As he drifted in between worlds and in and out of consciousness, Loki saw lights. There were no lights on Svartalfheim, he knew in a brief moment of lucidity, so they must have been of his own making. But these lights were white, soft as snow and the light of his magic shone green. His own powers were directed inward in any case, pushing blood through his veins and air through his lungs, slowly repairing ruined muscle, tissue and bone.
He had held the illusion of still grey skin until Thor had gone, taking the mortal with him, and then he could spare no more strength but the little needed to turn a hand to a claw to help drag himself back up to the crack between worlds, where at last he lay in breathless agony with darkness eating at his vision as he began the spells to draw the required magical energies from the place. Now he would wish for any rest, as short as it must be, but the lights were denying him.
He thought he glimpsed Asgard when next he saw a light, and it was the golden city indeed, and darkness had only just fallen. A white orb floated up from the palace, and his heart caught in his chest as he was reminded of the passing of an immortal, the death of his mother and the lights in her honour that he had not been permitted to witness. This was a single light, though, drifting up from the healing rooms of the palace, where perhaps one of Asgard's sons had fallen to a blow of Thor, though he had tried to rein in his great strength, or the blade of Sif in a desperate moment.
When he next saw a light many hours later, he was more himself, and could not help but pull himself a little closer to the Realm Eternal. Another one from the palace, Loki mused, Thor would be displeased to hear of the results of their little jailbreak. This one came not from the healing rooms, but... the chambers of the royal family? No, from his own chambers it floated skyward, and startled Loki sent his presence to the back of a moth drawn towards the glowing sphere and saw.
She was standing on the balcony, no longer girded for war but simply Sif, the war in her veins contented to rest for now while the woman gave thought to her heart. The floating light reflected silver on tear tracks on her cheeks; Heimdall must have seen, and told her, Loki thought, feeling a tear of his own take a matching path down his face at the thought of her weeping for someone such as him.
The moth fluttered down to rest in the shadows near the shield-maiden, but her quick eye noted it none the less.
"There is no need to hide, little one," she said, and in the crack between worlds Loki startled to hear her address him, before he remembered that all she saw was a moth, brilliant of wing but an insect none the less. "I shall be glad to have some company this night."
The moth stayed to the shadows.
"You know I thought quite frequently of tossing him over these very rails, when we were young," Sif said after a while. "But even then he always had the quickness of tongue to redirect my anger, or the grace of limb to avoid my grappling."
Loki remembered the first time she had nearly succeeded, how she had been so fierce and beautiful even with her golden hair cropped unevenly short and her red in the face from screaming at him. She had been determined, for she was not yet tall and strong enough to lift his gangly form over the railings, to at least shove him between them, and with one leg dangling over a dangerous drop and a bloody nose from her punches, he had in desperation kissed her, and she had stopped, shocked, punched him one last time, and run off.
Loki supposed that it was only natural that her favored remembrances had been of their clashes, War and Trickery opposed but in the end unable to deny their way their natures intertwined. As fond as he had been too of their childish arguments of the merits of steel and spell, and later their talks of tactics and deceptions, the times he held closest to him were the moments of stillness. The stories he wove to her and Thor, sitting under the stars on a winter's night, wrapped in blankets, stories of a shield maiden and two princes who fought great foes, discovered long-forgotten powers, and wrote their legend across the stars. ("Loki," Thor had always complained, "What heroism is there in finding an old magic grail? It is not a monster to slay or a maiden to rescue." "Maidens can rescue themselves," Sif had corrected, proudly. "Not so for foolish boys who cannot see the value of a magic vessel and so fall into the trap of its fearsome guardian." "You didn't say there was a fearsome guardian," Thor accused, and told Loki to come back under the blankets that he had shrugged off in the excitement of the tale he had been illustrating with his child's illusions, which at that point had mostly consisted of bright flashes of light and colour.)
When they were too old for tales, she would still come sit on the balcony with him, and make him read to her from books of war, because she said she would like, on occasion, to hear his voice used for another purpose than spinning lies and pretty flatteries. When she started to doze he would continue reading, but from his books of mysteries and the arcane, and once or twice poetry from far off lands. He noticed that she began to feign sleep more often after that, and then one day she could feign it no more and proclaimed that she had found a better use for his silvertongue, and whispered it to him with her breath hot on the shell of his ear. Loki began to neglect their books somewhat for quite a time after that, which seemed to make her perfectly content.
"You wonder who in this realm would weep for the god of lies," Sif said, conversational. "I did not, the first time, though his brother did. Perhaps I knew that if anyone could return from the Void it would be he, though in my foolishness I did not realize that he could hardly come back the same after such a fall. I think I weep now because I am told he died in honour, that he died for Thor. In my heart of hearts I wish this is his end, for it is fitting to the man he once was, and perhaps underneath it all still is at his core. But I think I know enough of him to know that Loki would only die for Loki, and I would rather he dead in valour than spinning his webs from hiding and making games with the hearts of those who care for him."
Loki could see the steel set of her jaw despite the redness of her eyes, and some strange feeling passed through him. Regret, perhaps, such as he had not felt for his actions an a long time, for how could it not be better for those few - those two, only two now - who cared if he lived or died to discover that he had survived yet another brush with death? He had not known, or perhaps never wished to give thought to the pain and mistrust his deceptions had sown. He thought that he would have liked to spare her that, but she ever saw more of him than he had liked to admit, and what would Loki be if he was not prepared to turn Asgard's greatest moment of weakness to his own strength? Better that she mourns now the person he could have become, that she would have liked him to become, than to walk in contempt over the corpse of a villain at the end of all things, he thought bitterly. Yet he could not bring himself to strike her from his heart and bury her, for as War is a part of Chaos (though it does not need to be, and only is so if it chooses, he reminds himself) so Sif would always be a part of Loki, no matter how he might wish it otherwise.
He felt the realms flicker around him, and dark stone again met his eyes so that there was nothing anymore on the balcony but a moth, and a maiden watching a white light ascend to join the stars.