Sif's footsteps are curt and prominent as she marches toward the prison room, designed to be heard and acknowledged without mistake. The guards nod to her as she clasps the handle, not daring to offend her by opening the doors themselves; the woman's disdain toward chivalry is famous within the palace halls.
She approaches the prisoner in a line perpendicular to that of her mouth. A platter of food presses its weight against her hand, a prisoner's feast of bread, meat and water. This time, Sif's armor has returned in its full majesty: polished steel plates and metal frets, tough leather-hide pants, gauntlets which crease deep with the stiffness of her fingers.
Her eyes betray no account of the previous night's events.
"It has been decided that I shall be the one to deliver your meals," she announces, her body stonelike. Loki recalls a Midgardian word: 'professional'. It changes nothing.
They are both silent as she releases him, not without difficulty, from the restraints that bind his hands and each know of the guards who wait braced beyond the doors of the chamber, weapons threatening behind fingers itching for a chance to prove their valor. Sif makes no mentioning of them; she knows better than to tread on such unstable ice.
Loki eats his portion of bread and mutton without tasting, but savors the water—his first sample of the life-fluid since installed in his cell—with dripping slowness, letting it coat his arid tongue with precious moisture, tipping it back to cool his inflamed throat. Sif watches him throughout, noiseless, her feet arched into a careful point.
When he has finished she snatches the muzzle and cuffs and reattaches them crudely; lifts the emptied ware from the floor, and delivers him a glance of absolute enmity.
She leaves as stridently as she came.
The training grounds of the castle were extensive and scattered: great stretches of land splayed out into outcroppings of rock and equipped with barracks and weaponhouses. Here warriors were crafted, skills were honed, honor was claimed. To Loki, the warrior's barracks were breeding grounds of prideful and loquacious men. He detested the shameful schools, which groomed the brutest bullies into protectors of the kingdom while the weak straggled behind, despite any talents they might have displayed if only given the chance.
They were places that fostered the kind of animal thirst for battle displayed so often by his brother, an attitude whose inherent threat to the well-being of Asgard was handwaved as acceptable—glorified even—by the people, while boys of Loki's scholarship and sense received neglectful treatment.
Despite these truths—or perhaps, he thought grimly, because of them—Loki found himself in the smallest of the alcoves, which constituted the projectiles quadrant, almost nightly. Sheltered beneath a generously-leafed tree, he engaged the more obfuscated corners his mind beneath the blanketing wisdom of the stars.
He was never missed; he was far too quiet to ever be missed. The air was ever calm beyond the palace doors, so long as his brother had gone to bed in a content humor.
He craved the stillness, the solitude, the slipping away of time. Here he could meld with the shadows of the trees, so much grander than the shadow cast behind his brother. Since he had first held the notion he had escaped his rooms to join the night, never to be discovered by prodding eyes.
When the leaves above him began to rattle, Loki thought nothing of it. He rested his nose against his cape, breathed a quiet hum of sound. Then a voice broke the still.
"What are you doing here?"
The scrawny yellow-haired girl burst from the trees, clad in dark breeches and tunic further masked by darkness. Clutched in her hand was a small throwing dagger, unmarked, an obvious make of the sort used to train young warriors.
"You stole that blade," Loki remarked, amused. It was the first thing he thought to say. The girl tightened her grip in response, as if to protect the steel along with her reputation.
"Borrowed it," she retorted, a scowl edging into the smooth lines of her face. Her hands splayed out from her sides, suddenly, like a falling bird. "I do not need to explain myself to you," she sneered.
He met her protective stance with laughter, high and sharp and unpracticed. Sif's diminutive glare fell pitifully flat on her thin, ghostly face. Loki was reminded of a mewling baby animal.
"And why are you here, on warrior's grounds in the dead of night, with a borrowed blade?" his eyes were playful, but not in the innocent manner of a child; rather, they gleamed as to invite the evil wraiths of night to dance.
"I will become a warrior," she said flatly, astutely, a perfect mirror of their first encounter. "The head trainer refuses to let me participate until I prove myself worthy. So I have been coming out here, in the night, to practice my form. I care not whether you choose to support me."
He found himself wishing again to laugh, to sneer at the prospect of such a lanky, undisciplined, female child someday protecting the realm; it was an absurd idea, a farce, and yet no sound left his lips, no smile bent his mouth.
"Why are you out here?" she asked him suddenly, her eyes burnished with the unbounded, purposeful energy of a child determined.
The silence fermented awhile before he answered her. "Perhaps I enjoy the darkness," he said, turning his gaze upward as, just in that moment, a flicker of moonslight drifted beneath the leaves of his tree. A mocking gesture, he thought bitterly, even as the beams touched his cheek softly in recompense.
"You hold no purpose here, other than to stare at shadows? Does that not seem to you to be ..." Sif's voice faltered before continuing, "rather strange?"
"There are some who believe me wicked," he said simply, shifting his body as though entranced by some marvel of the earthen ground invisible to her, to every set of eyes but his.
She stepped closer to him, her hair pale gossamer, the moons' light a sheet of brilliance that danced upon the strands. "I don't think you to be wicked."
He watched as the lazy beams scattered across her hair. The silver drifting of light framing Sif's delicate face made him want to touch. He almost did, until her cry of surprise halted the path of his hand.
"What are you doing?!" she shouted, flustered, smoothing her hair down with an errant hand. He started up then, springing to his feet in a sudden rush of vertigo, green battering the edges of his vision. "Where are you going?"
"The shadows do not touch it," was all that he said, in a voice that did not reach her ears.