From the basic decencies of how a man ought to live and conduct himself, all the way to a wholesome, upstanding outlook on life and the world, Uncle Ben dressed Thor down from head to toe, a solid fifteen minutes of it. He left off with one final, blistering warning never to harass Peter Parker, then turned on his heel and stalked away in a huff.
Thor felt as though he'd taken a sledgehammer to the chest. With great power comes great responsibility: that single line struck him so hard he could barely breathe. He sank to his knees on the ground, eyes vacant, staring up into the night sky, unable to rise for the longest time.
There was hatred for the days behind him, and a fog of uncertainty about the days ahead, but more than anything there was guilt, toward every kinsman and friend he had. He had never once been a hero, not for a single day, and yet he had basked in a hero's cheers all the same.
That weightless little word, hero, hung impossibly heavy in his heart. He had done it all wrong. Could any of it still be started over now?
"Thor, don't... don't go..." Sif knelt beside him and held him tight.
The goddess had been watching over Thor in silence, never absent for a single day.
That the World Serpent and the God of Thunder would perish together: few knew of this prophecy. But as one of the ranking goddesses, Sif knew it. To the Asgardians the prophecy was real and absolute, which meant that Thor was certain to fight the Serpent to the death and, in the end, fall on that battlefield.
Sif possessed the Asgardian's fearlessness in the face of death. She did not fear dying; if she could fight valiantly to her last breath, she would walk smiling onto the field. But this was different. This time the matter wasn't hers; it was Thor's. The moment Thor chose to take up the power of the God of Thunder, he would become the Thunderer once more and, just as the prophecy decreed, die in battle against the Serpent.
Were he to remain a mortal, he would not be the God of Thunder, and so, naturally, he would not die.
All this while, Sif had wavered between honor and love, torn in two. The two choices seemed bent on tearing her apart down the middle. On Thor's failure, again and again, to win Mjolnir's recognition, she had neither objected nor lent her support.
But now, with Thor on the verge of reclaiming his divine power, the love in her heart at last won out over honor. To die a glorious death as a god, or to live out a hundred years as a mortal: she would choose the latter. Perhaps, she thought, this was the very reason Odin had exiled his eldest son.
Sif locked her arms around Thor's waist, her position needing no words.
"I..." How could Thor not know the prophecy? A step forward was death; a step back was life. His heart was in chaos. "Let me think it over. My head's a mess..." He pried himself loose from Sif's embrace and walked off alone down the path, into the distance.
Daisy had no idea that Marvel's foremost master of the silver tongue (Uncle Ben, whose brainwashing prowess outstripped both Professor Charles and Odin combined) had just landed a critical hit on Thor, knocking the already battered god down to a thin sliver of health. She was far too busy for that.
The World Serpent kept dragging its feet, and she had plenty of her own affairs to manage; she couldn't sit in an office twiddling her thumbs day in and day out. Chief among those affairs was that the voting in Obama's election had finally gotten underway.
Although S.H.I.E.L.D. styled itself as a global body rather than the organization of any one region, its headquarters sat in Washington, and there was no need to spell out the rest: it was bound up tight with the United States. Whatever each individual's politics happened to be, batch after batch of agents were dispatched out into the field.
Black Widow, still torn between hero and agent, and Coulson, who camped out at the school every day with no desire to go back to HQ, were both sent out on assignment.
Daisy, too, tagged along with Obama through the final stretch of campaigning.
"If it ever comes to a choice, please, protect my family." Obama made the request of her with great sincerity. Granted, a presidential race wasn't likely to cross any truly dangerous lines, but it never hurt to be careful.
Daisy folded a sizable contingent of her S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra agents into the security detail and personally took charge of guarding the candidate's family.
Before the cameras, Obama stood composed and unhurried with his family at his side and cast his ballot in his home precinct. In frame it was only the handful of them; behind the cameras and the photographers stood several hundred more.
The voting itself was without novelty. Afterward, facing the press, Obama trotted out his policy platform yet again. Everyone had heard it eight hundred times by now, yet every soul present behaved as though hearing it for the first time, sending up enthusiastic applause at all the right moments.
As evening came on, the count officially began.
Obama sat with his family awaiting the tally, staff bustling in and out to report each state's electoral votes and popular vote. A map of the United States hung in the banquet hall, and with every state secured the crowd cheered together; with every state lost they cried foul play.
As a heavyweight backer, Daisy was spared such undignified antics. She wore a sapphire-blue gown, the line of the left shoulder cut straight and clean, her skin smooth and pale as cream, her arm bared all the way to the collarbone, stately and elegant, yet carrying the faintest thread of allure.
There were reporters about, and to project his man-of-the-people image and leave his critics nothing to seize on, Obama had kept the banquet hall's heating turned down rather low.
Next to the men in their thick suits, the women drew the short end of it in a setting like this. Daisy watched a senator's wife five meters (sixteen feet) away go down in a spectacular sprawl, partly the fault of those ten-centimeter (four-inch) heels, but mostly because the poor woman's feet had gone numb with cold.
Set against Daisy's constitution, which let her swim laps at either pole, the ladies present were suffering. Frozen half to death, every one of them, and still putting on a show of not minding in the slightest.
"It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Mr. Osborn." Daisy politely shook hands with the middle-aged man beside her, the one in the brown suit and blue-striped tie.
"I hope we'll find an opportunity to work together." The man's expression was severe, his bearing distinctly out of the ordinary. Feeling perhaps that his tone had come off a shade too heavy, he allowed himself a small smile. "Lorna and Harry get along wonderfully. When you have the time, you and yours are welcome at my home anytime."
"Of course. The honor would be mine." Daisy nodded courteously and closed out the conversation.
Norman Osborn had only jumped on the Democratic bandwagon on the very eve of the election, barely a touch of icing on an already finished cake. But as one of the foremost biotech conglomerates on the planet, a behemoth whose reach spanned genetics, engineering applications, and biopharmaceuticals, he was not someone Obama would shut out either. The man had stepped straight into the inner circle and become one of the campaign's important supporters.
There was no shortage of familiar faces tonight, a true gathering of the eminent. There was the newly met Norman Osborn; there was General Ross, lined up to become Secretary of State; there were Viper and Pierce, both of whom had joined the camp on Daisy's account. And of course there were her two now-indispensable subordinates, the former mob counselor James Wesley and Justin Hammer.
And, hidden away in the shadows watching this whole circus, there was Loki.
Sweeping her gaze across the room, Daisy had to admit it: aside from herself, there wasn't a single decent person in the place.
She dragged Viper over to throw her weight around in front of Pierce, giving that crooked old man a good, hard rap on the knuckles. Daisy's meaning was perfectly clear: her appointment as Deputy Director had to be made official, and fast.