"Loki?"
Thor thought he was hearing things.
But the green silhouette before him grew sharper, more solid.
"You look utterly pathetic, brother."
Loki shook his head, a tangled mess of emotions swirling inside him.
"Laid so low by a mortal sickness. How pitiful."
"Loki... it really is you... I knew it..."
Loki's voice confirmed it. Loki was truly alive. A shuddering breath of relief escaped Thor, tears spilling from the corners of his eyes even as a smile of solace spread across his face.
Then he could hold on no longer and slipped completely into unconsciousness.
Loki's gaze swept over Thor from head to toe. The mocking words he had intended to say never made it past his lips.
After leaving H.A.M.M.E.R., he had unhurriedly begun searching for Thor. But the intelligence Coulson provided was clearly outdated. It took him several days to finally track down Thor, wandering the streets like a vagrant.
Loki had been certain that seeing Thor in such a miserable state would fill him with gleeful satisfaction. But the emotions now churning inside him were nothing like that.
Once, he had driven a blade through Thor's kidney with a beaming smile, without a flicker of hesitation, even exhilarated by it. Because of that, he had always believed he could kill Thor in cold blood. He thought he didn't care one bit about Thor's life.
The man before him wasn't even his true brother.
But now.
Seeing Thor so broken, so wretched, Loki felt no joy at all.
Instead, an oppressive weight settled in his chest, making his breathing heavy and strained.
He didn't know what was wrong with him.
And he certainly could not confront his true feelings for Thor.
"How are you feeling right now?"
Bant's figure suddenly materialized behind Loki. Loki spun around. The instant he laid eyes on Bant, his gaze flickered with something between avoidance and panic, tinged with what almost looked like relief.
"What are you doing here?"
"What's the matter? Embarrassed that I caught you feeling torn up over your big brother's suffering?"
Bant walked past him, propping Thor up against the shade of a tree, and explained.
"It was Heimdall."
"I'd just gotten to school when Heimdall used his sight to tell me Thor was on the verge of death," Bant said with a resigned sigh.
Thor had indeed been sent to Midgard to endure hardship, but letting the guy actually die on Earth would have been a disaster of cosmic proportions.
"He can see across the Nine Realms, so he must know you're here too, right? Why send me?"
"Who knows?" Loki smiled faintly. With a flick of his wrist, a dagger materialized in his hand. "Perhaps he feared I'd kill the son of Odin."
"Give me a break." Bant shrugged.
"You can fool your brothers, but don't go fooling yourself."
Come on. Everyone knew the two of them were trapped in a cycle of love and hate where the hate was a lie and the love was real.
The God of Mischief and Lies?
More like the God of Self-Deception.
Bant kept that jab to himself, though, letting Loki save a little face.
"Your mouth says one thing, but you still see him as your brother. One look at him sick is enough to shatter your heart, yet you've forgotten that what you suffered on Sakaar was ten times worse."
"I'm adopted," Loki said flatly, clearly finished with the subject. He shifted gears. "Did Heimdall say anything else?"
Bant shook his head.
At that, Loki's expression flickered with something like relief, though a trace of disappointment lingered beneath it.
He asked nothing further.
Instead, he transported Thor to a hospital and then turned to leave.
"You're not going to wait for him to wake up so you can mock him?" Bant asked.
"Too boring."
"I'm not in the mood to mock a useless waste of space."
Loki turned and walked away.
Watching his departing figure, Bant lowered his head and thought for a moment.
The truth was, the whole business about Heimdall contacting him was a complete lie, something Bant had fabricated on the spot.
He had deliberately followed Loki here.
Something about this Loki felt... off.
Loki had originally come to Earth to gloat over Thor's misery, but after arriving, he hadn't immediately gone looking for Thor. Instead, he had gone searching for the hammer.
Loki's explanation for that was reasonable enough, but Bant still found it strange.
Knowing Loki, he probably did care whether Mjolnir would deem him worthy, but what he cared about far more was Thor.
Even after that, when Loki did start searching for Thor, he never seemed to be in any real hurry, almost as if he was deliberately putting on a show of looking.
All these signs made Bant suspicious.
But after observing him in secret for a while, Bant could clearly feel that Loki's emotions toward Thor were completely genuine.
"Could it be that he purposely went after the hammer first just to trick himself into believing Thor doesn't matter to him at all?"
Well, when you thought about it like that, it made perfect sense.
"What a worthless fool!"
Kingpin hurled the object in his hand crashing to the ground.
That Chameleon. He had left brimming with confidence, swearing up and down that no one could possibly see through his disguises. Loki had been the one to find him: I am a god! And yet, in less than a day, he had vanished without a trace.
At first, Kingpin assumed the Chameleon had simply run into some complication and couldn't make contact.
But after several days of total silence, doubts began to creep in.
Now, it was obvious.
The Chameleon had almost certainly been dealt with on day one. Kingpin just hadn't known until now.
And with that, the plan to obtain the Super Soldier Serum formula had failed yet again.
Kingpin had to admit, for the better part of this year, he had been losing, losing, losing. Never winning, winning, winning. The one and only victory had been joining the recent war against Hydra. And even then, he had reaped no tangible reward. Unless you counted stopping Hydra from taking over the world as a reward in itself. But that war hadn't depended on him. His grand criminal empire, the thing he prided himself on? It had been a nameless foot soldier in that conflict.
Kingpin often felt an acute sense of urgency.
For a villain, he was remarkably driven.
It all started with Iron Man. A man with no powers whatsoever, who became a superhero through nothing but a suit of armor. After that, it was like someone flipped a switch. All manner of extraordinary individuals began crawling out of the woodwork. Maybe they had always been there, lurking in the shadows, only now stepping into the light. But from Kingpin's perspective, life for ordinary people like him was only going to get harder.
That was why he was so desperate to acquire anything that could transform a man.
The Goblin Serum. The Lizard Serum. The Super Soldier Serum.
Anything would do.
But none of them were easy to get.
Still, he was nothing if not persistent. Chameleon's failure enraged him, but it wasn't enough to truly discourage him.
It was then that one of his subordinates brought him staggering news.
"Mr. Kingpin, Walter Hardy is back."
"What?"
Kingpin shot to his feet, staring at the subordinate in disbelief, as if doubting the man's words.
If he had managed to learn that the Cat was in S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, then naturally, he also knew the Cat's true identity.
Kingpin had already mapped out the whole scheme. Once Chameleon helped him extract the Cat from H.A.M.M.E.R.'s prison, he would use Felicia Hardy's life as leverage to force the Cat into obedient compliance.
Of course, Kingpin had also dug up the fact that Felicia was close friends with Bant, the same Bant who had brought Spider-Man after her last capture.
But Kingpin believed that Spider-Man's actual connection was to Peter Parker, not to Bant. And a friend of a friend was already a fairly distant relationship anyway.
He was confident that as long as he moved quickly and cleanly, he would leave no loose ends.
What he never expected was that the Chameleon would disappear.
Even more unexpected, the Cat had gotten out of prison.
"How is that possible?" He pinched his broad, millstone-like chin between thick fingers, deep in thought.
"Did he spill his secret to H.A.M.M.E.R.? Even so, H.A.M.M.E.R. would never let a man who knew the formula just walk free."
"Or perhaps... H.A.M.M.E.R. doesn't actually know his secret?"
He shook his head, dismissing that unrealistic thought.
H.A.M.M.E.R. had been built on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s corpse. Every scrap of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intelligence had been absorbed. Information as vital as the Super Soldier Serum was something H.A.M.M.E.R. could not possibly overlook.
"Unless they deliberately let the Cat go."
Kingpin mulled it over, figuring it was probably connected to the Hydra situation. Too many Hydra operatives had been captured, so many that even S.H.I.E.L.D.'s detention facilities couldn't hold them all.
They couldn't very well lock the Cat up in the same cell block as Hydra, could they?
"This is a golden opportunity."
A grin spread across his face, his small eyes gleaming with a predatory light.
"But could it be a trap?"
His subordinate voiced some worry. Maybe H.A.M.M.E.R. didn't know who had sent the Chameleon, so they had set a snare to draw them out.
Kingpin didn't see it that way.
"Do you think Chameleon has enough honor to protect our secrets?"
His relationship with the Chameleon was purely transactional. No matter how reliable the man was, he wouldn't take a secret to his grave to shield his employer.
So, either H.A.M.M.E.R. already knew Kingpin was behind it, or they simply didn't care who had sent him.
If they didn't care, there was no reason to set a trap.
You had to admit, Kingpin had nerve.
At twelve years old, he had committed arson and killed a man with his own hands. Over the years, he had only grown more vicious and cold-blooded.
Sitting on the throne for so long just made him look a little more benevolent on the surface.
"Aleksei should be healed by now. Send him... no, forget it." Kingpin decided against deploying the Rhino. That guy wasn't exactly a thinker. If he went, he'd just cause a massive scene and accomplish nothing.
After a moment's thought, Kingpin opted to dispatch a handful of his more skilled gang members to handle the kidnapping.
Yes, the Cat had likely been dosed with the serum. But the man was eighty or ninety years old now, practically ancient, almost as old as Biden. Even with the serum running through his veins, his combat ability was probably negligible by now.
/-\
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