Hello, and welcome to this story. I hope you like it!
Mary Parker looked up at Loki with a sad smile. He pulled her in for a hug, and kissed her hair softly. The buzzing in his ears and sinking feeling in his stomach were making him dizzy. He closed his eyes, exhaling softly.
When Loki decided to go on a "field trip" to Earth a few years ago, Asgard had been at peace for centuries. He had grown tired of the constant competition between his older brother and him, and had wished to escape the stifling court life for a few years. Only Heimdall and his mother knew he was on Midgard, but they never actively sought him out. He liked to think that he had successfully shielded his precise location from them, but he had a suspicion that they simply did not want to cut his few years of borrowed freedom short. He did regularly visit Asgard through his dreams, to check on his family.
After a few months of travelling, he had moved to New York, and enrolled into a Midgardian university. That's where he had met Mary Parker. They now lived together, in a small house, with a cat (oh, he loved cats).
A few months ago, when he had told her why he had some weird Shakespearian quirks and why he always insisted on going on holidays to Norway once in a while, she had just laughed and said it explained a lot. A few days later, he asked her about her own rather mysterious family, and she had said, with a frown, "you wouldn't believe what my family is like". They then had carried on with their daily lives, and had not talked about their respective families.
He opened his eyes, and looked Mary.
A few minutes ago, when he had gone to Asgard through his dreams, he had seen his people readying for battle. He had shaken himself awake, and looked at his side. Mary hadn't been there. He had quickly stood up, opened the bedroom's bay window, and walked into the garden. He knew that Mary often sat there with her notebook, working on scientific theories until the early hours of the morning, before staggering to bed and burrowing into his lap to fall asleep.
Sure enough, Mary had been there, sitting on a large wooden chair, her legs propped up on a small coffee table. Her left hand holding a steaming cup of tea, her right rapidly typing in numbers into a bulky laptop.
He had smiled sadly and sat down next to her. Her eyes had widened when he told her that Jotunheim had started an open war with his realm, and she had nodded, sombre, when he said that he couldn't not stand by while his people suffered.
She tightened the hug, bringing him back to the present. He kissed her hair, readying himself, and silently called upon Heimdall.
He broke away from her, and she looked up at him, eyes glistening. She opened her mouth to speak, but the Bifrost opened, and he was pulled far, far away from her. He didn't know then, but he would not be able to return to Earth for many years.
Peter was born almost nine months after Loki left.
Mary knew that her child was bright, maybe too bright for a human. He reminded her of Loki so much. He was a very intelligent and sweet child, who loved animals – it sometimes seemed like he could converse with them. She also despaired about his tendency to underestimate risk. One day, she took him on a picnic to a park next to their small flat. She got the scare of her life when he fell off a tree's branch after bringing a chick back to its nest while she wasn't looking. The fall should have broken a few of the six-year-old's bones, but he just stood up. And that little imp smiled nervously, knowing that she would berate him about carefulness and not climbing trees when she wasn't looking. This incident confirmed what she had always suspected. Peter had inherited more Asgardian traits than just his father's intelligence.
When Peter asked his mother why he couldn't meet his uncle and aunt, Ben and May Parker, she told him that they lived far away, and that he was too young to travel all the way to New York from California, where they both had moved a few years prior. What Mary Parker didn't tell her son is that they hadn't moved because of her post-doc offer at Caltech. They had moved to get him away from Ben and May. She repeated to herself, again, and again, 'they must never notice anything unearthly about Peter'.
A short while after Peter turned seven, at the end of a very warm August, one of her lab partners fell sick, and she was chosen to stand in for him at a national research conference in Washington D.C. It was a last minute decision, and she ran to her neighbours, who accepted to look over her son for a few days.
After hugging her son for a last time, and telling him to behave – causing him to smile innocently at her, the little devil -, she thanked her neighbours again for taking him into their flat for a couple of days. She waved goodbye at him, blowing him a kiss, before closing the door of the taxi that would drive her to the airport.
A few hours later, shortly after going to bed, Peter woke up, short on breath. A faint light was filtering under his bedroom's door, and he could hear his neighbours whispering agitatedly in the living room. He heard his and his mother's names multiple times. His hands started shaking, and his vision blurred. Something was wrong.
He padded to the door, and slowly opened it. His neighbours heard his sharp intake of breath, and quietly guided him over to the sofa. The TV, muted in the background, showed flash news about a plane crash. Peter cried for the rest of the night.
Peter moved into an orphanage at the end of the summer. His first day in grade 3 was bittersweet; his friends took his mind off his grieving, providing him some temporary relief, but he nearly crumbled into tears when his mother was not been there, waiting for him outside the school, after the last bell of the day rang.
Today was no different; he had been feeling restless during the last period, and nearly jumped when the bell rang. Walking out of school, he squeezed his eyes shut for a second, forcing himself to not look at the tree that his mum used to lean against while waiting for him.
He sighed, pulled the straps of his backpack to adjust it, and started to walk back to the orphanage. After a few meters, he was brought to a stop by the sight of a couple. The man looked rather similar to his mother. His stomach gave a churl, and his hair stood on end; but he forced his feelings down, and stared up at them, smoothing his expression.
The woman had been looking at him since he had walked out of school, and looked like she had been seconds from calling him out herself. Peter could tell that she was surprised that he had noticed her before she had made herself known, but she was hiding it well. She came closer to him.
"Hello, Peter. My name is May Parker, and this is your uncle Ben." Peter looked at the man standing next to her again; he looked like his mother, but something was off about his smile. He shivered. "We looked for you for a long time, and only learned of your address when we got the tragic news about your mother a few weeks ago. We have just finished up the paperwork with the social workers in charge of you, and we decided to come straight to your school to pick you up."
Peter's eyes flicked to the paper that she was holding, and true to her words, it was a fully signed-and-stamped adoption form.
He swallowed and forced himself to smile up at them, ignoring the faint warning bells going off at the back of his mind.
"Could I go back to the orphanage to get my things?"
"Don't worry, we took care of everything." His uncle said. His voice was deep, and made him start slightly. He shook his head, attributing his jumpiness to the surprise of meeting his mysterious relatives, and took the hand that May was holding out for him. He looked back at his old school, and at his mother's tree, before swallowing down.
"Let's go."
Gasp! What is up with Ben and May?