"Loki fell," Thor says in the quiet of the aftermath, voice heavy.

She has to clench her core and dig her nails into her own flesh to remain still. She does not realize she is biting her lip until there is the ugly metallic curl of blood on her tongue, until her friend raises his tired eyes.

She stares, and Thor is silent until he isn't anymore.

"He jumped." Thor says, and Loki's room is resoundingly still around them both, the shadows inching along the floor brutally pulled back into lines and planes. "Sif, Loki let go."

Gods, is the first thing she thinks, but that's not right either—because who do gods pray to? Who do gods beg for salvation?

Gods, Sif thinks, and gazes skywards.

Life resumes, the world falls back upon its axis, and Asgard Eternal tosses off the death of its second prince and continues in all its golden glory.

She spends her time in the arena, until her arms are sore and her hands are bruised, until Volstagg and Fandral flinch from her gaze. She eats in the dining hall, she laughs at bad jokes during banquets when she is able, and she tries, oh, she tries so very hard to not look at Thor.

She eats, she fights, she laughs, she goes on. She is War, and this is the song that poets never do write of: that life is its own sort of battle, that sometimes finding the strength to wake up in the morning is its own pitched, bloody struggle.

She finds that she feels nothing overmuch in the aftermath of Loki's death; most things come to her in muted, grey tones, but the one thing she feels in strange bursts of brightness is the anger.

It curls in her stomach like the silver roots he had been so fond of summoning as a boy, flares up like a flame blown into strength by a stray window, curling around and between her ribcage, finding its way into the darkest corners of her heart. It's the anger that strikes at certain moments; when she spots one of his knives tucked out of sight beneath his desk, when she sees Thor smile at a jest and look to his side, when she sees the Queen herself trail a hand over an empty seat.

You gave up, she thinks, and she is struck with a hatred so dark and deep and sudden that it makes her dizzy. You let go.

In her mind's eye, on the darkest of nights and in the stillest of seconds, she can picture it. His long, pale fingers around the spear. The unblinking green of his gaze. The final rush of breath that leaves his lungs as he looks up at his brother, at his father. When they had been children, he had conjured strange spectacles for their pleasure in the arena, set phantom dogs to chase their instructors around the ring and suffered the consequences, smiling. Wait for it, he had said. Just watch.

This is no spectacle. There is nothing beautiful or grand or mythic about the weight of sorrow that hangs over the most private wings of the palace. Grief is a dark, twisted, ugly thing. There is nothing poetic about mourning the death of a brother, nothing poetic about mourning the death of someone who was a friend but not a friend—she is no maiden waiting in a tower, she is no princess crying over the death of her champion. There is something resoundingly grotesque about the short silences after Thor's words at the banqueting table when he is waiting for someone to elaborate on his argument. There is something dark and twisted about the shut doors of a chamber that had once belonged to a prince. There is nothing beautiful about mourning the death of a man who had not been a hero, nothing heroic about mourning a man one ought to hate.

You let go, she thinks dumbly at certain moments, watching Thor gesture to an empty space, listening to the silences between words. You let go. You gave up. After everything, after—

She bites off the thought in her throat, and she wants to claw it out of her skin.

But we loved you, she thinks, dazed. We love you.

Thor takes to stargazing.

A long time ago, when they were children with barely two centuries to their names, Loki had taken the two of them to the roof of the far palace, had hissed, quiet, and pointed to the teeming skies.

The birth of a star, bright and shining; a single flare of pure white light. Above them, the dark of the universe gasps, and groans, and there emerges a new point in the map of the cosmos.

Thor wakes her up in the middle of the night, whispers, come, and leads her to the roof.

"I have been looking through Loki's books," he says, and she pretends not to notice how his voice still cracks on his brother's name. "Most of its unreadable, of course, but I've worked it out, I've read some of his equations, and it should be any time now, any time—"

"Skoll and Hati," he says absentmindedly, pointing to the teeth of a wolf and the tail of a snake. "But that's not it, any time now, soon, Sif, I promise you won't be disappointed—"

For an eternal, infinite second during which neither of them breathed, nothing happened. The stars are still and the universe is dark and the cosmos is uncaring, and then—

A flare, less than a fraction of a second long, and for a moment Sif is blinded. When she blinks, and looks up again, it seems nothing has changed, but it occurs to her without quite knowing why that the universe is poorer a star.

"Did you see it?" Thor asks, voice excited. "Did you see?"

"Yes," she bites out, and turns to her friend. He is not even looking at the stars, but staring at some fixed point beyond the splay of her limbs, his gaze unfocused. He is not looking into the sky; he had not seen the death he had woken her up for.

It occurs to her very suddenly that he may not be able to look into the dark. It occurs to her very suddenly that Thor, the most reckless and most courageous and most fearless man she knows, a man made into a god for the raw strength of his wrath, is afraid to look into the abyss.

"Did you see it, Sif?" He asks, and she says, yes.

She supposes, quietly, that he cannot watch another death fade into space.

Absence is made all the more pressing only when it is noted.

Loki had always been quiet company; slow to anger, slow to taunting, slow to challenge. He had always been silvertongued and still, sliding between silences and filling them up with something not very different, gliding along your sinews and bones, a second coating of quiet not so different from what had been there before.

Now, silences in the court of Odin are thicker, longer, clumsier, with no one to make a song of it.

Thor's limbs are weary and his eyes are tired. Frigga smiles less brightly now, and carries common flowers to the seaside every day. The Allfather himself is older, and greyer; a lethargic king. This silence is draining.

She thinks of Loki falling, she thinks of his cape swirling around him as he falls through a million worlds and a thousand galaxies, thinks of shining stars at his fingertips, thinks of deaths and rebirths flashing around his lone still figure as he falls through the cosmos. She thinks of these things when she goes to sleep, the images imprinted against the back of her eyelids, and she dreams of dying stars.

She wakes with sweat dripping down her back, silver smile fading into the ether. She learns not to look up.

Loki's eyes are pale and bright with excitement, his arms folded beneath his head. He is mouth words and numbers silently as he watches the birth of a star.

Sif watches him, and thinks that he has a particular beauty she had not encountered elsewhere; a statue cast in marble, sloped cheeks and delicate bones, lashes like the spreading points of an expanding planet creeping along his pale skin. She thinks there is some strange unknown beauty etched into the lines of his face, as if one is looking upon a sarcophagus, as if he is gone already.

"Skoll and Hati," he says, pointing to the teeth of a wolf and the tail of a snake. Sif thinks, very suddenly, I love you.