He still has no idea how long he's been in the cell.

Hours pass, days. Weeks—months, for all he knows. In the permanent whiteness of his cell, there are no shadows and there is no movement of shadows or light for him to measure the time. His guards come, and his guards leave, a plateful of uninviting fare every time, and a glass of water. During earlier days, he'd thought about refusing the food altogether, about letting gnawing in his stomach grow until his entire body is numb; a final act of defiance to spit at the Allfather. They had stripped him and cuffed him, and bound him like an animal—him, Loki of Asgard, Prince of Asgard, Rightful King of Asgard—and now they keep him alive on this meagre brew so that they may have use of him one day. So I am nothing more than another stolen relic, he'd said to the man he fancied his father once—locked up here, until you may have use of me?

Oh, the irony.

He lifts his hands, the movement slow and lethargic, and the clink of his chain is music after such a long silence. Starvation is for martyrs. For unthinking fools who resign themselves to their fate, and Loki is neither. How much better to wait, to plan, to rip back his magic from the hands of Asgard and leave them bloody, to burn this kingdom clean from its filth—maybe then they'll call him saviour. In a new generation they might even think him a saint. He smiles.

He senses her arrival before any physical sign of her is here.

A slender silhouette, in the far corner of the wide hall. Light steps, the splay of feet and rhythm of their fall so familiar, pit pat pit pat, a slight heel. Something is off—the beats don't hit exact, something in the fall of her feet slightly irregular—Loki closes his eyes, imagines the calf twisted somehow, a muscle turned the wrong way, the hamstring up the thigh bruised—

"Leave us." Comes the quiet command, and his ghostly guards make their way out of the hall.

Loki's eyes open. He smiles, but doesn't turn his head. "Ah."

She doesn't reply. He can sense Sif's silent presence on the other side of the glass, can feel her careful eyes on him and he can almost taste the tension in the back of his throat, something almost like hate radiating off her, almost tangible. When he does turn his head, it takes his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the sight.

She looks older. There is a line between her arched brows that he doesn't remember seeing before, ever. Her mouth is sterner, and they had always been wide, always been thin, but now what little softness they once had is completely devoid. There are dark shadows under her eyes, and the muscles of her throat stand taut, she is putting the majority of her weight on her left leg, and her fists are clenched. Loki tilts his head back, blinks indolently at her, and smiles.

"Have you come to kill me, Lady Sif?" He asks lightly.

Her shoulders tighten, as if she is trying to hold back a flinch. The muscles in her throat work, and Loki could almost laugh, could almost let the breath out of his lungs in a great rush if he didn't think it was beyond his strength and capacity. Gods, he'd missed this. He had, dare he think it, missed her.

Before his fall, before the lie—or rather, he amends, before the lie was discovered—before earth, before, before, before, he'd been a boy given to shadows and quietness and she'd had been a girl who hungered for carnage. A very long time ago he had cut off her hair in the hopes of doing a great deed; of proving her more than a maiden and himself more than a patsy in the name of tradition. Before, before, on dark nights with the palace rowdy with drink and Thor at the centre of it; a bright burning star around which all else danced, and the two of them anomalies in the great hall, he had sat in the library in the great seat by the window and had read to her of the space between stars, of the cracks in the universe. Before, she had been a girl with golden hair, barely awake as she listened to him, his voice cracking in excitement as he read from the ancient tomes—of stars and of seidr, of the strands of light in the branches of Yggdrasil that if followed, will never end. You'll get yourself stranded one day, she'd had said to him once, the light glinting off the silver pin in her hair. Don't think I'll risk my skin, trying to bring you back.

I don't intend to get lost, he had retorted, affronted. I mean to rule the stars.

Her laugh had rung through the shelves of the library, a great rising arpeggio of delight, and he remembers with painful clarity the incline of her throat, the curve of her nape, the juncture at which her collarbones jutted sharply against the curve of her shoulders, as she leaned upward, leaned close. Loki blinks now, and finds that his hands are clenched.

"I'm not here to hurt you." Sif says quietly. Her green eyes are bright, darting, quick, as if she is trying to take in every inch of him. How talentless at guile she had always been. How straightforward and true, how like his brother she is at the core of her. He would do well to remember that. "I'm here to talk."

Something is rising in the back of his throat. "And is that," he asks, trying to swallow it down, "going to actually involve talking?"

She doesn't flush, as he'd expected her to. Instead she looks at him steadily, calmly, quietly. War has grown, it seems. She is given more to cunning now than carnage, more given to compromise than pure taking. "You tried to kill me. On earth. You sent the Destroyer after me, knowing that it could kill me given the chance, if I even slipped for a fraction of a second."

His teeth come down hard on the inside of his cheek, until he can taste copper. When he moves again, it is a simple shrug of his shoulders, a bare small movement. "What of it?"

She stares at him for a while, then turns and walks out of his sight.

For a moment, there is nothing, and Loki allows his head to fall back, allows his eyes to close, allows a ragged breath to come out of his throat and he can breathe, breathe, finally, finally there is air in the cell and he can think, without her suffocating claustrophobic presence on the other side, watching, staring, eyes cool and calm—

The door to his cell opens, and she steps inside.

Her eyes are cold. "When they told me you'd changed, when Thor told me you'd changed, I didn't believe them. Or him." She says, and the closer she stepped the smaller the room seemed, the smaller he felt. "I didn't believe them when they told me of how you'd tried to enslave Midgard, I didn't believe them when Thor brought you back, muzzled like a beast. I didn't even believe them when you turned from your own mother in the great hall. I didn't even believe that you could have invited the Jotuns into Asgard, that you could do such a thing to your family." Her eyes close briefly. And then she is stoic again.

"I have no family," he spits at her. "I am alone, and unattended, and unshackled by choice, just like my Lady Sif with her pretences to independence, trying to beat the woman out of her with a sword—"

Her blow hits him square in the jaw, and for a moment his vision shakes. A trickle of blood runs down the corner of his mouth. She is breathing hard.

"Get up." She snaps at him. "Get up—you are a prince of Asgard, you're a citizen of the Realm Eternal, get up!"

"I am neither," he says, with a grin that doesn't reach his eyes. "My, my, my Lady, you are behind on the news—"

She hauls him to his feet, slams his back against the wall in a savage display of strength. Her voice is low in her throat, curling down his spine, when she says, "Now I believe."

His fingers twitch. There is a tendril of hair tucked behind her ear that has fallen from the rest, curling loosely at the nape of her neck, at the incline of bone; an oddly intimate, strangely fragile sight. He follows the length of it to where it curls lightly against the stark rise of her collarbone. Once upon a time, that strand of hair would have been gold, would have been bright. He would have curled it around his fingers.

They were friends once, were they not? They were friends and not friends, they were the left and right of Thor, the revolved around her brother like everything resolved around the sun, the same distance in between; never touching, never close enough except when the sun is absent. They were friends and not friends, they were lovers but not in love, they cared but never enough and gods, is that what it comes down to? The constant almost, not enough. He could remember the colour of her eyes with the moon reflected in them, the smile on her face when he read, the way her mouth curved against his. But he couldn't, for the life of him, remember her in the light, in the open; he couldn't remember ever taking her hand where others could see, ever allowing himself to acknowledge whatever it was; couldn't remember if ever being more than an almost.

If he does, then he must have purged it all by now.

When Sif loosens her hands from around his throat, her eyes close, and she turns away. He is finding it hard to breathe. "Asgard has been attacked." She says quietly.

He is watching the incline of her nape, watching her hand at her mouth, watching her fist clench and unclench.

"Asgard is under attack, and we have lost many men in the far country." She carries on quietly. "In a few days, Thor will come to you. He is in negotiations with the Allfather as we speak. He will come to you, and you will help him."

"What makes you so sure?" He asks lightly. "Out of some brotherly affection, perhaps? Or something else?" He laughs lightly. "They must be truly desperate, if they think some childhood dalliance long forgotten will move my heart. Or my hand."

"You seem to be the only one talking of dalliances." She turns to face him, and now her hand is on her glaive. "You will help Thor. You will do what must be done. And it won't be for Asgard, or for me, or for the Allfather, or even for Thor. It'll be because if you don't, you'll be here until you rot. You'll be here until you are the Allfather's age, and older, you'll be here powerless and weak and slumped against a wall, and in time Thor will bring his children here to gaze upon you the way you were taken to see the Jotuns' casket. You will be a relic, useless and powerless. And in the years after that, when Thor's children have grown to adulthood, you will not even be that. No one will remember the name Loki Silvertongue; no one will remember the Liesmith. You will be what you have always been afraid of being: you will be nothing."

His throat works, and there is something cruel in her eyes, a cold light glinting ceaselessly as she picks up a single thread and unravels the whole thing. I won't be his shadow, a drunken confession, years in the making. I won't be the dark by which he can shine. I won't do it. I won't.

A hand on his cheek. Didn't you speak, she had asked, of ruling the stars?

"That can't be all." He replies. "You know I will betray him. You know the first chance I get, I'll put a knife in his back and be off before he realizes."

She inclines her head. "Yes." She says calmly. "And you know I'll chase you to the ends of Yggdrasil for it. I won't let Thor commit such a crime, but I'll gladly do it myself. When you betray him, I will kill you."

"Is that a promise?" He asks softly. "The Lady Sif, my very own Skoll and Hati. I'm honoured."

Don't think I'll risk my own skin, trying to bring you back, she had said once.

We are all liars here, he thinks, as she leaves. This kingdom makes liars of us all; these white walls make the most truthful of men into liesmiths.

One day, you'll catch me. Loki smiles, and sits back to wait.