WHAT IF...: Marvel OC One Shots

| The Scorned |

TW: gore, murder, and haunt.

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{ Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar, New Orleans, Louisiana | First Quarter }

       "What can I get for you?"

       The soft chatter at the Lafitte was minimal, allowing the slow tempo jazz song that played silently through the room speakers to reach the Lucas Spector as he leaned forward with his forearms on the bar counters edge. His dark brown eyes, heavier set and housing hidden spare flecks of dirtied green and gray, focused on the young woman that settled across from him. His dark eyebrows were still raised in the yet to be answered question he'd posed to her.

       "Whisky, if you've got it." The young woman seemed older than him by only his study of her frown lines. They ran deep upon her pale complexion, tugging at the edges of her lips as if she had rarely ever been brought to a smile, her unseen sadness familiarly ancient. He'd watched her that night as he watched everyone else on any other night. He'd made a game out of an obligatory task— watching people. He spent his time guessing what their drinks would be before they came up to order, guessing how many they could handle before they were shitting out of their mouths and talking out of their asses.

       Even after a month of working at the bar, he couldn't decide on which part he found more amusing— being right about their orders or about who couldn't hold their liquor. Shift after shift, night after night, he watched and he watched. He had been good at it long before he'd arrived at the city, long before he forgot what it was like to not have an archaic weight in his bones and his blood, long before he ever heard an even older voice within his the walls of his skull. Long before he'd assessed the weight of a curved blade in his hand and learned the endless ways to use it, long before he knew the brutality of the world of gods, the haunt of the world of humans.

       Khonsu [Egyptian God of the Moon and the Night Sky] was an uncompromising being. Luke supposed that's what happened when you presided over the night, its weights, and its happenings since before the ancient Egyptians. Time was jading, even to the gods who roamed freely, calling on others to do their bidding. Even so, Khonsu did not tend to walk among the rest of the gods in the Ennead [Group of the main nine Ancient Egyptian Gods]. When their backs turned on him for his direct involvement in its mankind, he decided there was no other path but that of his own. In that sense, Lucas supposed he and the bird were one and the same— alone.

Regardless, Khonsu had been as insightfully clear as he usually was with his instructions regarding Luke's task; go to New Orleans and wait.

       He was frustratingly old, maddeningly vague, that bird. Another embellishment in Lucas Spector's long life of one finding miraculously inventive ways to add salt to one wound after another. He was a traveler without roots to return to— the closest blood ones he knew anyways were reduced to ash long before he'd reached double digits. The roots he did have, the ones he gained after his world went up in flames, he took a slow liking to, until the training, Marc Spector and his insane life was something Lucas found himself fitting into easily. See, Luke had never been very good at it— being the careful, thoughtful type. It was a waste of time, in his opinion. He much preferred quick fixes, brute solutions, loud tactics that got him what he needed faster than anyone thought he could get it— perhaps Khonsu knew it before Lucas even did. Perhaps the ancient god had recognized the call to recklessness, to pull to violence, to chaos, within the orphaned young boy. Perhaps it was what drew Khonsu to save him, to convince Marc to keep him, after tragedy claimed his family. Why the old god made Marc teach the boy the discipline that came with a hunt, with the night. In time, Luke learned his way around patience like he learned everything else. Honed it like a blade, like a trained fist that could never fully bleed out no matter what it hit. He made a rugged home out of the lessons, and eventually, the missions too. He grew accustomed to the ways of Khonsu, how best to serve him if it meant continuing to do it.