A Curious Bird
A wild parrot in Brooklyn isn’t an uncommon sight, but the one that’s swooping along with Peter catches his eye, if only because its green plumage is decidedly darker than that of any parrot Peter has ever noticed.
Still, he figures it’s some sort of mutation, or maybe a more exotic pet that got loose. Besides, he’s far too busy looking for muggers (and, to be fair, enjoying the sensation of freefall) to think too much about it.
The second day, the bird follows him through the air for a couple of hours as he does his patrol. When finally he stops to rest, on a ledge overlooking the waterfront, the parrot sits near him—out of arm’s reach, but near enough—and quietly studies him.
Parrots are surprisingly intelligent, Peter recalls, and wonders if it’s trying to figure out how to categorize this giant red-and-blue creature that can fly without wings.
More days than not, it shows up as soon as he starts his rounds, but leaves a while before he’s done—he’s never seen it near his home. After a few days, he looks up the right food for wild parrots, and brings a selection of walnuts, sunflower seeds, and fresh fruit, but it refuses to touch anything he offers.
One afternoon, as he’s sitting on a ledge and eating a banana, the parrot unexpectedly lands on his head.
Not wanting to startle it, Peter sits stiff and still as it moves around. After a moment, it hops down onto his shoulder and begins to peck at his mask, pulling at the fabric.
“Clever bird,” Peter murmurs softly, and carefully moves his far hand up to hold the mask in place. (He never removes his mask in public; no telling who might see him, even up here.)
When its efforts prove fruitless, the parrot gives up and flits off to the ledge again.
Chuckling, Peter breaks off a little piece of his banana and places it between him and the parrot, then dials Happy for his daily report, even though he knows it’ll only go through to voicemail. (After the Avengers’ falling-out, the remaining heroes are a bit pressed for time, and (now that he understands the problem) Peter doesn’t mind the lack of interaction nearly as much as he used to.)
Halfway through the report, he notes that the piece of banana has vanished, and grins.
A few days later, school lets out an hour early, so Peter carefully secures his backpack in a place where no one can spot it (yes, he’s capable of learning from his mistakes, it just takes him a while sometimes) and takes to the sky.
He’s at the top of an arc, feeling that joy of momentary weightlessness, when his gaze happens to land on a man just stepping off the edge of a high-rise apartment block, arms outstretched as he goes into a fall.
The next moment is more instinct than thought: an instant change of direction and a web shooting out to catch the—parrot, who two seconds ago had been a man.
As the tangled parrot plummets toward the pavement, Peter yanks the web toward him and scoops the bird up, bringing them both to the roof again.
“Ohmigod, I-I-I’m so sorry,” Peter stammers, staring at the poor thing as it struggles against the nigh-unbreakable webbing that has pinned down both wings and even covered its beak. “I didn’t realize you were a—I mean, I thought you were trying to—I didn’t expect you to—I mean, I, uh, this, this stuff dissolves in like two hours and I really don’t want to leave you stuck for all that long but I, uh, I can’t risk– I mean, I’ve got a compound that’ll take it off immediately but it’s not great for human skin and I’ve been meaning to make a better one but I just haven’t had time and I really don’t know what it might do to parrots so I can’t exactly free you right away and I’m sorry for everything but I honestly thought you were trying to kill yourself so I was just trying to– ow! ”
The parrot, who’s stopped struggling, had managed to twist enough to peck him on the thumb—not hard, but enough to startle Peter and cut short his brain spewing out of his mouth as it so often does when he gets nervous.
“Sorry!” he says again, and makes an abortive attempt to set it on the roof before reflexively picking it back up again and joggling it nervously in his hands. “Okay, so, uh… what do I do? Okay. Two hours. Okay okay okay. Um, I can’t just stay here until it dissolves, ’cuz I’ve still gotta patrol. And I can’t just leave you here, that’d be rude, and besides there might be, I dunno, there might be cats, or—omigod, there are hawks, there are hawks and peregrine falcons around here, I can’t leave you on your own.”
He starts pacing, still trying to reason out his options. “I could call somebody but, uh, who could I call? The Avengers are all, they’re kinda broken up and I don’t know what all’s going on but they’re probably too busy and they might not even be in the area. I guess I could just take you with me on patrol, but what if I get into a fight? But I can’t, like, I can’t just leave you in my bedroom because honestly I don’t know if you’re a good guy or a bad guy or just a normal kinda guy who can turn into a bird or, um… oh gosh, did I hurt you?!”
The parrot has gone limp in his hands, and except for Peter’s enhanced hearing and touch (both of which register the bird’s breathing and heartbeat), he would think it had died, what with the way that its head has fallen back over the edge of his hands.
“Sorry!” he says a third time, and almost sets it down again. “I, I’ll try to figure something out but I just don’t—”
Raising its head a little, the parrot glares at him balefully. Then—he almost drops it—the form shifts in his hands, thinning and lengthening, and the webbing stretches along with it, still stuck to the… scales? of the thin black-and-green snake that it has become.
Before the snake has even fully solidified, it’s growing hands out in front, outside of the webbing, turning into some sort of lizard? salamander? and the color’s turning to an angry purple-red that seems to move in waves along the now-smooth, now-moist skin.
Just as his spider sense blares out a warning, flames burst from the creature’s skin, turning the webbing to ash and melting Peter’s gloves right onto his palms, a blistering agony before he can even think to let go. Whimpering, he drops the creature and steps back toward the edge, his spider sense still screaming at him as the creature arches its back and morphs into the form of a man: wavy black hair, pale face, black suit.
Straightening up and turning Peter’s way, the man glares at him through mismatched eyes: one blue, one green. In a face he recognizes.
This, too, is more instinct than thought: Diving backward off the roof and shooting out a line of webbing, the imperative to get away before his brain can even process danger and Loki and he burned right through my webs.
Seconds later, as he tries to grab his webs, his hands won’t close all the way. The damage to the muscles is too great, they can’t grip, and he’s falling, falling—
Above him, a gigantic shape blots out the sun, and there’s the flap of great wings before enormous talons grab his arms, lifting him up and away and dropping him onto the roof again.
“And I’m the one trying to kill myself?” Loki says bitingly, as soon as he’s regained humanoid form, and before Peter can quite react Loki is there, grabbing him by the wrists and looking over his hands with narrowed eyes.
Panting through the pain, Peter yanks back, trying to pull free, but Loki’s hands don’t budge, and that just freaks him out more because how many people can actually outdo his spider-strength? He tries to kick, but it’s an awkward angle, and Loki just rolls his eyes and murmurs a word that even Peter’s superhuman hearing can’t make sense of the sounds of, and then his body goes still, the fight draining out of it as though it’s a separate being, a thing that isn’t quite Peter, and Peter’s just riding around inside this vehicle that has suddenly turned itself off.
Mostly. He can still see, and he’s blinking and breathing like normal, he just can’t make his body do anything. And the panic of a moment ago is distant, remote, unimportant, even though he knows, objectively, that this man is the most dangerous foe he’s ever faced.
Loki lets go of Peter’s wrists and cradles his hands, one in each of his, and turns them sideways. Then he closes his eyes.
Green light flows gently across Peter’s hands, a feeling like cool silk, and the pain fades away. As Peter watches, the melted suit peels off and falls away like scales, and the deep, bubbling wounds and black flesh soften and reform, slowly, until they look and feel as if they’d never been burned. Even the acid burns on his fingertips from working in the lab are gone; his hands seem literally good as new.
Then Loki opens his eyes again, and regards Peter for a moment, giving Peter the chance to really take in those eyes. He’d thought they were mismatched—one blue, one green—but now they’re dull, a watery blue. But they flash green for a second, and the paralysis is gone.