Chapter Text
“Why is it so cold?” Tom questioned as he and Chris H walked to set. Chris looked at Tom before laughing wholeheartedly at the older Englishman.
“It’s only Autumn,” Chris pointed out before patting Tom on the shoulder and walking over to get into costume. Tom kept walking until he was on the main set with a few of the others who were already in costume and good to go.
“How was the run?” Sebastian asked with a smug smile.
“Longer than the pitiful sprint you did,” Tom retorted, thinking back to this morning when Sebastian ran past him telling Tom that he was ‘an old man’.
“You’re just old,” Sebastian joked while Tom grabbed his helmet, looking at it with melancholy since it was the last time he would ever wear it before he put it on. Someone was instantly by his side and fixing his costume so that the helmet was in the right place and the wig out of his eyes.
“Well aged,” Tom corrected Seb while the designer kept tugging at this and that.
“You wish,” Sebastian replied as the sound of tearing filled the open space. The designer finished what she was doing before walking off just as the sound filled the space again.
“What the hell is that?” Seb questioned aloud as the small group looked around, trying to find the source of the noise. Tom walked out of the door of the set and looked around outside as the sound came back. The cast and crew ran outside, since the noise was louder outside, and joined Tom as they looked around. Tom looked over his shoulder just as a portal of some kind opened up near one of the buildings.
“Ah,” A woman ran out of the portal and stumbled with her first step on the ground. She got to her feet and sprinted at the wall across from her before leaping into the air and pushing off of it, landing on a small ledge on the opposing building. Everyone watched this girl as she sat 8 metres in the air as a thudding filled the space and a large purple man ran through, covered in armour.
“Holy shit,” Chris E commented as they all looked at Thanos, a real Thanos.
“You think you can hide from me?” Thanos asked turning his head to look up at the girl.
“I don’t need to hide. Try and find me,” the shadows beneath Thanos’s feet swarmed around him and covered his whole body before they disappeared and Thanos with them. The cast and crew could all hear her breathe out a sigh of relief before she dropped down to the ground and landed heavily as her body began to shake. Tom and Chris E began walking over to her as she turned onto her stomach and tried to stand up.
“Fuck,” the woman grumbled when she tried to walk, her whole body collapsing as she fell back to her knees. As she began to cough, violently, she leaned onto all fours, bent over the ground as she continued coughing but now she was coughing up blood onto the cement below. As the coughing subsided she looked up and would look at everything until she turned her head towards Tom and Chris, the two maybe 5 metres from the woman.
“Loki?” the woman asked weakly before her eyes rolled into the back of her head and everything she fell to the cement unconscious.
“Miss,” Tom asked as he crouched down next to the unknown woman. Her whole body was covered in blue and purple splotches with cuts and blood over some of them. Tom lay a hand on her side and shook her gently but when she didn’t stir he pulled his hand away and found his hand covered in his blood.
“Call an ambulance!” Tom exclaimed as he tried to pull her shirt out of the way so he could see the wound but found he couldn’t grab the fabric because there wasn’t any. In the back of his mind, Tom could hear someone on the phone, calling an ambulance, but he just knew that he had to move her into the light or produce some. He reached into the small pocket in the Loki costume and pulled out his phone, using the torch as a light and pointed it at the area where the wound is and watched as the woman’s ‘clothes’ recoiled from the light to reveal a deep wound in her side covered by a large purple bruise.
“Who the hell is she?” Benedict asked hurriedly when he came around the corner and saw what was going on. He ran over to Tom and the woman trying to see if he could help.
“Hold my phone but keep the light there,” Tom said in a panic as he tried to keep the wound closed while keeping pressure on it so the woman didn’t die.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Benedict pointed out when Tom seemed to calm down a little when the blood wasn’t freely flowing through his fingers.
“I don’t know. She appeared almost out of nowhere and was followed by Thanos,” Tom explained not thinking his words through.
“You mean Josh?” Benedict asked as Chris E came over.
“Ambulance should be here soon,” Chris said lifting the woman’s head and putting her head on a makeshift pillow he made using one of the smaller crash mats. When the three calmed down a bit Chris spoke up.
“What happened to her?” he questioned as the three of them looked over the woman’s broken body.
“I don’t know,” Tom said honestly but something caught his eye. On the woman’s wrist was a swirling black tattoo and his mind reeled as he recognised it.
“But I might know who she is,” Tom explained motioning his head to the woman’s wrist. Chris grabbed her arm and turned it to see the tattoo better.
“And you know her how?” Benedict asked.
“Stan mentioned that he was thinking of giving Loki that same mark on his left wrist but he didn’t and I was the only person he told. The reason is that he was thinking of adding a new character but decided against adding her because of her involvement with different characters,” Tom explained archaically making Benedict and Chris groan in annoyance.
“If I’m right. Her name is Shadow, she has a mutant X-Gene that makes her more like a shadow than a human but her birth name is Timor Strange,” Tom explained making Benedict tense.
“I guess we will find out,” Benedict noted as the sound of an ambulance siren filled the awkward silence.