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It’s too loud.
Everywhere.
It’s too…loud.
It doesn’t matter where he slips to. The solitude of the jungles of Vanaheim. The barren emptiness of Niflheim. The heights of the tallest mountain in Jötenheim. The depths of the most remote caves of Svartalfheim.
It’s just too fucking loud.
It ought to be funny. He stares off into the twilight of Vanaheim’s horizon, refracted through a perpetually frozen lightning bolt, thinking that it should be funny. That this silence, this deep and unending silence, no matter where he goes, no matter what he’s near, this complete and total silence is so fucking loud it hurts. It’s laughable. If Br—
No.
Slip.
Helheim, the oppressive cold not nearly oppressive enough, not to block out the last…how long has it been now? A handful of days? A month? He’s slipped so many times between realms, seen so many different horizons, fallen asleep in so many different places, that it’s all just run together. It feels like it happened yesterday. It feels like it happened centuries ago. Doesn’t matter. It happened.
He doesn’t blame himself. Well, he does, of course he does, how can he not, it’s his fault his soul was missing a piece and so he’s lost forever, it’s his fault that they were all there giving cover to the— to the— But it’s not his fault. Not really.
It’s theirs.
He grips the rocky ledge on which he sits until the chill of the ice numbs his hands, the jagged edges slicing into his fingers. So what? Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need them anymore. Won’t ever use them again. What would he even make? For whom? Not them, certainly. Never again. And anyway, anything he made would be incomplete, only half of what it should be, missing the part that only Br—
No.
Slip.
Muspelheim. The roar of the burning, bubbling lava is almost, almost enough to fill his brain, except it can’t, how could it hope to complete with the inner monologue of fucking rage that never, ever stops? He blinks away the sweat that fills his eyes, only sweat, that’s not deflection it’s just that he’s cried so much in the last however-long-it’s-been that he quite literally doesn’t have tears left inside his body. He’s surprised he’s even hydrated enough to sweat. He dimly remembers a time when sweating this much would have caused him so much anxiety, when the dirt and heat and grime and sweat of this place would’ve made him feel unclean.
But he is unclean. He’ll never be clean again. Why should he care about sweat when the blood that dried on his hands (from trying to stanch the wound because Freya the fucking mage was more interested in her fucking revenge fantasies than fucking healing him) persists, when the blood that soaked into his tunic (from trying to pick him up and hold him while Kratos the fucking wall of muscle just fucking stood there) has permanently stained it, when the blood that ran down his legs (because he kept bleeding, he just kept bleeding, I couldn’t stop the bleeding because my fucking friend Atreus invited a fucking murderer into my fucking home) still drips from his footsteps no matter where he walks? Nothing in this world can cleanse him from this…this hatred.
Y’gotta let go.
“NO!” Sindri bellows, springing up and whirling around at the voice that’s only in his head, only in there, not out here, never again out here. “It’s their fault! I let them in, I trusted them, and they killed you!”
There’s no response.
But there doesn’t need to be. “Yes, they did!” Sindri’s played this argument out a thousand ways in a thousand different places over the last thousand however-long-it’s-beens. “Odin would never have found us if they hadn’t fucking led him there.” It doesn’t matter what he would say. “If they hadn’t tried to play hero by rescuing Týr.” He’s dead. “If I hadn’t tried to play hero.”
He’s dead.
Y’gotta let go.
Sindri screams again, pounding his tiny, ineffectual fists against a cliff wall, dangerously close to a descending rivulet of lava. “Stop it!” he shouts desperately, pounding again, and again, and again. “Stop!” He slides down the wall, head in his bleeding hands. “Stop…”
Guess he’s not so dehydrated after all.
He stops thinking for a little while, blessedly, his brain overloaded by the visceral reaction of his body. When he comes back to himself, he’s staring vacantly ahead again. The bubbling roar of Muspelheim barely registers in his periphery, nor does the dull throbbing of his hands, nor does the mess caked on his face. A plume of lava is what gets his attention. Rising up gently, so gently, like a single flame falling from an arrow tip onto a small boat. Like the one at the funeral that carried Br—
No.
Slip.
Alfheim. The dancing lights of the floating baby hafgufa overhead perfectly framing the beam of Light in the—
No.
Slip.
Svartalfheim. The mountain of the Forge, overlooking the lake where—
No.
Slip.
Midgard. The familiar warmth of Týr’s Temple, the workbench—
No.
Slip.
He keeps slipping, from realm to realm to realm but he can’t escape the constant crushing noise of memory after memory everywhere he looks. There had been a time when it was easy for Sindri to find a place where he was not, they had so studiously, easily avoided each other. But he can’t anymore. Because every place is filled with his voice. His laugh. His foul mannerisms, the clang of his hammer, his temper, his gentleness, his fire, his bravery, his hospitality, his love. Every place Sindri tries to escape to is filled with him.
Brok.
And it’s so loud it fucking hurts.
Sindri slips, and slips, and slips, and finally finds himself on the edge of a great ocean he doesn’t quite recognize. Midgard, by the shape of the air, but a place he hasn’t been to, or at least hasn’t seen in a very long time. Wherever he is, it makes him remember something. Something small, at the back of mind, something that he hasn’t thought about in a very long time. “That’s right,” he murmurs, looking out across the sea. “There are other realms.”
I know what ya done.
“Other places. They came from somewhere else.”
And I forgives ya.
“Maybe…maybe I can find a place where you’re not.”
But y’gotta stop.
“And I can…”
Y’gotta let go.
He slips.