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Black tendrils whipped around her face, writhing like striking snakes, despite the fact that Sif had tied her long, thick hair back with a leather strap. It didn't matter, nothing mattered, and she urged her horse faster still as she sat atop the powerful beast, galloping with long powerful, ground devouring strides, muscles bunching, snorted breaths drifting back to his oblivious rider, and, still, he gave her another gear, pulling farther away from the palace, from her misery.
Memories are like water, tangible, containable, but you can never truly hold it in your hands; the tighter your grip the faster it slips through your fingers. This, Sif thinks, is her problem, her memories have become slippery, deceptive; what once was a sleek pool or reflective water, is now a murky quagmire. She shakes her head to clear her mind; she doesn't want to think about it- about anything.
Dirt and grass and twigs are barely discernible at this speed, and she's not looking for them anyway, not looking when the ground becomes more uneven and her horse wisely slows his pace; she doesn't care when she squeezes him back up to speed and hisses in his turned-back ears. Doesn't care when he loses his footing and they both summersault through the air, through time, and space, and memory, into blessed darkness.
She finally comes back to consciousness much later, the sun that was once high in the sky, now slipping behind the snow-topped mountains, casting undulating shadows, writhing with a life of their own through tree branches, nearly bare in the late fall chill. She hears the telltale ripping and grinding of her horse grazing nearby and she tips her head back to see him on his feet, and she wonders that he is on his feet at all. Slowly she moves her own extremities, testing for injury, and finding that she, in fact, not as broken as she wished to be.
Dull aching springs to life in a dozen muscles and joints as she moves them in turn, but she knows that none of those twinges will compare to the pain in her head should she try to stand; she doesn't even try. She has been gone for hours, and there is no one left to care, no one to look for her out here, and she thinks that maybe it is best this way.
That rakes a new pain to life, a constricting, heart stopping pain that is of her own doing and she hates herself for it. Everything is different now, everything has changed since Loki let go – no, since Thor let Loki manipulate him and he led them all into Jotunheim; the last battle that they were whole, the six of them, unstoppable. Now there is only Thor (and Jane – how she wants to hate Jane, but cannot), Thor who is performing self-assigned duties upon Midgard with his new friends, and watching over Loki who is living out his exile. Only the Warriors Three, who are tighter-knit than ever, in their combined hatred of the younger prince.
Only Sif. Alone. Alone because she could not bear to go to Midgard with Thor, she would not torture herself that way. Alone because she did not agree with the Warriors Three, and an uneasy truce is the best they can muster between them now. She flat out refused to examine the reasons that she could not hate Loki as he deserved to be. She tried to ignore the emptiness, but, for so many centuries, they had been a team, an unstoppable force, and now – now they were broken apart and scattered like an old puzzle; she couldn't ignore it anymore, the loneliness had threatened to swallow her.
Now, here she lay, with no one to look for her, not sure if she is thankful to be relatively unscathed, or regretful that she is not. It doesn't matter, would never matter, because she has a duty of her own, to Asgard, to herself, to Thor, and the Warriors Three, a duty to Loki. She is Sif, Lady Warrior of Asgard, Goddess of War, she tells herself as she slowly lifts herself from the ground, head pounding, muscles screaming; she collects her stallion and painfully drags herself back into the saddle, forcing herself to sit tall and proud, despite the stabbing throb that pulses through her temples. She will ride back to the palace, and she will smile, and be the only person she knows how to be; and no one will ever know that she can be broken too.