Who: Peter, Thor, and Loki What: Loki pretends to be a harmless little old lady, but, like the big bad wolf, my what big teeth he has. AKA - Peter gets kidnapped, and Thor arrives just a bit too late. Where: Peter's house [Marvel Door] When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Nope.
“New rules,” Spider-man told himself as he moved over the familiar rooftops of Forest Hills in the late dusk, leaving slim silver threads behind him as he ran, leaped, and landed, divesting himself of the suit as he went. “No taunting all-powerful villains on anything less than four hours of sleep in three days.” He changed his shirt behind a shed three houses over, and he shouldered his backpack to walk the rest of the way down the block, still muttering to himself under his breath to take his mind off his worry. “Can’t protect Aunt May if you’re dead, Spidey.” Then again, Peter logicked to himself, tossing a shifty, nervous glance behind him as he bounded up the front steps to the porch, nobody had any reason to go after Aunt May, or Gwen or MJ, if he was dead. Grim thought. Only a little reassuring.
Peter still couldn’t believe he’d been so monumentally stupid as to deal with a hurricane and then go on the journals without sleeping, because if he’d cared to think it through he would have realized the possibility that his identity might be public knowledge with this whole Vegas thing in effect. Man, if he could punch the guy carrying Loki around, he totally would. What kind of jerk tells a super villain all about the good guys? Peter didn’t think Billy would punch anybody over something like that; come to it, the musician hadn’t left him so much as a friendly word in weeks. He gave him all the time he needed to deal with the hurricane and its aftermath, though, for which Peter was grateful.
Maybe he should be counting his chickens and not his broken eggs. This guy Thor said he would help protect the house from Loki too, and from what Peter had read about the stuff he’d missed, Thor seemed like the best one to deal with the skeezy Norse trickster. Maybe he was around here somewhere, he said he’d be coming soon. Not a lot of time to explain the situation to Aunt May... Peter was dreading it, and he was glad MJ wasn’t going to be there. He pulled open the back door and peered through it, sniffing for cooking smells. “Aunt May?”
It was a little late to protect the house. But Peter didn't know that - how could he? Everything appeared to be perfectly in order, and, in the kitchen, the soup that had been bubbling away before Peter even arrived was still merrily simmering on the stove, wafting the scent of tomatoes, ground beef, and onions throughout the house. "Peter?" she called, when the door opened and shut. "You're just in time. Dinner's ready."
A pair of bowls, which had also been set out some time ago, before anyone came into the house, were set out on the table. She was ladling the soup into the bowls when he came into sight, smiling fondly at him. She looked right - the same, in the same clothes she’d been wearing earlier that day. Attention to detail. "How was your day?"
Peter shrugged off his backpack, letting it drift over the clean tile as he shifted across the kitchen to duck his head over the soup, which smelled amazing. He turned to her and gave her a quintessentially Peter smile, all sheepish affection and little boy warmth. “Hey, Aunt May. It was okay.” He leaned forward and crossed the two inches difference between the two of them to give her a kiss on the cheek, a mark of affection both easy and quick enough to suggest he did it all the time. Peter pulled away, not really that keen to talk about his problems with Gwen and Harry, or the fact that he hadn’t turned in any homework the past three weeks. The hurricane gave the people of New York something else to think on, though, and he was hoping he would have time to make up the work and claim it had been lost.
Peter dropped his backpack next the refrigerator, taking out his phone when it buzzed in his pocket. Taking one of the kitchen chairs, he scrolled through his text messages with one elbow on either side of his bowl. He smiled at the last one from Harry and set the phone aside again before jumping up to retrieve a soda from the fridge. “MJ said she’d be out late,” Peter sorta-lied. MJ wouldn’t be back any time soon because Peter asked her not to, anticipating a lot of yelling when he told his aunt the truth. “So it’s just us.”
"Really?" said his aunt, still at the stove. "Oh, good." Just them. All alone. No meddling gods waiting just outside.
She walked around behind him, ostensibly to ladle some soup into his bowl. Instead, though, she set the pot down on the table, and walked up behind him at the refrigerator. "Don't turn around," came a low voice.
It didn't sound like May Parker, because it wasn't.
Behind Peter, May seemed to grow. Her height corrected itself, her form lengthening. She grew thin and wiry, and she suddenly wasn't a she at all, not even mildly. His hand was on the small of Peter's back, which had settled there in a motherly, fond way a few moments before, to avoid sparking suspicion, or any 'spider senses' of danger. He had made sure not even to think ill-meaning thoughts until the false shape began to fall away from him. The eyes were the last to go, gentle, soft blue fading into a green as sharp as madness. Then Loki stood behind Peter, his hand resting lightly on the teen's back, crackling with energy.
"If you turn around," he said, the real voice now, low and British to the ear, at least, and amused, "Or try to run, I will show you what it is really like to be a spider. Unless you are interested in living out the rest of your days as an eight-legged insect, avoiding your aunt's broom when she notices your web spun along the arch of the door, screaming for mercy but unable to speak, then you will do as I say, and behave yourself."
It took a while. There had been something niggling at the back of Peter’s senses since he walked in, but he thought it was just his guilt, and he’d been too busy to notice it even when he sat down. It got stronger and stronger as Aunt May puttered around the kitchen, and he didn’t understand exactly what it was until suddenly all his senses were screaming at him so much that every color behind his eyes flickered and every sound echoed in his ears. Peter didn’t stop to think about what the god was saying. He wasn’t built that way. Every bit of youth, every surge of hormones, and every instinct that made him Spider-man told him to move, and so he did.
Peter’s chair scraped backwards, shoved so hard that it went back into whoever and whatever was behind him, while Peter went straight up. A bowl shattered on the kitchen floor with the force of his flailing arm, skidding porcelain chips in all directions. Peter caught the ceiling in nine fingers and flipped over to catch the light fixture and stare with horror down at the intruder, the tennis shoes obviously no inhibition to his abilities.
It was a good trick, and Loki wondered at it for half a moment. The beings on this planet who raised themselves above the rabble had powers unusual even for a very skilled magic-user. He could understand the nature of them, theoretically. He had studied the stunted sciences of earth, such as they were, and they were more than many realms could say for themselves, it was true. Still, freaks of their race, like this one, were anomalies. Strange and varied indeed. He would like ruling this world, if their were more surprises hiding in it like the frightened boys who clung to walls.
Loki's tongue found the tip of his back teeth, with a light, open-mouthed smile. "I was gracious enough to warn you," he pointed out, and turned his hand. Ice began creeping up the walls from the floor, a wall of ice that sealed the doorways and windows swiftly with a glacial sheet, ice that crept higher and higher on the walls. The things it touched froze permafrost hard. The refrigerator burst, the moisture inside freezing instantaneously into crystals and ballooning their way out of the metal confines with a creak, then a slide of snow and flash-frozen food. The fixtures cracked and fell to the floor in pieces. The bowls shattered.
Through it all, Loki stood below Peter, looking up, gaze fixed, waiting for him to drop. Red crept out of the corners of his eyes. Though his long incarceration without his magic had left him worn, he seemed all the better for it now that he had been given time to rebuild his strength. He wore none of the armor he had crafted for himself - clearly, he didn't think the threat posed by a boy severe enough to bother. Just that raven wing of hair with no helmet atop it, slicked into place down to his nape, and black leathers with green and gold at the edges. His nails were black, the only notable remnant of his time with the manacles on, when maintaining the shape he’d been born into had been outside his power to correct. A badge of his bastardy, then, where everyone can see it.
“Are you coming down?” he asked, arching a brow, all innocent inquiry. He gestured to the blocked exits. “Or would you prefer to freeze solid? You do as much good to me as an ice statue as you do breathing.”
It would have been a good sign if Peter had spooked like a dog for the exit. No, this was a different kind of fear, and it most certainly wasn’t for himself. He shuffled all four limbs slight, feeling the paint on his Aunt’s ceiling, the faintly greasy feel from years of cooking on the powdery plastic, the unexpected scent of his uncle, who must have been the last one to change the fixture inches from his face. Peter’s young face was abruptly suffused with the rage he kept very well hidden.
“What did you do to her?!” He skittered sideways on the ceiling in a most unsettling fashion and then launched himself directly at Loki’s smug face. He didn’t care that he wasn’t human, he didn’t care that his magic froze the ceiling. He didn’t even have a clear idea of how he would hurt him, other than heels first and anger.
Loki deflected. He lashed out with a quick bolt of something akin to his brother's electricity, though lacking its truth of conviction about its identity. This was purely magical, nothing drawn from the energies of nature. Carefully aimed, it was intended to stun, not to kill, or to fry. Though that could be arranged.
Peter was fast, but he was angry and not thinking, and he didn’t move quite fast enough. The bolt caught him on one side of his shoulder and chest. The deflection of his own energy threw him sideways into a wall that housed several shelves, which dropped several ornamental teapots and silver spoons as he smashed into it and slid to the floor.
Thor didn't need Heimdall's hearing to catch the noise within the house. He'd been too far away, walking up and down on the sidewalk in front of the home to hear the thud of body, but the crash of china and metal wasn't going to be ignored. He strode up to the door he had watched the young man go through earlier and entered, Mjolnir already spinning within his grip. There was no knocking, no inquired 'Hello?' only a growl when he saw his brother. "Loki!"
Loki was leisurely strolling around the table to the boy on the floor when he heard his name called. His eyes shut, briefly. His back was to the iced-over doorway, and he turned to look over his shoulder at the expectant image of Thor.
The wall of ice was thick enough that Thor would need to give it a few cracks with that hammer of his to get through it. By then, Loki would be long gone with his prize. He knew it, and Thor had to know it, and Loki smiled at him, slowly.
Loki reached down and grabbed the boy by his collar, hoisting him up. He was considerably stronger than he looked - weak physically for an Asgardian, but much stronger than any normal human could ever hope to be. He picked the boy up by his waist, smooth and easy. He seemed of no more concern than a wet kitten. Loki’s hands still tingled with flickers of energy, sparking his prisoner, and he glanced down at him. "If you try to run from me, I will cook you inside your skin.”
Peter was barely conscious by this point, stunned by how much energy had knocked him nearly through the living room wall. He was still angry, though he was more afraid now, afraid for Aunt May and even a healthy amount of fear for himself. He struggled at first, aiming a punch or two that never landed, but he felt the strange lightning move against his skin and he froze. He didn’t want to die before he even had a chance to land a strike, and so with what was left of his thoughts, he told himself to wait until he could be effective. He stopped fighting and focused on trying to stay awake. The scene flexed in and out of Peter’s awareness, and in a stutter of disconnected sound and image, he lost his hold on it entirely.
Accomplished, Loki looked up, through the doorway, and locked eyes with his brother. "You see what you've forced me to?" he said, still smiling. "What happens when you fail to acquiesce to a fair, reasonable offer? I tried to negotiate, but you would not...listen." His expression changed in seconds, eyes narrowing, glinting with that cold edge of rage. It wasn't a joke, by the time the sentence was done. Not anymore. His voice filtered through the ice, muffled, but still clear. "As always, you must stand between me, and that which I deserve."
Loki might be gone by the time he managed to get through the frozen wall, but that didn't stop him from swinging Mjolnir at it, all his anger, his frustration with his brother fueling the blow. The ice cracked, splintering in lines that webbed out from the point of impact, silver ribbons forming in the ice.
And just as Thor knew that his brother would likely leave, he also knew that this likely had nothing to do with the offer that Loki had given him. "If this is how you would treat those you would rule then Midgard is ill suited for you, Loki," he said, low, his words muffled through the sheet separating them. That didn't stop him from swinging the hammer again, a chunk of ice flying off with the impact.
Loki smiled a little again, and clucked his tongue. “So quick to reject theories different from your own,” he observed. “Nothing’s changed. But you are irrelevant to me now. Agree, or don’t agree - I will still have this world.” He looked down, and threaded his fingers lightly through his prisoner’s hair, almost fondly, like the spider-boy was no more than an overgrown pet. Then he grabbed the strands tight, and lifted his head on that loose neck. “Look at his face, while you can. I have plans for your admirer, and I doubt you will see it intact again.”
He reached back with his free hand. Long fingers wrapped around the air itself, grabbing at some invisible resistance, and wound transparent threads around each finger. He pulled, sharply, and the space beside him split apart, a seam in the world coming undone, revealing blackness behind that taunted the eye, warped and multicolored at the edges, then dark. It seemed to pull everything else around it into itself, reducing the room into a million points of light all straining to leap into the crack and escape, bending and turning. In that skewed space, Loki’s smile was all the more chilling, tilted, slanted, and flat. “If you had only killed me,” he said, his eyes gone fever bright in the reflected glare of the nothing behind the curtain of reality, “You would not need to watch him die.”
Loki stepped into that empty place. With a snap that shattered what little glassware remained, the world sewed itself shut again behind him.
There was a difference in knowing that Loki could travel between the realms in some other way than the Bifrost and seeing it actually happen, the fabric between Midgard and whatever world he'd chosen opening up. "No," Thor said, not shocked into inaction but spurned into movement, hitting the wall of ice that separated them hard enough that a chunk flew off and skittered across the floor of the kitchen.
"No!" It was already too late once Loki stepped through, the world snapping back into place, knitting itself together after he'd torn it. It didn't stop him smashing his way into the demolished kitchen, glass and ice everywhere. "Where did you go, Loki?" He asked the empty space as if it could answer. There was only the gurgling of the pot on the stove and the frustrated crackle of the broken refrigerator.