Frostbite

The PeterSuit 3000

Peter shut the front door behind him with the heel of his foot and shucked off his jacket, tossing it onto the arm of the couch as he carded a hand through his hair. Spending the day with Ms. Domin—Neena, oh, wow, it was really Neena now, huh—had been a lot of fun. Less on the gun thing and his identity getting unintentionally outed by May, more on the burgers and stories he got to hear about her travels.

Being a merc sounded pretty cool if he completely ignored the whole point of the job, and he purposefully willed himself to not think about all the dead bodies traded in for stacks of cash.

(It bothered him in the beginning. Being surrounded by people with blood on their hands and guns tucked in their waistbands and spare magazines hidden in the linings of their winter jackets. But then he thought about how New York was just New York, and if he even tried to stop them all there would still be a million other people in a million other cities doing what he tried to stop.

Maybe it was a mistake figuring out that all the killers he knew were still people, too. But that was Peter Parker, not Spider-Man, and that was something Peter Parker could live with.)

He pried off his shoes without untying the laces and pushed them to the side of the doorway right next to May's nice tan heels, just shy of being a tripping hazard. As he shuffled to his room, he snatched a half-full bag of chips from the kitchen counter and popped a chip in his mouth as he pushed through his bedroom door. Maybe he'd take a look at his web shooters to see if they needed any—

"Did you take these photographs?"

"Holy—!"

The chips slipped from his grasp and his foot kicked out instinctively, sending them flying to the other side of the room in a rain of crumbs. Loki, watching the aluminum bag land with a crinkle with his hands clasped behind his back, raised a brow.

"Good evening, Peter," he greeted smoothly, a hint of amusement at the corner of his lips. "How was your day?"

"Oh, um, uh, good? How'd you even get in here?"

Loki kept his eyebrow raised.

"Right. Alien God. Dumb question." Peter took one look at the spilled chips on the carpet, thought about it, really thought about it, and resigned himself to shoveling them back into the bag. "Sorry, uh, what were you asking about?"

He glanced up, and Loki looked like Loren today. His walnut brown pants donned a faint windowpane pattern and matched the neatly-folded blazer draped across the back of the desk chair. His light pink button up was rolled and cuffed to his elbows with his wine red tie held down by a simple silver tie bar.

Brown hair, brown eyes, brown glasses.

Like this, Peter thought he could see a little bit of himself in his mother.

"The photographs you have posted on your wall." Loki gestured to the prints of sunsets and skylines taken at dizzying, impossible angles—Peter wondered if he could get away with saying he used a drone to snap those shots—and pointed to one in particular that was a clash of oranges and pinks and blues and golds. "Are they yours?"

"Yeah! Sometimes I like to walk around and take pictures with Ben's old camera. Uh, the scratched up Nikon next to all my books." The teen pushed as much of the bigger chips into the bag as he could before he strode over to his desk. He was careful not to think too much about how standing so close to his mother made his stomach feel light. "The model's, like, super old, but I was able to fix it up enough for it to work like brand new."

"Regardless of the apparatus you used, your images are magnificent. Well done."

Warmth shone behind that magic that turned Loki's eyes brown. Peter ducked his head to hide the flush in his cheeks.