Above All Shadows [Loki Timetravel fic - Completed]

9. Third Time Lucky

'This is how my son died,' Tyr said. In the last few hours, Tyr's voice had taken on a softness that Loki had never known the man to possess. He used a cool cloth to wipe the sweat on Sif's face and straightened the blanket Sif's last seizure had left askew. 'Not exactly like this, no. His company became cut off and thus unable to take their injured to a field hospital, let alone back to Asgard. The poison took him as he lay in a dark cave, without so much as a fire to give him comfort in his final hours.'

Loki pressed his palms together, uncertain about what response Tyr wanted from him. Ove, Sif's brother, wasn't a topic one raised within Tyr's earshot. As best as Loki understood it from snatches of whispered conversations and from Sif's few words on the matter, Ove's early death left Tyr to bury all the ambitions he had held for his house. In the first few centuries, Tyr had hoped for another son, but the Norns saw fit to offer him three daughters in Ove's stead. After Sif's birth had nearly robbed him of his wife too, Tyr had to admit defeat.

Tyr's family had long amused Loki: Sif always striving to become the son she could never be; Tyr's simmering resentment that she would even attempt such a charade; and Sif's older sisters perpetually attempting to force a peace between the two.

It wasn't so amusing now.

'Well over a millennium has passed and, unlike her brother, Sif is in the care of the best healers in Asgard,' Loki said.

Tyr threw him a condescending smile. 'Does she look to be improving?'

She didn't. The arrow wounds themselves were serious injuries, but the poison on the arrowheads turned out to be the true calamity. The first symptoms had appeared in hours after their return to Asgard, once the poison had a chance to spread throughout Sif's body. A fever came. Within an hour it was severe enough to spark seizures. Then Sif's organs began to suffer. The healers propped up her vital functions, but they struggled to bring down the fever and they could do nothing about the grotesque spider-webs of grey spreading over Sif's skin.

'How is it that after the long years Asgard and Jotunheim have been at war, we don't have a cure for this?' Loki asked. Sighing, he leaned against the windowsill and tried his best to ignore the sun creeping up from behind the mountains.

'Healers say the poison is never the same,' Tyr replied as he sunk into the wicker chair by Sif's bed. 'And they cannot keep a patient alive long enough to try an antidote.'

'An intelligent strategy, I'll give the frost giants that.'

'A coward's strategy. An honourable man doesn't resort to poison.'

Loki bit his lip and swallowed his instinctive reply, then reached for something more conciliatory. 'I'm not ready to surrender my hope for Sif's recovery, but whatever may come, I'm sorry this grief has befallen your family. She should've had many more years in this world.'

Despite their mutual dislike, Loki didn't have to spin his words out of nothing. Sif had been more perceptive than the rest of the Asgardians, so fearing that she would expose him, Loki had banished her from the Nine Realms. She hadn't been there for Ragnarok or for the funeral pyre Thanos made of the Statesman. She could well have survived Thanos' Snap too.

Helblindi. Sif. Who else will find premature death because of me?

Something of Loki's thoughts must have crept into his expression, because Tyr cocked his head and said, 'Do not doubt your father's strength, Loki. He is not as we are. He will recover.'

'Thank you, Lord Tyr,' Loki said, speaking more quickly than he meant to.

Loki had no desire to discuss his father, but now that Tyr had brought up Odin's condition, Loki couldn't find a trail of thought that didn't swiftly circle back to Odin. Tyr, for his part, seemed to have nothing else to say. So they kept vigil until a healer burst into the room and disrupted their uneasy quiet.