It was never winter in Asgard; spring, summer, fall. A three-season rotation. But that never stopped him from feeling that bone-deep, extremity-numbing cold far within from time to time. At first, it seemed to have no rhyme or reason. Long periods of soaking up the warmth of the sun, the pleasant heat and mild golden weather of Asgard, as if he would never be warm again, interspersed with a fear, a repulsion, and finding the sun to be his ally no longer.
He would barricade himself in his room with the curtains drawn to block out that cursed light, and Thor would plead and pester and bully him to come out in the burning-roasting-far-too-hot-far-too-bright sun, and his skin would blister just at the thought, his insides twisting, squirming, and recoiling like the edges of paper from a flame. Summer was the most dreaded and hated time of the year.
That was something Thor—with his golden disposition and his laughter and warmth and brazen character—would never understand.
When summer at last gave way to fall, he greeted the sun timidly as one would an oft-regretted old accomplice whose betrayals may or may not be petty, but whose companionship one finds hoping to enjoy once more. As the weeks passed, he had an inexplicable longing, an anticipation for something, but that never came.
For when fall disappeared in a blaze of glory to be replaced almost overnight by the bursting cheer of spring, he felt cheated. Like something was missing. He was empty and cold from the inside out, but the world around him was beginning again; he thought he loved spring, for its beauty and warmth as tender as any lover's caress, but though he ached to warm the chill inside of him, a chill like a dim echo that never originated from him but consumed him as though it were entirely his own, by the cherished heat of the sun, nothing truly filled that hole left by the inexplicable hope that had annually been deferred.
And yet, he should not feel so cold, all over, so utterly frigid when he knew he should feel the warmth that was beginning the climb of its cycle once again.
It was not until he visited Jotunheim, and the cold sank deep into his bones and called to him, that he understood.
Jotunheim had no summer, and its seasons were polar opposites of Asgard's. Jotunheim's winter was Asgard's summer; the ice realm's mild seasons, first spring and then a fall, were Asgard's fall and then spring, respectively. He was forever in suspension in Asgard because her seasons ran in converse to the ones wired into his genetic makeup, but he could never be content in the natural order of his seasons either, because Asgard had left her mark.
And yet, when he returned to Asgard, to the land of light and sun and beauty, answers left much to be desired, and displacement set in, because it was warm, and he knew he should not be.