Frostbite

Strange

Peter looked down at the card in his hand, then up at the double doors of the brownstone townhouse in the middle of Greenwich Village. His spidey-sense was suspiciously low-key for Loki's weird disappearing act, all puns aside, and the only thing that could be considered out of place was the circular window on the roof whose metal muntins curved into some symbol he didn't recognize. All he had to do was knock, right? He would just explain to the kidnappers that he was just a high-schooler who didn't have the means to pay ransom for a literal alien god who just happened to be his mom and—that was probably too much info. Or they could already know. Oh my god, did they know he was Spider-Man too?!

"Breathe, Parker," he mumbled. In, out. "You could probably punch your way through this situation." In, out. "Maybe. Channel your inner Hulk. You got this. You got this."

He raised his hand.

His knuckles drew closer to the doors.

Spike.

He wasn't on the street anymore, but this time he braced himself for the nausea that came with the slowly rising familiarity of magic.

The inside of the building was gigantic. A dark ambiance clung to the air; the floors were a marbled pattern of deep reds and earthy browns and blue-greens like the tides on cloudy days. Some leather chairs and roundtables pushed up against the far side walls, kind of like the studies he'd seen in movies in scenes where some old professor type guy sat at a huge oak desk and quoted boring classical literature.

His eyes finally landed on the grand staircase that led up to a second floor.

And to the person standing up at the top.

"You're younger than I was expecting," the stranger said. He started his descent down the stairs and the weird red cape he wore didn't... didn't move the way it was supposed to. It should be creasing with every step and swishing with a twist of the shoulder or the torso, but it was unnaturally still and puffed out, like it was soft and starched at the same time. "How old are you? Fifteen? Sixteen?"

"That's—D-Does it matter?" Peter steadied his stance as the stranger slowed to a stop at the bottom of the staircase where the light hit him better. Blue outfit, black boots, a weird necklace on his chest. "Where's Mr. Loren?"

"Fifteen, I think. Did I guess right?"

"A portal opened up and took him," the teen bit. He rolled his wrists, his ever-present shooters cooling slightly against his skin before the activation pads stretched against his palms, undetected. "Bring him back. He wasn't doing anything to you!"

"Right, like he wasn't doing anything to anyone when he brought the Chitauri down on Manhattan in 2012," was the counter. Peter tensed, and the man simply raised a brow. "Come on, don't look so surprised. You went to an address written on a piece of paper after someone with you was transported through mystical means. You know exactly who you were with." He stepped forward and Peter stepped back, so the stranger stopped and held up his yellow-gloved hands. "Tell me, what's a fifteen year old kid hanging around Loki Odinson of Asgard, the Plague of the Realms?"

And that just didn't sit right with him.

Peter knew above all else that Loki didn't have the biggest fan club. All the people he hurt and everything he destroyed, sometimes things like that people can't forgive no matter how much they might try, if they ever. He was a little kid during the Invasion, in a car with Ben and May as they drove across the state line after the evacuation orders hit; it took him a while to understand what it meant when May said they wouldn't be seeing some of her friends again or why there were so many funerals Ben and his cop buddies had to be in uniform for in the following weeks.