When Sif next sees the prisoner she bears no platter and no goblet, but instead a more intangible purpose.

"I have been to see the Lady Frigg," she tells him with a furtive glance, and looks away, cursing her weakness.

She had come before the All-Mother abject in the middle of the night, gently beckoned into the woman's rooms. It had taken Sif the finest measure of will to refrain from collapsing before the feet of her queen, from spilling her tears like a wretched child into the precious furs carpeting her bedchamber. The wife of Odin, in her compassion, had simply taken the warrior's hand into her own and allowed Sif to speak.

"And what wisdom would my mother bestow?" Loki asks dryly, resentment coating his tongue. "Has she at last yielded to the prospect of my wickedness, conceded to my permanent punishment? Has she at last called you to realize the fate written in the letters of your name*, to stand patiently and gracefully at the left arm of my brother as he sits upon our father's throne?"

"She has discussed matters with the All-Father and wishes you to take initiative in the reconstruction of the Bifröst," Sif answers slowly, "in due time."

He tenses at this, frozen in space, for some time before inclining his head. Sif knows in that moment just how this is to unfold: without words, without protest, but with the ever-impending threat that Loki will always pose.

"I would imagine myself to be choiceless in the matter," he says finally.

"You concede so easily."

His features are raw and abraded. He turns to her exhausted, a man who has known defeat, who has held the whole of the universe in the palms of his hands and lost it.

Then he asks her a question she does not expect. "When did you discover the truth?"

She follows the path of a nook in the stone, clicks a heel against it. "After you left, all of us mourned. Your brother especially. I kept his counsel." She pauses, then adds, "and I have known of what became of my hair for some time."

"Does it not repel you, Sif? Does it not boil your blood to know you have lain with a Frost Giant?"

And again, as in so many instances before, she can indulge him no response; because there is no creed and no credence for such an unstable heart.

"All the words you could never say," Loki murmurs, and lets his eyes drift shut. "I read them like a book."

They loiter there in silence for an indefinable period, laid bare to the wily coaxing of Time; and when Loki at last opens his eyes, Sif is staring unguarded into his face.

"It was 'I love you,'" she says quietly, but the words fumble and fall, spilling from her lips as rotten wine. "It was 'I love you' and 'I hate you' and 'you are infuriating' and 'I wish as much to fall into your arms as to slice them to ribbons'." She's pacing now, circling him in a narrow arc, Loki transfixed upon those strong and savage hands that would render him as useless in all too many ways. "Those were the words I could not say, could never say."

An errant shadow crosses her face, diffuses into her hair.

"It was 'I came undone when you went away,' she whispers, and Loki can feel the charter, the endless scoreboard kept so solemnly between shadowed minds, crumble to dust by virtue of her eyes.

"I know it," he tells her.

Time, to Asgardians, is measured in the rise of dawn pitted against the genesis of night: a sequence of events cast in the glowing hands of Fate, unchangeable, a foundation for calendars and systems plotted in stone to guide the people as they live.

Time, to children, is measured in insurmountable walls and bullys' fingers, in the giggles of young maidens and the hairs upon young men's chins, in playtimes and mealtimes, in sisters and in brothers.

Time, to the warrior, is measured in the beats of battle-drums and hard-shelled boots, in the tinny shriek of a hefted knife; it is measured in glory, in the color red, in once-breathing shells who lie nameless, defeated upon the ground to join the dust once more.

Time, to Sif, is measured in victories gleaned, great and small, against the monsters of the field and the demons of her mind. It is measured in swells of pride and draughts of shame, in smiles allotted as fighter and as friend, in an identity of being which lies ever-obscure someplace between warrior and woman.

She thinks of him because his magic melded with her will is a vehement force, and a destructive one; she goes to see him because Time is guileful in the number of instances where the corners of her vision blaze green with his influence; she tastes him because he is what the realms call evil, because he is every bit the foil of all that the kingdom expects of her, and Sif has always harbored an abhorrence for the expected.

"I would corrupt you," he whispers to her torchlit form another night, and it is Time who unearths the memory of these words, velvet against her ear in a cavernous room swathed in darkness. "I, who cut your hair, who sullied your body and created a kingdom all my own within the deepest corners of your mind."

She lowers her arms then, forfeits her protective stance; the dagger in her hand slips from her fingers and falls, clattering to the ground, and Loki watches as it spins, spins, before coming to rest against the stone—a long, slender, tri-pronged model inlaid with a single shard of onyx.

Time, to lovers, is measured in feathered words: in coy glances and wafting lights, tinkling laughter and furious glares, in eyes and tongues and lips that brand into skin the secrets shared beneath a blanket of night.

Time, to them, is as the shadow: it creeps upon the conscience, a subterfuge of the mind, lovely, chaotic, infallible.

"A pity it wasn't enough."

And to him, she is nothing.

And to him, she is everything.

* 'Sif' is an Old Norse word meaning 'wife' or 'bride'.