always and in all ways.
It is horrifying to hear her answering scream, anguished and heartbroken in a way that rings in his ears for days— or whatever passes for days in this afterlife— afterward. In that moment, he wonders if he should’ve just told her, should’ve confessed to his survival and rode on the brief wave of happiness it would’ve given them both. Unfortunately he cannot live in that world for long when he remembers, fondly, his lover’s sense of duty that would’ve obliged her to tell all of Asgard the truth of his not-death. It would’ve broken them apart, would’ve broken their hearts all over again, but would it not have been worth it for even a day of living in the knowledge that they were alive and together once again?
He is certain the pain he feels at that thought is a mere echo of hers, and because he could never quite stand to see her in pain, he tries to push against the walls of Valhalla. Repeatedly he tries in this timeless place to get through to her, to return, but time and again he is rebuffed. It seems he cannot outwit death this time. But still, he keeps pushing.
He spends hours, days, weeks, until he falls to the ground, utterly exhausted and then, and only then, does he weep.
- - -
“Why did you fear telling me?” He finally asks, after he's finished the whole tale of Loki’s demise.
They sit side by side looking out across the water together and for the first time, she doesn’t feel anxiety or terror in the aftermath of her outburst nor at the thought of what she is about to admit. Mostly, she just feels empty.
“You would have questions. Why did my mind conjure up him? Why not my parents or Heimdall or our friends or your mother or someone else I loved, and then I would have to tell you that I loved—” His name catches in her throat as though saying it out loud might be too much right now and blessedly, Thor understands.
“Loki?”
“Yes.” The word falls from her so quiet, so raw, she barely recognizes it.
“Huh.” He sounds confused to be sure, but not upset. Not angry like they thought he’d be, in fact he sounds more…surprised than anything else. “How long?”
“A while, we were mostly on-and-off over the years though.”
“What, like four or five years? Or was it closer to six?”
“Closer to seven, actually.”
“Years?” She tilts her head, with an embarrassed wince and his jaw drops incredulously. “Decades?”
“How upset would you be if I said it was centuries?”
“Sif!” His utter shock in the face of this completely absurd situation and the way his voice has steadily been creeping up into a higher and higher pitch is enough to startle a small laugh out of her. “Seven hundred years and neither of you thought to tell me?!”
“Well to be fair, we never told anyone. And like I said, it was on-and-off.”
“But what about Haldor?”
“That happened during one of our off periods and I was only with Haldor for about five years before the whole incident with Lorelei happened.”
“But you— but he— no one knew?!”
The way he is stuttering and stammering as he tries to process this new information while genuinely humorous also leaves her chest aching as she has the distinct thought that they shouldn’t be having this conversation alone.
No, this conversation should be punctuated with Fandral’s jests, Volstagg’s advice and well-wishes, Hogun’s considering hums as he hears his suspicions confirmed, and the solid, reliable feeling of Loki’s hand resting on the small of her back as he struggles not to bury his face into her neck in embarrassment, murmuring we need to get out of here, please my love, this is torture.
“Looking back on it I’m certain that your mother and Heimdall knew, particularly once your brother learned how to hide us from my brother’s sight, and apparently, Fandral found out somehow so there’s an excellent chance Volstagg and Hogun knew as well.”
“But why did you not tell anyone? I mean, Seven hundred years…Sif, you should’ve married, had children, lived a full life in the open with each other!”
Hearing him give voice to a wish she’d carried for all those years, especially with the incredulity and blind optimism in his tone causes an unexpected but well-trodden pain. Thor’s assertions tacitly confirm the wildest hopes that she’d secreted away in the depths of her heart that held on to the belief that, had they gone public, it wouldn’t have ended the relationship as both of them had cynically thought, it would’ve allowed them to flourish. It would’ve given them a life it would have…she almost lets her regrets overtake and drown her but she shakes her head, allowing reality to resettle back over her.
“There were a few times I considered petitioning the Allfather for his approval of our union but then, what would’ve been the point?”
“What do you mean?”
“We never could have gotten approval from your father so why even take the chance?” The words angrily bubble out of her as the truth of what their situation had been reignites the frustration she’d suppressed nearly as long as their relationship had gone on. “The only thing it would’ve done was expose our relationship. From there gossip would spread, gossip that had never treated either of us kindly, and one of us likely would’ve been shipped off to another realm until a suitable match could be found for the other.”
“But that could’ve taken years, you could’ve fought it, you could’ve—”
“We couldn’t have, not when I was always supposed to marry you.” Thor seems to be torn between shock and apprehension at her outburst, it still boils her blood that he seemed to be ever-oblivious to the expectations set for her since the day she’d set foot in Gladsheim’s halls. “You truly had no idea, did you? That was exactly what the Allfather intended, there may never have been a formal agreement in place but the court spoke of it constantly as some foregone conclusion even after I took up my warrior’s oaths.”
“But Sif, I never—”
“Neither did I! But it mattered not and if it had been asked of me I would’ve done it. I wouldn't have been happy about it, but I would’ve done my duty had the realm asked it of me.”
All her words seem to run out there, and she slumps a little, pulling her knees up to her chest. It hurts, it has hurt, to carry these feelings within herself for so long, especially with no one to speak of them to, but releasing them hadn’t been as painless as she’d thought it would be, nor does it leave her feeling lighter.
Unfortunately, with her occupation, Sif has spent years becoming all too familiar with injuries and with their subsequent healing processes. Throughout her life, she’s had scars aplenty from childhood scrapes, to nicks and gashes earned on the training grounds, to grotesque wounds gleaned from battle, she knows what to expect from them, how to treat them, how to wait for them to either go away completely or scar over, but not this. For some reason her heart doesn’t seem to want to heal in the same way her worst hurts have and, instead of eventually scarring over and numbing the skin, this wound lingers. Every time someone or something has poked and prodded at this loss, no matter how light their touch, the wound reopens and bleeds even more. It never seems to stop, never seems to heal over or build up any kind of scar tissue. It is maddening and frustrating and— and it reminds her a bit of Loki himself, if she’s being honest.
“I am sorry you’ve had to suffer in silence all this time.”
“It’s…” Though she tries to speak, tries to say it’s fine as she always has, it seems her body has finally had enough, has finally acquiesced to the pain in her heart and she answers with something approaching honestly for the first time in her life as tears slip down her cheek. “It’s been challenging.”
“I’m sure someone’s told you that time heals all wounds?”
“I have. Please don’t tell me that’s your sage wisdom.”
“No, it’s complete horseshit.” The matter-of-factness in his tone startles a laugh from her, and Thor shoots her a small grin before he continues, “It doesn’t. I miss my family and our friends constantly. There are days when the pain isn’t as bad, days when it fades to the background of everyday life, but it’s never gone. Maybe if the losses had come slower, had not been so clustered that advice would be sound but…no, this is a pain that lingers. I tried to run from it but I think we just need to move through it and see where it takes us.”
For a moment he sits in his grief, and just as Sif is beginning to worry that this evening is going to end with them spending hours sobbing by the sea, a weary, determined smile that is somehow both familiar and completely new emerges from his features. “D’you think that’s a challenge you’re up for Lady War?”
She cannot help but give him the same little grin back. “With a warrior such as yourself by my side, how could I not be?”
- - -
Within a few days of that conversation, she finds herself falling into her old habit of staying up until all hours underneath the stars as she befriends these new constellations and waits to see if he will return to her again. Fleetingly, she wonders if this is how Jane Foster felt when she observed the sky after they left her in New Mexico; looking up, and knowing for sure that she was not alone. Knowing that lightyears, potentially even universes, and realities away, there was someone looking into the same emptiness, the same expanse of unforgiving space, and sending their heart through it all.
He never appears, or if he does, is never visible, never speaks, but that feeling of knowing that someone is with her, looking out for her as she gazes into the heavens never quite goes away.
After that, everywhere she goes, she is certain he is a phantom presence at her back.
Decades pass exactly like this and Sif is careful to fill her time with the raising of her nephew, working to train the Aesir who have chosen to remain on Midgard, and beginning to involve herself in local leadership, even serving as a member of their Council of Elders for a spell. But as time continues to move ever onward, she finds herself drifting more and more and in the quiet moments where her house is empty or she walks alone to the center of town. Her mind wanders and her heart aches and, as Axl marries and has children of his own, regret lodges itself somewhere in the vicinity of her heart.
She remembers hearing someone— her mother, she thinks, in the days after her father died, nearly two thousand years ago— tell her that time heals all wounds, but no matter how hard she tries to close this wound and let it heal, her own mind will not allow her. Just as she thinks she is close to forgetting the exact feeling of his fingers in her hair, his warmth beside her, the way he would dance with her at every festival, the quiet words he whispered when he thought she was asleep, something will remind her; a particularly vivid dream, a story shared about Asgard of old, even a shared look between lovers.
It is no longer accompanied with the pain of those first years, but regret is a powerful thing all on its own, and on its own, even as she remains in the company of her people, it festers.
- - -
It pains him to watch her do this to herself, especially now, when he has no way to reach her.
Watching her haunt New Asgard like a ghost, her spirit, once so brilliant and strong, wasting away little by little as her nephew grows into his own man, no longer needing her guidance, as Thor again begins spending more time off-world than on, as the Valkyrie becomes increasingly absorbed with her leadership duties…it is something like torture. Of course, it isn’t that any of them love Sif any less, it is merely that the ones she has loved so well all have obligations of their own, families, spouses, missions, desires that come first. She has no one for herself, no one to put her first, no one living, at least.
He has scried upon her steps every day since she arrived on Midgard, and shadowed them from the moment she learned of his true death, watching as her life has become emptier, read her face and heard her offers to be sent out on increasingly more daring off-world exploratory missions and watch the loneliness grow into something dangerous and sad and very, very familiar. Desperately he tries to make his way back to her, continuing to try and push the boundaries of Valhalla and fight his way back to her side but, though strong-willed and clever he may be, it seems that not even the Trickster can manipulate the veil of death once he is well and truly behind it.
It is after another such attempt that his mother finds him, looking forlornly out into the world beyond the feasting hall near tears, too heartbroken to even conjure up her face for fear that it would break him entirely.
“She will kill herself over this Mama and she doesn’t deserve to, not like this—” not over me. He doesn’t dare speak the words aloud to anyone, not even his mother, but she hears them regardless.
“Oh my dear, you never truly understood what you did that day.”
“I…” He tilts his head in confusion, even as that memory, millennia old by now and only thought of when he thinks back to her scream of grief and anguish, tugs at the back of his mind, “What are you talking about?”
“The protection spell.”
The tug of memory blossoms and he remembers the day in scattered moments and then all at once; the feeling of the warm sun and his hand in hers and the sharp bite of a blade washing over him. When he speaks it is on the end of a gasp.
“You knew?”
“Of course I knew, Loki, you are my child.” He smiles at the words, ones that no longer make him feel desolate and alone, and she clasps his hand between two of hers. “You stole—”
“Borrowed.”
“—of course dear.” She chuckles a bit before her face returns to an expression both deeply serious and deeply sad. “You borrowed an enchanted rope and dagger from my study and performed an ancient binding spell which I’m assuming you read about in the restricted section of the library. You performed the ritual, which includes spilling blood and a handfasting, in your extra-dimensional gardens and, though I don’t believe either of you realized it, now had an oath between you that had sunk soul-deep.”
He is struck silent. He has half a mind to correct her that no section of the royal library is restricted to a prince or to question how exactly she knew about his hidden garden, but the sarcasm he’s so often used as comfort and cover in the past seems to fail him.
“I remember feeling it, the magic suffused through the air when I saw you both next, but the work was already done. I also remember that I had recently warned you of the power of blood magic,” the slyness bleeds back into her voice, along with a fondness at the remembrances of simpler years, “but you were so curious, so ambitious then and so you never truly understood what I meant.”
“I did!”
He bubbles over with youthful defiance, with certitude for the child that he was, even as he feels his voice now waiver. The memory, the idea of the promise he’d made surely isn’t something he would’ve done as a more experienced sorcerer, but in that moment, as he’d told Sif of his studies, he would swear by the Norns that he felt something more than conviction in his heart, he felt the inevitability of fate.
“Oh Loki…” She continues, undeterred, “It didn’t matter how many times you or she spilled blood after that moment, you felt her pain in a way you could never comprehend.”
His mother’s eyes pierce his soul, her smile heartbroken, and for the first time in his long life— his long afterlife, really— he finds he is beginning to understand just how deeply his love for Sif has run. How much that love has knitted itself into every spell he’s ever cast.
“When you cut her hair, your scalp itched, did it not? Every bump and bruise and scar earned in her training resulted in phantom pain you could never make sense of. I remember when the Lady Sif received that near-fatal wound from fire demons on Muspelheim, you demanded that the Aflar king conjure a portal to send you back to Asgard. You arrived at the Healing Halls just seconds after Eir had started her examination. Never before had you allowed yourself to be pulled from your studies and when I asked you why, do you remember what you said?”
“I knew something was wrong. I knew, down to the smallest cell in my being, that I needed to return home because something was terribly, dreadfully wrong.”
The queen nodded. “That trip to Alfheim meant everything to you, you petitioned us for months to be allowed to go and develop your studies, yet you dropped everything the moment you felt that she was in mortal danger.”
“But…”
He thinks back to that moment when he’d felt his heart drop while in the midst of learning a complex transportation spell, and with that memory comes a slew of his own, memories of his own injuries, and the way that Sif had reacted. Clearly she had felt something, but as he turns the past over and over again in his mind, it hits him she never felt with the same depth or sensitivity.
"Why? Why me? What about her? Did she not— ”
“It was not because the spell was unsuccessful or that her promise was not as sincere as yours, it was merely because her connection to her own seidr was far weaker than yours. For you and I, magic is a part of us, it flows through our blood, makes space for itself in our hearts, comes as naturally as breathing, it was never like that for Sif. But, I have it on good authority” Frigga taps her temple, “that when you made your final journey here she knew, even though she tried to rationalize it otherwise, some part of her understood.”
He sits with that realization, painful and bittersweet, for a long time. Long enough that the sun sets and the feasting hall grows rowdy with the exuberance of warriors, long enough that he has made his way through nearly the whole history of his acquaintance with Sif, though the word acquaintance feels entirely inadequate. He misses her, gods he misses her, and though the last time he saw her, spoke to her, kissed her, was thousands of years ago, he still feels the connection between them, still loves her utterly, completely, desperately.
“How am I supposed to live with this?” He finally asks after something like an eternity— although that is a word with very little meaning here.
“You aren’t.” His mother’s smile is enigmatic, almost mischievous, a joke with a punchline she has yet to finish. “You’ve died with it. Loki, you could’ve let this promise go the moment you crossed over, yet you didn’t, you’ve held on to it, kept it alive within yourself for thousands of years. Why do you think that is?”
Why indeed? And yet, before he can consider that information and the myriad possibilities that flood his mind at the implication, he feels a pull, sharp and strong, to the other side and suddenly, he is in a rather familiar clearing with a rather familiar someone.
- - -
They are somewhere in the Alfar wilderness— the rare occasion has come to pass that Sif has decided to join her best friend and nephew for a fairly low-stakes mission off-world— when she feels it. A chill running down her spine that could be nothing other than a warning: your time draws near. She gasps and Thor and Axl turn towards her, eyes widening at something on her person that she cannot see.
“Your eyes!”
“What?”
“They're…Sif, they’re gold.”
Heimdall.
The thought strikes her then that it could only have ever been her dear brother who would allow her this moment, this warning that she is not long for this realm, to allow her what he and so many of her other friends did not have, the chance to say goodbye.
A moment later, Sif blinks and somehow she knows her eyes are back to their usual hazel. As they finally stop to make camp in an old spot they’ve used on a thousand quests before, she readjusts her armor, silently preparing for battle. Axl gets a fire started, parsing out which rations to use with the small game they’ve hunted, and he relaxes into a now familiar banter with Thor, but she cannot. A blanket of unease wraps around her shoulders as sunset turns to twilight and Sif comes to the conclusion that she will not last the night.
Knowing that, she feels compelled to take the first watch, to have some time to herself before the battle to come begins, looking up at a sky that is the closest she’s known to Asgard’s in all her long years. Sif sends her comrades off to bed with tight hugs and I love yous that she knows alarm them and as she rests comfortably on a log, her glaive resting across her lap, she turns her face upwards with a smile.
“Brother?” She says, to no one in particular, unable to tell if he is with her at this moment, or even listening from where he stands beyond the veil. “Thank you for giving me this. I am ever in your debt.”
The stars and the binary moons of Alfheim gleam, shining off of her glaive like a beacon and Sif waits and watches until, just when she has started to give up hope, she feels a presence that has remained there, but near silent, for hundreds of years. She smiles, then she speaks.
“I think I must be the most selfish woman in all the realms.”
“Why?” There is no surprise in Loki’s voice when he responds but rather, an impish curiosity she’s rather missed. Though she cannot quite tell if he is truly speaking or merely a voice pressing against her mind, he is here and that is enough.
“I know that I am not to remain here much longer and yet…I cannot help but feel as though I am steps away from entering into a great reward.”
“I see.” She thinks she can make out a spark of green magic in the trees to her right, but her gaze remains fixed on the dying fire before her. “You feel guilty then?”
“Immensely so.”
“Then I am the wrong person for you to have conjured up, Lady, for I remain as selfish as ever. I have awaited your arrival for many years.”
“But not as many as I thought.”
“No.”
The silence that falls between them is easy and comfortable, and she thinks of all their conversations after his second death in Asgard and on her spaceship, and the presence she’s felt at her back since the day she learned he died.
“You know, you lied.”
“Which time?” She can hear the smirk in his voice and it makes her heart skip a beat.
“All those years ago, that massive fight we had before you fell. Do you remember what you said to me?”
He remains silent for so long that for a moment, she’s afraid she’s permanently banished him. When he speaks, his voice is rueful and shaded with shame. “I said that the missing, the longing, wouldn’t last forever. I said that you’d forget me, that you wouldn’t even care about me someday soon. I said—”
“You said that as deep as I thought my foolish feelings went, that they would nonetheless go away. You said that time would bring me some modicum of relief…” She feels tears pressing against her eyes as she remembers that last, messy argument, when he’d told her in no uncertain terms that they were done, that he didn’t and never had cared about her in the same way she’d cared for him, “you lied.”
She hears a shuddering gasp from a few feet behind her and it makes a few tears spill over, shining in the low light of the fire. “To be quite frank, my love,” He says, his voice shaky and low, “at the time, I thought that I was being the most honest I’d ever been. I never once had dared to hope your feelings ran as deep as mine, I—”
She hears it then— a branch cracking with heavy footfalls and she knows her time runs ever shorter— and both of them freeze, their instincts calling them to attention.
“Well then, we shall have to continue this conversation though I expect it will be some time quite soon.”
“As you wish.”
The softness in his voice makes her grin, even as she calls for Thor and Axl to wake and whips her glaive around to catch the club of an unsuspecting troll.
- - -
“Behind you, get down!”
She hears his voice in her mind like she had so many times years ago when they fought these battles side-by-side and ducks low, just missing the wide arc of an enemy sword.
Their skirmish has been going on for some time now, Axl and Thor rising and joining at her battle cry. Their opponents are irritatingly well-prepared, it seems, staying just out of sight in the dense trees after a few attacks and giving themselves time to regroup in order to match the stamina of the three Aesir. Time slips fluidly by, seconds and minutes and hours punctuated with the clanging of metal and the loud booming of thunder and Sif thinks it might be getting close to dawn when it happens.
It takes less than a second, one moment, the three of them are moving like the well-oiled machine they have become and the next, Thor is forgetting to guard her left side as he strikes out on his right and in that moment, a small blade, a dagger, slips through.
As she feels the knife strike deep between her ribs, piercing through her lungs and her heart, she feels like a fool; this particular quirk of Thor’s had been something she’d trained herself to remember when fighting with him years ago so why had she forgotten now? And then just at the edges of her vision she sees a flash of green and hears a familiar voice calling for her and she realizes that it seems she’s forgotten which Odinson she was fighting with. Usually it would be an absurd mistake to make; for the two brothers fight so differently, not to mention one of them has been dead for more than a few millennia, but today, after hearing his voice in her mind and seeing flashes of green in her periphery almost nonstop it makes a sad sort of sense.
She drops to her knees and his name slips from her lips, the first time she’s said it aloud in centuries.
“...Loki?”
She feels her body being maneuvered to lie flat and hears faraway voices calling her name as the battle rages on, but all of those sights and sounds seem dulled as the stars shine so so bright above her and she could swear he hears him whispering words of comfort to her. She never thought that falling in the heat of battle, that fighting and dying could be so peaceful and yet she feels a sense of calm as her lifeblood flows from her wound. Her limbs feel so very heavy, and though it feels like there are weights resting on her eyelids, she fights to continue gazing up, transfixed, until her eyes finally slip closed.
A second, or perhaps a lifetime later, she wakes in the middle of a vast, empty field.
- - -
They set her off to sea wrapped in an ancient verdant cloak that is several inches too long for her body and clutching an old book of poetry over her heart, her glaive laid beside her. A great many are baffled.
“She was a warrior, was she not?” They ask, stunned. “Should she not go off to Valhalla with her sword in hand rather than paltry words of love that could not possibly endure? Should she not be wrapped in the blood-red of her slain enemies rather than the color of growth? Of life?”
And yet her nephew and her brother-that-should-have-been know better, know from the stories that Lady War used to tell that this book of love poetry was collected from all across the realms and transcribed by a nervous yet elegant hand was her most prized possession, the closest thing she’d received to a courting gift from a nervous young scholar who knew he was completely out of his depth, yet swam deeper regardless.
- - -
As she surveys the space around her, she notices that the field is not, in fact, as empty as it first had seemed.
“Care to help me up?” She props herself up on one elbow, raising her other arm and wiggling her fingers. “The way I see it it’s the least you can do after literally everything.”
Loki smiles a lazy grin and saunters over to her, and when he grabs her hand, it feels like light floods all through her. And then, she yanks him down to the ground, flips him onto his back, and, straddling his waist, pins him against the soft grass.
“Wha— ow! Sif!”
“You lied to me!”
“Well, not technically, but—”
“You never told me you were alive!”
“You know I couldn’t,” He holds his hands up placatingly, “you know why I couldn’t!”
“You sent me away from Asgard knowing it would burn!”
He freezes then, his face falling into despair, and more than anything she wants to get up and walk away, to punish him with her silence, but she has lived a life without him in it for so many years now, and Sif has come to find that it is not something she wishes to bear again. She relaxes, shifts back a little, and gives him the space to sit up, watching as his eyes widen, filled with fear and joy and anxiety and hope, and beneath it all, she sees an emotion she’s certain is reflected in her eyes too. Her breath hitches.
“I did.” His voice is choked with tears and he reaches out to her, one hand at her cheek, his thumb catching on a few tears, the other cupping her shoulder, his touch featherlight.
“You told me you loved me.” It comes out broken and breaking, and were she not moving ever closer to him, she would not hear his whispered response.
“I did. I still do.”
“You are infuriating.” She says, and yet all of her anger has fled.
“I know.” A smile breaks across his face and that look gleams in his eyes. She bites down on her answering grin. “I love you too.”
Before he can say anything more, she kisses him, uncaring of which of their compatriots have left the feasting hall to greet her. Distantly, Sif thinks that for once, time has worked in their favor or, perhaps, they’ve simply beaten it.
An instant later, her last coherent thought is that maybe it doesn’t really matter, that maybe, all that matters now is that they are here, together. It makes her smile so wide they break apart, but it’s only momentarily, only long enough for her to reply in kind before they’re pulled back, two heavenly bodies locked into each other’s orbit, colliding into a whole new galaxy.