Warning for canonical major character death (Frigga).

Holes

You said you did not wish to share our grief. But I will share with you, brother. You will hear.

You will hear how it was to be told that the only person who never gave up on you – who never even pretended not to care, as you did – is no longer there. Told curtly and unsympathetically by a faceless guard who did not expect any kind of caring reaction. I was good; I gave him what he wanted, what he expected and I did not react, did not even care until he left. And I was so polite brother, you would have been proud.

No, you probably wouldn't.

Let me tell you how I screamed behind the frozen mask I made my face. Did you hear me brother? Did you hear your shadow scream inside your head? They leave a hole in your heart don't they, the dead? Whoever they are. Did you feel the hole in mine? Could you ever see into that abyss? Would you even have looked? And when you did not was it out of hate or fear or did you just not care as much as you told yourself you did?

Did you have any idea of how cruel you were? On the one hand yes, you acknowledged I did grieve. I suppose you thought that was more than I deserved. I suppose you prided yourself as you always did on knowing me better than anyone else. At least anyone else now. But to not answer my one simple question – to leave me not knowing if she had suffered – that was depth to which not even I could have sunk.

And you. You shared in the passing, in the journey to the stars. You saw the whole beauty of death from your lofty vantage point, saw her return to the water, to the skies in flame and light while I saw

nothing.

You saw the lie this time. You all saw what you wanted to come next. After death. You consoled yourself with it while I saw what really happened from my room in which the passing went unmarked except in blood in silent screaming. You dwelt in the wishes of others while I sat with bleeding feet, alone with only the memory of her voice in my ears.

How selfish grief is. How dull. For while we remember life all that plagues us most is that they are no longer there. That they will never look at us again or comfort us with their physical presence. That they are inexplicably gone – and it is always inexplicable – and can never be touched nor seen again though this does not seem real and every new minute brings the expectation of seeing them as though they were never again. Waking up to find they live in the few moments before you remember they do not, only to have those few moments stab you in the heart you thought you lost. How callous is time that in the end we simply move on and something can come to fill the hole in the heart that at the time you thought nothing could mend.

Yes I would share my grief brother. For only in the sharing can we diminish the loss and we are all selfish in that we wish to. Only when we have, enough times, re- uttered do you remember when she – do the memories cease to cause such bittersweet jabs at the heart and the recollections that should be comforting are crueller and more taunting than the immediate grief. There is a time when you feel it will never be otherwise. That the heart will remain this heavy until it sinks through the floor. The eyes ache and the head is hollow and stuffed with dead leaves.

Whether this should diminish or not it does.

In the end me will share so closely that you too will sit alone in this cell, wishing you could comfort yourself with memories of the beloved departed and instead able only to wish that they were still here.

_x_

I had a small death in the family. Thence came this fic. Sorry for the sad. :-(