Pudding and Science
Peter
He found it funny that Loki felt the need to tiptoe around the apartment, like Peter’s empty bag of chips from the other night was going to fly off the counter and attack him. Loki was eyeing everything with a very practised, cool air, but beneath his casual facade, Peter could very plainly see alertness. It was habits and quirks like these that gave him strong reasons to presume a few things about the god.
He opened the refrigerator, hoping to find something Loki might actually enjoy eating, but the options weren’t exactly thrilling. Grapes, milk, cheese, and a few leftovers so old that Peter couldn’t even remember when they’d actually turned up.
“Are you entirely certain of your plan?” Loki’s low voice rattled his chest from behind him, where the god was standing, arms folded, leaning against the counter as he watched Peter scavenge for food. “Mine is insurmountably better.”
He closed the fridge, padding over to the pantry to test his luck there instead. “You know, Mr Loki, I don’t think anyone actually uses that word in regular conversation.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Peter paused, his hand on the doorknob of the pantry. He looked back at Loki. “Insurmountably. I think I’ve maybe typed that word once, on one essay. I probably had to Google it, too. No one uses that word casually, I’m telling you. At least not here.”
“We do on Asgard.” He heard Loki argue, a streak of stubbornness in his voice. “And I know they use that word on Midgard, too.”
Peter laughed, opening the door with a soft creak. “Like a hundred years ago, maybe- but I don’t think Mr Thor has ever used a bigger word than ‘lightning’ in his whole life.”
“That’s because my bro-” Loki abruptly halted, and he slowly turned to him again, waiting. “That’s because Thor is a fool. Everyone on Asgard is essentially just as foolish, but they at least know how to string together words in a well-constructed composition of language.”
“I’m not even going to comment on that one,” Peter rolled his eyes and looked inside the pantry.
The pantry, as it turned out, had much better luck. Fruit snacks, pudding cartons, fruit cartons, rice treats, chips… Aunt May had done some good shopping recently, and that wasn’t even the half of it. As he dug through the many options, he called them back out to Loki, and to each one, the god replied with a no, or that he wasn’t interested, or that he wasn’t hungry, or that he didn’t want to try something if the name sounded made-up. Eventually, Peter decided to ignore Loki’s actual words and read between the lines of what Loki was saying.
But after a few seconds, Peter changed his mind again, because that was actually way too hard.
He wasn’t doing a terrible job at reading the God of Mischief, but he wasn’t an expert or anything. Loki was still a good liar and he was still just Peter. His new tactic, however, involved trying to remember all that Thor had said about Loki, some of it ranging from petty childhood insults to sappy childhood memories, and the word pudding sure rang a bell somewhere. May as well try. He pulled out a butterscotch flavoured one and set it on the counter in front of Loki, waiting for his reaction.
Loki’s eyes widened, darting Peter up and down suspiciously before he did the same to the pudding cup, innocently waiting on the granite countertop. However, he crossed his arms tighter and leaned more casually, adopting an air of carelessness. “And what is that supposed to be?”
“Pudding,” He nodded, smartly. “It’s just in an Earth package because it’s shot full of preservatives and it's not homemade.”
If anything, Loki only looked more confused.
Peter was about to try re-explaining it when the front door suddenly opened, and in came the all too recognisable sounds of Aunt May’s high heels clicking on the hardwood floors. He gasped, panic swooping in his stomach, and Loki shot up like a cat, arms uncrossing to reveal daggers as sharp as the teeth he bared. They had no plan. He needed one. Fast.
“Peter, I’m home!” May called, and Peter could hear her taking off her shoes and coat, setting down her purse- about to make her way towards them.
Without thinking, he grabbed the very sharply armed Loki and yanked him towards the open pantry. But when Loki immediately hissed and tried to pull back, Peter shot web-shooters from his wrists, straight at the god. He fired several times, pinning Loki’s arms around himself, entrapping his legs together, and then, just to be safe, Peter covered Loki’s mouth with a sticky spider web, earning him a muffled, but still clearly shocked shout. It wasn’t until right then that Loki had known Peter could do anything different from an average little Earthling, but he assumed the god could put together exactly why he was called “Spider-Man.”
Loki, thankfully, still seemed too shocked to do much more than struggle weakly at the webs which bound him as Peter shoved him into the pantry and forced the door shut just in time. Aunt May walked into the kitchen, a massive grin on her face. She pulled him into a tight hug, then kissed his face several times, the true Italian way. Just when it was starting to become too much, May finally let up, still smiling. He smiled back but was glad Loki couldn't see him.
“I can’t believe you- you-” May was giggling excitedly over her words. “A resort, Peter? Ugh, you are the sweetest, most precious-”
He laughed, gulping when his voice cracked. Against the pantry door, he felt a soft thud. “Yeah- yeah, of course, Aunt May! I mean, you just work so hard to take care of me and all-”
“Oh, Peter…” His aunt’s eyes were beginning to glisten and her hands clasped over her heart. “I want you to know how grateful I am for you, too- you know, you mean so much to me and I-”
He nodded hastily, putting an arm on May’s shoulder and nudging her towards her room. “I love you too, Aunt May- but you really, really have to get your stuff and go because Mr Stark said-”
“Ah!” Aunt May clapped her hands together, skittering off to her room. “You’re right, I don’t have much time to grab a few things before I leave, I really shouldn’t be talking, but I just-”
The rest of her sentence trailed into nothing as Aunt May vanished into her room, and all discernable words became gradually less so until Peter could hear nothing at all besides enthusiastic exclamations that he every now and then laughed at or agreed with. He felt Loki slamming against the inside of the pantry door some more, and Peter was very worried that whenever he let Loki out, or whenever Loki got it open himself, he was so dead. As in, he was going to be literally murdered- that sort of dead. Peter didn't think Aunt May would like to come home to his gross corpse after the fun vacation Mr Stark had set up so generously for her. He really wanted to prevent that scenario, if at all possible, so, in a ditch-effort to calm Loki down, he turned around and whispered very loudly into the crack between the door and its frame, hoping that it would do some good.
“Mr Loki, I promise you can come out as soon as May leaves-” Peter whispered, and Loki, evidently having heard him, faintly made another angry sound and banged even louder. “Please- stop that- you’ve got to stay quiet, I had to come up with something fast, okay? I’m not betraying you, so please don’t kill me or do something bad. I’m promising, so I need you to promise, too, Mr Loki.”
He pressed his ear against the door, listening hard. Loki had gone quiet.
"Please?" He raised his voice a little louder.
Loki still didn't do anything back.
He turned back around, pressing his back to the pantry door. He could feel the weight of the god tipped against it, and he felt like Aunt May might just happen to get x-ray vision or something. He was playing it down, but he was truthfully more nervous than he had been the one time he cheated on an exam- and he nearly wet himself that day. But now he had just locked a god in his pantry. Peter felt like he was sweating a lot and he was being super obvious about it. He’d done the same thing the first time he’d spoken to Mr Stark after meeting Loki, and he’d done the same to his best friend Ned when he asked Peter how his weekend had been. If Loki didn’t kill him, he’d need to ask him for some tips on how to pull off lying without sweating so hard.
May came back into the kitchen, a small suitcase packed very messily with a bunch of clothing still hanging out of the sides. She blew her hair off her shoulders and peppered Peter with several more hugs and kisses, assuring him profusely that they’d do something wonderful as soon as she got back. It was about another five or ten minutes before his aunt May actually left the house again, and with every passing minute, Peter felt more and more like he was going to break the record for the youngest person to ever have a heart attack. But when she did, after he’d led her out the front door, Peter sprinted straight to the pantry and opened the door.
A sticky, web-trapped Loki tumbled out, landing flat on his face with a heavy smack.
Peter winced. “Oops.”
On the floor, Loki groaned and weakly rolled onto his side, uncoordinated and messy in his efforts.
“Mr Loki?” He asked, tentatively. “Your magic can undo those webs, right?”
Loki didn’t flop around or make a noise, so he presumed that the god wasn’t going to do anything at all until Peter elaborated further, which, unfortunately for him, was the last thing he felt like doing, in case Loki couldn’t undo the webs with his magic.
He hesitated. “Um… well, if you can’t, then… it’ll take two hours to dissolve.”
Loki’s head lifted, and when he made a noise that time, it was the loudest and most indignant one yet. But above all that, it was the noise of someone who sounded downright horrified of being trapped for two hours in such a humiliating situation- and that wasn't a particularly enormous thing to comprehend. Loki struggled on the floor, writhing around in the webs that wrapped around his legs and his arms, all of his limbs bound to his body so that Loki was unfit for any sort of dignity. Peter watched Loki twist around, unsure whether to laugh at him or feel guilty for covering him in spider webs and shoving him in his pantry. He decided to feel both things, but keep the laughing to himself.
Then, from Loki’s torso, where the outline of his trapped hands was, he started to see a green light, glowing, pulsing for a moment through the white layers of webs. Loki rolled once more, onto his back, and raised his neck to squint at his own efforts. Loki’s eyes squeezed shut, and the glow from beneath the webs grew even brighter, lime threads of light shooting out in a blinding brightness.
Peter was impressed at how resilient his webs were, even against the powers of a god, but he was beginning to feel pretty badly for Loki. He knew he’d hate to be in that position.
Something that sounded very close to a whimper escaped Loki’s throat, though Peter thought he might have been imagining it because the sound was hard to hear through the webby-gag thing and the weird glowy sound of mystical magic that was still struggling to break through. A throbbing vein of concentration and heavy exertion had appeared on Loki’s forehead, his face screwed up even tighter, the green magic that held Peter in awe was still glowing, with more vibrancy- more intensity.
A sharp crackling noise, the thousands of individual threads of the webs that bound Loki splintered, they too were infused with green light, and then- they shattered like the dusting of glass. Destroyed.
“Wow,” Peter breathed. “That was really, really cool, Mr Loki.”
Loki, still on the floor, was breathing harder than seemed healthy. Loki glared at him like he didn’t believe Peter meant what he said in the slightest. “Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. I’ve never seen that stuff before. The only magic I’ve seen you do before is your stabby knife thing. Oh, and mimicking me when I first got home. What else can you do?” He tried to offer Loki his hand to stand up, but Loki slapped it harshly away and got onto his hands and knees by himself, though it didn’t seem very easy for him.
Loki finally got to his feet, back to an entire six inches above him as he procured one of his magic daggers, likely just to prove his neverending, pointlessly pointless point. “Would you like to see another magic trick, then, Spiderling?”
“Uh-”
Loki tilted the knife towards Peter, cocking his head dangerously and taking a step nearer to him. “If you really believe that was impressive, then how about I turn you to your namesake? Is that cool enough for you? If you were nothing more than a small araneae, you could easily be trodden upon underfoot-”
“A what?” Peter interrupted, trying to distract the god with a question, even if it was a genuine one. “What’s an ara- aran-?”
Loki frowned, the blade dropping slightly. “Araneae.”
He shrugged, in reply.
“It- that’s the nickname you’ve given for them nowadays on Midgard. You call the araneae spiders and the formicidae ants, do you not? The nicknames you use for them are the… slang terms, I believe, for their actual names.” Loki was searching him for an answer. “Is that not correct? The slang Midgard has adopted for the araneae is spider- yes?”
He had no idea what Loki was going on about, but the possibility of Loki’s elegant vocabulary being somehow off was distracting him enough so that Peter felt less worried about being stabbed or turned into… whatever Loki had just said.
He raised a finger, hoping to be helpful enough to win back the favour of the unpredictable and decently temperamental god. “How about you describe what it looks like, and I can tell you whether or not we’re thinking of the same thing.”
Loki’s brows creased, tentatively. “They have eight legs and often eight eyes. They spin webs for which to catch prey. Additionally, they have fangs for which to inject venom, and while they are not large in comparison to a Midgardian, their size is greatly varied by species and-”
“Yeah, that’s a spider,” Peter assured. “But that’s just their name. It’s not slang.”
Loki vanished away the knife. “But I learned-”
“One second, Mr Loki.” He dug in his pocket for a moment, grabbing his phone and doing a quick search, just to confirm a mounting suspicion that had started to grow. Sure enough, with the aid of a breezy Google search, he found out he'd been right.
Loki rushed over like he'd forgotten to be scary, hovering over his shoulder again. “What is it?”
He tilted the screen towards Loki, smiling. “See, Mr Loki? That makes way more sense. You’re not wrong, you’re just using their scientific names, and hardly anyone knows those. You know, that’s even older and weirder than using something like insurmountably in conversation.”
Loki leaned away from the screen, visibly uncomfortable. “Is it?”
“It just makes you fancier and cooler, Mr Loki, don’t worry about it.” Peter put his phone away, then went back over to the butterscotch pudding, still waiting on the counter. “You've really gotta try this, though. I bet you haven't had this kind before, right?”
Loki narrowed his eyes to read the container, the word foreign-sounding as the god tried to pronounce it. "Butter... scotch. I know the two separately, but..."
"It's really good," Peter sang, wanting to tempt Loki into taking it, picking it up off the counter and waving it towards Loki.
Much to his delight, Loki did slowly approach him. Peter held out the cup, waiting for him to take it. Loki was watching his every move carefully, with more caution again, perhaps because of the webs, or possibly it was Peter’s regular human decency that perplexed the God of Mischief- as it always seemed to. He didn’t believe Loki would really take it, but he wasn’t bothered. He’d just gotten himself three or four days to try and get the god to try a packaged butterscotch pudding.
Loki’s arm reached out. Peter watched him, his carefully neutral expression, even as Loki’s hand slowly enclosed around the container in his hand.
Amazed, he looked up at Loki’s face and beamed.
In reply, the corners of Loki’s mouth almost nervously turned up, his unnaturally sharp pair of cheekbones softening in something Peter almost could have sworn was genuine.