Count the Days
I counted the days while you were gone. The words come to mind, sit heavily upon her tongue. Yet she can’t speak them, dares not because the man she would say them to is there, sitting across from her as he has thousands of times before, but he is not the man who was her friend.
She is his friend, she will always be his friend, there for him if ever he calls to her, and he will. He always does request her assistance. Perhaps that is the comfort she will take in hanging on to the oaths that she could have let go, severed by law in his own actions. Even if she is only an afterthought, he can recognize her usefulness.
But when he seeks comfort or companionship, it is not her face he thinks of, not her name, and should she need the same, she is no longer comfortable imposing her own troubles upon someone who thinks nothing of the possibility that she might have them.
People change. He has changed, they both know. He who has turned away from all he once was, and she wonders if he hates the parts of her that are so similar to that which he so dislikes in himself.
She shakes it off as best she can, the fingers of her left hand rubbing across the knuckles of her right. Many a man has sprayed his life’s blood over her hands, but, while most of it has washed off easily enough, a handful of faces haunt her, their deaths her responsibility in more ways than just where she stuck her blade.
“Lady Sif.” He greets her, his voice so familiar, but his eyes are not. She smiles at him anyway.
“My Lord Thor.” His eyes linger on hers for a moment, but he says nothing, and she exhales, missing the friend who would have seen her worries. The one she watched die a mortal’s death by the Destroyer’s hand.
I counted the days while you were gone. One day, perhaps, I shall stop counting.
