Notes: Title comes from A Softer World #917.
I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
Or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
In secret, between the shadow and the soul.
-Love Sonnet XVII, Pablo Neruda
She stands beside him, unnoticed by the denizens of Asgard, yet, if he only uses his periphery he can see her standing beside him, ebony feathers ruffling in the breeze. There is blood on teeth that are white and predatory with the echoes of war swirling across her abyss-like eyes.
She stands beside him and watches the universe spin past and when he ventures too close to the edges of the Lady Delirium's realm he feels her blood-caked nails pierce his armour as she drags him back to his place beside her. She will never let him leave her but sometimes she leaves him, diving forward in a swirl of feathers and soaring across the field, laughing cruelly as her champions fell their enemies with an ease that they will later declare supernatural as they toast her name. Yet, even when she does fly to perform her duty he can still feel her hand gripping his arm. Sometimes he wonders if he dared look he would see a detached hand latched onto his arm. Sometimes she is joined by her sisters. Her elder sister flaps her wings and circles the battle, watching as the seeds of discontent she has so carefully nurtured comes to fruition, cawing softly while the other, young and pure as his Dark Lady is old and black, walks barefoot among the bodies of the fallen, comforting the dead and dying, her long red hair trailing unsullied on the ground, licking at the fallen like flames even as she cradles their faces in pale white hands and lets the tears of millions fall on their still-warm cheeks. While he knows what they do, it is not her sisters that he watches but her. She stands in the centre of the battle, swarmed by crows and blood and battle and she laughs, a harsh, cawing sound of pure, undiluted chaos born out of billions of forgotten soldiers, her scarlet lips slashed across her bone-white face like blood on snow.
And yet, no matter how often she leaves him to fly among her disciples, she always returns to him, leaving one sister to pick up the pieces of those left behind and the other to stoke the fires of their next meeting. Her part has been played and what happens next is the role of players other then herself. Sometimes, when her elder sister has been particularly effective and and her younger has wept oceans, she'll brush her bloodstained lips across his forehead before returning to her place beside him. In this moment the universe is silent and he closes his eyes.
Sometimes he sees her elder sister flapping about the spires of Asgard, unseen by even the all-seeing Hugin and Munin, and he feels dread slip into the chinks of his heart as poison drips into the blood of kings. She plucks the slivers of worry out with needle-like precision and smooths the creases out of his forehead with a calloused hand, reminding him of everything's eventuality.
The Cuckoo will be wrong when he says that the Watcher does not see everything that he does, but the Watcher is simply that, an observer and not a participant. What the Cuckoo Prince does is inevitable, and so the he does not try to stop it.
Eventually, sooner then he'd wished but many millennia since it was first catalysed, the poison has blackened the last drop of even the bluest of blood and she leaves him once again, following a band of kings and soldiers into the lands of frost. It is not a large battle but it shall act as a herald of what is to come and for that alone she must be there. She returns with her elder sister, the shamed warriors, the Allfather, and the newly self-discovered king with an anticipatory glint in her eye. She grips his arm once more and watches the young princes hungrily. The sweep of her feathered cloak catches the corner of the Allfather's good eye and for a second a frown flits across his face before he turns back to his warmongering sons. She leaves with the prince, off to attend to a bloody conflict in which there will be few survivors.
After the others have left, heads hung low, the Allfather stands before him, appraising the Watcher of the Yggdrasil.
'I do not see everything that happens in my kingdom,' his king muses, his eye becoming cloudy with fatigue. 'I thought I did, but now I see that was mere arrogance.'
'Possibly.'
'You, I think, you see everything clearly. You do not suffer from my arrogance. Pray that you never do.' The Allfather's posture slumps slightly in the shoulders, as if he is tired of bearing his burden.
'Perhaps.'
'I saw the Crow Queen today, watching and smiling as I cast my son into the Bifrost. Thought i have heard many stories of her this is the first time I have seen her,' the Allfather looked thoughtfully at the Watcher, 'Yet I think, perhaps, that you have been seeing her for much longer.' There is no reproach in the Allfather's voice, merely worry for what is to come.
'I cannot refute your claim.'
'There is some ill will upon the horizon. I like it not.' The Allfather stares out into the endless space that lies waiting outside the Bifrost
To this he makes no reply and soon the Allfather leaves, engrossed in problems that will come to a head much sooner then any of them would ever wish.
She is busy now, engrossed in playing her part in her sister's plans; giving the Allfather's metal Goliath extra power even as she whispers words of encouragement in the golden prince's ear, laughing gleefully as a building falls at the Cuckoo's command, smiling languorously as the golden kingling fights the man of iron.
Terrible things happen to his king's family, yet the Watcher cannot help but wonder if they did not bring it on themselves. He thinks she sees it too, but right and wrong has never factored in to who she bestows her favour upon.
Those who once fought under the Dark Lady are forever hers, spending the remainder of their lives waiting to be called by her once more, such is the nature of the old man who stands against the Cuckoo (He is twelve and sitting at home wrapped in his mother's arms as the Allies bomb his city flat and his father's out fighting their own country, strapping charges to a train track whose derailment will cause hundreds of his friends' fathers and older brothers die. A crow shrieks above. He stands facing men who will kill him with a gun in his hands, unable to pull the trigger. A crow perches on a nearby branch and he does not feel regret when he pulls the trigger.) He has been called and like all good soldiers he answers. He stands in defiance before a man who would crush him because it is his lady's will. Those who champion the Queen of Crows do so for life.
The Watcher has not seen her shine brightly for a long time, as civilizations enter treaties and accords instead of battles and massacres, and yet, as a great city burns under the hands of the Cuckoo and his allies she is like a supernova or a black hole, surrounded by crows that swirl around her in a violent flurry that seems to be more blades then feathers, like planets orbiting a single, unmoving point, drawing the worst of the battle towards her like gravity.
They all orbit around her, the Golden Prince and his allies, whether they know it or not. The Soldier, who calls her Saint Michael when he prays to her, the Rage, who quietly acknowledges her existence despite his scientific mind, and the Widow, to whom the Dark Lady is the only god she's ever known, are more aware of their dependance upon the Crow Queen then the Fabricator with his hubris and the Hawk with his distrust of any but himself and the Golden Prince with his blind faith in the Allfather. They dance to the tune she and her crows play for them; a horrible battle hymn that is woven out of the cries of millions as the charge into battle across time and space and the sound of wings. They dance until they can dance no further and fall to the ground, so exhausted they cannot feel when they next wave of dancers bring their feet down upon the fallen.
Sometimes the allies do not win. Sometimes they die; sometimes the Widow can't wipe out the red, sometimes the Golden Prince watches his love dies, sometimes the Hawk is happy, sometimes the Soldier is no longer so sure, sometimes the Fabricator lives too long, sometimes the Rage is scattered across the globe. Sometimes bad things happen and there is not a happy ending. Sometimes there is.
Whatever happens she always comes back; always wraps her talons around his arm and places her pointy chin on his shoulder, watching life go past. They have been like that since time began, they will be like that until it ends. It will not end. They are infinite.