Days passed.
Weeks went by.
Months fled.
They flew with the speed of angels and they dragged their feet, weary day-laborers, longing for their rest.
There was much to be done, and little time for grief.
She was often alone, lacking the energy to face her people. Thor and Odin were frequently away.
She missed Loki's still presence. How abruptly he would appear behind her as she fumbled through some long strain of scrawled terms or decrees and pick out the places she was missing. The loopholes. The catches and tricks.
This was a role she had learned. He moved as though born for it.
He had.
Word that the Bifrost had been destroyed and the staying hand of Asgard was removed from them, its AllFather weary, had spread like a fire licking across a sheet of oiled paper, flaring farther across the realms. The discord that had ever bubbled among the border lands burst into conflict. And that conflict rushed inwards and nearer, bordering on the central Nine, drawing all to succumb.
Sometimes she stopped, lost as she had been in those days before Thor's birth.
In the moments that followed, when she'd come back to herself, she would pause. She would close her eyes, and she would try to remember the good of it.
And always she came back.
How had it come to this.
She had never wanted a throne. She had only even longed for a husband who would let her stand beside him, and children to call her own.
Odin was busy, always, lost in the archives and surrounded by buzzing clumps of his advisors. Thor he was continually sending away. Not that Thor would come to her. Thor had ever kept his own counsel. More now, more solemnly than he had before, as a headstrong youth. He had grown in his banishment, but he was unsure how to go on in this newer, darker world.
And she was left with the day-to-day leading of the realm.
She was standing in a storeroom, looking at something that stood in one corner of the place, festooned with thin, white cobwebs, bathed in blue shadows.
Its golden curves looked smudged in the weary light, a mockery of what it ought to have been.
It was the cradle where both her boys had slept as babes.
She remembered first laying Thor down in it. Tiny and red and squalling, little hands balled into tight, tiny fists.
She remembered the first time she'd taken Loki from it. Remembered the wondering uncertainty that had numbed her.
Those times. The darkness and doubt. Even through it, they'd had the pure light of a beginning, like the silver-grey of coming dawn.
This wasn't like that. This was death. And how she longed only to rest.
"Are you remembering him?"
"Thor," she turned to face him, then realized the tears on her face and she smeared them away. She glanced back over her shoulder, longingly, at the cradle. "Yes," she answered.
It was old, unused. Coated with dust. A relic of a past now lost.
"…just another stolen relic…"
She remembered Odin recounting to her those words in the first days after his waking, and how wearily he'd laid his head in his palm, weighed down by fathomless grief.
Straightening her shoulders, she cleared the tightness from her throat and drew her station about her. She was a queen. She was his mother. She was herself. "Remembering the both of you," she told him, summoning a weak smile. "The days as they were."
He folded his great arms about himself as though to fend off a chill she could not feel.
"Why do you come down here?" he asked her, finally.
In all the time since his banishment, he had not asked her such a question. He'd spoken at length with his father, but when he looked at her it was as though he drove her out. Something was drawn closed behind his eyes.
But now he looked at her as he had as a boy, open and searching as he had been before he'd become so sure of his own supremacy.
She took a long breath.
"I find it good to remember what was," she said softly, "To remember all the good there was in it."
Thor didn't answer, nor did he look at her again for a long moment.
He had ever been quiet when troubled. She allowed him his silence.
Then he nodded his head.
"Father has new assignment for me," he said. "I wished to bid you farewell before I set out."
A soft pang jerked her heart and she would have pressed it back, but that her hand betrayed her. It fluttered up, out of the shawl she held about herself and rested on his arm.
He looked down at her.
"Must you go so soon?"
Somehow, she felt she had only just gotten him back. And she was so afraid to lose another son.
He pressed her hand with his. His was larger, warmer, than hers. "I must."
"When will you return?"
"I can't say," he told her. "Not even Father knows the duration of this never-ending conflict."
His eyes were distant, his tone bitter. She reached out to him and he took her hand.
"To speak truly," he pressed both her hands in his, "I am glad of it. This place is haunted with ghosts of a past I no longer know how to cherish and a future I have no more any desire for. In battle," a wry cast tipped his lips, "I find more peace than ever I know within these walls. If not for the love I bear you, Mother," his blue eyes met hers squarely, "I often think I might not return to them at all."
She watched him, searching his eyes, remembering all that had been, the boy he had been.
"I am sorry, my son."
He pressed his lips to her bent fingers and released her. "I will return when I may."
And within moments, she was alone in the storeroom once more. Accompanied only by memory.
