There is no ceremony when you return.

You did not expect there to be, other than perhaps the celebration of your defeat, but there is not even that. Those that see you avert their gaze. Embarrassment, shame, pity.

No disgust. You wonder some at that, and what has been said. If they gave you a proper funeral, though they lacked a body.

There will be repercussions. There always are.

XXXXXX

While it is debated what is to be done to you, you are kept in solitude. A tower, one that you knew in theory though had never been inside. It is said no one can escape it, and that once Ymir was held here for his crimes and never found a way to twist free of its magics.

You do not try.

There is food and water. There are books, hallways to wander, and the topmost floor has no ceiling—open to the air, there is a garden there. You examine it one afternoon.

(You note what it lacks: narcissus, figs, pomegranate; hemlock, crocuses, mulberries.)

Time passes.

Some days, the bitter fury that you first arrived with burns and twists inside of you. Others, there is the cold-sweat of fear and threats from titans slighted; those are few and far between. You are on the Realm Eternal, and even Thanos' reach does not reach here. Not yet.

Most days, you feel nothing. Caught between moored and adrift, thoughts silent, you have time plenty to reflect.

You have visitors, on occasion. Thor most frequent of all, clinging to thoughts and hopes and dreams that you've long since realized lie, unwilling to let go of a childhood fancy. Brother, he still calls you, no matter how you protest, until eventually you have no further words for him. Frigga, who says little and does not question, and in her you see a thousand reflections of questions you are quick to bury as deeply as you can—where did I go wrong? what have I done? Her guilt is heavy, suffocating, nearly so much as her love. Odin is rarest of those who tried to claim a cuckoo for their own, but he questions most.

You tell him of Thanos, but little more when he tries to ask motivations. Your motivations are your own, and you do not care what fate it brings you that you will not share them.

You do not owe him anything.

After near strangling Odin in a fit of temper, there tend to also be guards who arrive with the visitors. Thor scoffs at it, and Frigga clearly is displeased, but neither do anything. Odin does not visit again.

(Good, you think. Good that he recognizes the wolf he has allowed as part of his flock. The knowledge you have now leaves no point to try and justify the slights and ills down you and your house.)

You have visitors, and you mark them and how they break up your day.

She does not visit.

You wonder, sometimes, what they've told her. Thor tells you without being asked about her—her silence, her distance, her reserve. He does not mention where she lives, if she stays in the rooms you shared or the home in the countryside you gifted her with its goats and cellars for cheese and wine.

(She does not visit and you do not let yourself think of it.)

XXXXXX

Eventually, they decide upon hanging you on Yggdrasil, with an eagle to come and feast on you.

It is announced, it receives no fanfare, and then there is only the waiting. Two weeks before what they intend.

It is, you think, fitting; give a gift, cause too much trouble, and be chained to have parts of you ripped out over and over and over, unable to escape your fate. They mimic Prometheus; the difference between you and your in-law is it took more push to receive the fate. Thor disagrees, of course, but what can he do? It seems to cause far more stir among those who claim concern than it does to you.

You can escape. You have always been able to do so. It is only a matter of time.

(After all, you escaped Thanos, did you not?)

Two weeks.

XXXXXX

You notice the guard before you notice her.

It is the last night before. Your skin hums with energy, and you cannot sleep, bracing already for pain. You raise an eyebrow at the guard, and your eyes slide a little to his left and you notice her.

Her eyes are still the storm-grey you remember, shocking against the dark of her skin, and they watch you without giving anything away. She does not speak, only examines you unblinking. No words, no questions. Silence.

(It is near as if she has not come to visit at all, and you deny the part of you that aches.)

"You may leave," she tells the guard.

"I—"

The look she levels at the guard would draw wolves short for fear.

"You would deny a wife a final night?"

Ah, and there you see how Asgard has been forced to tread around her since your absence. She is yet a token of peace, even if it is easy for you to forget. From widow to wife of a condemned man, but it is her happiness that must be ensured, and so the whole of a kingdom bends on one knee as it ever has since that night so long ago.

(Not for the first time, you wish she had not been in Vanaheim when Thor fell; she would have made a marvelous queen, and you dare think that perhaps events would have gone differently.)

(Yet you know she would have refused to wear a crown. Too Aesir, she would have scoffed, ever unwilling to take an Aesir custom when there was a Vanir one available.)

The guard would rather face Odin's displeasure than her's, and there is some amusement in that as he casts one last glance at you before leaving.

She does not speak as she turns her attention to you once more; you do not break the silence, but wait.

You drink in the sight of her; you had nearly forgotten what beauty she is despite being so very much not of Asgard. Short, black curls, dark skinned. Only her eyes stand in sharp contrast, remind you of the sky over a stormy sea. She is lovely, still lovely, will ever be lovely, but now, as you relearn the lines of her face, you realize with the suddeness of a knife to the gut that there are lines that were not there before. Worry and grief etched deeper than they were before, untold stories that you have not shared with her.

This—this is grief. More grief than any you have felt since your return, more guilt and loss and regret than any single word from anyone else could stir.

She must see something of it on your face, or sense it, for she moves towards you. You catch glimmer of starlight—the himation you paid far more for than any other gift you have ever given, crafted by the elves from captured starlight of Vanaheim and the finest unicorn's down in the darkest green that looks near black.

(No one tells stories of this gift, because it is not one that needed to be proclaimed from the mountain tops; it is hers, and hers alone, and it will never be enough to begin to soothe the hurt it covers.)

She touches your cheek; you do not lean into the touch. You stare at her, search over her face for what she wishes, but she remains silent. There is a scent to her that you struggle to place; it seems familiar, but you've forgotten much in your time away.

(The feel of her skin, the sound of her voice, but not her image, never that, this woman who is more than any you have ever met and ever will meet, who is some blending of fae and neriad and erinyes.)

Her hand smooths along your cheek to your neck, then your shoulder; a slight pressure, and you kneel before her. You know this language, and finally the strange and earthy scent takes a name: blood.

(A thousand rituals she has never explained but always done, for safe-keeping and safe return, love in every beat and step and pulse. Ritual she did not preform that fateful span of days because she was not there, but instead with her own, grieving for the loss of her aunt.)

The himation slips from her skin to the floor; beneath she wears nothing but a woven belt. The knife she has never explained to you hangs from it. Her skin is painted in blood—you think goat's though the scent is not quite right—but it does not hide the marks beneath, history written in flesh of children born.

(History yet in her eyes of children gone.)

There is nothing to indicate the rules you must abide now; you lean forward, running your hands over her hips and then sliding around to her spine. She allows it, a hand twining in your overlong hair as you lean forward to press kisses to the skin, running your nose along her stomach, and you breath in her smell.

If you must suffer, you would the memory of her to tide you through the pain until you escape.

Her hand grips your hair, and you hear the sound of the knife sliding free. You do not move, and shortly after, there is the soft brush of your hair slipping to the floor, cut free. It is not gentle, but it is not rough either. You keep your eyes closed and face pressed to her stomach as she works. When she is done, she steps away, and you reluctantly let her go.

She examines you, knife still in hand.

"You are a fool," she says.

You do not reply.

"You shall be my ruin," she says, and then she leans down, grabbing your chin and kissing you.

You have only seen the seas of Vanaheim a few times. Once, you saw it in a storm, dark and angry and claiming any who erred on its surface; this is how your wife-princess-lover kisses, dark and angry and claiming, teeth pressing sharp into your skin and drawing blood, unfanthomable depths beneath threatening to drag you down.

She cuts your clothes from you, tearing them away, eyes calm. You can sense power twisting inside of her, and with a little effort can hear the rhythm she is creating in the methodical disrobing. Rip, rip, slide, tear, all to the slow and steady pulse of what she calls Asgard's heart and you only know as the sound of magic.

Except not; there is something off to her beat, something unfamiliar, and there is intention behind it as there ever is when she works this way.

She pushes you to your back when you are unclothed and rides you with a hand around your throat, her teeth biting into your flesh. For every kindness and worship you pay her flesh, you are left dizzy with the pain and unkindness she repays you with. There is anger, depths of anger and rage that roil beneath the surface, that when you can focus you can see it in her eyes, and she gives you no mercy.

She kisses your forehead when she eventually stands, drapped once more in her starlight himation, a hand smoothing your hair down.

"Orycheío," she says.

Mine.

"Yours," you agree. For all the stiff ache settling into your bones, you feel, for the first time, like you are home, where you belong. You feel peace instead of nothing; you do not deserve such a gift from her, and yet she has given it all the same.

"Do not wash," she says, and you nod. The traces of blood and more; a final ritual then, and you would not deny her anything now.

She leaves.

XXXXXX

It is Thor who offers you a drink to numb, that leaves your head dizzy and a laugh half on your lips. You wonder idly when the bird is meant to come, if it shall always arrive at the same time punctually, or if it shall instead come when it desires. If only you had thought to ask Prometheus, but it is too late now, strung up.

The sound of wings beating the air answers at least when the bird will arrive this day, and in a drunken haze you note that is quite a lovely eagle—large, with a vicious beak and wicked claws, steel gray shadowing its feathers and eyes that remind you, amusingly, of your wife-princess-lover's.

The only pain is the prick of claws in your skin, there and gone again, and you hear a sharp crack, and then you are falling.

You have no magic at your finger tips, no cloak to shift yourself to bird, and you twist, disoriented, before the bird has caught you upon it's back and is winging its way higher.

Skywalker indeed, it screeches, and you stare in confusion at the back of it, at the way it is laughing and the pleased tone of its voice, recognizing the sound of her voice

XXXXXX

"Your brother is an idiot," she says later, bird form shed and nude, the patterns of blood smeared on her skin and a feather yet caught in her hair. You reach and tug it free clumsily, trying to push through the fog in your head.

"He tends to be," you say, tongue still numb at the edges. "You should not have—"

"I will burn Asgard and all the realms to ash before I let them touch anything else that is mine," she says, voice calm, even, matter-of-fact, and beneath the words churn the dark deeps of a stormy sea, of a woman tired of loss and grief. She looks at you, eyes the heart of a tempest. "You are mine, and you have returned."

"Yes," you agree, "I have."

Sigyn is of Vanaheim, and in this particular case, I've tied the Vanir strongly to Greek mythology and Greece. There is still a distinction between the Vanir and the Greek gods, but they share relations as well.

The erinyes are the Furies; neriads are sea nymphs of the Mediterranean.

The lack in the garden breaks down as well; each is a reference to something in Grecian myth.

Narcissus reference the myth of Narkissos, who died staring at his reflection; it was also this flower that Hades caught Persephone's attention with before he stole her away.

The cultivated fig tree was a gift from Demeter to a man for his hospitality while she searched for Persephone.

It was the seed of a pomegranate that Hades finally got Persephone to eat, and is why she had to remain with him for part of the year-a month for each seed she ate.

Hemlock was a traditional way to kill criminals.

Crocuses are associated with Persephone, and were one of the flowers she was gathering before she noticed the narcissus flowers.

And finally, the mulberry-changed black because it absorbed the blood of two lovers of a rather tragic forbidden love tale, Pyramos and Thisbe.